The Ancient Women Mystics Your Bible Never Told You About w/ Dr. Joan Taylor

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, from Long Island, New York, and it is an absolute pleasure to have Dr. Joan Taylor with me today. Dr. Taylor, thank you so much for your time.

Dr. Joan Taylor: Thank you for inviting me, Johnny.

Johnny Ova: My pleasure. Let's jump right in, because I know this is going to be an awesome conversation. When most Christians picture the biblical world, they think of Jerusalem and Galilee, but Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the most important Jewish cities in the ancient world. Can you paint a picture for us of what Jewish life looked like in first-century Alexandria?

Dr. Joan Taylor: Wow, that's quite a big ask. So think of New York. I think what happens is people think of Jerusalem and they think of Rome, and those are the two cities that matter in terms of the New Testament world, along with the cities of Paul hopping around Asia Minor and Greece. But the New Testament story doesn't take us to Alexandria, and that's kind of weird, because we know there were Christians in Alexandria really early on, and that survives in later traditions about the church in Alexandria. The reason they were there was that there was already a very large Jewish community in Alexandria, and it was doing something quite distinctive. Alexandria was this huge mixture of cultures. It was based, a bit like New York, on a colonial culture. The Greeks had come with Alexander the Great and established themselves by taking part of Egypt, the northern coast, and the port city of Alexandria was established as a huge trading hub, with a whole lot of Greeks coming over after Alexander conquered that territory.

Dr. Joan Taylor: They established this colonial city that was quite distinct, plonked there in ancient Egypt. But gradually it did something quite different from most colonial cities: it blended with the Egyptian culture. The people in charge, the Ptolemaic dynasty that ruled Alexandria, had already created a hybrid culture of Greek and Egyptian. Jews came in to support the Ptolemies as mercenaries, as part of their army, from Jerusalem and wider Judea, and they became a significant part of the culture in Alexandria. They became very Greek themselves, part of this Hellenic culture. Alexandria was a trading hub where you had Indian Buddhists arriving and people from all over the Greco-Roman world coming to trade. There were religions and philosophies of all kinds, but it was based on this Hellenic culture, so they saw themselves as the prime bastions of civilization, civilization being Hellenic at that time.

Johnny Ova: Wow. Seems like a bustling city, lots of things going on.

Dr. Joan Taylor: Big and bustling, what we might call multicultural. However, as you can imagine in a post-colonial city, the different ethnicities, particularly the Jews and the Greco-Egyptian Hellenes, fought. There was conflict, and a great deal of violence erupted at a particular time, in the year 37 to 38, under a Roman governor called Flaccus. That continued through to the beginning of the second century, when there was a very sad result of that inter-ethnic violence: Jews were essentially wiped out of Alexandria. There was a terrible bloodbath. The Christians survived by differentiating themselves from Jews at that point, and they went on continuing the Jewish heritage in Alexandria, which was now Christian rather than Jewish.

Johnny Ova: I know Philo of Alexandria is one of our key sources for everything we know about the Therapeutae. For listeners who have never heard of him, can you give us an intro? Who was Philo, and why does his testimony matter so much? And I saw 19 pronunciations of Therapeutae, so I'm going to go with Therapeutae, and you can correct me if I'm wrong.

Dr. Joan Taylor: I say "Therapeutai," but that's fine.

Johnny Ova: I'm yielding to you, Dr. Taylor.

Dr. Joan Taylor: Philo of Alexandria was a prime example of the kind of Jewish thinker in Alexandria in the first century. He's a contemporary of Jesus, born probably just a few years earlier than Jesus. Around the year 40 he was probably in his early 50s. He was one of the most eminent Jews of Alexandria, part of a very powerful and very rich Jewish family. His brother was the leader of the Jewish community, which was a huge part of Alexandria. So he was moving in the high echelons of society, and he couldn't be more different from Jesus. He was super elite and super educated in the Greek philosophy of Alexandria. He would have been at the Museum, this fabulous hive of learning, and the Alexandrian library, famous all over the world as the best library in the world. He knew his literature. He could work with Homer, with Plato, with all the greats of the Greco-Roman tradition. But he was also absolutely committed to Judaism and his Jewish heritage.

