Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Incarnation as Social Protest 124
Both sexes ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Both
sexes are complicit in original sin and the fall of the world, but only men killed Jesus.
Only men killed God. The women wept and stayed near while the disciples fled. Women
went to the tomb and saw the resurrected Christ, while the disciples were in hiding and had
to be told by these same women that their saviour lives. Lanyer ends ‘Eves Apologie in
defence of Women’ with lines in which ‘thy wife (O Pilate) speakes for all’ (834) when
she says,
Then let us have our Libertie againe,
And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie;
You came not in the world without our paine,
Make that a barre against your crueltie;
Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine
Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?
If one weake woman simply did offend,
This sinne of yours, hath no excuse, nor end. (825-832)
This speech and its belief that the subservience of women was a punishment of the Fall can
also be found in another seventeenth-century writer, Owen Felltham. He writes,
If wee argue from the Text; that male and female made man: so the man being put
first, was worthier. I answer, So the Evening and the morning was the first day: yet
few will thinke the night the better. That Man is made her Governour, and so
60 ‘That These Words of Christ, “This Is My Body,” etc., Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics’ in Robert H.
Fischer (ed.), Luther’s Works: Volume 37: Word and Sacrament III (Philadelphia, 1961), p. 62.