No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
What did Women do for the Early Church? The Recent History of a Question
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
The question posed in the title deliberately reverses one that has accompanied me through my academic career: what did the early church do for women? The reversal signals what will prove to be an underlying theme of what follows, namely the role of women in history as objects or as the subjects of action and of discourse. Yet already the question as conventionally phrased highlights different points of stress that reflect where it belongs within reflective historiography, the subject of this volume. Firstly, ‘What did the early church do?’ The coming of early Christianity, it is implied, brought blessings or perhaps curses, evoking a way of writing church history which goes back to Eusebius and which continues both through Edward Gibbon and through those who still portray the social and religious context of the time as one of the inarticulate search for alternative conceptions of the divine or for alternative social values that Christianity would answer. Secondly, ‘for women’: thus, a deliberate rejection of any universalizing interpretation of such effects; a recognition, or at least a suspicion, that any apparently universalizing claim is actually spoken from a ‘normal’ that is already gendered as male; an invitation to ask how women’s experience could be recovered, what the sources would look like, and, indeed, whether it can be recovered from the extant sources.
- Type
- Part II: Changing Perspectives on Church History
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2013
References
1 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, The Woman’s Bible (New York, 1895, 1898; repr. with intra, by Spencer, Dale, Edinburgh, 1985).Google Scholar
2 Ibid. 13.
3 For its range already in 1985, see Russell, Letty M., ed., Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Oxford, 1985)Google Scholar; Collins, Adela Yarbro, ed., Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Studies (Chico, CA, 1985).Google Scholar The explosion of bibliography since means that only key or representative examples will be cited in what follows.
4 See, e.g., the tendency to see the primary question as that of the roles or functions women could fulfil: e.g. Hayter, Mary, The New Eve in Christ: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in the Debate about Women in the Church (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Heine, Susanne, Women and Early Christianity: Are the Feminist Scholars Right? (ET London, 1987)Google Scholar; Witherington, Ben III, Women in the Earliest Churches, SNTS Monograph Series 59 (Cambridge, 1988), 3, 219–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see nn. 24 and 32 below.
5 Pape, Dorothy, God and Women: A Fresh Look at what the New Testament says about Women (London, 1977), 57 Google Scholar; see the discussion in Lieu, Judith, ‘The Women’s Resurrection Testimony’, in Resurrection: Essays in Honour of Leslie Houlden, ed. Barton, Stephen and Stanton, Graham (London, 1994), 34–44.Google Scholar
6 See von Kellenbach, Katharina, Anti-Judaism in Feminist Religious Writings (Adanta, GA, 1994)Google Scholar; Schottroff, Luise and Wacker, Marie-Theres, eds, Von der Wurzel gelragen: christlich-feministische Exegese in Auseinandersetzung mit Antijudaismus, Biblical Interpretation Series 17 (Leiden, 1996).Google Scholar The contribution of Jewish women New Testament scholars to the debate has been particularly important, e.g. Levine, Amy-Jill, ‘Second Temple Judaism, Jesus, and Women: Yeast of Eden ’, Biblical Interpretation 2 (1994), 8–33 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levine is also editor of the Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christian Literature series (London, 2001–).
7 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York, 1983).Google Scholar
8 Thecla is the ‘heroine’ of a series of episodes within the second-century Acts of Paul; these chapters are often treated as an independent unit, ‘The Acts of (Paul and) Thecla’, although their separate circulation and expansion appears to be a later secondary development: see Schneemelcher, W., ‘Acts of Paul’, in Hennecke, E., New Testament Apocrypha, ed. Schneemelcher, W., 2 vols (ET London, 1965), 2: 326, 353–64 Google Scholar; Barrier, Jeremy W., The Acts of Paul and Thecla: A Critical Introduction and Commentary, WUNT II, 270 (Tübingen, 2009).Google Scholar A critical edition of the Greek text is awaited.
9 A parallel course was followed in the recovery of Jewish women; see, e.g., Ilan, Tal, Mine and Yours are Hers: Retrieving Women’s History from Rabbinic Literature, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Christentums 41 (Leiden, 1997)Google Scholar; eadem, Integrating Women into Second Temple History, Texte und Studien zum antiken Judentums 76 (Tübingen, 1999).