Dr. Joan Taylor: What he did with Israel's Scriptures, which were known and used in Greek in Alexandria rather than Hebrew, was look for symbolic resonances throughout Scripture that would point to the deep philosophical truths of the Greco-Roman tradition. Moses was recast as the super philosopher, the best of all philosophers. Not just a prophet, but one who truly understood everything Greco-Roman philosophy could present, and who in fact inspired Greek philosophy. In the way Philo thought, that philosophy exists as a kind of bad copy of what was already in Moses. So he went through Israel's Scriptures, particularly the Pentateuch, and said, this is the deeper meaning, all the way through. That's what counted for him. It's read in this very philosophical, mystical way, as a path to what we might call self-actualization, a path to the divine, leading you to a moral good, a spiritual good, enlightenment, to use a Buddhist term. He's part of a particular Hellenistic tradition of understanding philosophy. He's very familiar with Stoic philosophy and with Platonic and Pythagorean philosophy, so he fits into the philosophical rubric of the ancient world.

Johnny Ova: Interesting. Was his message well received, or was it pushed back on a bit?

Dr. Joan Taylor: It's really interesting to see the reception of Philo through the centuries. He was certainly known in Judaism at the time and hugely respected. Josephus refers to him as someone very respected and eminent. But Judaism took a different turn in how it developed through the centuries. It went down the path we know as rabbinic Judaism, rather than this kind of Hellenistic Judaism that was very integrated with Greek philosophy. That type of Judaism survived best in the church, with thinkers like Origen and Clement of Alexandria, the Alexandrian tradition of great patristic writers. It was very influential, so much so that the church really saw Philo as a kind of saint, someone who was part of the Christian tradition. There was even an understanding that when he talked about the Therapeutae, he was talking about Christians, which is not so, but we can see how that correlation could happen.

Johnny Ova: We're almost there. One more point on this. I know you've argued that we really can't understand Philo's account of the Therapeutae without understanding the conflict between the Jews and the Greeks in Alexandria. How did that political tension shape what Philo was really trying to say about this community?

Dr. Joan Taylor: In my studies, it's that historical context that explains why he uses them as an example and what the bigger debate was. Philo, as a very eminent member of the Jewish community and brother of the alabarch, was sent to Rome on a deputation to represent the Jewish community during the time of Gaius Caligula. He talks about this in one of his treatises, the Legatio ad Gaium, the Embassy to Gaius. It's a complete shambles. Caligula doesn't really want to listen to the Jewish community from Alexandria, and they have to trail behind him while he orders renovations to other people's houses in Rome. He just goes into these affluent houses and says, I want that completely redesigned. Philo describes trailing behind the emperor as he goes into these mansions ordering renovations, trying to put across his case for Jewish rights in Alexandria that had been eroded. And suddenly Caligula reels around and says, why don't Jews eat pork? He can't get a word in. It's a farcical situation.

Dr. Joan Taylor: But it's likely he stays in Rome and sees the end of Caligula and the arrival of a more sensible emperor, Claudius, in 41. Then he's able to present a proper case in Rome about Jews and explain what Judaism is about to the Roman imperial elite. I see this treatise as forming part of the speeches he would have given in Rome to Claudius in 41. We know there was a deputation from the Hellenic, Greco-Egyptian side, with people like Chaeremon and Apion, whom Josephus later wrote a refutation against, and they presented the wonderfulness of Greco-Egyptian culture. They used certain philosophical tropes about how wonderful things were for them in Alexandria and how they showed the excellence of their philosophical life. What seems to have happened is that Philo then wrote about Jews in a similar way. He answered the sorts of critiques being leveled at Jews at the time, and they were absolutely abominable. Everything about Jews was presented as awful. Passover was a chance for drinking and debauchery. Jews kidnapped a Hellenic young man and killed him and ate him. It's that kind of antisemitic, anti-Jewish, horrific material that appears when a society is super polarized and you just "other" people.

