2)       "Some historians would further caution that even texts written by women may not be representative of women's perspectives and voices. The fact that men largely control the processes of transmission is likely to mean that only texts deemed acceptable by them are likely to survive." page 10

3)       ". . .religious systems, including both ritual and belief, reinforce and replicate social experience." page 13

4)       "Although women in ancient Greece unquestionably worshipped both male and female deities, goddesses played a much more central role in their religious lives." page 22

      "The centrality of Demeter in the religious lives of Greek women may be approached first from a consideration of the ancient Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which dates at least to the seventh century B.C.E. It relates that Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, was abducted by Hades, lord of the underworld, while gathering flowers. Grief-stricken Demeter, haunted by the cry of her daughter sobbing as through she were being raped, learns that Zeus has assented to the rape-marriage of Persephone to Hades. In anguish and anger, Demeter deserts Olympus for the mortal city of Eleusis where she seeks refuge in the house of the king, Keleos, as a nursemaid to his only son. Ultimately, she reveals herself to the people of Eleusis, and instructs them to build her a temple and inaugurate her rites." page 24

5)       That Romans men and women were aware of women's attempt "to gain a bit of control over their lives is made magnificently clear in the speech Livy attributes to Cato's defense of the Oppian [a law forbidding consumption by women] law:

Unless you act [against repeal], this is the least of the things enjoined upon women by custom or law and to which they submit with a feeling of injustice. It is complete liberty (libertas) or rather, if we wish to speak the truth, complete licence (licentia) that they desire. If they win in this, what will they not attempt? Review all the laws with which your forefathers restrained their licence and made them subject to their husbands; even with all these bonds you can scarcely control them. What of this? If you suffer them to sieze these bonds one by one and wrench themselves free and finally to be placed on a parity with their husbands, do you think that you will be able to endure them? The moment they begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors."

6)       "From a male point of view, the primary problem with women's "unchastity" is the underlying loss of male control over women, including, but hardly limited to, the loss of legitimate heirs that was so crucial in aristocratic Rome." page 61

      "The frequency of divorce in ancient Rome meant that Roman mothers were often separated from their children." page 64

      "The myth of Ino and her slave (who in Plutarch acquires the name Antiphera and the ethnic origin of Aetolia) may well reflect the nature of antagonisms between married women and their female slaves, who not infrequently had sexual liaisons with the husband. By Roman law, such liaisons were perfectly licit, and Roman wives were expected to tolerate them. The children of such relationships were illegitimate, and posed, in theory, no threat to the status of the matrona's own legitimate children. In reality, however, things may not have been so simple. There is some evidence that foundling children (alumni and alumnae) and slave children (vernae) raised in the master's house (often alongside his legitimate children) may have been, in fact, the illegitimate children of the man and his slave mistress." page 67

7)       "In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the worship of many foreign divinities spread from their native lands as commerce and military maneuvers moved multitudes back and forth across the Mediterranean. . . .Principal among these was the religion of Isis, which any scholars identify as the primary contender against Christianity for sovereignty in the Roman Empire." page 71

      ". . .[I]in its Greco-Roman incarnation,. the cult of Isis emphasized the goddess as exemplary wife and propounded the sanctity and joys of marriage and the nuclear family. While Isis was frequently identified with the Greek Demeter, the differences between them are significant. Demeter's central role was that of grieving mother, but Isis seeks her spouse, not her child. In the Hymn to Demeter, the goddess has little regard for marriage, which separates her from her beloved child. It seems at best a necessary evil, a compromise to be reluctantly tolerated." page 74

8)       "We have scant evidence for women's religious leadership and authority in pagan contexts apart from cultic offices." page 89

9)       "Strikingly different portraits both of Jewish women and women's Judaism emerge from ancient rabbinic sources on the one hand, and inscriptional, archaeological, and neglected Greek literary sources from the Greco-Roman period on the other. Rabbinic writings have led many scholars to conclude that Jewish women led restricted, secluded lives and were excluded from much of the rich ritual life of Jewish men, especially from the study of the Torah. Evidence from the Greco-Roman Diaspora suggests, however, that at least some Jewish women played active religious, social, economic, and even political roles in the public lives of Jewish communities.
      . . . As more and more scholars are beginning to concede, rabbinic sources may at best refract the social realities of a handful of Jewish communities, and at worst may reflect only upon the utopian visions of a relative handful of Jewish men." page 93