10 Schottroff, Luise, Lydias ungeduldige Schwestern (Gütersloh, 1994)Google Scholar, ET Lydia’s Impatient Sisters: A Feminist Social History of Christianity (Louisville, KY, 1995)Google Scholar; the reference is to Acts 16: 11–15. See Schottroff, Luise, Schroer, Silvia and Wacker, Marie-Theres, Feministische Exegese: Forschungserträge zur Bibel aus der Perspektive von Frauen (Darmstadt, 1995)Google Scholar, ET Feminist Interpretation: The Bible in Women’s Perspective (Minneapolis, MN, 1998)Google Scholar, who also trace the history back to The Woman’s Bible (ibid. 3–7), and (ibid. 25) identify the first German scholarly monograph of feminist biblical exegesis as Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel, Ein eigener Mensch werden: Frauen um Jesus (Gütersloh, 1980), ET The Women around Jesus: Reflections on Authentic Personhood (London, 1982).Google Scholar
11 Jensen, Anne, Gottes selbsthewusste Töchter. Frauenemanzipation in frühen Christentum?, Frauenforum (Freiburg, 1992)Google Scholar, ET in an abbreviated form as God’s Self-Confident Daughters: Early Christianity and the Liberation of Women (Louisville, KY, 1996); the difficulties Dr Jensen faced in furthering her scholarly career after the closure of the institute are well documented.
12 Biblical scholars have favoured their own term, ‘narrative criticism’, for this analysis focused on literary strategies within the text.
13 For an overview of these methods in general, see Aichele, G. et al. [‘The Bible and Culture Collective’] The Postmodern Bible (New Haven, CT, 1995)Google Scholar, esp. the essay on ‘Feminist and Womanist Criticism’: ibid. 225–71. Essays in ‘The Feminist Companion’ Series (see n. 6 above) illustrate the various approaches discussed in this paragraph.
14 See, e.g., Dube, Musa W., Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St Louis, MO, 2000).Google Scholar
15 In particular the texts discovered c.1945 at Nag Hammadi: see Robinson, James M., ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (Leiden, 1977).Google Scholar
16 von Harnack, Adolf, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, 2 vols (ET London, 1904-5), 2: 217–39.Google Scholar
17 Origen, Contra Celsum 3.44, transl. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge, 1953), 158.
18 Minucius Felix, Octavius 8.4, in Tertullian, Apology, De Spectaculis, transl. Glover, T. R. / Felix, Minucius, Octavius, transl. Rendall, Gerald H., LCL 250 (London, 1953), 335.Google Scholar
19 Athenagoras, Legatio 11.3-4, in idem, Legatio and De Resurrectione, ed. and transl. Schoedel, William R., OECT (Oxford, 1972), 25.Google Scholar Other apologists continue this theme.
20 Stark, Rodney, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ, 1996), esp. 95–128.Google Scholar
21 On this and what follows, see further Lieu, Judith M., ‘The “Attraction of Women” in/to Early Judaism and Christianity: Gender and the Politics of Conversion’, JSNT 72 (1998), 5–22 Google Scholar, repr. in eadem, Neither Jew nor Greek: Constructing Early Christianity (Edinburgh, 2002), 83–99.
22 So, e.g., Witherington, Ben III, Women in the Ministry of Jesus: A Study of Jesus’ Attitude to Women and their Roles as Reflected in his Earthly Life, SNTS Monograph Series 51 (Cambridge, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Women in the Early Church.
23 Meeks, Wayne A., The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven, CT, 1983), 16–25; 70–3.Google Scholar
24 See, e.g., Heine, Susan, Women and Early Christianity, 124–46 Google Scholar; Torjesen, Karen Jo, When Women were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity (New York, 1993), 155–76 Google Scholar; Wagener, Ulrike, Die Ordnung des ‘Hauses Gottes’: Der Ort von Frauen in der Ekklesiologie und Ethik der Pastoralbriefe, WUNT II, 65 (Tübingen, 1994).Google Scholar A more nuanced picture of the early period is presented by Carolyn Osiek and Margaret MacDonald with Tulloch, Janet H., A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity (Minneapolis, MN, 2006).Google Scholar
25 For this deliberate renegotiation of canonical boundaries, see Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, ed., Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary, 2 vols (New York, 1993–4)Google Scholar, which includes forty ‘Christian’ texts.
26 Most commonly cited is the convenient, albeit not critical, Latin text and English translation by Musurillo, Herbert, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, OECT (Oxford, 1972), 106–31 Google Scholar; see now the detailed study with text and translation by Heffernan, Thomas J., The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity (New York, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 The Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas 3–10 (Musurillo, Acts, 108–19); see Wilson-Kastner, Patricia et al., A Lost Tradition: Women Writers of the Early Church (Washington, DC, 1981), 1–32 Google Scholar; Dronke, Peter, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (†203) to Marguerite Porete (†310) (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar; so largely still Salisbury, Joyce E., Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman (New York and London, 1997)Google Scholar; and, with due caution, Heffernan, Passion of Perpetua.
