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Concluding Part 7 of Tom Lee's manuscript, today's excerpt examines the role accorded to women in the early Church and how it gradually became subverted at later points in history. It also has some valuable observations on the role played by the early community leaders — the bishops and presidents of the local communities.

The more important role of women in early Christianity
Part 7.2

by Tom Lee

The evidence of the equal role accorded to women in the early Church...

In pre-Christian Greek society, Joan Breton Connelly in her book Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press 2007) points out: "religious office presented the one arena in which Greek women assumed roles equal and comparable to those of men". In the Greek cults, priests and priestesses carried out ritual, mostly to do with sacrifice of animals. If properly placated in the temples dedicated to them, gods might help mortals; if not their random and often spiteful acts of vengeance made good drama. The power of the gods and the possibility of petitioning them had no moral element at all. But women sustained, and were in turn sustained by, a powerful and cohesive religious awareness, easily co-opted into early Christianity.

Women performed the purification rites in Roman and early Christian society. The dead were thought to be contaminated, and before the ground was broken for burial their bodies had to be purified. Banquets were an important aspect of the funerary rite, which women frequently led. It wasn't until about the sixth century that Christian priests began officiating at burials.

St. John addresses his second Epistle to an Elect Lady, a woman who was in the position of overseer of a church community. This may mean that as an ordained overseer she also was ordained to consecrate the Eucharist. It is a too frequent reality that history is written by the winners, which explains the deleting, obscuring and distorting of women's role in the surviving official record of the ecclesial establishment.

Early preachers, as Paul described, were teams of men and women. The Churches he established were dependent on a large group of fellow workers, carefully named and praised, women and men, in whose houses the Eucharist was celebrated. In the next generation, bishops were married, and deaconesses were ordained.

We know that due to the taboo concerning women during menstruation, they were at times considered unclean and liable to contaminate others, an excuse used eventually to withhold women from the service of the altar. However, they were able to undertake many other services such as overseers of communities that in apostolic times started in their homes.

The second Epistle of John warns the Elect Lady and her community against false teachers, and it ends with greetings from the children of her sister elect. We can understand this sister to be an Elect Lady over another community. There is evidence of other women heads of Christian meetings in the letters to Trajan from Pliny the Younger (61-113) while he was governor of Bithynia. He said he found it necessary to torture two maids called ministrae by the Christians in order to obtain information from them. They were evidently singled out as being the ones responsible for the meetings and as being leaders in service of the others.

Fifteen archaeological inscriptions have been found that demonstrate women were sacramental ministers in the first three centuries after Jesus' death, though there is need for caution in respect of some of these inscriptions. In the church of St. Praxedis in Rome there is a beautiful ninth-century mosaic of St. Theodora with the word episcopa inscribed above her. In fact, the lady in question is the mother of Pope Paschal and not a member of the clergy at all. However, catacombs and churches in Rome display beautiful mosaics and frescoes showing that women served priestly roles in the early church. Pilgrims can see how seven early Christian women celebrated Eucharist at an overnight vigil in a fresco in St. Priscilla's catacomb.

In her book Women Officeholders in Early Christianity (Liturgical Press 2007), German epigraphical scholar Ute Eisen demonstrates there is widespread evidence of titles for women priests and presiders (presbytera, presbytides, presbyterissa) who served in both the Eastern and Western churches from the second to the ninth century. Yet churchmen consistently maintain, without any evidence, that these women were merely the wives of priests, not priests themselves. This does not explain why burial sites of single women have the presbytera inscription, nor does it explain why married women with the presbytera title are buried alongside husbands with no title. It does suggest that there were single women and married women whose husbands were not office holders who were given the title of priest, as priesthood was understood at the time. Burial-sites in which a female presbytera is buried alongside a presbyter spouse indicate that both husband and wife functioned as priests.

In Romans 16:7, Paul greets, "those outstanding apostles Andronicus and Junia, my compatriots and fellow prisoners who became Christians before me". For centuries Junia was mistakenly translated as the masculinized Junius, and still is in the Jerusalem Bible, because it was considered impossible for a woman to be an apostle even if acknowledged as one by Paul himself. But the name Junius is not found in any ancient text while the female Junia is common.

Evidence from pagan writers...

There is some evidence that the use of women overseers (episcopae) continued through several centuries until it was slowly suppressed and, once masculine control was complete, most records of the earlier practice were destroyed. One reason may have been the increasing influence of male Gentile converts. The pagan writers Pliny, Marcus Cornelius Fronto, Lucius Apuleius, Lucian of Samosata, Galen and Celsus, all were generally hostile in their polemical comments on Christianity and the degree of women's participation and freedom within the movement, seen as subverting Greek and Roman presuppositions about women's permitted roles and about society in general.

The beginning of suppression of feminine influence appears to be reflected in the fragments we have of the Gospel of Mary (Magdala), which gave voice to the spiritual vision of the first witness of the Resurrection. That is why Peter is jealous of her in this second century work.

The Church of Bythinia, founded by Paul and visited by Peter, had fraternities of deaconesses within the living memory of the Apostles. The institution spread rapidly during the second century, and by the third it was exceptional for a church not to have deaconesses. Wherever baptism was performed deaconesses were necessary for women catechumens, as the rite originally required nudity.

By the sixth century, church offices for women were declining, in some measure because of the decline of baptism by immersion and the emergence in its place of infant baptism, making female deacons redundant. The rise of cultic sacramentalism demanding cultural purity was another factor.

