On the Role of Women in the Rise of Christianity, Part 2

Woman of ancient Rome

In my last post I reviewed the abysmal status of women in the ancient, pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. In this one I intend to discuss the status of women in the early Christian subculture, and the ways in which Christianity must have appealed to women in this time period. These posts are based mainly on the book The Rise of Christianity by sociologist Rodney Stark.

Perhaps the most gruesome example of women's low status in Greco-Roman society was the legal and socially accepted practice of female infanticide, which resulted in an estimated 58% - 42% male - female sex ratio in Italy, Asia Minor and North Africa during this time period. But according to a number of sources cited by Stark, the situation in the early Christian Church was reversed: women greatly outnumbered men. Why might this have been so?


Christian Egalitarianism

Here I would like to quibble with Stark's analysis, which I think is oversimplified. His line of reasoning is simply this: women, for reasons beyond the scope of my book, convert to new religions at a much higher rate than men. Additionally, amongst Christians infanticide and abortion were forbidden, so the birth and death rates of males and females were restored to their normal balance. This produced a surplus of women among Christians, which according to theories of sociology will lead to greater status and increased welfare for women.

My problem with this analysis is that many of the benefits Stark lists as accruing to women due to their increased numbers come directly from the teachings of the Jews, of Jesus and of Paul, teachings that predate this period of male-female imbalance. I believe rather that we should consider the abundance of women and their increased status and welfare in the early Church as a situation of mutual causation - women joined because the Church treated them well, which led to a gender imbalance, which created a subculture in which women could more easily assert themselves and guarantee that the Church would treat them well. In truth I think Stark would agree with me, but being a sociologist he chose to stick to the sociological side of the argument.

At any rate Stark quotes 1 Cor 7:2-7 as evidence that women enjoyed greater status among Christians, but as I said, this is also reason for women to be attracted to Christianity:

But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.

For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does....

Stark comments that, "The symmetry of the relationship Paul described was at total variance, not only with pagan culture, but with Jewish culture as well." This symmetry in marital responsibility is a feature of Jesus' teachings as well, as we can see in Mark 10:11-12 when he overturns the one-sided Jewish arrangement by which a man may divorce his wife, with this:

"Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her;

and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."

Stark argues that

[T]he more favorable Christian view of women is...demonstrated in their condemnation of divorce, incest, marital infidelity and polygamy. As Fox put it, 'fidelity, without divorce, was expected of every Christian' (1987:354).....Like pagans, early Christians prized female chastity, but unlike pagans they rejected the double standard that gave men so much sexual license (Sandison 1967). Christian men were urged to remain virgins until marriage (Fox 1987), and extramarital sex was condemned as adultery. Chadwick noted that Christianity 'regarded unchastity in a husband as no less serious a breach of loyalty and trust as unfaithfulness in a wife' (1967:59).

Christianity therefore provided a moral framework in which women's needs were not presumed to be of lesser importance than men's, which was revolutionary for that time and place. Nevertheless, our modern sensibilities take that for granted, and some of Scripture's more patriarchal statements about the role of women, which were probably considered scarcely worth noting in ancient times, sound harsh and unreasonable to us today. Stark takes the time to comment on one passage:

As to the status of women in the early church, there has been far too much reliance on 1 Cor 14:34-36, where Paul appears to prohibit women from even speaking in church. Laurence Iannaccone (1982) has made a compelling case that these verses were the opposite of Paul's position and were in fact a quotation of claims being made at Corinth that Paul then refuted. Certainly the statement is at variance with everything else Paul wrote about the proper role for women in the church.

I don't know how probable this interpretation of 1 Cor 14 is; I'd never heard of it until I read Stark's book. But I think it's sufficient to bear in mind the context of First Corinthians. The Corinthians were engaging in serious, if childish, abuses of the Mass. In those days each participant brought his or her own bread and wine to the service, and at Corinth the rich were refusing to share with the poor. They showed up hungry and behaved as if they were eating a meal rather than worshiping God: some got drunk while others went without. Women came to the service without the headdresses that were customary in Greece at that time, probably indicating a spirit of rebelliousness. (And if Paul's commandment that women keep their heads covered in church offends you, think about the last time you saw a man refuse to remove his hat in church or during the national anthem. As silly as these things are, people put great importance on them.) And on top of all that, parishioners, often several at a time, would start babbling forth in the nonsense language of tongues right in the middle of the service. If Paul's instructions are harsh it's because he's trying to put the hammer down, and stamp out these abuses by any means necessary.

