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The Changing Role of Women in the Early Christian World
By Howard Clark Kee

"[T]he vitality of the church is regained when it recovers the revolutionary insights of its founders, Jesus and Paul. In the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and in the renewal movements that have taken place in both Roman Catholic and Protestant circles in the present century, it has been the fresh appropriation of the insights of Jesus and Paul about the inclusiveness of people across ethnic, racial, ritual, social, economic, and sexual boundaries that has restored the relevance and vitality of Christian faith and has lent to Christianity as a social and intellectual movement a positive, humane force in the wider society. "

UNDERSTANDING the role of women in the early Christian communities first requires knowing the social position of women both in the Greco-Roman world from which Christianity emerged and in the sharply contrasting Jewish world. Still valuable for this purpose is the nineteenth-century study by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome. Although the author describes changes that occurred in Roman culture as it replaced the culture of Greece as the paramount social factor in the Mediterranean world and as Roman society itself developed over the centuries, he also notes certain basic continuities in the attitudes toward women, which were only insignificantly modified in the so-called Christian era.

The central factor in the family was the husband. A new wife was literally carried into the marriage house and initiated into the cult of the hearth. Her sharing in the new social context was symbolized by a shared loaf. Her task was to raise up a son to perpetuate the family line, and in every way she was subject to her husband.¹ The transfer of

Howard Clark Kee is Senior Research Fellow in Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of many books and articles in the fields of New Testament and the history of early Christianity. His latest works include Medicine, Miracle, and Magic in New Testament Times (1986), What Can We Know About Jesus? (1990), and Christianity.- A Social and Cultural History (1991). This essay originated as a lecture at Trevelyan College, University of Durham.

¹ Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City.- A Study of the Religions, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955) pp. 41-51.

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property, which was so essential to the preservation of the hearth and the honoring of the gods there, was strictly hereditary from male to male. By the time of Cicero, modifications were adopted in Roman law, but worship and inheritance were at most transmitted through the woman to the male heir (for example, when the only child was female).² Under the tradition of Solon, the woman was never a real proprietor, and citizenship, which was so highly coveted and open only to the wealthy and powerful, was strictly a male monopoly.³ Even as late as the time of Caracalla, when the franchise became universal, it was for males only.⁴

I

As for the place of Roman women in regard to religion, Livy reports that when women were found to be fostering the cult of Bacchus in 186 B.C.E., the senate condemned them and took strong action to block the spread of the cult. Much earlier, the role of women in the promulgation of religion was exposed and rejected in the Bacchae of Euripides. Clearly, with the exception of special roles such as the Sibylline oracles and the Vestal virgins, women were considered to have no right to take leadership roles or to participate in the spread of religion. Scholars are divided over what the religion was that was being fostered, according to Dio Cassius, within the imperial household, but Domitian's punishment of Domitilla for having lapsed into Jewish customs and atheism-probably a confused charge that she had become a Christian-was, apparently, yet another evidence of intractable Roman opposition to women promoting religion.

Even more significant, a similar attitude toward women in religion is evident in Judaism of the same period. There is no mistaking that the priestly traditions of Israel, as known from the Jewish Scriptures and as inferred from the writings of Josephus, allowed no place at all for women in the official cult. Even the attendance of women at the temple ritual was limited to a single outer court, the Court of Women. Only Jewish males could penetrate beyond.

Although our knowledge of the early stages of Pharisaism is severely hampered by the fact that the Mishnah and the Talmud, which purport to describe the emergent rabbinic movement in the century before and after the birth of Jesus, actually were written in the second to the sixth centuries C.E., we do have the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish documents from this period that convey vividly the attitude of one Jewish group. These documents, the first of which were accidentally discovered by some herdsmen in caves overlooking the northern end of the Dead Sea in the mid-1940s, include the oldest copies of the Jewish Scriptures in existence plus writings interpreting the Scriptures and copies of the rules of the community that wrote and preserved these writings. The

² Ibid., pp. 74-75.
³ Ibid., pp. 316, 382.
⁴ Ibid., p. 387.