      "In fact, broadly speaking, rabbinic Judaism subscribed to the belief that there was one set of religious obligations that God had imposed on God's people, Israel, namely the observance of the law that God gave to Moses at Sinai. But if the law given at Sinai contained everything needed to place a person in the proper relationship with God, the rabbis nevertheless understood that not all of the commandments given at Sinai were equally binding on all members of the community. The entire law was binding only on free adult males; all others (children of either sex, free adult women, and slaves of any age or either gender) were exempt to varying degrees from certain religious observations and obligations. Such exemptions had an unavoidable consequence: exempted persons could never serve God fully, and therefore could never stand in the same relationship to God as a free adult male who observed all the commandments." pages 95-96

      "The primary role of religious observances for Jewish women, in the rabbinic view, is to enable men to fulfill their convenantal obligations." page 100

10)       "When the pagan critic Celsus denigrated Christianity in the second century C.E. as a religion of women, children, and slaves, he articulated a connection between women and early Christianity that has only recently received serious and critical attention." page 128

      "Almost certainly, Luke's insistence on this [women's subordination to men] should be seen as a response to a Greco-Roman critique of Christianity, which was in fact grounded in the social reality of those Christian communities that denied or minimized the significance of marriage and women's subordination to husbands and fathers. When Luke insists that Christians are men and women, he may in fact be emphasizing not the women, but the men." page 129

11)       "In a study that became a classic almost instantaneously, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza argues that women not only constitute the paradigm of the faithful disciple in the earliest layers of the gospel traditions, but also that women were the first Gentiles to become followers of Jesus and were intimately involved in the development and articulation of a theology which made possible an extension of the Jesus movement to non-Jews. She bases this claim on her analysis of several stories about Jesus and non-Jewish women. [see Mark 7:24-30 and Matthew 15:21-28]" page 131-132

      "The Jesus movement began as a protest and renewal movement wholly within Judaism, one of many responses to the extraordinary conditions of political, social, economic, and religious crisis experienced by Jews living in Roman Palestine in the first centuries B.C.E./C.E. It preached an imminent end of the current world and the advent of the Reign of God, where the last would be first, and the first would be last. Consonant with these intense eschatological beliefs, the Jesus movement advocated a radical interim ethic that had far-reaching ramifications for social roles, including those associated with gender distinction. We can see clear traces of this in sayings attributed to Jesus in the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, as well as in the Gospel of Thomas. The disciples of Jesus are repeatedly admonished there to renounce their families, occupations, and residence to follow Jesus." page 138

12)       "Still, I continue to see the specifics of Christian asceticism as a logical extension of earliest Christian belief in the imminent end of the universe as they knew it, which rendered normal social relationships, particularly marriage and childbearing, more or less irrelevant.
      For women, this constellation of intense convictions that the end of the world was at hand and that marriage, childbearing, and the transmission of property from one generation to the next were consequently no longer of any concern had major ramifications. . . . [W]hen traditional divisions of labor according to sex and concerns for the transmission of property are invalidated[,] . . women stand to achieve significant parity with men." page 139

13)       ". . . [T]he early gospels and the seven undisputed letters of Paul would have afforded women a flexible system in which departure from the normative standards for women was legitimized while the standards themselves were not wholly obliterated. The Jesus movement and the early Pauline communities supported the renunciation of natal and marital ties, but left just enough room for those who were able to join without breaking such ties altogether.
      Within the reconstructed Q sayings source, the female figure of Wisdom is prominent. Some scholars have proposed that the Q community would have advocated a theology particularly conducive to women by virtue of this more nuanced perception of the gender of the divine." page 140

14)       "By rendering the public realm an extension of the domestic, women were able to exercise power and public functions without explicitly challenging the division of society into public and domestic realms, and the association of women with the domestic. With the location of early Christian churches within private households and with the use of sibling terminology, early Christian communities seem to have brought the public into the domestic sphere, and in the process to have further supported women's activity." page 142

      ". . .the conflict over head covering is closely related to the revised constructions of public and domestic space that prevailed among the Corinthians. Within the privacy of their own homes, respectable women would not have covered their heads. Taking with utmost seriousness the view of ecclesia as the household, Corinthian women saw no reason to cover their heads within it. "[Corinthian women prophets] retain the house-church as their own space and dignify hat they are no longer determined by shame through sexual subordination but are determined by honor through the spirit as persons who have put on Christ, God's image not male and female. . . " " page 148 quote from Wire in

15)       "No analysis of Christian women at Corinth can refrain from some comment on 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36, those (in)famous verses that attempt to impose more serious and clear-cut restrictions on women's public participation in the Christian assembly. These verses are sufficiently difficult that no English translation can be neutral: no translation can avoid at least a preliminary interpretation of what it is women are not supposed to do and where they are not supposed to do it. According to the newest Revised Standard translation (NRSV), the text read,

As in all churches of the saints, women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