There's no denying that Paul envisioned a patriarchal structure to marriage, in which the woman should be submissive to the husband, but again his instructions to married people embody the same symmetry of responsibilities between men and women that we saw in Jesus' prohibition of divorce, as can be seen in Ephesians 5:21-33:

Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body. As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. So (also) husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

"For this reason a man shall leave (his) father and (his) mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.

In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.

Paul sees in the relationship between husband and wife a reflection of the relationship between Christ and his Church, so the wife should be subordinate to the husband as the Church is to Christ. But in turn the husband must love his wife as Christ loves his Church. In Christianity to love is to serve with humility; Christ washed the feet of his disciples, an act that the Jews would not demand of their lowliest slave. This is why Paul is able to begin his instructions with, "Be subordinate to one another."

Appearing as it did in the midst of a society in which "males could divorce simply by ordering a wife out of the household," this is clearly a revolutionary vision of the proper relationship between men and women. It's small wonder women found it attractive.


Advantages of Being a Christian

Stark lists a number of clear advantages women had within the Christian subculture over their pagan counterparts. The first and most obvious is that they were allowed to live beyond their first day: as did the Jews before them, Christians absolutely banned infanticide, female or otherwise. Christians also banned all abortions, which caused so many deaths among pagan women, and banned all forms of contraception, which protected Christian women from some of the more demeaning forms of sexual activity that were common among pagans, such as anal and oral intercourse. And Christian girls were far less likely to marry young than pagan girls: according to one study, 44% of pagan girls were married by age 14, while only 20% of Christian girls were.


The Role of Women in the Church

Women within the early Church held also greater positions of power than was customary at that time. See for instance 1 Timothy 11-13, in which Paul describes the qualifications necessary for deaconesses. Stark notes that "Deacons were of considerable importance in the early church. They assisted at liturgical functions and administered the benevolent and charitable activities of the church." He asserts that

there is virtual consensus among historians of the early church as well as biblical scholars that women held positions of honor and authority within early Christianity (Frend 1984; Gryson 1976; Cadoux 1925). Peter Brown noted that Christians differed not only from pagans in this respect, 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' (1988:144-145).

In addition to the testimony of scholars and contemporaries of the early church, Stark offers as evidence the fact that a large number of early Christian martyrs were women: the Romans were known to target the leaders of any group they attempted to suppress.

Finally, Stark notes that although pagan women also sometimes held positions of power within the pagan mystery cults, those cults were not central to the lives of their followers in the way that the Church was for the early Christians. "Daily life revolved around the Church," he says, and so the women who held significant roles within the Church had more influence over the most important force that governed their lives than did their pagan counterparts.


Christianity's Aspirational Opportunities for Women

Stark offers two additional explanations for how Christianity rose to dominate Rome, which I would like to tie back to the issue of the role of women in Christianity. First, Stark argues that Christianity was strengthened, while paganism was weakened, by the two major plagues that struck Rome during this time period. Stark believes that Christian survival rates were much higher than pagans, owing to the superior manner in which the Christian community organized itself in response to plagues. As is evident from the lives and deaths of the martyrs, Christianity really did give its adherents courage of conviction in the face of death. And the Christian conviction in a time of plague was to care for the weak and the ill, even if it meant risking your own life in the process.

According to contemporary accounts, the usual response of pagan priests, and even of pagan doctors, to a plague was to flee to the countryside. The response of Christians was very different. The bishop Dionysius wrote of one plague

Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ....

The heathen behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead...

While a Christian bishop is hardly an unbiased witness, there are many pagan accounts of ancient plagues that describe pagans behaving in exactly this way, and as Stark says, a bishop could hardly expect to get away with making a public declaration of this sort at a time when the plague he refers to was still raging if it were a total fabrication.