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headquarters of the community, not far from the caves, was excavated in the 1950s, providing firm dates for the existence of this group, from about 100 B.C.E. until the invasion of the Roman troops under Titus and Vespasian in the late 60s C.E.

After careful sifting of the archaeological and literary evidence, including allusions in other Jewish writings of this period to a group called Essenes, it now seems that Qumran (the Arab name for the district of the Judean desert where the scrolls and the ruins were found) was the center for a Jewish sect whose members were found in many of the cities and villages of Palestine. The spiritual and organizational leaders of the movement lived in a monastic community by the Dead Sea, but members of the group lived like those of other pious Jews of this epoch, including their customs of marriage and family-raising. Multiple copies of one set of rules, The Covenanters of Damascus, were among the finds at Qumran, and these rules seem to apply to sect members living in ordinary Jewish society even while seeking to maintain their distance from their contemporaries by the strictness of their observance of sabbath and dietary laws. At the community center, however, the population was all male, and any sexual activity was strictly prohibited. Members of the group from the towns and villages were required to come to the community center once a year for evaluation and renewal of their commitments, as well as for celebration of their continuing life as those to whom God had given special knowledge of the future, with a promise of defeat of their enemies, of vindication by God, and of the establishment of their own priestly leaders in control of a renewed and rebuilt temple in Jerusalem. Although excavations of some of the fifteen hundred graves in the Qumran cemetery have disclosed only male skeletons, there is a peripheral area in which bones of women and children have been found. These must be the remains of those who died there during the annual conclave of the sect at its community center.

The most recently published of the Dead Sea writings, the Temple Scroll, details the reconstruction of the temple and the rules for admission and participation in the cult. Women and proselytes (non-Jewish converts to the sect) were permitted to enter only the outer court. Women in their menstrual period were not permitted even to enter the city of Jerusalem. Vows taken by women were invalidated if the male head of house-husband or father-objected. The sexual laws in the document were all binding primarily upon the women. There was no place whatsoever for leadership roles of women in the local sect communities, and their very presence in the ongoing life of the central monastic community was simply excluded from the outset by the all male membership and exclusively male community structure set down in their basic constitutional documents.

In the earlier biblical tradition, the servile status of women is clear and unconditional. Divorce, for example, can be initiated only by the male, "who finds in his wife that which is unseemly" (Deuteronomy

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24:1). As Jews came under the cultural influence of Hellenistic culture, however, the older tradition which spoke of wisdom as a female consort of God aiding in the work of creation (Proverbs 8), was developed and refined, as one can see in Ecclesiasticus or the Wisdom of Ben Sirach. There wisdom is personified in imagery that bears a striking resemblance to the figure of Isis, the Egyptian goddess whose role in this period evolved from that of wife and aide to Osiris to that of a divine agent in the gaining and maintaining of order in the universe. This female image of the creative instrument was carried over into early Christianity, though in some cases with basic modifications, as we shall note.

II

The oldest strata of the Jesus tradition are to be found in the so-called Q document, which can be reconstructed on the basis of material common to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but not found in Mark. It is apparently based on oral tradition concerning Jesus' sayings and activities and may have been reduced to writing by the middle of the first century. In the Q tradition, Jesus calls on feminine images when he announces and seeks to defend the message he claims God seeks to convey. He says, "Wisdom is justified by all her children" (Luke 7:35), and he uses a kindred image when he describes God as a mother hen seeking to rally God's disobedient people and to gather her little ones around her once more (Luke 13:34). He anticipates the response to his message of divine reconciliation and covenantal renewal on the part of non-Israelites by recalling that the Queen of the South had come from southern Arabia to hear the wisdom of Solomon (Luke 11:31). He foresees the result of his followers turning to him will be severe family conflict involving not only males, but also mothers, wives, and sisters (Luke 12:53; 14:26). In his teaching about divorce, in distinction from the Jewish law and its interpretation by the Jewish sects of his time, Jesus seeks to protect on an equal basis the right of the wife to be preserved from arbitrary dismissal by her husband. Thus the mood, the imagery, and the concerns of Jesus in this old tradition involve women and their fate with respect to his new movement. But we have no indication in the Q tradition that there was any special role for women in this newly established Christian community.

