The Oxford History of the Biblical World (100 page)

Any imperial sympathy for pagan or Jewish worship ended with Julian’s death, and antipagan and anti-Jewish legislation continued throughout the fourth and into the fifth and sixth centuries. Beginning in the decades before Julian’s accession to power, the imperial campaign against paganism escalated gradually. By the end of the fourth century, both antipagan and anti-Jewish legislation would serve as licenses for the increasing number of acts of vandalism and violent destruction directed against pagan and Jewish places of worship carried out by Christian mobs, often at the instigation of the local clergy.

In 383, Gratian (emperor in the west, 367–75; joint emperor in the west, 375–83), one of whose mentors was Ambrose, the powerful and aggressively antipagan bishop of Milan, had relinquished the title and remaining responsibilities of the pontifex maximus, ordering also the removal of the altar of Victory from the senate. This action further widened the breach between the state and the old Roman religion. In 391, Theodosius I (379–95; joint emperor, 379–92) ordered that all temples be closed and that all forms of pagan worship cease. In the aftermath of the emperor’s edicts, the bishop of Alexandria ordered the destruction of the city’s main temple, the great Serapeum. This pattern of destruction continued, in Alexandria, Carthage, Gaza, and elsewhere, as the severe legislation directed against temples, pagan worship, and the old priesthood increased.

The repetitive nature of antipagan legislation bears witness to the persistence of traditional worship. Thus in 435, Emperors Theodosius II (emperor in the east, 408–50) and Valentinian III (emperor in the west, 425–55) ordered the destruction of all temples and shrines “if even now any remain entire.” As late as the sixth century, legislation was promulgated demanding the death penalty for the practice of sacrifice.

The policies of Emperor Justinian (527–65) were especially instrumental in the final phase of the Roman government’s struggle against paganism. Justinian’s policies were repressive not only toward pagans but also toward Jews, Samaritans, Manichaeans, and heretics. In 529 he closed the Neoplatonist school at Athens—an action consistent with his policy of prohibiting pagans from teaching, proclaimed in the same year, although not enforced consistently throughout the empire. Justinian also issued an edict demanding that all who were not yet baptized receive instruction in the “true faith of Christians” to become eligible for baptism. Failure to comply could result in confiscation of property or the loss of the right to an inheritance. Pagan worship was punishable by death.

Organized traditional worship seems to have persisted in the east somewhat longer than in the west. The dissolution and division of the western empire in the fifth and sixth centuries by the now Christian “barbarian” tribes of Europe was not fertile ground for the continuation of paganism in any organized form. Some pockets of paganism survived, especially in the countryside, and some pagan practices coexisted with Christianity, especially in the lives of new Christians. Astrology and the use of
amulets for healing would have been especially difficult to eradicate. In fact, paganism continued to be of concern to church councils into the seventh century, though sources for organized pagan worship are spotty after the sixth. Christianity triumphed, but only after incorporating and then promulgating much of the classical culture formerly identified with paganism.

Many historians of religion also argue that the triumph of Christianity was facilitated by its ability to adapt, transform, and internalize facets of the religious traditions with which it had competed during its formative centuries in such areas as its calendar and its evolving understanding of its key personages. Thus, even as Justinian was endeavoring to suppress in its entirety the worship of the goddesses who for millennia had been believed to sustain the recurring seasonal cycles of death and rebirth, he was building magnificent churches to Mary, mother of God and Godbearer, a more powerful, complex, and significant figure than the Mary of the New Testament, who receives relatively scant attention in the four Gospels. Although officially a focus of veneration and not worship as such, Mary shared, well before the sixth century, some of the features of the old goddesses such as Athena and Artemis, who, like her, were both virgins. Like Isis, the Egyptian goddess whose worship had spread throughout the empire, Mary was also the queen of heaven and an intercessor for humankind, whose love for her son had brought her honor and adoration; in both hymns and statuary Mary and Isis share attributes.

