1 - Women in first-century Mediterranean cultures

Summary

No study of women in the NT can be undertaken without looking at the larger historical context in which the events of NT history transpired. In this chapter we will attempt to indicate what the prevailing attitudes about women, their status and roles, seem to have been in various places in the Roman empire before and during the NT era. We can only hope to mention selected portions of the relevant data, but it appears that the material presented is representative of the period.

One of the great difficulties in dealing with the material is that by and large we only get the perspectives of those who were authors and authoresses, except in the case of the inscriptional and epigraphal evidence. Thus, we are most often hearing the views of those who were educated, literate, and in a numerical minority. Nonetheless, the inscriptional and epigraphal evidence seems to confirm that the writers of the era, to one degree or another, reflected the largely patriarchal orientation of the culture. As we shall see, however, within the general patriarchal framework, women's status and roles varied from one sub-culture to another.

Women and their roles in Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor, and Egypt

Within the general patriarchal framework, present to a greater or lesser extent in all of Greece's city-states and colonies from Homeric times through the age of the Roman empire, one finds a diversity of roles and views of women that goes beyond the confines of rabbinic Judaism.