Carnal Resurrection: Sexuality and Sexual Difference in Early Christianity

Abstract

This dissertation explores the ways in which early Christians thought about resurrected bodies in terms of desires, sexual practices, and roles, as well as in terms of how maleness and femaleness are distinguished. The early Christian writings on the resurrection discussed in this dissertation addressed a set of interrelated and overlapping questions and goals. First, they sought to define what was meant by the resurrection, especially with respect to what degree of continuity existed between the mortal self and the resurrected self. In doing so, they specified what substances, desires, dispositions, and practices persisted in resurrected bodies and what did not. For early Christians, sexual acts, desires, and reproduction did not have any place in the resurrection. Second, they sought to underscore the importance of having a correct view concerning the resurrection so that they could better understand the mortal body. By examining the resurrected body's characteristics, early Christians sought to diagnose what was most important about the mortal body. These differences between the mortal and resurrected spheres produced a set of problems for describing not only the relationship of sexual practices, desires and reproduction to resurrected bodies, but also the place of such practices in mortality. Third, as these writers wrangled over what kinds of morphological and substantive bodies would persist in the resurrection, they confronted questions concerning the nature of male and female difference. While they suggested that sexual desires, acts, and reproduction were inessential to resurrected bodies, they argued that maleness and femaleness remained essential features of resurrected bodies. This dissertation explores the instability of the early Christian attempts to separate maleness and femaleness, located in resurrected "parts," from the gendered discourses of sexual desires, acts, and reproduction.