The women of the early church

The Gospels and Acts were written in a world where the philosopher Celsus could dismiss Christianity as a religion of "women, children and slaves" — and mean it as an insult that would land.

He was not entirely wrong about the composition. He was wrong that it was a weakness.

The women who funded the ministry

Luke includes a detail the other Gospels omit:

Mary, called Magdalene... and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod's household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means.— Luke 8:2-3

Jesus' itinerant ministry was financed substantially by women, out of their own resources. Joanna's position is particularly striking: she was the wife of Herod Antipas's estate manager — a woman from the household of the man who had executed John the Baptist, using her position and money to support Jesus.

The first witnesses

All four Gospels name women as the first to find the tomb empty and the first to see the risen Christ. In John's account Mary Magdalene is alone in a garden, mistakes Jesus for the gardener, and is sent with the message: "go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father" (John 20:17).

The significance is historical before it is anything else. In first-century Judea a woman's testimony was heavily discounted; Josephus states plainly that women should not be admitted as witnesses. If you are constructing a persuasive story, you do not select witnesses your audience will not credit — and you certainly do not have the male leadership hiding behind locked doors while the women go to the grave.

Luke even records the disciples' reaction: the women's report "seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them" (Luke 24:11).

Nobody invents that.

Romans 16

The last chapter of Paul's most theologically dense letter is a list of greetings, and it is one of the most informative passages in the New Testament about how the early church actually operated. Paul names roughly twenty-nine people. Ten are women.

Phoebe (16:1-2). Paul calls her diakonos of the church at Cenchreae — the same word he uses of himself and of Timothy, and which most translations render "minister" or "deacon" when applied to men. He also calls her prostatis, a word meaning patron or benefactor, someone of standing who provided protection and resources. And the letter is in her hand: she carried Romans to Rome, which in the ancient world normally meant she also read it aloud and answered the first questions about it.

Priscilla (16:3). Paul greets "Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers." In four of the six New Testament mentions, she is named before her husband — a reversal of normal convention that ancient readers would have noticed and that usually indicates the more prominent figure. In Acts 18:26 the couple hear Apollos, an eloquent and educated preacher, teaching incompletely, and "they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately."

Junia (16:7). "Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen and my fellow prisoners. They are well known among the apostles, and they were in Christ before me." A woman, imprisoned for the faith, described in terms of apostolic standing. Chrysostom — a man whose views on women were entirely of his era — wrote in the fourth century that she must have been remarkable indeed to be counted worthy of the name of apostle.

Mary, Tryphena, Tryphosa, Persis (16:6, 12) — all commended for hard work in the Lord, using a verb (kopiaō) Paul elsewhere uses of his own gospel labour.

Rufus's mother (16:13), whom Paul calls "his mother and mine." Julia and the sister of Nereus (16:15).

The house churches

The early church met in homes, and homes in that world were run by women. This is not incidental — it means women were hosting, organising and providing the base of operations for congregations.

Lydia of Philippi (Acts 16:14-15) is the first recorded convert in Europe. She was a dealer in purple cloth — a luxury trade — and was evidently wealthy enough to have her own household and to insist that Paul and his companions stay with her. The church in Philippi began in her house.

Nympha hosted a church at Laodicea (Colossians 4:15). Mary the mother of John Mark hosted the Jerusalem church, and it is to her house that Peter goes after his escape from prison (Acts 12:12) — where a servant girl named Rhoda is so overjoyed she leaves him standing at the gate.

Why this mattered socially

Rodney Stark, writing as a sociologist rather than a believer, argues that the position of women is one of the significant reasons Christianity grew.

Infanticide. Exposure of unwanted infants — overwhelmingly girls — was legal and common. Christians refused to practise it and took in abandoned children. This alone produced a very different sex ratio in Christian communities compared to the surrounding population.

Marriage. Roman girls were frequently married at eleven or twelve, often to much older men. Christian women married later and had more say in the match.

Widows. The church supported them structurally (Acts 6:1, 1 Timothy 5:3-16), at a point when a widow without family was often destitute.

Abortion. The methods available were extremely dangerous to the mother. Christian opposition had the side effect of saving women's lives.

The result was that Christian communities had proportionally more women, better survival rates and higher birth rates — which compounds enormously across generations.

The disputed passages

It would be dishonest to write this article without acknowledging that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 and 1 Timothy 2:11-12 exist, and that they are hard.

Christians read them differently and always have.

Complementarians hold that they establish a permanent ordering in which some teaching and governing offices are held by men.

Egalitarians hold that they address specific first-century situations — disorder in Corinthian worship, a false-teaching problem in Ephesus involving the Artemis cult — and note that Paul assumes women praying and prophesying in the assembly three chapters earlier (1 Corinthians 11:5), which would contradict a blanket prohibition.

Both positions are held by people who take Scripture with complete seriousness. This article does not settle it, and Harvest does not pretend that it can be settled by asserting one side loudly.

And underneath it

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

In a world organised entirely around exactly those three divisions — ethnicity, legal status and sex — a first-century Jewish man wrote that sentence and had it read aloud in public assemblies.

It has been unfolding ever since, and often far too slowly.