Document Type

Article

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1017/S0017816023000275

Journal Title

Harvard Theological Review

Publication Date

2023

Abstract

In this article, I engage Athanasius of Alexandria’s invocation of the infamous dismemberment of the unnamed woman found in Judg 19. By the fourth century, this story of gang rape—along with other preserved stories of sexual violence—found in Judges, were scattered throughout early Christian literature. Judges 19 holds a particularly troubling history in the late ancient context. The story of the rape and dismemberment of the unnamed woman in Judg 19 gave life to another story and typified a style of writing that I characterize in the article as a heresiology. The spectacle of Judges, along with other gruesome deaths of women, was one way in which heresiological discourse frames rhetorical arguments for writers like Athanasius of Alexandria. Here, I purposely draw our attention to how Athanasian orthodoxy became reliant on gender-based violence.

Comments

The definitive article is available on publisher's website at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816023000275. 

Publisher Statement

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is included and the original work is properly cited.

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