In her book, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity, Kate Cooper argues that the Christian ideal of virginity was persuasively presented to Roman urban elite in terms that shifted the dependence on marriage (and the benefits that this social agreement implied) to “a model of otherworldly allegiance”[79] that dispensed with marriage.
The Apocryphal Acts, for example, promoted this ideology in their portrayal of conflict between an apostle, who convinces a woman to live a life of Christian chastity, and the woman’s male partner, who opposes this decision.
For the ancient audience, the woman’s choice posed a threat to the elemental institution of marriage that ensured the continuation of noble figures and their contribution to the urban environment.[80] Hence, the female protagonists in these narratives do not so much reflect ‘actual’ women in late antiquity as they do present a “female point of identification” that undermined social structures upon which the male elite relied.[81]At the heart of Cooper’s analysis lies the challenge of how to view literature like the Apocryphal Acts, especially when seeking to describe religious experiences of women in antiquity. When a literary work refers to women or presents itself from a female perspective, should it be read as a reflection of “real” women and their experiences, or should it be examined for “the ways in which ‘woman’ or ‘the female’ becomes a rhetorical code for other concerns?”[82] Elizabeth Clark refers to the former approach as reading compositions as “documents” and the latter approach as analyzing compositions as “texts.”[83] Identifying the literary genre can be helpful in determining how much, if at all, the work may reflect actual experiences of women (i.e., whether it should be understood as a “document” or not),[84] but examining the evidence as a “text” does not necessarily detract from discussing the experiences of real women. Exploring the construction of the female in a literary text can contribute to our understanding of the social world within which women in antiquity lived.[85] [86] Especially concerning anonymous texts, the best we can glean from them is a reflection of and response to social conventions and structures (which include ideologies) that formed the worldview of women and men in antiquity. This “text” approach to examining the female in late antique Christian literature applies well to the study of Aseneth in the Jewish novel, Joseph and Aseneth* Instead of reflecting “real” Jewish women and their religious experiences, the character Aseneth mainly serves to confirm an ideology that Joseph and Aseneth promotes. The overall goal of this narrative is to present a particular picture of the couple, Joseph and Aseneth, and not simply a picture of Aseneth alone; even though Aseneth dominates the story, the narrative addresses both Jewish women and men in antiquity. In order to investigate these issues, let us first examine the rhetorical design of the protagonists in ancient Greek novels, the genre to which Joseph and Aseneth is best ascribed, and then explore the presentation of Aseneth in the narrative. A.