A community that organizes itself in the manner attributed to Christians will survive a plague in dramatically greater numbers than one that responds as the pagans did. By some rough but scientific measures, Stark estimates that 30% of the pagan population may have died during each of the two plagues, while only 10% of the Christian population would have. This could have had a significant effect in nudging the population of the Empire in the Christian direction, but I am currently more interested in the effect it would have had on Christian women.

Because it occurs to me that the role of taking charge of the sick, of attending their every need and ministering to them in Christ, is one that would naturally fall to women. In a society in which women were so undesirable that they were killed shortly after birth in large numbers, in which men largely held all the property, all the power, and all the opportunities for making a mark on the world through war or through business, Christianity offered women something that they could get in no other way: an opportunity to exercise heroic virtue. Christianity offered them a chance for greatness. For who could argue that the woman who stared down the plague in order to care for those who had contracted it was less brave than the man who faced death on the battlefield?

And these opportunities were not as isolated as you might suppose. Christianity, according to Stark, was largely an urban phenomenon in its early days, and the ancient cities provided ample opportunity for enduring personal suffering. In examining the historical record of one city, Antioch, over a period of 600 years, Stark calculated that between earthquakes, plagues, fires, famines, foreign invasion and riots, the city suffered a catastrophe involving significant mortality an average of once every 15 years. Women in this time period knew that sacrifices that are nearly unimaginable to us today could be demanded of them at any time, and Christianity gave them a way not only to face them, but to unite them to the suffering of a loving God, and through Him to conquer them with acts of virtue as heroic as those of any man on the battlefield.


A New Society

And they didn't have to become Joan of Arc to do it, which leads me to my final point. One of Stark's final explanations for why Christianity overtook paganism is that its doctrines revolutionized the way people related to God and to one another in a way that revitalized and reformed Roman society. As Stark puts it,

The simple phrase, "For God so loved the world..." would have puzzled an educated pagan. And the notion that the gods care how we treat one another would have been dismissed as patently absurd....

Indeed, as E. A. Judge has noted in detail, classical philosophers regarded mercy and pity as pathological emotions--defects of character to be avoided by all rational men. Since mercy involves providing unearned help or relief, it was contrary to justice....'Plato removed the problem of beggars from his ideal state by dumping them over its borders.'

This was the moral climate in which Christianity taught that mercy is one of the primary virtues--that a merciful God requires humans to be merciful. Moreover the corollary that because God loves humanity, Christians my not please God unless they love one another was something entirely new. Perhaps even more revolutionary was the principal that Christian love and charity must extend beyond the boundaries of family and tribe, that it must extend to "all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor 1:2). Indeed, love and charity must even extend beyond the Christian community....

But perhaps above all else, Christianity brought a new conception of humanity to a world saturated with capricious cruelty and the vicarious love of death (Barton, 1993). Consider the account of the martyrdom of Perpetua. Here we learn the details of the long ordeal and gruesome death suffered by this tiny band of resolute Christians as they were attacked by wild beasts in front of a delighted crowd assembled in the arena. But we also learn that had the Christians all given in to the demand to sacrifice to the emperor, and thereby been spared, someone else would have been thrown to the animals. After all, these were games held on honor of the birthday of the emperor's young son. And whenever there were games, people had to die. Dozens of them, sometimes hundreds (Baron 1993)....

[T]he issue here is not capital punishment, not even very cruel forms of capital punishment. The issue is spectacle--for the throngs in the stadia, watching people torn and devoured by beasts or killed in armed combat was the ultimate spectator sport, worthy of a boy's birthday treat. It is difficult to comprehend the emotional life of such people.

In any event, Christians condemned both the cruelties and the spectators. Thou shalt not kill, as Tertullian (De Spectactulis) reminded his readers. And as they gained ascendancy, Christians prohibited such "games." More important, Christians promulgated a moral vision utterly incompatible with the casual cruelty of pagan custom.

I can't help but believe that women must have found this new, Christian moral vision more to their liking than the pagan one.