Dr. Joan Taylor: We see this in Alexandria, and it's actually quite a lesson for today, the kind of disinformation flying around Alexandria about the different communities. Philo has huge stakes in trying to defend Jews and Judaism from this terrible, vitriolic, crazy material, because it was resulting in violence in the streets and the desecration of synagogues. The stakes were incredibly high. So he wants to present Jews as something really admirable to the Greco-Roman world. On the other side, we hear they said there's nothing admirable in Judaism. There are no admirable men of philosophical greatness like Socrates or Plato. This is our tradition, we have civilization, we have Plato and Socrates and all the great philosophers, and the Jews have this crazy man Moses who thought he was something but was nothing. Everything about Judaism was disparaged. With the stakes that high, he had to think how to present Judaism in the best possible light, and he chose certain examples from his society to show that the Jews of Alexandria had the best possible philosophy. And there we get the Therapeutae.

Johnny Ova: Very interesting. We know the Jewish people faced a lot of opposition and oppression in the first century, but hearing the details you mentioned is really striking. Dr. Taylor, this is honestly why I got you on. I first heard you on the History Hit podcast, and I thought, I have to get Dr. Taylor on, because I know my audience is going to love this. So let's get into it. Who were the Therapeutae? If you walked into their community, what did daily life look like? And the name itself, I know it means healers or worshippers. What does that tell us about the community?

Dr. Joan Taylor: Big question, with various parts to it. To start with Therapeutai: the verb means to care for something or someone, so ultimately they're carers or ministers. It had double meanings in Greek. We have the term surviving in "therapy" and healing, and it was certainly used for healing. You could care for someone and heal their body. Philo talks about that at the beginning of the treatise: these are people who are good for the body, but they also heal souls, and the soul is beset by various terrible things. This lifestyle of the Therapeutae is very healthy for soul and body. But he also uses the word in its other meaning, people who look after or care for the divine. We know this term was used for people who served in temples. Elsewhere Philo talks about the Levites who served in the Jerusalem temple as people who serve God, using that same term, therapeuo or therapeutai, in a cultic way. So it has this cultic devotion to it and also this healing aspect.

Dr. Joan Taylor: It's hard to find one English word that covers all the dimensions of the word. In the commentary I wrote with David Hay, I ended up using the term ministers. You can minister to someone who is sick, and you can minister to the divine. So they are those who minister to the body, the soul and the divine. In fact, when Philo uses the term, the greatest of all Therapeutae is Moses himself. So he sees this service or care for the divine, the soul and the body as what all Jews are doing. While he uses this particular group to represent the best, he's not really separating them from the rest of Judaism. They're representative of the whole, rather than some little separated sect or cult, which is how it can be imagined. They are integrated. In fact, that's what Philo himself wanted to be in his life. In other treatises he talks about people in Alexandria who have given up a lot of public engagement, business, food and pleasure, and lived a very simple life in the city. So he's not only thinking of people who removed themselves. But the best of them, the super devoted, have gone to this particular place outside Alexandria and live this super austere existence in community.

Johnny Ova: For a long time, scholars connected the Therapeutae to the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls community at Qumran. I know you've challenged that. What makes the Therapeutae distinct, and why is it important to separate them?

Dr. Joan Taylor: A lot of people, and we all bring our presuppositions to texts, read this and it looks like some obscure group no one has ever heard of. So they compare it to the Qumran community, which also looked like an obscure group no one had ever heard of. What Philo himself does is contrast the Essenes with the group he calls the ministers, the Therapeutae. The Essenes are very busy with the active life of philosophy, and the Therapeutae with the contemplative life of philosophy. He does that because it was already a kind of genre in Greco-Roman literature: you would look at active philosophers engaged in public life, or at contemplative philosophers like the Pythagoreans. Plato is really interested in the active life in his Republic, but he also has a contemplative philosophical way of operating. There was supposed to be a balance between the active and the contemplative to reach a good philosophical existence and happiness. Philo says that was integrated in Moses, and Moses wanted it for all who followed him: six days of the active philosophical life and the seventh day, the Sabbath, as the day of contemplation.