Broad international scholarly consensus considers Mark to be the oldest gospel and very likely the prototype of this literary genre. Mark was probably written in the late sixties, and from beginning to end there are details about the participation of women in the Jesus movement and the important roles that they played following the death of Jesus as witnesses to the resurrection. Special attention is given to the access women had to the healing powers the tradition attributes to Jesus. One of the first such healings reported is of the mother-in-law of Peter (Mark 1:29-31). There are the interlocked stories of the healing of the woman with a hemorrhage and of the

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restoration to life of the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the local synagogue (5:21-43). The daughter of a non-Israelite woman, who is described as a Syro-Phoenician, is healed by Jesus as well (7:24-30).

As in the Q tradition, those warned of the domestic disruptions that will result for the followers of Jesus include women, who may be forced to leave husbands, parents, and children in order to fulfill their call to serve Jesus and proclaim his message (Mark 10:29). Indeed, the basic pattern of family relationships will be replaced. The new network established within the early Christian community is one in which men and women will receive hundreds of brothers, sisters, mothers, husbands, and children in the new age, which, according to the Markan Jesus, is about to be established (Mark 10:29).

Jesus' special relationship to his mother is attested by Mark in his reference to Jesus as "son of Mary" (Mark 6:3), with no mention of Joseph, and by the fact that it is she who leads the family delegation that comes to take him out of the public scene, since they think initially that his performing cures and exorcisms is a sign that he is crazy (Mark 3:19-35).

In a number of details of Jesus' teaching, there is an indication of special concern for women-his denunciation of scribes who deprive widows of their property (Mark 12:40) and his lament for the condition of pregnant women during the final cosmic cataclysms before the New Age (Mark 13:17). At the legal level, he insists on the full reciprocal rites of women, both in the maintenance of marriage in the face of contrived reasons males may give for wanting to be rid of their wives and in obtaining a divorce, which, by Jewish law, women could not initiate (Mark 10:11-12). Similarly, he laments their fate under the Jewish law of levirate marriage, which could require them to have a succession of husbands in order to raise up a male heir for their first deceased husband (Mark 12:17-23). He commends a widow who presents all her monetary possessions as an offering to God (Mark 12:41-44).

In Luke, however, it is in the realm of support and fidelity that women figure most prominently. We learn from Mark 15:40-41 that, when Jesus was in Galilee, a group of women provided the services essential to his carrying out his work. In Luke they are identified by name and by their connections with the local authorities (Luke 8:1-3). It is this group of women who, alone, remain faithful to him in the hours of his trial and crucifixion. It is a woman who perceives that he is about to be put to death, anoints him in advance for this agonizing experience (Mark 14:3-9), and is, accordingly, praised by Jesus. It is the women from Galilee who stand near the cross in his hour of death, who see where his body was placed in the tomb, and who gather the spices to prepare his body properly for burial (Mark 15:47; 16:1). It is they who first hear the news of his having been raised from the dead and are instructed to tell the disciples to go back to Galilee, where they will see him (Mark 16:5-8).

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One must acknowledge that in this older gospel tradition, which probably was written down before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.,⁵ the social structure is still male-dominated. Compared with the prevailing Jewish attitudes of that period, though, there is a significant shift in the positive value assigned to women in Mark, including the essential role that they fulfill as witnesses to the public career of Jesus and to their private experience of his having been raised from the dead.

III

In ancient literature-pagan, Jewish, and Christian-there is no statement about the place of women more radical than Paul's declaration in Galatians that "in Christ" (his term for the new Christian community) there is no place for the ethnic, social, and sexual differences the wider society maintains: "In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free. . . " (Galatians 3:28). Later in this letter, when he is developing contrasting images for the Jewish concept of covenant based on conformity to the law of Moses, and the Christian concept, dependent solely on trust in what God has done for humanity in Jesus Christ, he compares the two wives of Abraham. Hagar, the slave wife, is the symbol of Israel enslaved to the law; Sarah, the free wife, represents the new community of freedom (Galatians 4:21-31). Both the cultural connotations of these feminine images and the substance of Paul's argument based on them are nothing short of revolutionary.