28 Musurillo, Acts, liii; as is frequently the case, the Pauline ‘neither Jew nor Greek’ is dropped.
29 Frend, William, ‘Blandina and Perpetua: Two Early Christian Heroines’, in Rougé, J. and Turcan, R., eds, Les Martyrs de Lyon (177), Colloques internationaux du Centre national de la recherche scientifique 575 (Paris, 1978), 167–77, at 175.Google Scholar
30 This was the motivation of Wilson-Kastner, Lost Tradition; see also Clark, Elizabeth A., Women in the Early Church (Collegeville, MN, 1983), 78–88 Google Scholar (Thecla), 97–106 (Perpetua). For scholarly editions see nn. 8 and 26 above.
31 So, e.g., Davies, Stevan L., The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts (Carbondale, IL, 1980), 95–109 Google Scholar; Burrus, Virginia, Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts (Lewiston, NY, 1987)Google Scholar. Wehn, Beate, ‘Vergewaltige nicht die Sklavin Gottes’: Gewalterfahrungen und Widerstand von Frauen in der frühchristlichen Thekla-Akten (Königstein, 2005), 51–3 Google Scholar, still largely follows Burrus. On the tide of ‘the Acts’, see n. 8 above.
32 See n. 24 above. Others, maintaining the primary concern with office-holding, have argued that evidence for women fulfilling roles of recognized authority can be uncovered for several centuries, although often masked by ambiguous terminology or by negative polemic: Eisen, Ute E., Amtsträgerinnen im frühen Christentum: Epigraphische und literarische Studien, Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 61 (Göttingen, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ET Women Office-holders in the Early Church: Epigraphical and Literary Studies (Collegeville, MN, 2000).Google Scholar
33 In the account of the ‘Martyrs of Lyons and Vienne’ preserved by Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 5.1.3-2.1 (text and translation in Musurillo, Acts, 62–85).
34 The Martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonike 43 (Greek), 6 (Latin) (Musurillo, Acts, 22–37, at 28–9, 34–5). For the motif of an appeal to a mother’s compassion for her children, see Martyrdom of Perpetua 6 (Musurillo, Acts, 113–14); 2 Mace. 7: 25–9; 4 Macc. 8: 20; 14: 11 – 16: 25; Luke 23: 28.
35 Martyrdom of Perpetua 13 (Musurillo, Acts, 121–3).
36 See Clark, Elizabeth A., Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith (Lewiston, NY, 1986)Google Scholar; Cooper, Kate, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealised Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA, 1996).Google Scholar On Thecla’s heritage, see Davis, Stephen J., The Cult of St Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity, OECS (Oxford, 2001).Google Scholar
37 See Trevett, Christine, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy (Cambridge, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
38 On the situation in Corinth, see Wire, Antoinette Clark, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric (Minneapolis, MN, 1995)Google Scholar; Økland, Jorunn, Women in their Place: Paul and the Corinthian Discourse of Gender and Sanctuary Space, JSNT Supplement Series 269 (London, 2004).Google Scholar
39 For social-scientific analysis of the phenomenon, see Lewis, I. M., Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (London, 1989).Google Scholar
40 So already Corrington, Gail, Her Image of Salvation: Female Saviors and Formative Christianity (Louisville, KY, 1992)Google Scholar; Kraemer, Ross Shepard, ed., Maenads, Martyrs, Mystics, Matrons: A Sourcebook of Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World (Philadelphia, PA, 1988 Google Scholar; 2nd edn, Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook [Oxford, 2004]).
41 Epiphanius, Panarion 42.1.4, in Epiphanius II, ed. Karl Holl, 2nd edn, ed. Jürgen Dummer, GCS (Berlin, 1980), 94.
42 For texts and discussion, see Hanig, Roman, ‘Der Beitrag der Philumene zur Theologie der Apelleianer’, Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity 3 (1999), 240–77 Google Scholar, who notes how she, too, shares the fate of other women, as her independent contribution is forgotten in later tradition.
43 Fox, R. Lane, Pagans and Christians (Harmondsworth, 1986), 311 Google Scholar; it is unclear whether we are to imagine a long lazy afternoon, the male (?) Gnostic teacher surrounded by his adoring female devotees, or the sexual dalliance that would be a welcome relief from long philosophical disquisitions – although why should only women be likely to succumb to either?
