The role of women in the early church

The role of women in the early church reflects the role of women in the Bible, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. The attitudes shown toward women in scripture and in the way the early church developed show a certain ambivalence, seeing women both as a treasure to be protected and as a source of potential evil. These attitudes begin in Genesis with the story of the Creation and the Fall, and indeed much of what follows in terms of how women are viewed can be traced to the belief that Eve brought disease and death into a world that had been perfect before she was seduced by Satan. In the early church, women were relegated to a subordinate position for both reasons -- they needed the protection of men, and they were not quite trusted because of their potential for sin. An examination of how women are treated in biblical writings will be connected directly to how women were treated in the early church and to the roles they were given as well as to those they were denied.

The role of women in the bible is ambiguous. Women have a secondary position from the beginning. The creation stories in Genesis indicate that the human being was created by God and provides a specific description of this process. According to the biblical text, there are three elements involved in being in the image and likeness of God: 1) dominion over the rest of creation; 2) creation male and female; and 3) the command to be fruitful and multiply. Sexual diff

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of human consciousness of the sacred. While Eve has been presented by the writers of Genesis as only a woman and not a goddess, the origin of Eve is seen in the Goddess who preceded her and whose name has been taken from the form of the Hebrew verb "to be" by the masculine God, Yahweh (Eve in Hebrew is Hawwah), and it is necessary to see the history of Eve in terms of her place as a deposed Creator-Goddess. The creation stories of the Near East share two important elements -they all deal with the initiation and sustenance of human civilization, and they all presuppose or describe power struggles between masculine and feminine deities, usually with the masculine deities dominant: It is as though the writers believed that civilization could not begin or be sustained until the Feminine, as a dominant religious power, had been mastered and domesticated (Phillips 4). Phillips cites various passages which indicate a debt owed to Babylonian and Canaanite mythology, with images of a male warrior carried over into the figure of Yahweh: Yahweh is a warrior who must time and again do battle against the evil dragon-mother. Like Marduk, Yahweh guards his universe against eruptions of that chaotic power that constantly threatens to undo the

Category: History - T