"Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?" (...) Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, 'Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.' (...)
When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, 'Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?' She said, 'No one, sir.' And Jesus said, 'Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do no sin again.'" John 8:1-11
What was common practice in Jesus' time is still common practice today, after 2000 years, in some fundamentalist Muslim countries. Every now and then the newspapers report cases of women caught in adultery and how they are slaughtered by stoning.
The internet is full of photos and videos of these barbaric executions, which are not ordered in the Quran; in fact, there is no mention of stoning being prescribed for any crime in the entire book of the Quran; according to the Quran, adultery is punishable by lashes. When we compare this practice, which is still common today, with the one that Jesus advocated two thousand years ago for the same sin, it is surprising and moving...
On the other hand, the death penalty is always an injustice because laws exist to judge acts and not the totality of a human life; even when the crime is murder, the death penalty is a worse crime than the crime it seeks to sanction. Those who committed murder were most likely possessed by extreme anger or rage; those who hand out the death sentence do so in cold blood, in full use of their mental and rational faculties.
Since the dawn of humanity, all cultures and civilizations on this planet have been, and to some extents still are, patriarchal sexist or, as we commonly say, macho and chauvinistic. In addition to Eve in the Jewish tradition, and Pandora in the Greek tradition, all cultures blame women for the manifestation of evil in the world, they are the scapegoat.
If in Europe and the Western world in general, North America and to some extent South America, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, women are more respected, it is because something of the mentality of Jesus, and the spirit of Christianity, has influenced the culture.
In a large part of the Black Africa, women are the only ones who really work, in the agriculture they invented and in the home; men devote themselves to war, when there is one, hunting, fishing and governing the tribe; I have seen women in Africa carrying a heavy load on their head, another in each hand, a baby in the belly and another on their back, walking for kilometres while their husband went along empty-handed. In many countries even today, it is still considered normal to kidnap a girl for marriage, and female circumcision, to deprive women of sexual pleasure during intercourse.
In modern day Asia, women are still subjected to shame. Child prostitution is very widespread; take Japan for example, a country that is so advanced, it is the only one that does not accept the UN laws on child pornography. In Japan and China, there are restaurants where food is served on the naked body of a teenage girl.
This is unthinkable in the Western world, not even in the Middle Ages. In India, and in other Asian countries, impunity reigns when it comes to raping women and disfiguring their face with sulphuric acid. The only Asian country where women are somewhat respected is the Philippines, precisely because it is a culture that has been more or less shaped by Christianity for 500 years, since Spanish colonization.
Even a cursory reading of the gospels is bound to surprise the most inattentive and impartial reader by Jesus’ attitude towards women; he treats them as equal, defends them and includes them in his group of disciples, something that has never been done before. Jesus was undoubtedly the greatest defender of women of all time.
Conclusion – Jesus is the only founder of religion that has looked at women as being equal to men and the only one that has never uttered a derogatory statement against women.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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