One last post today on the issue…
One of the best-kept secrets in Christianity is the enormous role that women played in the early church.
Though they leave much unsaid, still, both Christian and secular writers of the time attest many times to the significant involvement of women in the early growth of Christianity.
Celsus, a 2nd-century detractor of the faith, once taunted that the church attracted only “the silly and the mean and the stupid, with women and children.” His contemporary, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, acknowledged in his Testimonia that “Christian maidens were very numerous” and that it was difficult to find Christian husbands for all of them. These comments give us a picture of a church disproportionately populated by women.
The Neglected History of Women in the Early Church | Christian History.
Overall, one of the best, but still sort of based on conjecture.
The one thing I don’t really get is that while the Church in defining orthodoxy developed the doctrines of Mary, along side those doctrines developed too the subordination of women.
Joel L. Watts holds a Masters of Arts from United Theological Seminary with a focus in literary and rhetorical criticism of the New Testament. His interests include exploring the role of mimesis in human civilization, specifically in the study of religion and media, as well as science fiction and the way in which it has allowed mythology to be explored in light of scientific discoveries of the past century. He is the author of Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark: Introduction and Commentary (Wipf and Stock, 2013) and a co-editor and contributor to From Fear to Faith: Stories of Hitting Spiritual Walls (Energion, 2013).
Website: → Unsettled Christianity
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Mary is the Mother of the Church and Queen of the Apostles, so she is clearly above everyone else be it man or woman. Not that I actually believe any of that …
But, that was developed. So, while it was developed why was the opposite so for women?
In Romans 16, Paul thanks six women, who are know amongst the community, for their leadership and work in the church. In Philippians 4:2-3, Paul has Euodia and Syntyche at the same level of leadership as Clement. Paul addresses his letter to Philemon also to Apphia.
That Jesus had called 12 men to be his Apostles must have eventually overridden any influence women had in the early church, despite Jesus clearly having more than 12 followers in his group and some of those were women, including many more than three women who helped to finance his ministry. Luke 8:1-3
The Neglected History of Women in the Early Church (3) #tcot #christianity #god- http://tinyurl.com/2clg6xl
Christianity has always been a vehicle for both social justice and equity on the one hand, and hierarhcy and subordination on the other. This has always been true and still is today.
There are many paradoxes regarding women in the Bible. Why are women told to submit to their husbands in one text, but throughout the narrative of the Bible, not one woman is honoured for submitting to her husband? Rather, women are remembered for petitioning, for disagreeing, for initiating, for protecting and for bearing children.