Apocryphon

Which one am I? Doting mother? Reformed harlot? A man might wash his mother’s feet as a whore’s, after all. Or I might be one of his sisters. Women of no renown whatsoever. Erased as though they had never been, not even so much as names struck through on a crumbling papyrus scroll found by chance and purchased from an Egyptian scoundrel by a German diplomat. Perhaps I am all of them, or none.

Lover, brother or son, my foolish boy appeared to me after dying on the hill. Peter, of course, did not believe me: setting the precedent for two millennia of ignoring women. I have that man’s words burned in that place between soul and mind where visions are truly seen:

“Did he then speak secretly with a woman, in preference to us, and not openly? Are we to turn back and all listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?”

Of course, they chorussed a resounding ‘NO!’, the twelve, the chosen. Andrew was as bad as Peter. Only Levi remarked that they should not forget that my boy loved me above all others. But forget they did.

Saul, I will not call him by his other name, came after. Forever jealous. Quite forgetting that he was too busy persecuting my boy’s followers to have been one of the chosen twelve. Like a delayed guest to a party, he came late and loud. Writing his damned letters, sending them hither and yon, spreading the gospel according to men, a red-faced midget with no love for women other than as submissive chattels to their husband.

Who recalls Susanna, Joanna? Yet they were there, we saw the miracle of the tomb. My beautiful boy appeared first to women, yet we were silenced and silent still. My boy was a Jew, we are matrilineal, he was the son of God, therefore God is a woman. I will not seek vengeance, though it be mine. I will seek justice.