Women in the early Church

Introduction

Years ago I read an interview with the film director Arthur Penn (The Left-Handed Gun, The Miracle Worker, Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man), who made movies about the marginalized. The reason he found this theme interesting, he said, was that societies define themselves by the people they cast out. If you know the marginalized, you know the ostensible norms of the society from which they are outcasts, and how rigid these societies are, and probably something about how power works in them.

Penn's ideas resonated with me, and often in my professional work I've come back to the theme of the Christian marginalized.

In the 1960s, historians became generally interested in the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in historical societies. This was promoted:

• partly by the "Annaliste" school of history in France. Historians were increasingly suspicious of the "history from above" approach which focused on kings, bishops, and intellectual leaders;
• partly by the civil rights and women's movements, particularly in the United States;
• partly by the need of newly independent nations in Africa and the West Indies to discover their history;
• partly by a new group consciousness of a number of underrepresented groups — women, third-world, ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians, for example.

This page focuses particularly on the role of women in early Christianity. It was often though not always assumed that their gender would disqualify them from giving leadership or even being allowed to be heard in many contexts.

• The New Testament. In the New Testament women play a prominent role. Junia is described as an apostle at Rome; Phoebe is a patron at Cencreaea; women lead house churches, prophesy, teach, and minister. In a supplement of 1979 to the Catholic Biblical Quarterly (quoted in part here), a group commissioned by the Catholic Biblical Association of America to examine the question of women's roles in the New Testament reported their conclusion that women could be found to be exercising most or all of the functions later associated with priesthood.
• Well into the second century this New Testament gender egalitarianism seems to continue. Blandina (d. 177) is explicitly seen as a Christ figure and as the leader of the martyrs of Lyons in the story recorded in Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History. And we've seen how the record of Perpetua (d. 203) breathes scarcely a word of gender prejudice. See the Christian artwork on the webpage for this week.
• In (perhaps!) the early third century, however, we see the first explicit restrictions on the ministry of women. The first such text is the so-called Apostolic Tradition, which we read a few weeks ago. It excludes women from offices involving the celebration of the Eucharist, although it still allows them to exercise teaching functions. A generation later, a document called the Didascalia prohibits women from answering questions about the kingdom of God. In the early fourth century, many surviving canonical documents are assuming that very few offices will be open to women.
• What happened between the New Testament period and the third or fourth century that might explain the suppression of women's ministries? A number of answers have been proposed.

1. Maybe women's ministries weren't so widely suppressed. Actually quite a number of women were prominent in the early Church, even if most of our history texts largely ignore them: for example, Lucilla (early 300s), Marcella (325–411), Melania the Elder (342–400), Paula (347–404), Melania the Younger (d. 439), Macrina the Edler, Macrina the Younger (330–379), Olympias (360–408), Egeria (380s), and Brigid (d. 525). Moreover, since organizations seldom legislate against things that aren't happening, the legislation against the ministry and leadership of women may actually imply that women are indeed doing ministry and giving leadership. In addition, the few particular documents that have survived with negative commentary on women may simply represent the few particular local situations where they were written. For instance, it seems that women continued to have a high profile in the Greek and Syrian churches long after they were receding into the background in the Latin churches. And in some cases it's possible that the documents which are usually quoted as restricting the ministry of women are being misinterpreted.

2. Maybe as the Church was increasingly inculturated, the gender prejudices of Greco-Roman society came to be imported into Christianity. One piece of evidence in favour of this is that widows, who led reasonably emancipated lives in the society of the Roman Empire, also could assume special roles of leadership in the Church.

3. Maybe the problem is that the Church changed from a "private" institution like a family to a "public" institution. In families, women then as now played quite a large role, and when a predominant metaphor for the Church was "family of God", it might have been natural for women to be prominent. But when the Church became a public institution, it may have seemed more culturally appropriate for leadership to be restricted to men. This is the thesis of Karen Jo Torjesen in her book When Women were Priests.

4. Maybe the rise of asceticism in the late third century privileged male celibates. Ascetic theology tended to regard sexuality as problematic, and also tended to associate women more closely with sexuality than men. If this is so, it's not only women, but also married men who began losing their influence in Church affairs. What was happening was not so much the subordination of women in particular, as the exaltation of celibate gentile men. This is the view of Charlotte Methuen writing in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995) 92–104.

5. Maybe trends in Scriptural interpretation had a major influence. In particular, the story of Adam and Eve becomes quite important in the third century to explain human sin and unhappiness, and one reading of that story was that the original sin was the fault of the woman.

IV. Conclusion

• Much of the historical research into marginalized groups is of an "advocacy" nature. For instance, historians who have argued that women exercised strong leadership in the early Church until their ministry was suppressed for exogenous reasons are often those who support a stronger women's leadership in the Church today.
• On the other hand, it would be wrong to assume that their critics are not advocacy historians. On the contrary, often the critics support a conservative approach to the same church issues today.
• On both sides some of these historians can be criticized for misusing Church history to justify a position in current denominational controversies. On one side an historian will seem to be arguing, "The early Church did it, and therefore so can we;" and on amother side a historian will seem to be arguing, "No it didn't, and we shouldn't either"; and on a third side a historian will argue; "The early Church did it, or didn't do it, because it was blinkered by its cultural presuppositions, which we reject."
• One problem with this form of argument — whether used by liberals or conservatives — is that it would seem to underestimate the diversity of early Christianity. Just as the leaders and people of the churches today will seldom agree on any given issue, so the leaders and people of the churches in the first six centuries didn't agree, either.