44 On the dynamics of the association between heresy and women, see Kraemer, Ross Shepard, ‘Heresy as Women’s Religion: Women’s Religion as Heresy’, in eadem, Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religions among Pagans, Jeivs, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (New York, 1992), 157–73 Google Scholar; Wagener, Die Ordnung, 219–21. On the later period, see Burrus, Virginia, ‘The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome’, HThR 84 (1991), 229–48.Google Scholar
45 The issues are well illustrated by the range of highly nuanced readings in Bremmer, Jan N. and Formisano, Marco, eds, Perpetua’s Passions: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis (Oxford, 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Particularly influential in recent reconsideration has been recognition of the structural and thematic, and so, potentially, the generic, similarities between these writings and the Hellenistic novels of the same period, which increasingly have been interpreted not as ‘women’s literature’ but as reinforcing conventional values: see Burrus, Virginia, ‘Mimicking Virgins: Colonial Ambivalence and the Ancient Romance’, Arethusa 38 (2005), 49–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Perkins, Judith, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London, 1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
46 The role of women in the sects he denounces is a recurring topos in Epiphanius, and he routinely transfers such claims between different groups when his earlier sources are silent. On the place of women in ‘gnostic’ texts, see King, Karen L., ed., Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (Philadelphia, PA, 1988)Google Scholar; for more recent nuancing, see McGuire, Anne, ‘Women, Gender, and Gnosis in Gnostic Texts and Traditions’, in Kraemer, Ross Shepard and D’Angelo, Mary Rose, eds, Women and Christian Origins (Oxford, 1999), 257–99 Google Scholar; Trevett, Montanism, 151–97, is cautious about the evidence that women had more status in Montanism.
47 Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988).Google Scholar Included here would be a number of those whose work is cited in footnotes to this essay: Elizabeth Clark, Virginia Burrus and Elizabeth Castelli, and from the UK Averil Cameron and Kate Cooper.
48 Martyrdom of Perpetua 20.1–5; Martyrdom of Carpus (Latin) 6.4–5 (Musurillo, Acts, 129, 35 respectively).
49 For Perpetua, see n.27 above; ‘Acts of Thecla’ 3.25 (Acts of Paul, ed. Schneemelcher, 359–60). For Blandina, see Martyrs of Lyons 1.17 (Musurillo, Acts, 67).
50 On the use of Lévi-Strauss, see Kraemer, Ross Shepard, Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (Oxford, 2011), 128–9.Google Scholar For the broader polemical application of such gendered associations, see Knust, Jennifer Wright, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York, 2006).Google Scholar
51 See Castelli, Elizabeth A., Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York, 2004), 61–7, 138–43.Google Scholar
52 Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica 4.22.4.
53 Martyrs of Lyons 1.45, 55 (Musurillo, Acts, 77, 79). Such imagery of the church also draws on biblical traditions of Jerusalem as barren mother whose children are restored, and of the church as bride (Isa. 54; Rev. 21: 2). It also intersects with the topos of expected motherly love noted above (n. 34).
54 Cameron, Averil, ‘Virginity as Metaphor: Women and Rhetoric in Early Christianity’, in eadem, ed., History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), 181–205.Google Scholar
55 Martyrs of Lyons 1.41 (Musurillo, Acts, 74).
56 Ibid. 1.18; subsequendy (1.42) she is said to ‘have put on Christ, that mighty and invincible athlete’ (Musurillo, Acts, 67, 75).
57 Here again studies of Christian and also Jewish material were embraced in a move that was already taking place in classics; see, e.g., Foxhall, Lin and Salmon, John, eds, When Men were Men: Masculinity, Power, and Identity in Classical Antiquity (London, 1998)Google Scholar; Wyke, Maria, ed., Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford, 1998).Google Scholar
58 A further dimension that cannot be explored here would be the multiple intersections with the gendered ways in which God is conceptualized.
59 See already Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks, ‘Every Two Minutes: Battered Women and Feminist Interpretation’, in Russell, , ed., Feminist Interpretation, 96–107.Google Scholar
60 See Clark, Elizabeth, ‘The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the “Linguistic Turn”’, ChH 67 (1998), 1–31.Google Scholar Several of the scholars cited in these notes have become increasingly cautious about attempting historical recovery in their more recent publications: see the review of scholarly development and a personal perspective in Kraemer, Unreliable Witnesses, 3–28.
61 One very patent by-product has been the increased sensitivity to gender issues in translation of the Scriptures as well as in scholarly analysis.
You have
Access