Paul describes himself—a male apostle—as a pregnant mother, a mother giving birth, and even a nursing mother. Not only does Paul consider the female body valuable, but he is willing to “hand over the authority of a patriarch in favor of a role that will bring him shame, the shame of a female-identified male.”34 How beautiful, how radical is Paul’s message! I can’t even imagine how welcome his words would have been to women in first-century churches. What made female bodies weak in the Roman world made them strong in the writings of Paul. By taking on the literary guise of a woman, Paul
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