Consonant with the Jesus tradition on this theme, though with no explicit allusions by Paul to the sayings of Jesus on the subject, Paul insists on equality and reciprocity between men and women with respect to conjugal rights and sexual relations (1 Corinthians 7:1-4). It is obvious that there are married couples, but also unmarried women and widows who are active in the churches established by Paul (1 Corinthians 7:8-9, 25-35). In some cases, only one of the married partners is converted, and he makes a special point of the possibility that a Christian wife may effect the conversion of her pagan husband (1 Corinthians 7:10-16).

Women are not only active participants in the life of the early Christian communities, they are assigned leadership roles as well. In Romans 16:1, Phoebe, who was a deaconess in the church at Cenchrae, one of the ports of Corinth, is to be given financial support by the church to which Paul is writing in Rome, where she is now in residence and active. A couple, whom Paul met in Corinth, who had come from Rome and were apparently converted to Christianity there, had been of great assistance to Paul in Corinth and later in Ephesus and were now to be visited by him when he came to Rome (1 Corinthians 16:19; Romans 16:3). Paul gives both of their names-Priscilla and Aquila-

⁵ For details on the literary structure of Mark, the apocalyptic worldview it embodies, and its expectation of the coming of the new age, see my Community of the New Age, Second Edition (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988).

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but priority is given to Priscilla's name; both are given equal rank as co-workers with him in the gospel, and the church meets in their house. Other female co-workers are mentioned by name in Philippians 4:2, Euodia and Syntyche, and in Romans, Tryphaena and Tryphosa (Romans 16:12) and Julia, the sister of Nereus, and Olympia (Romans 16:15). The import of this evidence is clear: Paul was able to carry out his extensive missionary and church-developing activity only by full and generous participation of women, as well as men, in the urban centers where he took up residence.

At the same time, however, Paul was powerfully influenced by the socio-cultural patterns and values of his time. In sharp contrast to the radically egalitarian pronouncement in his letter to the Galatians, he wrote to the Corinthians affirming the hierarchy of human existence that inheres in the created order itself: Man is the head of the woman (I Corinthians 11:2-12). That secondary position is elaborated in I Corinthians 14:33-35, where women are instructed to keep silent in the church meetings and to ask their husbands on returning home for clarification of what was said or done in the service. Yet, Paul at the same time insists on the mutuality of men and women in that each was created for the other (1 Corinthians 11:8) and that, in the Lord, each is dependent on the other (1 Corinthians 11:11). Thus, Paul, bound as he is in some respects to the male-dominated social values of his time and culture, does substantially modify these perspectives both in theory and in practice, allowing as he does for significant, indeed essential, roles for women in the launching of the Christian mission to the Gentile cities of the first century Mediterranean world.

On the other hand, the waxing of the male-dominated features of the Pauline tradition and the correlative waning of the ecclesiastical roles of women are evident in the later writings attributed to Paul, which, in keeping with the literary custom of the Greco-Roman world, were produced in his name by a later generation. They were produced, in all probability, between 70 and 120 C.E. In Colossians, for example, the church still meets in the house of a woman, Nympha (Colossians 4:15), but the only instruction offered to women is that they are to be subject to their husbands (Colossians 3:18-22). This is set out in the context of a comprehensive pattern of social hierarchy, which includes not only the actual members of the family but the servants as well. This social structure is elaborated and reinforced in Ephesians 5:21-6:9, where the subjection of women to husbands is linked with their subjection to the Lord.

