Tuesday is Stump a Scholar day here at Patheos Progressive Christian — and no question is too tough or too radical for our experts!
This month, we’re answering your questions about the Bible with resident expert Professor Jerry Sumney. Dr. Sumney is professor of biblical studies at Lexington Theological Seminary and the author of Colossians: A Commentary (2008) and Identifying Paul’s Opponents (1990). He’s also the author of the new Bible: An Introduction, Second Edition from Fortress Press, a dynamic interactive digital textbook for learning about the Bible on your own.
This week’s question comes from our Facebook inquiry (to which many of you responded) and is from Robyn Parkin. Keep the questions coming in the Comments section below or on Facebook! And your comments on Prof. Sumney’s answers are always welcome, below.
Robyn asks: What happened to women’s stories and women’s leadership, given that the early church was radically egalitarian?
Professor Sumney responds:
This question asks how the church has or has not lived up to some of the things it proclaimed. A number of different things contribute to a full response. From very early times, the church said that the things that establish status in the world (social class, ethnicity, and sex) do not count as markers of status and value in the church. We see this from the baptismal liturgy Paul quotes in Galatians 3:26-28. These declarations were not, however, always met with acceptance. Despite such declarations, Gentiles church members were often seen by some in the early church as lower in status than Jewish church members. While we hear less about it, we should not doubt that there was always a struggle for women and slaves to be counted as equals in the church. Yet there is evidence that there were prominent women in the early church. We hear, for example, of Prisca (AKA Priscilla). She is mentioned along with her husband Aquila. The order of their names indicates that she was the more prominent member of the couple; she is usually named first (Acts 18:18, 26; Romans 16:3; 2 Timothy 4:19; in only two places is he named first). She was a sponsor of and participant in Paul’s mission activities. There are several women leaders named in Romans 16. Some are clearly involved in ministries of the church. Those include Mary in v. 6; Junia who is prominent among the apostles—it is not clear whether she has the title apostle or is well-known by the apostles; Tryphaena and Tryphosa are involved in the work of the church; Rufus’ mother; and Julia, the sister of Nereus, and Olympas are leaders in a congregation. We could name several others from Paul’s letters. We learn almost nothing about them except what is needed to discuss whatever issue is the topic at hand. In some ways, this is what we should expect. The writings of the New Testament do not tell about the lives of these women because these writings are addressed to people who know them. So Paul does not tell us about Chloe, who seems to host a church in Corinth, because he mentions her in a letter written to Corinth. Since everyone there knows her, there is no reason to say much about her. He even does little to introduce Phoebe to the Romans other than to tell them that she is a deacon of the church in Cenchrea (a suburb of Corinth). We should note that there are also few stories about the lives of the men who are in the church except for a select few such as Paul, Peter, Jesus. Most characters in the Gospels and Acts, both men and women, are flat characters. We hear about them only what we need to hear the keep the central stories moving.
Still, there are indications of the prominence of women in the earliest church. After all, against cultural expectations, the Gospels name women as the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus. In favor of seeing this as a genuine memory of the church is that the early confessional tradition that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 leaves them out and names Peter as the first witness. So the later Gospels seem to recapture the early memory that women were the first to experience and proclaim the resurrection.
Having women in places of leadership caused both internal and external problems for the early church. The topic of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 is how men and women should dress when they lead worship. It assumes that both lead worship, but the Corinthian church struggled with what that meant about whether there should be distinctions and if so what they should be. (Paul argued that there were distinctions without allowing that to imply that those distinctions entailed a difference in status.) Being a member of the church complicated the lives of women, even when it opened new possibilities for status within the church. For example, women who were married to non-believing men would have to continue to live as subordinates in their homes or face retaliation or expulsion or both. (The same went for slaves.) Yet they were told at church that they had the same value and status as those husbands who continued to exercise authority over them.
Declaring that women and men and slaves and free people have the same status in the church set the church at odds with the surrounding culture. It tells people who are required to act as inferiors that this treatment violates their true identity and status. The world they live in requires them to act like beings of inferior value, but the church tells them they are not. Before long, the church had to help such people make sense of their place in the world. It did so in part by emphasizing that the structures of the world violate the will of God. Such a counter-cultural stance is hard to maintain.
In addition, one of the ways the church talked about itself from quite early times was as the household of God. This could be understood in ways that granted all members equal status as children of God who are destined to receive an inheritance. In some cases, through their identification with Christ all are said to have the status as first-born. In this configuration, God is the head of the household. In the Greco-Roman world, all households were hierarchical. We should also remember that the earliest churches met in people’s houses. Think of how difficult it would be if they met in the house of a wealthy person. The head of the household would often have been a man who was accustomed to having his superior authority be recognized by all (his wife, children, and slaves, as well as outsiders). Now imagine that some of his slaves became church members. When they were baptized, they heard someone say that in Christ there is neither slave nor free person, all are one (Gal 3:26-28). Think of the tension when that slave asserts an opinion contrary to her or his owner in the context of the gathered church. The same thing would go for wives. So meeting in the context of a given household and calling yourselves a household made it even more difficult to maintain a sense of all having the same status.
By the time we get to the writing of the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy and Titus), the church had begun to accept a more hierarchical internal structure. By then (the end of the 1st or beginning of the 2nd century), the author of 1 Timothy prohibits women from speaking in the gathered church and limits them to teaching other women. But women did not acquiesce easily. Even this author may recognize women deacons (see the discussion of deacons in 3:8-13 that includes discussion of women, seemingly as deacons). More importantly, 1 Timothy is insistent about the silence of women in worship in part, perhaps for the most part, because there was an office of widows that seems to have wielded a great deal of power. He devotes most of chapter five to giving instructions about who can be counted as a “widow,” what they get from the church, and what ministries they should be engaged in. He seems to think that a teaching he finds destructive is accepted by many who are “widows.” Thus his demands for submission and silence are a direct response to this powerful group of women. It is the combination of their acceptance of the “false teaching” (which seems to have concerned an interpretation of the Mosaic Law in Gentile churches) and their identity as women that moves him to impose these regulations.
External pressures and internal controversies moved many in the church away from the early teaching that all possess the same status and worth in the church. But that impetus did not disappear. At a still later time (the early third century) its opponents could still complain that that the church was a movement of “slaves and women” (see Origen’s response to this accusation by Celsus in Contra Celsus 3.44, 55, 59). But the more the church attained status as an acceptable institution, the more pressure it was under to conform to the ideologies of the outside world. So by the time it is legalized in the fourth century, it had largely accepted a male dominated hierarchical structure.
The ancient setting and internal disputes of the first two centuries are only part of the reason women seem invisible in the New Testament texts and the early church. Another part of the reason they are less visible than men is that most of the people who have produced studies of the early church have been men. It has only been since the middle of the 20th century that the number of women New Testament scholars began to increase. Women scholars have increased the amount of attention given to the women who appear in the biblical texts. So those early women believers are becoming more visible. In addition, the rise of feminist scholarship and methods of doing history that look not only to prominent figures but also to the lives of the more average person have opened ways for us to recapture something of the lives of women in the early church. Hopefully these scholars and these studies will continue to increase so that we can gain more insight into how women did lead and into how they were pushed into submission as time passed.
Got a question? We’ve got an answer! Join the new Stump A Scholar series every Tuesday here at Patheos Progressive Christian!
And to learn more about the Bible on your own, check out The Bible: An Introduction, Second Edition interactive digital textbook by Jerry L. Sumney here!