Jesus and his earliest followers, including Paul, may have been unusually open  to women playing an important role in the community of the faithful, but it was not long until women’s voices and activities came to be suppressed.  It is interesting to see both how that happened, historically, and how some women found alternative ways to find expression for their faith.

This is one of the topics I cover in my book After the New Testament (2nd edition; Oxford University Press, 2014).  As I’ve said, in some ways it may be the most useful book I’ve published.  It is an anthology of passages from major Christian writings, both proto-orthodox and “heretical” of the second and third centuries, organized thematically, in modern English translations, with introductions both to the themes themselves and to the individual writings.

Here is the introduction to the section where I provide excerpts of early Christian writings on women and gender.

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Women played significant roles in the early Christian movement, starting with ministry of Jesus himself.  In Gospel traditions both early and late, Jesus is said to have had women among his followers in his travels (Mark 15:40-41; Luke 8:1-3; Gospel of Thomas 114).   He was evidently supported in his itinerate preaching activities by the financial support of women, who functioned as his patrons (Mark 15:40-51; Luke 8:1-3).  He is said to have engaged in public dialogue and debate with women who were not among his immediate followers (Mark 7:24-30; John 4:1-42).   And he is said to have had physical contact with women during his ministry (Mark 14:3-9; John 12:1-8).

In all four of the canonical Gospel women are said to have accompanied Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem during the last week of his life, and (unlike his male disciples) to have been present at his crucifixion (Matt 27:55; Mark 15:40-41; Luke 23:49; John 9:25).  From these Gospels and the relatively early Gospel of Peter we are told that it was women followers who first came to believe that Jesus’ body was no longer in the tomb (Matt.28:1-10; Mark 16:1-8; Luke 23:55-24:10; John 20:1-2; Gospel of Peter 50-57).   Thus women evidently were the first to proclaim that Jesus had been raised.  In that very real sense, it can be said that women started Christianity.

Women continued to be important in the Christian movement, as is evident in the letters of Paul.  In the extensive greetings Paul sends in chapter 16 of his letter to the Romans, for example, he does indeed mention more men; but there are a significant number of women as well, and they were obviously playing a significant role in the church.

These include Phoebe, a “deacon” of the church of Cenchrea, and Paul’s own patron, who has been entrusted by Paul with the task of carrying this letter to Rome; Prisca, who with her husband Aquila is said to be largely responsible for the gentile mission and who supports a congregation in her home; Mary, Paul’s colleague who works with the Romans; Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis, women Paul calls his “co-workers” for the Gospel; Julia, and the mother of Rufus, and the sister of Nereous, all of whom appear to have a high profile in the community; and most impressive of all, Junia, a woman whom Paul says is “foremost among the apostles.”

Whatever roles women played in his churches, Paul’s attitudes toward and views of women have been matters of great dispute over the years, in no small measure because of the ambiguities of the evidence.  On one hand, Paul makes pronouncements that sound remarkably liberated for the patriarchal world he inhabited, especially Gal. 3:28, that “in Christ there is no male and female.”  On the other hand, when it comes to social – as opposed to hypothetical or eschatological – realities Paul appears to bow to the pressures of his environment.  In his letter to the Corinthians he is quite insistent that women wear head coverings in church, in no small measure in order to show that they are subservient to their husbands, their “heads” (a complicated passage: 1 Cor. 11: 2-15).

Both the traditionally conservative and the progressively liberated Paul were influential on later branches of the Christian church.   The conservative Paul was transformed into a radical opponent of women and their role in the churches by such texts as the Pastoral epistles (1 Tim. 2:11-15; and the interpolator of 1 Cor. 14:33-36, a passage that Paul himself almost certainly did not write); such views lived on into the second and third centuries in such authors as Tertullian (see Selection 88), who argued that women are inherently inferior to men and need to be subservient to them.

The occasionally enlightened Paul was taken up by such texts as the Acts of Thecla (see Selection 83), a legendary female convert of Paul who is liberated from the constraints of a patriarchal marriage by embracing Paul’s teaching of rigid asceticism and who is ultimately commissioned by Paul to carry forth the Christian mission of proclaiming the gospel without male oversight.   Such freedom from patriarchal constraints may be seen in other texts as well throughout this collection, as in the Martyrdom of Perpetua (Selection 9 in Chapter 3).

These glimmers of hope – starting with Jesus and Paul — that Christianity would decisively break with its patriarchal milieu never came to fruition in our period – or ever, one might say.   The traditional forces proved too strong, as women eventually came for the most part to be silenced and subordinated to the men of their world.   As just intimated, however, the rise of an ascetic form of Christianity, already in the second century (or arguably even in the first) and heightening until it reached its zenith sometime after our period, did provide one avenue of deliverance for women wishing to escape the patriarchal constraints of their society.  Christian women who chose both not to marry and to have the church itself as their primary social locus (rather than their family, with father or husband as paterfamilias), were no longer subjected to male domination.  This has often been read as a liberating feature of the early Christian movement, as well it should be.

But it was liberation with a price.  By following an ascetic option, women were limited in what they could do precisely as women, for example, if they spurned childbearing and raising a family, not because that was their life decision, but because such a choice was forced upon them if they wanted, even more desperately, to escape the constricted possibilities of life in a patriarchal world.  So even the option of asceticism appears ambivalent at best, a bypassing of some of the patriarchal restrictions inherent in the woman’s world only on terms that could be seen, by some at least, to have been set again by the patriarchy that was then dominant, forcing women to escape male domination only by compromising other conditions of their humanity.

We see all of these tensions in a range of texts from the second and third century, as the following Selection attests.