Further modification of these attitudes toward women is evident in the latest of this Deutero-Pauline material. It is clear that women of means have come into the Christian community, although they are sharply warned against public display of their wealth by fancy dress and jewelry while in attendance at the gatherings of the church (1 Timothy 2:9). At the other extreme are the widows, who are to be enrolled by the churches, apparently for receiving welfare benefits (1

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Timothy 5:9-16), perhaps as compensation for certain simple services rendered. There are deacons, but no longer any deaconesses (1 Timothy 3:8-13). As members of the community, women are to "learn in silence in all submission" (1 Timothy 2:11). Their chief hope for salvation is through child-bearing (1 Timothy 2:15). Indeed, it is through successive generations that the church is able to survive over the years, as is indicated by the listing of Timothy, his mother, and his grandmother (2 Timothy 1:4-5). Although the author of these epistles written in the name of Paul adopts certain stylized features, such as the mention of Priscilla and Aquila, as well as a certain Claudia (2 Timothy 4:19), his attiude toward women and his assignment to them of a place in the church are best summarized in the Letter to Titus, where they are told that they are to be chaste, domestic, and kind-but above all, submissive (2:2-4). A completely similar point of view is expressed in I Peter, attributed to Peter, but clearly written around the turn of the second century and long after his death. In this epistle, wives are told to be submissive, to avoid ostentation in dress, and to be of a quiet and gentle spirit following the example of Sarah, who is said by the author to have called her husband, Abraham, "Lord" (I Peter 3:1-6).

IV

In the infancy narratives (which Matthew's gospel has introduced prior to his account of the public career of Jesus, the point at which Mark begins his Gospel) the writer details the role of Mary as the central figure in the miraculous birth of Jesus (Matthew 1:18-25), in the visit of the Magi (Matthew 2:11), in the flight to Egypt (Matthew 2:13), and in the return to Judea and the subsequent move to Galilee (Matthew 2:20). A feminine image is used in the narrative of Herod's slaughter of the infants. Quoting Jeremiah 31:15, the writer pictures Rachel weeping for her children (Matthew 2:18). Women and children are mentioned in addition to the crowds of 5,000 and 4,000, respectively, who, according to the two accounts of Jesus' miraculous feeding partook of bread and fish (Matthew 14:21; 15:38). Matthew alone uses the image of the maidens awaiting the return of the bridegroom (Matthew 25:1-13), and he expands the role of women as witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus (Matthew 28:8-9). It is the wife of Pilate who warns him not to condemn Jesus to death in Matthew's version of the trial and crucifixion (Matthew 27:19). But at the same time, it is Matthew who relaxes the command of Jesus prohibiting divorce and remarriage and who omits the feature of reciprocal rights of the wife (Matthew 19:9). The result of this shift is to portray Jesus as conforming to the basic position of the rabbis of the earlier Mishnaic traditions. The story of the widow's coins, Matthew simply omits. Thus, it would appear that the Jesus tradition is being modified in two ways toward the end of the first century. The presence and activity of women in the churches is reflected in Matthew's account of the career of

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Jesus, but the rights of women are being delineated in ways that conform to the Jewish customs of the time.

However, in the Gospel of Luke and the companion volume, the Acts of the Apostles, the role of women is pictured as significantly expanded compared to both the older tradition and the standards of the contemporary Roman world. In Luke's version of the infancy stories, women are the central figures. Elizabeth and Mary are the ones prepared by God for the birth of their respective offspring, John and Jesus. The role of the males is, in one case, passive and, in the other, disbelieving. Both Mary and Elizabeth are referred to as the handmaids of the Lord. Mary's child is the Son of God (Luke 1:34). it is she who understands what God is doing (Luke 2:1-20), who is pronounced blessed by Simeon (Luke 2:33), and is hailed by the prophetess Anna (Luke 2:36). While both parents take the boy Jesus to Jerusalem, it is his mother who asks him why he lingered behind (Luke 2:41-52), and it is she who perceives and keeps her counsel about Jesus' God-given role (Luke 2:51). In Luke, her blessedness is declared (Luke 11:27-28).

