The question of the role of women in the foundation, formation, and promulgation of the Christian faith and church in the first and second centuries of the Common Era is, to say the least, highly elusive, if not utterly speculative. The distance created by time, alone, added to the absence of the original documents from which the canon of the New Testament has derived, makes it virtually impossible to know with abject certainty what was spoken and written in the earliest days and decades following the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
Despite the fundamental Christian belief that the Bible is the inerrant, infallible Word of God, sufficient evidence exists to demonstrate that, in some instances, some translators or copyists of the original documents which comprise the Gospels, the Pauline corpus, and the other Pastoral epistles have left out material, substituted verbal variants or inappropriately modified nouns--changing masculine to feminine or the reverse, or added entire portions of text which were eventually canonized but are known to modern scholars as not likely to have been original material (such as Jesus' encounter with the adulterous woman in John 7:53-8:11). Whether the "alterations" or "modifications" were deliberate or merely accidental, the potential for misuse or abuse exists.
Is it at all possible, then, that portions of textual material which might have given rise to the greater empowerment of women in the early (or even modern) church were consciously withheld or obliterated at the hands of the early church "Fathers" in order to perpetuate the well-developed patriarchal customs which passed from Judaism to Christianity? According to Heine (1987),
One of the greatest problems of feminism and feminist theology seems to me to lie in the fact that women form a negative theory out of their hurt and their negative experience and claim universal validity for it. It is then the "nature" of th...