      Several ancient manuscripts place these verses after 14:40, rather than in their current location. This suggests that even in antiquity, some people perceived that the verses break the flow of Paul's argument about prophecy where they are found. On the basis of this, the contradiction with 11:2-16, and other evidence, many modern scholars favor a simpler, though more radical solution. Paul did not write these verses: rather, someone else interpolated them into the text. From the location of the interpolation in Paul's regulation of prophecy, it seems most plausible that the interpolator intended to silence not just women in general, but women prophets in particular." page 149

16)       "The classic New Testament expression of misogynism, 1 Timothy 2:11-16 forms the basis of most later Christian restrictions of women, together with 1 Corinthians 14:33b-36. The author of Timothy writes,

I desire then that women should dress themselves modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes but with good deeds, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God. Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.

17)       "The specific story of Paul and Thecla is almost certainly a fabrication. But there must have been women just like Thecla, who did deny marriage and childbearing, authority and hierarchy, who taught and baptized, who were accepted and revered by many, and who fully saw themselves within the tradition of Paul and his troublesome Corinthians. It is conceivable that behind the tradition of Thecla lies a historical women, who ultimately came to be linked with the figure of Paul, but we have no way to determine this." page 154

18)       "In her ground-breaking feminist revisioning of early Christianity, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza . . . proposes that in the first few centuries, many Christian communities were appealing to women for their ability to address the specific status inconsistencies that certain women experienced. In particular, she suggests that many women sought access to the Greco-Roman prestige system by serving as patrons and benefactors of numerous Greco-Roman voluntary associations, yet found that their financial largess did not bring them the expected prestige and satisfaction they sought. In the Christian ecclesial household, by contrast, they found wholly different standards of worth that recognized their roles as patrons without denigrating them as women.
      . . . As I indicated earlier, such models often encounter resistance from scholars of early Christianity for their negative theological implications. They seem to imply that if these are the reasons why people became Christians, then the ultimate theological truths of Christianity is called into question. . . .
      In the end, I am still convinced that not only were the consequences of becoming Christian, particularly an ascetic Christian, different for women than for men, but also that the complex reasons why many women chose to become Christian are likely to have been different than the reasons why many men did so. It makes eminent sense to speak of women's Christianity (or probably Christianities) in the first few centuries and to explore the ways in which women's experience of being Christian differed from those of men, without in any way advocating, therefore, that all women experienced Christianity as fundamentally the same." pages 155-156

19)       After a lengthy quote of Jerome, Kraemer writes, "Jerome, it seems, was of the opinion that behind every heretical man was an heretical woman. It is in fact the case that among the many early Christian movements ultimately deemed heretical by their catholic opponents are a number in which women were apparently prominent, both as followers and as leaders. Jerome notwithstanding, women may not have been prominent in the majority of so-called heresies, but most movements we know to have been characterized by the prominence of women were ultimately judged heretical." page 157

20)       "The diary of Perpetua [Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas] may thus represent the earliest known writing of a Christian woman." page 160

      "The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitasconfirms both the centrality of prophetic vision in the New Prophecy and the prominence of women." page 161 [The New Prophecy is her name for the Montanist movement.]
      "We might also wonder whether Perpetua's husband was opposed to her conversion and somehow instrumental in her fate." page 161

      "The Montanist also points out that when Paul requires women to pray and prophecy with their heads covered, this of course implies that women may pray and prophesy." page 165

      Regarding Montanism and other heresies: "Nothing suggests that these movements are ever wholly women's movements; in fact, what may make them most interesting is not that their membership was limited to women, or primarily women, but rather that both men and women found compelling a movement in which women were not relegated to the background, but were significant, even central players." page 168

21)       "The denial of prophecy guarantees a particular apostolic succession while the advocacy of continuing prophecy forever threatens a stable political order, and it is hard to believe that even in Asia Minor this was not an issue for those esteemed men and bishops." page 170, see Elaine Pagels, Gnostic Gospels for more information

22)       ". . . [E]arly Christian renunciation of sexuality and childbearing enabled Christian women to achieve a significant degree of autonomy and to function in positions of community responsibility and authority that were difficult for other women to attain." page 173

23)       "Feminist scholarship of the last several decades has demonstrated that women clearly exercised leadership, in the modern sense, within the earliest movement around Jesus of Nazareth. Women such as Mary of Magdala were key members of the circle around Jesus of Nazareth, and they subsequently played instrumental roles in the growth and development of the early Christian movement." page 174, see Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her

24)       "Opposition to women exercising priesthood in principle, if not in actuality, also comes from John Chrysostom, who asserted women's exclusion from the priesthood but acknowledges that women effectively exercise power over the office nonetheless. "Since they can effect nothing of themselves, they do all through the agency of others; and they have become invested with so much power that they can appoint or eject priests at their will. " " page 187

