from the direct discourse about sex, gender, and marriage to an indirect contest over language and the interpretation of history, scripture, and ritual practices, but it is, nevertheless, the same contest. I claim not only that I see a nexus between the interpretations of sexuality and the interpretations of ethnicity but that this connection was perceived in late antiquity.
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Thus, when Augustine consigns the Jews to eternal carnality, he draws a direct connection between anthropology and hermeneutics. Because the Jews reject reading "in the spirit," Therefore they are condemned to remain "Israel in the flesh." Allegory is thus, in his theory, a mode of relating to the body. In another part of the Christian world, Origen also described the failure of the Jews as owing to a literalist hermeneutic, one which is unwilling to go beyond or behind the material language and discover its immaterial spirit (Crouzel 1989, 10712). This way of thinking about language had been initially stimulated in the Fathers by Paul's usage of "in the flesh" and "in the spirit'' to mean, respectively, literal and figurative. romans 7:56 is a powerful example of this hermeneutic structure: ''For when we were still in the flesh, our sinful passions, stirred up by the law, were at work on our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are fully freed from the law, dead to that in which we lay captive. We can thus serve in the new being of the Spirit and not the old one of the letter." In fact, exactly the same metaphor is used independently of Paul by Philo, albeit to make exactly the opposite point:
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 | | It is true that receiving circumcision does indeed portray the excision of pleasure and all passions, and the putting away of the impious conceit, under which the mind supposed that it was capable of begetting by its own power: but let us not on this account repeal the law laid down for circumcising. Why, we shall be ignoring the sanctity of the Temple and a thousand other things, if we are going to pay heed to nothing except what is shewn us by the inner meaning of things. Nay, we should look on all these outward observances as resembling the body,
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| | 14. Note that we find exactly the same nexus in the conflict of the Shakers, Koreshantists, and Sanctificationists with "mainstream" Christianity in nineteenth-century America. For these groups as well, as Kitch (1989, 67) points out, celibacy was conjoined with "the Bible as a symbolic rather than a literal history. They objected to baptism by water and to the use of bread and wine in the sacrament on the same grounds; they regarded such things as symbolic, not literal or substantive." All of these groups also believed in an androgynous God, whose image was restored in celibate, spiritual communion between men and women. The parallel is, thus, exact.
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