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Biblical Ponderings
To the woman [God] said, “...Your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you.”
~Genesis 3:16b, NKJV
In the later years of my identification as an evangelical Christian, I understood this account of God's word to Eve after Adam and she sinned to be a warning: God was warning Eve that because they were no longer sinless, men would oppress women, rather than women and men living and ruling the earth (not each other) as complete equals as Eve and Adam had done up to that point (Genesis 1:27-30). But it was only this afternoon that I realized God made no mention to Adam of a backlash against men because of the way they had oppressed women. It couldn't be because God (as the writer of this account knew God) did not know; according to the Bible, God knows everything. So was that part of God's word left out by the writers (or later editors), who were products of their misogynistic culture? Or, perhaps, did God not say anything to Adam about the inevitable backlash, because he knew Adam's sinful state would not allow him to hear and understand the danger of giving in to that sinful desire to rule over women?
Discuss.
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I don't think Gnostic Christianity is responsible for anti-semitism either. I concede the argument about the OT God = evil and NT God = good, except that mainstream Christianity, and most of the Christian anti-semites I know, hold the God of the Old Testament to be the same God of the New, and reject the notion that they are separate deities. The Christianity of today that we inherited from the early Church bears very little resemblance to gnostic Christianity, enough so that I don't think gnostic beliefs can be held responsible for antisemitism.