Dr. Joan Taylor: So Philo says the Essenes are the active ones. They're active in working. They pool all their resources together, live in these communities and are driven by a particular philosophy. They're involved in public life. Great kings love them. They live in Judea, in Syria Palestine. But the Therapeutae really represent the contemplative side of Judaism itself. For that reason he locates them away from the city, which helps him stress how uninvolved they are in the public world, and they're particularly careful about the Sabbath, so there's a real emphasis on the Sabbath in his treatise. It's an incredibly constructed piece of literature. The more I look at it, the more I can see how Philo very carefully worked things over so that he ticked boxes all the way through for his audience: aha, the contemplative life, the contemplative life, all the way through. He has a reality, and that reality is very important for pushing back against all the vitriolic attacks on Jews. He has to have a real group. But he designs them so that he can ensure they are presented as the peak of contemplative philosophy for his audience.

Johnny Ova: What a unique group of people. They followed their own calendar and pursued a trance-like state to experience a vision of God's light, almost like the mystics. What's the spiritual engine driving these people?

Dr. Joan Taylor: This is absolutely the deep heart of Judaism as Philo sees it, to experience this vision of the divine, which grounds you in everything you do. Your whole lifestyle is based on this vision. What he tells us about the Therapeutae is that they go out to what I think is some kind of villa in the area outside Alexandria. When I visited Alexandria many years ago, I was determined to find where this was. There's a ridge between the lake, Mareotis, and the sea, and he talks about this ridge as a place where healthy air comes together. So they've chosen a very healthy spot, which is the health-of-body aspect, and there's a spring nearby so they have pure water. They eat only very basic bread, sometimes sprinkled with salt and hyssop. Otherwise it's a bread and water diet.

Dr. Joan Taylor: They live together in a community, but not in a sort of barracks. They live in individual huts, and each hut has its own little solitarium, as I call it, or monasterion, as Philo calls it. In that little solitary room they have rolls of Scripture. They're educated, like Philo, they know how to read Scripture, and they interpret it in line with the symbolic, allegorical reading to get to the deeper heart of the philosophy. And they compose music. Singing is very important for them. They come together on Sabbath days and hear a talk by the leader of their community. Men and women are there together. It's not just a group of monks. It's a group of men and women who have chosen this lifestyle. They're separated by a barrier, and they're very modest with each other. They listen to the talk and go back to their solitary practice.

Dr. Joan Taylor: Every seventh Sabbath, the seventh of seven weeks, the 49th day, shall we say, they have a great festival where they come together. They probably have Sabbath meals ordinarily, but on the great festival of the 49th day they celebrate the crossing of the sea, which for Philo and the Therapeutae is the Passover, the crossing of the sea rather than the blood of the lamb on the doors in Egypt. They gather for a feast, which again is bread and water, and afterward they sing songs to replicate the songs of Moses and Miriam after the crossing of the sea. They gather in a great choir and do choral dancing and turns, and yes, as you say, according to Philo they become entranced. They have this beautiful, mystically alive drunkenness, and they have a visionary experience of the light of God. Then when dawn breaks, they all turn to the east and pray for a bright day that will illuminate them and their reading of Scripture, and they go back to their huts and work on Scripture. It's an extraordinary ascetic lifestyle designed to live the true life of Moses.

Johnny Ova: What about the women in this community? I think Philo describes women there, called Therapeutrides, and they're full participants in this life, right?