25)       "There never seems to have been much dispute over women's authority to teach other women. If anything, Christians seemed to have worried about the possible impropriety of men teaching women in private households." page 188

26)       Because it promulgated "social reversals and eschatologically oriented asceticism, earliest Christianity licensed alternatives for women that included participation in the public sphere often reserved, in most of Greco-Roman antiquity, for males." page 191

27)       "Yet we know now that women did baptize, teach, and exercise other priestly functions in some Christian communities." page 195
      "In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to suggest that while not all heresies accorded women authority over men, all those churches that did accord women authority over men were ultimately labeled heretical, even if there was nothing else offensive about them." page 196

28)       "Finally, there is conceivably some relationship between monotheism and the exclusion of women from Jewish and Christian priesthood, an exclusion that carries over to monotheistic Islam as well. When divinity is perceived to be one, and the gender of that divinity effectively presented as masculine in language, imagery, and so forth, perhaps only the sex which shares that gender is perceived as able to perform priestly functions." page 197

29)       "Interestingly, though, there seems to be some correlation between the perception of God as androgynous and the view that women would exercise Christian office." page 197

30)       ". . .[E]arly Christian defenses for the exclusion of women from the priesthood . . . focus on the subordination of women to men, and on the choices that God and Jesus could have made but did not in selecting the person who baptized Jesus or choosing the apostles. In antiquity, no one argues that women cannot be priests because the priest represents Christ in the congregation, and Christ came, necessarily, in the form of a male. Only later, in the Middle Ages, does this become a key weapon in the arsenal against women's ministry, as Christians begin to argue that, contrary to Genesis, woman was not created in the image of God and therefore was unable to fulfill the office of priest." page 198

31)       " In its earliest phases, Christianity undoubtedly espoused an egalitarianism that had significant consequences for women. Yet whatever advantages early Christian communities may have offered for women scarcely characterize Christianity by the end of late antiquity, and there can be no question that Christianity ultimately emerges as a major perpetrator and legitimator of misogynism in Western culture up through the twentieth century. For Christian feminists, it has become crucial to inquire whether this misogynism represents an inescapable feature of Christianity or whether it is a perversion of the core of earliest, and therefore most authentic, Christian belief." page 204

32)       Kraemer use grid/group theory to show that Christianity cannot be redeemed

33)       "Yet the preeminent Christian feminist theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza has argued strongly against this, denying that the misogynist transformation of Christianity was inevitable if Christianity was to survive. Rather, Schussler Fiorenza asserts that departure from the primal egalitarianism of Christianity was artificial, and that contemporary Christianity can be restored to its original "discipleship of equals" without sacrificing its ability to continue indefinitely." page 204

34)       Kraemer explains "the triumph of hierarchy and misogynism . . . in the failure of low grid, high group communities to win the day. . . . [S]uch communities are unlikely to survive for long, precisely because their low level of social organization is conducive on the one had to fission and dissolution and on the other to inadequate perpetuation." page 205

      "Political factors should also not be neglected. As a certain point, the tide may have turned against egalitarian Christian communities, when high grid communities ultimately obtained the real political power they needed to suppress and eliminate their egalitarian opponents. Until high grid Christians acquired the resources of the Roman Empire, their ability to coerce other Christians was limited; at the same time, the characteristics of communities at low grid and high group tended to assist their own ultimate demise." page 205

35)       Only when women succeed in separating themselves from the normal standards of their value as wives, mothers, and property, do they attain full autonomy.
      "Both for women in antiquity and for us, the price of that autonomy is high and problematic: the renunciation of sexual love and ecstasy and of their frequent correlate, children." page 207

36)       Christians "might do well to reflect on the differences between a religion whose central myth is that of the separation and ultimate reunion of mother and daughter beloved of one another, and that of a religion whose central myth is of a father who requires the painful sacrificial death of this only son." page 208

37)       "Ascetic and monastic women from the Therapeutics to Thecla to the desert mothers found it necessary to repudiate the body and its female associations, becoming male both in theory and in aspects of appearance in order to achieve self-determination." page 208

Books in bibliography that look interesting:

      The Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, in H. Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1972, 106-61

      Brooten, Bernadette J., Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogues, Brown Judaic Studies 36, Chico: Scholars Press, 1982

      Pagels, Elaine, The Gnostic Gospels, New York: Random House, 1974

            Pomeroy, Sarah B. , Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity , New York: Schocken, 1975

      Waithe, Ellen "Hypatia of Alexandria," in E. Waithe, ed., History of Women Philosophers , Vol. 1, Ancient Women Philosophers, 600 BC - 500 AD, Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987

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