Graydon Snyder, a Protestant Scripture scholar at the Chicago Theological Seminary, has been discussing that Talmudic passage with Christian students for 33 years. He uses it to illustrate how Jesus’ well-known dictum from the Sermon on the Mount-“anyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart”-resembles the later Talmudic doctrine on the importance of intention when judging sinful acts. But unlike Snyder, neither Jesus nor the rabbis had to contend with a Sexual Harassment Task Force. Based on a complaint from a former student, who charged that his lecture “unreasonably interfered with her academic performance,” Snyder, 63, was put on probation last month by seminary officials. He has also been ordered to apologize to the offended seminarian, urged to get therapy and warned never to be alone with a female student. Humiliated and angry, Snyder is now suing the seminary though not the student, who will not comment on the case-for defamation of character. “If I lose this suit,” he says, “it may mean that some sections of the Bible can’t be taught.”
Although Snyder remains a pariah at the feminist-oriented Protestant seminary, he is emerging as a hero to other scholars for fighting back. “I can see why women would raise questions, but it seems to me ludicrous for the school to reach a punitive decision because so much of our work is studying old texts,” says Walter Brueggemann, professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. William C. Miller, director of library services for the Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo. points to ripe sexual passages in the Koran and the Hindu Scriptures, as well as anti-homosexual statements in Leviticus, among other places in the Bible. “Do contemporary concerns about harassment and equality mean we need to abandon the reading of these old texts?” he asks. “The professor [Snyder] made an innocent statement and he quoted the Talmud correctly,” says Rabbi Aaron Soloveichik, a noted Talmudist and dean of Brisk Rabbinical College in Chicago. “People should stop reading their own prejudicial ideas into the Talmud. It’s libelous against the Talmud.”
As a white male, and as a member of the conservative Church of the Brethren, Snyder is something of an outsider at the seminary. Half of the students are women; the curriculum is pointedly “multicultural” and its sponsoring denomination is the very liberal United Church of Christ. Liberal Christians ought to be more tolerant, Snyder believes. In his lawsuit, the professor charges that he was never allowed to review the relevant documents, confront witnesses or “otherwise prepare and present a defense.” indeed, two female students who attended Snyder’s class with the student told NEWSWEEK that they found nothing offensive in the professor’s presentation. “As I recall, he told the story as part of a larger theme on the relationship between intentional and unintentional sin,” says Valerie Carnes, who is taking a second course from Snyder. But through the seminary’s attorney, president Kenneth B. Smith insists that the school “conducted a complete investigation of the allegations against Dr. Snyder and based its findings on all the facts, not just those selected facts presented by Dr. Snyder to the press.”
Snyder has attracted support from several secular organizations. The American Association of University Professors has rallied behind him, as have the National Association of Scholars and the Center for Individual Rights in Washington, D.C. But the organizations most directly concerned with religious scholarship in the United States are conspicuously silent. Neither the National Association of Theological Schools, an accrediting agency, the 7,000-member American Academy of Religion, nor the 6,000-member Society of Biblical Literature has a mechanism for adjudicating sexual-harassment charges. Meanwhile, a growing number of seminary professors worry that God’s word is in for fierce editing from today’s students. Many of the members of the SBL, says the organization’s associate executive director, Eugene H. Lovering Jr., fear exposing the spicier passages of Scripture to “new ears or new eyes.” For them, it seems, God might just be another dirty old man.
In the many volumes of the Talmud, between 200 B.C. and A.D. 500, rabbis debated civil and commercial laws, as well as issues of religious observance. Tractate Baba Kamma discusses tort law-the rules of liability and damages for accidental and intentional harm. There is much lawyerlike hairsplitting involved as in this passage that Prof. Graydon Snyder paraphrased in his class at the Chicago Theological Seminary.
“Rabbah further said: In the case of one falling from the top of the roof and [doing damage by] coming into close contact with a woman, there is liability for four items … The Four Items include: Depreciation, Pain, Medical Expenses and Loss of Time, but not Degradation, for we have learnt: There is no liability for Degradation unless there is intention [to degrade].'