Dr. Joan Taylor: Therapeutrides, yes. Absolutely. It's so interesting, because elsewhere Philo can be very disparaging of women. For example, he thinks it's really good that the Essenes live without wives, because wives are very troublesome in various ways. But here, in the community of the Therapeutae, he says they're mostly elderly virgins. That's an interesting comment, the "mostly." He wants to say they're all elderly virgins, but he can't. Are they mostly elderly? Mostly virgins? We don't know. What they are is women who have chosen the celibate lifestyle like the men. They also go to their huts, and it's expected they do exactly the same as the men. The only thing that separates them is this boundary wall in what we might call a synagogue, so that female modesty is preserved. He makes sure the women are seen as particularly modest, because otherwise they just wear a wrap. They wear very simple clothes, and the men wear very simple garments too. He doesn't describe the women as all veiled up. They wear this very basic wrap, which is quite traditionally Egyptian, weirdly. You see it in pharaonic paintings. So he has to accommodate the fact that there are women. It's a rhetorical problem for him, because it would be easier if, like the Essenes, there were no women in this community. He would be happy with that. But here there are women, women of the elite class in Alexandria who would have been educated, who also chose this very ascetic lifestyle to follow the philosophical path.

Johnny Ova: From what I've researched, these aren't women on the margins, as you might expect in that century. You've argued they were highly educated philosophers themselves.

Dr. Joan Taylor: Yes. We know there were women philosophers in the ancient world, in Alexandria, and women in Judaism who were very much involved with philosophy. Philo talks metaphorically about Skepsis as a character, a woman philosopher teacher, and there's a question whether she is a real woman or simply allegorical. But even if he's using a female allegorical teacher just as a symbol, it ties into the idea that female teachers as well as male teachers were a possibility in his world. That's part of the Greco-Roman world, that there were these famous women philosophers, so he can draw on that. He doesn't overtly refer to Diotima or Aspasia or others in the treatise, but he knows his audience would know of female philosophers, and in Rome there were female philosophers at this time. So he can slot the women in, but he has to be very careful, because women in philosophy were also disparaged by opponents as immodest, or as girlfriends of philosophers rather than philosophers themselves, and they could be used in very negative ways. So he has to say, they're mostly elderly virgins, they're all celibate. You can't talk about this group of men and women living together as Epicureans in their garden, where all sorts of naughty things happened. They are absolutely committed to the philosophical life.

Johnny Ova: This is eye-opening for a lot of reasons. As a pastor, Dr. Taylor, in the body of Christ, the church as a whole, in many areas, not every area, women are disparaged and put down with some scriptures taken out of context. Learning about women philosophers in this time frame should change the way we read the New Testament, especially passages about women's roles in the early church.

Dr. Joan Taylor: Absolutely. The writers of the Christian Scriptures also had to deal with negativity about what women were doing in a philosophical setting, from the way women philosophers were disparaged. You can see in 1 Timothy, for example, a real concern about modesty, and that's also what you have in Philo talking about the women Therapeutrides. They were making sure no one misrepresented the women in the church who were engaged in the philosophy of Jesus, because it would have been understood as a kind of philosophy. Jesus was understood as a sort of philosopher in the Greco-Roman world. So if you have women involved with that philosopher, you want to be really careful they're not misrepresented. That can mean they're actually skipped over. Apart from Philo, I've worked with Helen Bond on how women are remembered, in a book we wrote together, Women Remembered. Our study really homed in on how carefully women are presented in the Gospels, with the understanding that they could be so disparaged in the wider Greco-Roman world that it might be better not to shine the light on the women disciples of Jesus.

Dr. Joan Taylor: What we think of as a wonderful thing, that there were women disciples of Jesus, that there were women active in the early church and women witnesses to his resurrection, in the wider Greco-Roman world was exactly the stick they could beat the church with. We see it in the writings of Celsus, where he basically presents Mary Magdalene as a hysterical woman: how could you base your whole faith on the witness of this deluded woman? When you have that kind of negativity about women in a very patriarchal world, any writer about women, whether Philo or the writers of early Christian material, has to be so careful. You have to navigate it really carefully, and maybe shine the light on the men rather than the women, because that's going to score more points with your audience.

