6 - Trajectories beyond the New Testament era

Summary

The study of women and their roles in the earliest churches would not be complete without some attempt to glimpse how things proceeded after the period when the NT documents were written. This is especially important not least because there probably was no canon of twenty-seven books recognized before the time of Athanasius' famous Festal Epistle of AD 367. This means that many documents, both orthodox and heterodox, being written until well into the fourth century, were considered to be of great authority and even had the possibility of being recognized as canonical and so of final authority. It also means that documents later labeled orthodox and heterodox may reflect conditions not only in the Church during the period that led up to canonization, but also in groups on the fringe of or outside the Church. Thus, it will be important to examine the references to women and their roles not only in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, but also in the apocryphal material.

Since our study is about the earliest churches, we will examine material that can be dated with reasonable certainty to a time before AD 325. This means that we will not be dealing with the period when monasticism and Mariology were perhaps the two main forces dominating what roles and images the Church saw as appropriate and exemplary for Christian women.

We have already noted the anti-feminist bias of various readings in the so-called Western Text of Acts.