Although the concept of “orthodoxy” is anachronistic before the fourth century, and notwithstanding the great diversity of the early church, there was an emerging mainstream. During the second and third centuries, however, it had to respond to the challenges posed by the divergent views of a number of groups and systems of belief, prominent among which were those of the Christian Gnostics. Before the 1945 discovery in Nag Hammadi (Egypt) of more than forty Christian writings, many of them Gnostic, our understanding of Gnosticism was largely dependent on the writings of its adversaries, who included such prominent church figures as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Origen, and Justin Martyr. The origins of Gnosticism, which existed in both Christian and non-Christian contexts, are obscure, and Christian Gnosticism is itself diverse. Still, as Robert McL. Wilson writes, developed Gnostic systems shared several features: “(1) a radical cosmic dualism that rejects this world and all that belongs to it: the body is a prison from which the soul longs to escape; (2) a distinction between the unknown transcendent true God and the creator or Demiurge, commonly identified with the God of the Hebrew Bible; (3) the belief that the human race is essentially akin to the divine, being a spark of heavenly light imprisoned in a material body; (4) a myth, often narrating a premundane fall, to account for the present human predicament; and (5) the saving knowledge [gnosis] by which deliverance is effected and the gnostic awakened to recognition of his or her true nature and heavenly origin” (
The Oxford Companion to the Bible,
New York, 1993, p. 256). Similar to the beliefs of the Gnostics were the teachings of the second-century writer Marcion, who viewed the God of the Jews as an evil and inferior deity and would have excluded the Hebrew Bible from Christian scripture.

Other divergent views appeared, for example, in late second-century Phyrgia in
Asia Minor, where Montanus and two women, Priscilla and Maximilla, proclaimed a “new prophecy.” Apocalypticists, they heralded the second coming, announcing that Christ would return imminently to the Phrygian villages of Pepuza and Tymion. Despite Christ’s failure to do so, the movement persisted. Two centuries later, Emperor Theodosius commanded that the books of the Montanists be burned and that those who hid them be put to death. In their unbridled eschatological expectation, ecstatic prophesying, and claim to be instruments of the Holy Spirit, the Montanists challenged the growing authority of the church’s episcopal structure.

The Montanist movement was also noteworthy for the prominent role of its female prophets. However, just as the existence of powerful goddesses in the great civilizations of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world had not yielded societies with gender equality, so too in the church the growing importance of Mary, the mother of Jesus, was not accompanied by an increasing role for women in its ecclesiastical life.

The study of women in the earliest phase of Christianity is largely the study of Jewish women; indeed, the New Testament is a major source for Jewish women’s history, reminding us that the original followers of Jesus were Palestinian Jews. Not long after the death of Jesus, however, as non-Jews began to enter the community “in Christ,” debate arose concerning the role of Jewish law in God’s scheme for salvation. With his position that followers of Jesus had been “discharged from the law… which held us captive” (Rom. 7.6), Paul represented one end of the theological spectrum. James, the brother of Jesus and the leader of the Jerusalem church, represented the other in maintaining that the Jewish law in its entirety remained valid. By the second century, the majority of Christians were non-Jews, and the church adopted the Pauline position that the law was no longer a vehicle for salvation. Jewish Christians, diverse groups who followed Jewish law and accepted Jesus as the resurrected Messiah, were condemned by both the church fathers and the rabbis. At a time when the emerging church and the emerging synagogue engaged in a rigorous process of self-definition, Jewish-Christian groups blurred the boundaries that both sought to erect. Still, rabbinic and patristic sources hint that as late as the fifth century, Jewish-Christian communities persisted in such areas as Galilee, Jordan, and Syria. It is likely that eventually they were assimilated into the Christian community.

During the Byzantine era, female leadership was exercised largely within the hierarchical structures of women’s monastic communities. However, the letters of Paul and the book of Acts suggest that in the earliest phase of emerging Christianity, the opportunities for women were far greater. The closing chapter of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, following the epistolary conventions of that period, includes greetings and personal commendations. Paul mentions ten women, the first of whom is Phoebe, described in Greek as a
diakonos
and a
prostatis,
correctly translated in the New Revised Standard Version as “deacon” and “benefactor” (Rom. 16.1–2). Older translations erroneously rendered these words as “deaconess” and “helper”; thus, generations of translators ignored the plain sense of the text because of their assumption that women could not have exercised significant roles in the early church, and here and elsewhere produced translations that could be used both to reinforce
that point of view and to limit contemporary women’s ecclesiastical activities. To be sure, Romans was written before the institutionalization of church offices; one cannot describe with certainty the activities of a first-century deacon. But the inaccurate translation “deaconess” suggests a role of less importance than that of “deacon.” During the following centuries, the former developed into a position of circumscribed responsibilities, distinct and limited relative to those of a deacon.