Luke alone reports that Jesus defended his ministry to the oppressed and marginal people in his society by appealing to the scriptural precedent of the prophets: Elijah, who met the needs of a Sidonian widow, and Elisha who heated a Syrian leper (Luke 4:25-28). The inclusiveness of Jesus' ministry is pointed to in Luke's assertion that those who came to hear Jesus and to be healed included "everyone from every place"-that is, from both Jewish and Gentile territory (Luke 4:40; 6:17). Luke alone describes the healing of the son of the widow at Nain (Luke 7:11-17). He has moved the story of the woman who anointed Jesus from the end of the narrative of Jesus' career, as it occurs in Mark, to an early point in his public ministry (Luke 7:36-50). His is the only account of the healing of a woman with a spirit of infirmity (Luke 13:10-17). Only in Luke do we find the Parable of the Joyous Housewife (Luke 15:8-10). Repeatedly, in Luke's version of the stories and sayings of Jesus, women are mentioned specifically (Luke 8:21; 18:29). In Luke's version of Jesus' prediction of the judgment that is to befall the world, analogous to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the detail is added: "Remember Lot's wife" (Luke 17:32).

Still more significant, however, are the direct indications in Luke of the role of women in the public career of Jesus. It is a group of women whose origins include membership in the client families in the administrative staff of the regional governor, Herod Antipas, that provides the funds to support Jesus and his disciples in their itinerant ministry (Luke 8:1-3). But the role of women includes not only support but also participation in study and learning within the community of Jesus' followers, as the familiar contrast between Mary and Martha shows (Luke 10:38-42). Their involvement in the Jesus movement is pictured by Luke as going back to the earliest stages in Galilee (Luke

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23:49). It is they who stand by faithfully at the hour of his crucifixion, and it is women who are addressed in his final moments, when he speaks to the multitude of women who bewailed and lamented his impending death, addressing them as "daughters of Jerusalem" (Luke 23:27-31). It is women who see the tomb where his body was placed, who prepare spices and ointments (Luke 23:59), which they take to the tomb at the earliest possible moment, and who are informed by the two men in dazzling apparel that Jesus has been raised from the dead (Luke 24:1). They are reminded of the promise that had been uttered by Jesus in Gailee, and they return to tell the disciples what has occurred. In addition to the central group of women, there is reference in Luke to "the other women" (Luke 24:10). It is to the women's testimony that the disciples later refer, when it is confirmed by their discovery of the empty tomb (Luke 24:22).

This picture of the important place of women in the early Christian community in Jerusalem is confirmed in Acts. Before the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, when the apostles are gathered in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem, Mary the mother of Jesus and "the women" are with the apostles (Acts 1:14). But women are pictured in Acts as participating not only in the blessings of the new community but also in its problems and failures. Thus, it is not only Ananias who is held responsible and punished for witholding some of his resources, which he claimed to have given to the pooled funds of the community, but his wife, Sapphira, as well (Acts 5: 1-11). Among the throngs who are converted to the new understanding of God and his people are both men and women (Acts 5:14). Women have a right to share in the regular distribution of funds (Acts 6:1). When Saul (who after conversion and the launching of his mission to the gentiles will be known as Paul) undertakes the extermination of the Christian groups in Jerusalem, he is reported as having dragged off to prison men and women (Acts 8:3).

Once the wider mission of the church is launched, its members include women as well as men. When Philip preaches in Samaria, both men and women believe and are baptized (Acts 8:12). On arrival in Damascus to destroy the Christian movement, Paul seeks out both men and women who, in a favorite phrase of the author of Acts, "belong to the Way" (Acts 9: 1). One of Peter's healing miracles is the restoring to life of a widow, Dorcas, who is a disciple (Acts 9:36-43). When Peter is miraculously released from prison, he goes to the home of the mother of John Mark, where many were gathered together for prayer (Acts 12:12-17). Similarly, Timothy is identified as the son of a "Jewish woman of faith" (Acts 16:1). Women are not merely peripheral to the life of the new community, but central to its existence and the development of its leadership.

