Episode 72 -- Cutting

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali also points out in her book Infidel that female genital mutalitation predates Islam and that not all Muslims practice it and not everyone who practices it is a Muslim. I think the evangelical feminists who argue that there is no sexism in the bible are just as mistaken as the sexist Christians who argue there is no egalitarian views in the bible. The bible isn't a divinely inspired work with a single unifying message like many Christians want us to believe. It's a collection of books made by flawed humans representing different times and cultural values and we need to be careful in presuming that the bible contains a single unifying message, whether it be a fundamentalist message or a more moderate message. At the same time, I don't think Paul is as sexist as many atheist critics and fundamentalists make him out to be, but I don't think everything in his letters is pro-feminist either. In his book Misquoting Jesus, Bart D Ehrman makes the argument that Paul didn't write everything attributed to him in the NT. Most scholars are in agreement that the Pastoral epistles, which are the most sexist of the Pauline epistles, were written long after Paul died and weren't written by Paul himself. I don't remember the exact verses, but in his book Misquoting Jesus, Bart D Ehrman argues that even in the authentic epistles that were actually written by Paul, some sexist passages were added in by later copyists but don't appear in the earliest manuscripts. Ehrman points out that in Romans chapter 16, Junia is listed as a female apostle in Paul's church and later manuscripts try to censor it by changing Junia to being a man to cover up the fact that Paul had female apostles in his church. So there are sexist passages in the Pauline epistles, but not all of them were likely written by the historical Paul.