Ancient inscriptions suggest, moreover, that the
prostatis
or
prostates
was not only a benefactor or patron, but frequently the president or head of an association. Phoebe was probably one among many of an increasing number of wealthy upper-class Roman women who could control and dispose of their property as they wished, and who often chose to act as donors and benefactors, participating in the Roman system of euergetism or benefactions in the same manner as their male counterparts.

Later in Romans 16, Paul describes the activities of other women mentioned in the chapter using the same vocabulary he employs with respect to his own work and to that of his male colleagues. The husband-and-wife couples Prisca and Aquila (mentioned also in 1 Cor. 16 and Acts 18) and Andronicus and Junia, along with Mary, Tryphaena and Tryphosa, and Persis, are all greeted as coworkers in Christ, and, notably, in the case of Andronicus and Junia, as missionary colleagues (the Greek word is
apostoloi,
“apostles”). Paul also extends greetings to the mother of Rufus, to Julia, and to the sister of Nereus, who must also have been prominent in the community at Rome. Elsewhere Paul takes for granted that women pray and prophesy in church (1 Cor. 11). Similarly, Luke, the author of Acts, mentions women who are prophets, patrons of house churches, prominent converts, missionaries, and teachers.

Both the theological concerns and the highly stylized literary character of the Gospels are such that the historical significance is unclear of those passages in which women are portrayed as the discoverers of the empty tomb and the first post-resurrection witnesses, or as understanding Jesus’ true nature when his male disciples fail to do so. The Gospels do, however, provide evidence that Jesus’ followers included both men and women. Mary of Magdala was almost certainly among his innermost circle of disciples.

Perhaps the varied and important roles available to women in the earliest phase of Christianity were the church’s equivalent of the “Rosie the Riveter” phenomenon in the United States during World War II. That is, in times of political, social, and spiritual revolution, women have often had exceptional ranges of opportunities. However, during the periods of increasing stabilization that typically follow, many of these opportunities tend to shrink or be lost. The “household codes” of some of the later books of the New Testament advocate a subordinate and submissive role for women, and reflect what the pioneering feminist New Testament historian Elisabeth Schiissler Fiorenza has termed “repatriarchalization.” Thus the author of 1 Timothy, writing in the name of Paul decades after his death, decreed: “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 works, 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” (1 Tim. 2.9–12). The household codes are embedded in documents
written at a time of fading apocalyptic expectations within the church, as it was beginning to develop the institutions and the structure of authority that would facilitate its stability and self-perpetuation. Although the church would view itself as “outside” its Roman environment, at the same time it had set out to evangelize this same Roman world. Respectability could serve its goals.

In the Roman culture, “honor” and “shame” could be acquired on the basis of the behavior of the females in the household. The wellrun household was both a microcosm of and the foundation of the wellrun state. The images of the “ideal” woman in the household codes, in later rabbinic documents, and in the works of Roman orators, elegists, and historians are strikingly similar. They can be summed up in the epitaph of a Roman housewife of the first century
BCE
: “Here lies Amynome, wife of Marcus, best and most beautiful, worker in wool, pious, chaste, thrifty, faithful, a stayer-at-home” (
Inscriptiones Latinae selectae
8402). But the image of Amynome must be balanced against sources that depict women participating in a broad range of occupations and activities outside the home, including serving as priestesses and holding offices in religious associations. Upper-class women attended dinner parties and the theater, and as noted above, some participated in the Roman system of benefactions. Thus models both for women’s leadership roles and for the subordination of women in the church existed in the larger Roman environment of which the church was part.