In Acts, as in the letters of Paul, the church is depicted as meeting in private houses, and its membership is constituted of households (Acts 11:14). Paul's first convert on the mainland of Europe, as the author of

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Acts depicts it, is a Jewish businesswoman named Lydia. Together with other women, she has gone to the proseuche, or Jewish place of prayer, outside Philippi, the original center of the Macedonian dynasty which was to become the world-conquering enterprise of Alexander the Great. Martin Hengel has shown that proseuche was the standard term for these places throughout the Mediterranean world where Jews gathered for community conclaves as well as for informal worship prior to the emergence, in the second century, of the synagogue as a religious institution. Lydia's conversion carried with it the bringing into the Christian fold of her entire household, implicitly including women and girls as well as men and boys (Acts 16:11-15). Similarly, the conversion of the Philippian jailer resulted in his being saved and baptized, along with his household (Acts 16:19-34). That the attention to women in the Acts narrative is not merely random is confirmed by the report that Paul took care to visit Lydia before leaving Philippi (Acts 16:40). In Thessalonica, among those converted in the synagogue are "not a few Greek women of high standing" (Acts 17:12). And in spite of the meagre results of Paul's sermon at the Areopagus in Athens, among those converted is a woman named Damaris (Acts 17:34).

In looking at the letters of Paul, we have already noted that both Aquila and his wife Priscilla are important for Paul's missionary activity in Corinth, as well as later in Ephesus. That impression is confirmed by the details about them preserved in Acts. Paul associates with them in their common means of livelihood, tentmaking, and in evangelism in the local synagogue (Acts 18:1-4). When the head of the synagogue, Crispus, comes to belief, he and his household join the Christian movement (Acts 18:8). When Paul travelled from Corinth to Ephesus, Priscilla and Aquila are not merely his companions, but they also assist in instruction of new converts (Acts 18:18, 26). When Paul reaches Caesarea Maritima in Palestine, one of the leaders of the church there, Philip, has four daughters whose function in the community is that of prophetesses (Acts 21:9).

Thus, as it is in the older Jesus tradition and in the letters of Paul, in Luke-Acts the major leadership roles in the young church are in male hands, and the central core, the apostles, is an all-male monopoly. Yet, women in a variety of ways are essential to the ongoing of the church: in support, in instruction, in testimony, and, of course, in membership.

In the Gospel of John there is less attention given to women in the community. Curiously, Jesus is explicitly identified as the son of Joseph, rather than of Mary (John 1:45). And the image of wisdom as the female companion of God in creating and ordering the universe, which we observed in Jewish and some of the earlier Jesus traditions, is transformed in the prologue of John to the Word of God, which in Greek involves a change from the feminine sophia to the masculine logos. When Mary reportedly approaches Jesus to solve the problem of

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the lack of wine at the wedding feast in Cana, she is rebuked by him with the sharp rejoinder, "What is that to you and me?" (John 2:4).

On the other hand, Mary and the brother of Jesus remain with him for a time at his residence in Capernaum (John 2:12). Also, one of the early Johannine stories concerns his conversation with a woman of doubtful reputation in Samaria, who in response to him becomes an effective witness to him as the messiah (John 4:39-42). Mary and Martha are exemplars of the faithful community, even though their perception of the powers of Jesus does not yet include faith in the resurrection and his ability to raise the dead (John 11-12). As in the other gospels, however, it is the women who are the faithful followers at the cross (John 19:25-27) and at the tomb (John 20:1, 11-18). Their faith is confirmed by the experience of the disciples (John 20:19-29). The maternal role within the community is dramatically indicated by John in the word of Jesus from the cross: "Son, behold your mother" (John 19:27). Since there is no trace of organizational structure or community regulations in John's Gospel, we have no hint of what the role of women may have been in the segment of early Christianity represented by the Gospel of John, but their presence and the value of their testimony is clearly indicated.

V

In the earlier strata of the gospel tradition, human sexual existence as male and female, marriage, and the producing of offspring are simply taken as part of the divinely-planned order of creation. Jesus explicitly affirms this in Mark 10:6-9. There is an expectation that in the age to come marriage will not take place, and, instead, there will be multiple new relationships to supplant those presently experienced between children and parents, husbands and wives (Mark 10:29-30). Paul is categorical in denouncing homosexual relationships, but acknowledges the propriety of heterosexual relationships, even while expressing his own personal preference for single status since it frees him and others like him from domestic obligations in order more fully to carry out his mission of preparing his hearers for the coming of the end of the age (I Corinthians 7:25-35).

In Matthew, however, there is the first hint of a preference for asexuality. In Matthew 18:10-12, Jesus says that it may be expedient for some not to marry and, then, describes those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of God. This may have meant simply total abstinence from sexual acts, although by some, as in the case of the third-century biblical scholar, Origen of Alexandria, it was taken so literally that he castrated himself. If one takes the injunction as metaphorical, then it could also apply to women who, in the interests of their Christian discipleship, choose not to engage in sexual relationships.

By the middle of the second century, as gnosticism was beginning to flourish in Egypt and, probably, in Syria, the reverse of the saying of

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Jesus about God's having created human beings as sexual is pronounced. In the Gospel of Thomas, for example, there is attributed to Jesus a parable in which the older saying about becoming like a child in order to enter the kingdom of God is given a radical reinterpretation. To become like a child is perceived as abandoning one's sexuality, so that (in the words of the Gospel of Thomas) "the male is no longer male and the female is no longer female." One can see that the assumption that asceticism is a higher way of life is already finding expression in early Christian writings from around the end of the first century and the early decades of the second century. But neither in Matthew nor in the Gospel of Thomas is there any indication of a positive role for women in the leadership and work of the church.

Some scholars have conjectured that the fairly frequent references to widows (chairai) in the later Pauline tradition, and elsewhere, implies that these women were not simply formerly married but that they fulfilled a role like sisters or nuns of the medieval tradition. But in Acts, as well as in the later Pauline tradition, it seems that widows are mentioned because they were a major beneficiary group, drawing support from the pooled funds of the church designated to care for its indigent members. If the latter interpretation is correct, then it confirms our impression that women by the end of the first century were already reduced to dependent roles within the church and did not have access to the leadership functions that are indicated for them in the earlier traditions.

Of the second century Christian documents, we may examine two that are constitutional in nature. They overlap, precisely in those passages where they are setting down the regulations for guiding the life of the early Christian communities. The Letter of Barnabas is addressed to "sons and daughters" (Barnabas 1:1), but its advice is directed chiefly to "brethren" (Barnabas 4:11; 5:5), and the council about circumcision obviously applies only to men. In the instructions to members about their family life, there is an injunction to exercise control over one's sons and daughters (Barnabas 19:5d) and another to avoid anger with one's male and female servants who are also Christians (Barnabas 19:7c). As we noted earlier, there is an instruction to guard the rights of widows and orphans, but this is on the order of corporate charity rather than the indication of a special role within the common life. When in the Didache 11:3-15 rules are laid down for appointing and supporting the leaders of the churches, there is mention of apostles, prophets, teachers, bishops, and deacons, but none of these is seen as being filled by a woman. In short, the leadership has become a male monopoly. Or to put it another way, acculturation of the church to Roman and Hellenistic society has been so complete by the mid-second century that the socially revolutionary attitudes toward women found in Jesus and Paul, at the early levels of these respective traditions, have given way to the repressive norms of the wider society.

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VI

Speaking as one reared and trained primarily in the Protestant tradition, it seems to me that the vitality of the church is regained when it recovers the revolutionary insights of its founders, Jesus and Paul. In the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and in the renewal movements that have taken place in both Roman Catholic and Protestant circles in the present century, it has been the fresh appropriation of the insights of Jesus and Paul about the inclusiveness of the people of God across ethnic, racial, ritual, social, economic, and sexual boundaries that has restored the relevance and vitality of the Christian faith and has lent to Christianity as a social and intellectual movement a positive, humane force in the wider society. If the church in our time were to take with full seriousness the radical openness toward women and their participation in the life of God's people that characterized the movement at the outset, it could result in a significant contribution toward renewal of both the church and the human race.