Abstract

The word androgyny is a combination of the Greek words a&d12;nh &d12;r , meaning male, and gunh&d12; , meaning female. Strictly speaking, an androgynous person is one with both male and female natures and characteristics. In the ancient world, the concept of androgyny represented an original totality in which all possibilities are united. In many ancient mythologies, the first human creature was portrayed as an androgynous being. Then, a certain disintegration occurred. which split this whole being into two different halves, the male and the female. Since that time, it is declared that male and female have struggled to reunite. The myth of the splitting apart of an androgynous creature is implicit in the Jewish creation myth told in Genesis and also appears in stories from the ancient Indo-European world. It is my contention that this myth was influential in formulating the theologies of several strands of early Christianity. By early Christianity, I am referring to the time period from the first to the fourth centuries C.E. ;This dissertation, therefore, will be an investigative journey to discover the definition and function of androgyny upon developing Christian epistemologies. I will maintain that the myth of the androgynous being, sometimes referred to as the primal androgyne, came into Christianity through platonists in the Jewish tradition, that it was incorporated into some early Christian rituals, and that it became, within such groups, a metaphor for attaining salvation. This work explores the literature of four early Christian groups which project this type of soteriology---the Galatian and Corinthian Christians, the community which crystallized around the Gospel of Thomas, Christian ritualists in the Gospel of Philip, and the Hellenist converts of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. In exemplifying these groups, I am in no way claiming that they consistently share a common literary source or that they represent any identifiable mode of evolution. Rather, I am content to demonstrate how each of these Christian communities utilized the myth of the primal androgyne in constructing its specific christology and ritual