Misogyny was pervasive in Greek culture and eventually oppressed women's role in Christianity. Hesiod's story of Pandora's box, 800 years before Christ, reflected the dominant cultural attitude of the Greeks to women: "Contempt was her due for exciting the lust that leads us into the cycle of birth and death, from which we can never break free". The Church Fathers heaped a like opprobrium upon Eve.

Both Plato and Aristotle supported the attitude of sexual dualism, representing a society that saw women as "other", not normative humans like men. Though Homer dramatized the suffering of women with power and compassion, his epic poems of the Trojan war and its aftermath also stressed that woman was its cause and revealed women's powerlessness in matters of law and state.

There was soon a distinct contrast in the Church between the positive attitude of Jesus and Paul's radical affirmation of male-female equality in Galatians with the growing restrictions placed on women in the third and fourth centuries. Negative opinions and prohibitions from Tertullian, Augustine and other church fathers, as well as the attempt to separate a pure Mary from other women, began to overshadow the positive attractions the church held for women, viewed by men solely as fetus incubators. The condemnation of Eve became a fundamental cause of contempt for women.

Paul refers to Presbyters, or Elders, but it is not clear whether, initially, they were identical with the president/overseer or an intermediate rank between president and deacon. Prophets and teachers are also mentioned. It is thought that bishops (overseers) and presbyters were at first identical, either word being used to denote the same office. There were several presbyter-bishops in each church or local community as the sacerdotal work was probably still a part-time activity, the presbyters earning their living at something else. Later one of the presbyter-bishops in each church began to be singled out for a special position of authority.

The exact history of the transition from. apostles, prophets and teachers to bishops, presbyters and deacons is shrouded in obscurity and is an ongoing study. Evidently the churches established by traveling missionaries soon came to have local, stationary clergy, subordinate to the apostolic authority. For a generation or more the apostles and prophets coexisted with the local ministry of bishops and deacons.

Leadership of the early Church communities...

The early church had a wholly different idea of religious vocation to that pertaining today, with our reliance on volunteers who feel inspired to devote themselves to God and his people. According to Monsignor George Leonard: "The early Christian communities spontaneously singled out those needed for leadership, service or mission and laid hands on them as a sign of their calling. The initiative rested with the community and with those who spoke in the name of the Church." Thus the people of God assessed their local needs, decided who were best equipped to meet those local needs and then called upon those chosen to respond to the challenge of serving God in a particular ministry. The corporate church community felt free to invite suitable candidates to undertake the necessary formation and then the responsibilities of ministry. Celebrations of the Eucharist by non-ordained persons, according to modern norms, were considered valid and meaningful. The bread for communion was a shared unity loaf passed from one worshipper to another with the query "Are you a member of the body of Christ?" It was renewal of their baptismal commitment. The word liturgy means "response of the people". It was never intended as a private devotion. The early church pastors watched over the division of the people's offerings into three portions, one for the poor, one for the community love feast, and the third for the presiding elder and his family. We should remember that a celibate caste in the church eventually took control of the Eucharist and used it in part as a means of enhancing its power over the people. Nowadays, except in special celebratory liturgies, the offerings are completely monetary, most of it bound for the local chancery office with Rome getting its cut.

In his book, On Being a Christian, Hans Kung wrote:

"In the Palestinian tradition institutionalization had set in at a very early stage as a result of taking over from Judaism the college of elders and ordination. The Acts of the Apostles and the pastoral letters show that the Pauline congregations had also reached an advanced stage of institutionalization (ordination). Other congregations however (centered around Matthew or John) still exhibit expressly fraternal structures, so that even up to the end of New Testament times there is an immense variety - which cannot be harmonized - of both congregational constitutions and forms of ministries of leadership (partly charismatic and partly already institutionalized). But the unity of the congregations with each other is maintained. The question however arises: under these circumstances is it still possible to uphold a special "apostolic succession" of the ministries of leadership?...It cannot be maintained historically that the bishops in a direct and exclusive sense are the successors of the apostles (still less of the college of the Twelve)."

The late Anglican Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, maintained in his autobiography that: "The notion of a succession of bishops from the apostles is dubious at best."

By the end of the first century, Ignatius, who became bishop of Antioch about 69, developed a high idea of the bishop's office, as may be seen from this passage from his letter to the Christians of Smyrna:

"Make sure that no step affecting the church is taken by anyone without the bishop's sanction. The sole Eucharist you should consider valid is one that is celebrated by the bishop himself, or by some person authorized by him. Where the bishop is to be seen, there let all his people be; just as wherever Jesus Christ is present we have the world-wide church."

The growing emphasis on the priestly and cultic ministry led to a tendency to downplay their role as community leaders and proclaimers of the Word. Ignatius unambiguously called Jesus "God" — a divine being in human form, not regarded as it had been by the Jews as a scandal, but as a mystery.

St. Peter was never bishop of Rome as Roman Catholic apologists believed and claimed for centuries, nor did he reside there for twenty-five years. But at the conclusion of a National Dialogue between American Lutheran and Roman Catholic theologians in July 1965 it was concluded in their joint report:

"It is very likely that some sections of the church attributed greater prestige and authority to Peter than to any other church leader. However this was not necessarily true for all segments of early Christianity, or of the New Testament. It is more than likely that other segments of the church revered another disciple or other disciples as much as they revered Peter or even more than Peter if they were founded by another disciple."

The Christology of the New Testament developed out of two things: the belief in Jesus' resurrection and the memory of what was fundamental in his earthly life. Gradually, however, the second element — the notion of kingdom — was downplayed or shifted to the realm of a historical and esoteric spirituality, a recurrent tendency still operative today.

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[Index of Commentaries by Tom Lee]