Did Paul Hate Women? Historical Glimpse into the Role of Women in the Early Church

A few days ago I had dinner with a couple of my acquaintances. One was a young girl in her mid-20s with strong anti-religious sentiments. Usually, I don’t like to talk about heavy topics such as religion and Church at dinner, but she was persistent. As a pretext for engaging in dialogue (as it turned out, it was more a monologue, but okay) about religion, she used the example of a group of Christians who are kneeling and praying at the main square in Zagreb for, as they claim, men to become real men again. Whatever that means! Sooner than later, her discussion turned to history and she began to explain to us how the Church marginalized women from the beginning of Christianity. As an example, she used the apostle Paul who was, according to her view, the first Christan misogynist! Naturally, I didn’t say anything since the love of good food at a nice dinner is much stronger than the will to engage in a polemical discussion about the early Christian world with someone whose feminist energy is through the sky, but the knowledge of history isn’t. Rather, I’ll use this blog to address her theories and conclusions. Was Paul really a hater of women?

WOMEN IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

There are “three reasons for gratitude: that I was born a human being and not a beast, next, a man and not a woman, thirdly, a Greek and not a barbarian”. So it goes the rhetorical commonplace in the ancient world variously attributed to Plato or Thales. It is true that the Hellenistic world tried to reduce the gap in power between men and women. Particularly, the economic rights of women in cases of divorce and inheritance improved, and with them arose the figure of the wealthy woman, able to exercise considerable influence through the pervasive patron/client relationship in Roman society. However, the gap was still big and strong. After all, this was a patriarchal society that we are talking about. The father of the house had, from our modern perspective, unimaginable power and influence over his wife and kids. Women were not allowed to vote and engage (actively) in public life. Women in ancient times were generally given a place in a home, not in public discussion and politics. They weren’t involved in active politics. Their place was home! There, of course, were religious movements in ancient times where women were prominent. There were ancient cults (e.g., the cult of the goddess Cybele) primarily focused on women where only women could participate! Women could be priestesses. It’s not that every woman was completely oppressed. However, it is worth noting that these exceptions were always from the upper class of society. Regular (poor) women without aristocratic backgrounds (90 % of women) were generally limited to the boundaries of a home. As it turns out, the role of women within the Church at the beginning of Christianity was better than it was in the rest of society. We can begin by thinking about the New Testament documents chronologically. If you start with what Jesus was doing, then what was happening during Paul’s lifetime, and what was happening after Paul, If you trace that chronologically, it looks like women were at the beginning very active, but as time goes, they were less and less active within the community. Most prescriptions about what women cannot do come from later sources. Almost certainly these later writings were emphasizing that women should not be in leadership roles. Precisely because they were in leadership roles, and the authors of those later texts didn’t like it at all. It is worth emphasizing that if you are legislating something that means that people are actively doing something you wanted them to stop doing. In the ancient and medieval rules and codes, you can get a glimpse of what behavior was actually happening and what people in power were trying to control.

PAUL, WOMEN, AND THE EARLY CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES?

We are fortunate to have letters from Paul that have survived the ravages of time. There are 13 letters in the New Testament that bear his name. However, scholars have known for decades that only six of those letters were really written by Paul. The other 7 are written after Paul’s death by anonymous individuals who claimed that they are Paul. They claimed that because they wanted their letters to have bigger authority and influence. If people think that letter was actually written by a great apostle Paul, then the content of that letter is more significant! As the table below shows, biblical scholars divide Paul’s letters into three categories:

  1. Undisputed letters – virtually all scholars agree that these were written by Paul who dies around 62 CE.
  2. Disputed/Undisputed – scholars are about evenly divided. Debates are still very open!
  3. Disputed letters – most critical scholars concur that these were written a few decades after Paul’s death
Paul’s letters and the problem of authorship

It is interesting that in those 7 undisputed letters, we get a very different view of women and their role in the early Church than in those later epistles that were written decades later by someone else pretending to be Paul. Take, for instance, Paul’s epistle to Romans. In the last chapter, Paul is greeting various Christians in the city of Rome. He greets 25 people by name, and a number of them are women. And it is striking that he names one woman who is a deacon in the church and who is carrying his letter. There are others who have church meeting in their homes, others that he calls his co-workers. Paul calls one of those women apostles! Her name was Junia. Denial of her apostleship in later Church was so strong that the older translations of the Bible (e.g., in English) changed her name from Junia to Junius. Just to make her male. The problem, of course, is that we don’t know of any person in antiquity whose name was Junius. That name simply didn’t exist in the ancient world.

There are two main passages in Pauline’s corpus that are strikingly different in their opinion of women in the early Church. The most famous one is from 1 Timothy:

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission (ἐν πάσῃ ὑποταγῇ). I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.

As I stated, scholars have known for a long time that this wasn’t something Paul wrote. It is a letter written at the end of the 1st century. However, there is another passage in 1 Corinthians – an epistle Paul really wrote:

Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak but must be in submission, as the law says.

How do we explain this? Well, scholars have long argued that these two verses were not originally in 1 Corinthians. In other words, they are later interpolations. A scribe who was copying decided to put these words into the mouths of Paul. And there are really convincing arguments in favor of that conclusion. Even conservative (evangelical) scholars like Gordon Fee agree that these verses were not originally part of the letter. One evident argument is that three chapters earlier Paul explicitly says that women can speak in the Church. They can pray and prophesize. There are other arguments based on linguistic and contextual elements, but I won’t go there.

CONCLUSION

I don’t think Paul hated women. Far from it. In his day and time, women occupied important roles within the Christian communities. One reason for that was the fact that Christians of Paul’s day were meeting in private homes. Scholars argued convincingly that since the home was the sphere of woman’s influence that women who had group meetings in their homes could have more authority. The men basically seeded the household to the women while they were responsible for the public part of social life (politics, administration, wars, etc.). So, the church started out as these home meetings and women had a prominent role there. As Christianity spread, private homes became too small. Christians had to start meeting in outside places. One of those places was city cemeteries because they were big open spaces. As the Church grew, more men converted (obviously), and men started to marginalize the role of women. Once that happened, disputes emerged. That is the social context of the famous passages in 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians (interpolation). These verses are representing later views about women who need to stop exercising the authority that they had up until that point in time. That doesn’t mean women didn’t exist in the centuries that followed. Far from it. Early Christian history is full of prominent women that had influence within the church. But the position that they had during Paul’s life was something they never gained again.

1 thought on “Did Paul Hate Women? Historical Glimpse into the Role of Women in the Early Church”

  1. I loved as much as you will receive carried out right here The sketch is attractive your authored material stylish nonetheless you command get got an impatience over that you wish be delivering the following unwell unquestionably come more formerly again since exactly the same nearly a lot often inside case you shield this hike.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *