The Triumph of Christianity (15 page)

Conclusion

S
OME WILL OBJECT THAT
to stress the importance of tangible, worldly benefits for Christian conversion is to wrongly downplay the religious motivations for the rise of Christianity. This objection overlooks that these worldly benefits were
religious
in the fullest sense. “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matt. 25:40). It was by imitation of Christ that Christians were able to live longer and enjoy more comfortable lives.

Chapter Seven
Appeals to Women

B
ECAUSE
J
ESUS, THE TWELVE APOSTLES,
Paul, and the prominent leaders in the early church in Jerusalem were all men, the impression prevails that early Christianity was primarily a male affair. Not so. From earliest days women predominated.

In his Epistle to the Romans, Paul begins with personal greetings to fifteen women and eighteen men who were prominent members of the Roman congregation.
¹
If we may assume that sufficient sex bias existed so that men were more likely than women to hold positions of leadership, then this very close sex ratio suggests a Roman congregation that was very disproportionately female. Indeed, the converts of Paul “we hear most about are women,” and many of them “leading women.”
²
Thus, the brilliant Cambridge church historian Henry Chadwick (1920–2008) noted, “Christianity seems to have been especially successful among women. It was often through the wives that it penetrated the upper classes of society in the first instance.”
³
In this he echoed the formidable Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930): “Christian preaching was laid hold of by women in particular.... [T]he percentage of Christian women, especially among the upper classes, was larger than Christian men.”
⁴
This was recently confirmed by a sample of senatorial class Romans who lived between 283 and 423
CE
, in which 50 percent of the men and 85 percent of the women were Christians.
⁵

The question persists: Why? The answer consists of two parts. First, unless they specifically prohibit or at least discourage women from joining, religious movements
always
attract more women than men. Indeed, all around the world, data show that women are more religious than men, in terms of both belief and participation.
⁶
Recently, a debate has sprung up as to why this is so
⁷
—but that is of no significance here. Far more important is the second part of the answer, which suggests that Christianity was attractive to women far beyond the usual level of gender differences. Women were especially drawn to Christianity because it offered them a life that was so greatly superior to the life they otherwise would have led. After examining this matter in detail, the chapter then examines how the situation of Christian women had important consequences for the speed of Christian growth.

Pagan and Jewish Women

I
N NO ANCIENT GROUP
were women equal to men, but there were substantial differences in the degree of inequality experienced by women in the Greco-Roman world. Women in the early Christian communities were considerably better off than their pagan and even Jewish counterparts.

It is difficult to generalize about the situation of pagan women in the ancient West because there were marked differences between Hellenes and Romans. Hellenic women lived in semi-seclusion, the upper classes more than others, but all Hellenic women had a very circumscribed existence; in privileged families the women were denied access to the front rooms of the house. Roman women were not secluded, but in many other ways they were no less subordinated to male control. Neither Hellenic nor Roman women had any significant say in who they married, or when. Typically, they were married very young—often before puberty—to a far older man. Their husbands could divorce them with impunity, but a wife could only gain a divorce if a male relative sought it on her behalf. However, a Hellenic wife’s father or brother could obtain her divorce against her wishes! Both Roman and Hellenic husbands held the absolute power to put an unwanted infant to death or to force a wife to abort, but Roman husbands were not allowed to kill their wives. Roman wives had very limited property rights; Hellenic women had none. Neither could be a party to contracts. Many upper-class Roman women were taught to read and write; Hellenic women were not.
⁸
These differences may have played a role in the fact that Christianity grew more rapidly in the Hellenic than in the Roman cities (see chapter 9). Finally, only in a few temples devoted to goddesses were either Roman or Hellenic women allowed to play any significant role in religious life.

The situation of Jewish women varied considerably, not only between the Diaspora and Palestine, but also across—and even within—the Diasporan communities. In some Diasporan communities, many women were semi-secluded. According to Philo of Alexandria, the most authoritative Jewish voice in the Diaspora, “The women are best suited to the indoor life which never strays from the house, within which the middle door is taken to the maidens in their boundary, and the outer door by those who have reached full womanhood.... A woman, then, should not be a busybody, meddling with matters outside her household concerns, but should seek a life of seclusion.”
⁹
There is no evidence of female seclusion in Palestine, and clearly many Jewish women in the Diaspora were not secluded either. However, everywhere Jewish girls were married very young to whomever their father chose, although in many settings they could request to remain at home until puberty. To the extent that Deuteronomy 22:13–21 was followed, brides who turned out not to be virgins were to be stoned to death at their father’s door, but such events must have been rare. On the other hand, Jewish wives were easily and quite often divorced by their husbands, but wives could not seek a divorce except under very unusual circumstances, such as the husband being impotent or a leper. Jewish women could not inherit unless there were no male heirs. They “had no right to bear witness, and could not expect credence to be given to anything [they] reported.”
¹⁰
As Rabbi Eliezer is quoted in the
Babylonian Talmud
(ca. 90
CE
), “Better burn the Torah than teach it to a woman.” Indeed, elsewhere the Talmud advises: “Everyone who talketh much with a woman causes evil to himself.”
¹¹

Even so, Exodus 20:12 demands: “Honor your father and your mother,” and Leviticus 19:3 even reverses the order: “Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father.” Moreover, Jewish women were said “to have a
right
to sexual pleasure.”
¹²
In keeping with Rabbi ben Azzai’s opinion that “a man ought to give his daughter knowledge of the Law,”
¹³
some Jewish women were well educated and, in some Diasporan communities (beyond the reach of patriarchs in Palestine), women held leadership roles in some synagogues, including “elder,” “leader of the synagogue,” “mother of the synagogue,” and “presiding officer,” as is supported by inscriptions found in Smyrna and elsewhere.
¹⁴
However, men and women were seated separately in the synagogues and women were not allowed to read the Torah to the assembly. In general, Jewish women were better off than pagan women, but had less freedom and influence than did Christian women.

Christian Women

C
HRISTIAN WRITERS HAVE LONG
stressed that Jesus’s “attitude toward women was revolutionary.... For him the sexes were equal.”
¹⁵
Many feminist critics have dismissed the inclusive statements and actions of Jesus as having had no impact on the realities of gender relations within the early Christian community, where rampant sexism continued.
¹⁶
But recent, objective evidence leaves no doubt that early Christian women did enjoy far greater equality with men than did their pagan and Jewish counterparts. A study of Christian burials in the catacombs under Rome, based on 3,733 cases, found that Christian women were nearly as likely as Christian men to be commemorated with lengthy inscriptions. This “near equality in the commemoration of males and females is something that is peculiar to Christians, and sets them apart from the non-Christian populations of the city.”
¹⁷
This was true not only of adults, but also of children, as Christians lamented the loss of a daughter as much as that of a son, which was especially unusual compared with other religious groups in Rome.
¹⁸

Of course, there is overwhelming evidence that from earliest days, Christian women often held leadership roles in the church and enjoyed far greater security and equality in marriage.

Church Leadership

O
UR PERCEPTIONS OF THE
role of women in the early church has long been distorted by a statement attributed to Paul: “the women should keep silence in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak” (1 Cor. 14:34). There are solid grounds for dismissing these lines since they are inconsistent with everything else Paul had to say about women: he was “the only certain and consistent spokesman for the liberation and equality of women in the New Testament.”
¹⁹
Robin Scroggs has made a good case that the statement that women should keep silence was inserted by those who composed the deutero-Pauline and Pastoral Epistles—those letters wrongly attributed to Paul.
²⁰
Laurence Iannaccone has made the interesting suggestion that this statement about women was being made by some members of the church at Corinth to whom Paul was opposed, and that this distinction was lost somehow.
²¹
Be that as it may, it surely is the case that these lines are absurd given Paul’s acknowledgement, encouragement, and approval of women in positions of religious leadership.

In Romans 16:1–2 Paul introduces and commends to the Roman congregation “our sister Phoebe” who is a deaconess “of the church at Cenchreae, that you may receive her in the Lord as befits the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a helper of many and of myself as well.” Deacons were important leaders in the early church, with special responsibilities for raising and dispersing funds. Clearly, Paul saw nothing unusual in a woman filling that role. Nor was this an isolated case or limited to the first generation of Christians. In 112, Pliny the Younger noted in a letter to Emperor Trajan that he had tortured two young Christian women “who were called deaconesses.”
²²
Clement of Alexandria (150–216) wrote of “women deacons,” and Origen (185–254) wrote this commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans: “This text teaches with the authority of the Apostle that... there are, as we have already said, women deacons in the Church, and that women... ought to be accepted in the diaconate.”
²³
As late as 451 the Council of Chalcedon determined that in the future a deaconess must be at least forty and unmarried.
²⁴

Prominent historians now agree that women held positions of honor and authority in early Christianity. Thus, Peter Brown noted that Christians differed in this respect not only from pagans, but from Jews: “The Christian clergy... took a step that separated them from the rabbis of Palestine.... [T]hey welcomed women as patrons and even offered women roles in which they could act as collaborators.”
²⁵
As Wayne Meeks summed up: “Women... are Paul’s fellow workers as evangelists and teachers. Both in terms of their position in the larger society and in terms of their participation in the Christian communities, then, a number of women broke through the normal expectations of female roles.”
²⁶

Infanticide

T
HE SUPERIOR SITUATION OF
Christian women vis-à-vis their pagan sisters began at birth. The exposure of unwanted infants was “widespread” in the Roman Empire,
²⁷
and girls were far more likely than boys to be exposed. Keep in mind that legally and by custom, the decision to expose an infant rested entirely with the father as reflected in this famous, loving letter to his pregnant wife from a man who was away working: “If—good luck to you!—you should bear offspring, if it is a male, let it live; if it is female, expose it. You told Aphrodisias, ‘Do not forget me.’ How can I forget you? I beg you therefore not to worry.”
²⁸
Even in large families, “more than one daughter was hardly ever reared.”
²⁹
A study based on inscriptions was able to reconstruct six hundred families and found that of these, only six had raised more than one daughter.
³⁰

In keeping with their Jewish origins, Christians condemned the exposure of infants as murder.
³¹
As Justin Martyr (100–165) put it, “we have been taught that it is wicked to expose even new-born children... [for] we would then be murderers.”
³²
So, substantially more Christian (and Jewish) female infants lived.

Marriage

A
S MARRIAGE APPROACHED THE
Christian advantage continued. Pagan girls were married off at very young ages, usually to much older men, and they rarely had any choice in the matter. Here the evidence is both statistical and literary. As for the latter, silence offers strong testimony that Roman girls married at a tender age, often before puberty. The Cambridge historian Keith Hopkins (1934–2004) found that it was possible to calculate that many famous Roman women had been child brides: Octavia (daughter of Emperor Claudius) married at eleven. Nero’s mother Agrippina married at twelve. Quintilian, the famed rhetorician must have married a twelve-year-old since we know she bore him a son when she was thirteen. The historian Tacitus married a thirteen-year-old, and so on. But in none of these instances was this fact seen as sufficiently interesting to be mentioned in the women’s biographies. Beyond such silence, the historian Plutarch (46–120) reported that Romans “gave their girls in marriage when they were twelve years old, or even younger.”
³³
The historian Dio Cassius (155–229) agreed: “Girls are considered to have reached marriageable age on completion of their twelfth year.”
³⁴