Johnny Ova: It's one of the reasons we do the podcast, to break the box of our lenses. You're taught one thing your whole life and reject any information that opposes it, true or not. Honestly, that's how this whole podcast got started. When we started teaching a bit about historical backgrounds, cultures and context, people said, wait, this meant this, or this was going on at this time? Having guests like you on, I see from the comments that people are really starting to understand the whole of the Bible and its context more, and it levels the playing field, especially with minority or oppressed groups in the first century. I know you briefly mentioned your trip. You traveled to Egypt in 1999 and identified the location of the Therapeutae near Lake Mareotis. Tell me about that moment. What was going through your mind, standing in the spot Philo was describing 2,000 years ago?

Dr. Joan Taylor: My goodness. Well, I hope I was. It was a really complicated day. I had an Egyptian driver going around, and I was basically saying, go down that street. Back in the day all I had was a map of Alexandria. There was no street view or Google Maps. I was just trying to work out where the lake was at the time of Philo. It's all very built up now. That strip between ancient Alexandria and the area to the west is now urban. You drive down what looks like a regular street with houses on either side. So it was a case of going up various side streets and saying, I think we're here, okay, I think we're there. Finally we went up a side street where I could see there was a spring, and there was a hill going up. I walked up the hill and found Roman pottery on the ground. I can't be sure it's exactly the spot. If I'm pressed, maybe there were other suitable spots. But it was a place with a structure from the right time, it did have a spring, it was between the lake and the sea, and it wasn't a huge area it could be. So even if it wasn't exactly the right spot, it was very much in that area, and I was very glad to find it.

Johnny Ova: Well, on our show, it's the right spot. We'll say it was the one and only spot. One last question before we talk about your book. For those listening or watching, all the links to Dr. Taylor's books are in the comments and descriptions on YouTube, Apple and Spotify. Dr. Taylor, if you could sit down with an everyday Christian who has never heard of the Therapeutae and tell them one thing about this community and the women in it that would reshape how they see their faith, what would it be?

Dr. Joan Taylor: That could reshape how they see their faith. I said before how Eusebius saw this community as Christian, and I think there is a huge overlap between this community and early Christianity. The spiritual focus that comes through in Alexandrian Christianity is really in continuity with these people. So wouldn't it be great to know how they reacted to the Christians who arrived in Alexandria, the disciples of Jesus? And wouldn't it be great to know how those disciples of Jesus interacted with the Therapeutae? One thing to remember is that they're quite different classes. You have an elite class in the Therapeutae, and you have fishing people as the disciples of Jesus. But as the church embeds itself in society, it does capture the interest of the elite, and they provide spaces for Christian community meetings. I would love to know what happened as we move forward through the first century into the second. We know their ideas were picked up by Clement of Alexandria and Origen. What happened in that middle space, in the meeting between the Therapeutae and the early Christians? We just don't know.

Johnny Ova: That would be fascinating to know. Dr. Taylor, tell us about your book. Why did you decide to write it? Like I said, we're going to link it all up in the description.

Dr. Joan Taylor: The original book, Jewish Women Philosophers, came out of a massive project looking at women at the time of Jesus that could be used to understand the female disciples of Jesus. That's what I really wanted to do, and I still have drafts of that book I haven't used. But I sidelined into Philo, because the Therapeutae were enough to deal with in one book without bringing in the female disciples of Jesus too. Then I went on to the commentary with David Hay, picking up the commentary on De Vita Contemplativa after David Hay died, and that let me go into the treatise in great detail. I feel I've lived and breathed this treatise by writing a commentary on it. Note to self: never write another commentary, because it's never ending. Where do you stop with a commentary? You can always contextualize and contextualize, and I'm a contextualizer. It could have been double the length. But there we are. I went into the treatise, and I'm always discovering something new.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Taylor, I can't thank you enough. This was wonderful. You are the best. Guys, make sure you support Dr. Taylor and get a copy of her book today. Seriously, thank you for being so generous with your time.

Dr. Joan Taylor: Thank you for having me, Johnny.