16-5-6 The Role of Women in the First Century
Men greatly outnumbered women in the Greco-Roman world. Dio Cassius blamed the declining population of the Roman empire on the shortage of females(1) . J.C. Russell(2) claims that there were 131 males / 100 females in Rome itself, and 140 / 100 in most of the rest of the empire. A study of inscriptions at Delphi enabled the reconstruction of 600 families; and of these only six had raised more than one daughter(3) . This was partly due to female infanticide, and also partly due to the awful methods of contraception and abortion employed, which often resulted in the death of the woman.
And yet there is every reason to think that Christianity attracted women to it disproportionately. It held a liberating message for women, allowing and encouraging them to study Scripture and be independent from their male society when it came to personal faith and relationship with Jesus, even enabling them to formally teach each other and those in the world. Christian women enjoyed far greater marital security than pagans; abortion was outlawed for the early Christian; and they were to be respected for their own personhood by their brethren. Through being able to work with the likes of Paul in his preaching work, they broke through the surrounding low expectations of female roles. The competing religions offered no such respect of women. Some like Mithraism were limited solely to males. The Christian stress on the need to marry only within the faith must have lead to many sisters being single for the Lord’s sake; and there were doubtless many others who were divorced by unbelieving husbands. Such women were usually condemned to a life as prostitutes (hence the Lord said that if a man divorced his wife, he made her commit adultery). Yet the sisters’ problem with finding partners doubtless led them to go out into the world and convert men; as well as providing the basis for a unique society of females which would have drawn to it other hurting and neglected women within Roman society. Another outcome of the unusual situation would have been that women married brethren of different social rank to their own- there are records of higher rank women marrying brethren of far inferior status socially. The social world of the first century was turned upside down by those sisters and their preaching, in the same way as Northern Kazakhstan and other parts of the world have likewise been by the witness of large groups of sisters. Childless, single women would have been looked down on even more in those days than they are in ours. Time and again, the sisters would have asked themselves: ‘What am I doing this for?’. And every time, ultimately, the answer was that they were committed to this invisible man, the Lord Jesus, who had loved them to the end and was surely coming to claim them as His own.
An inventory of property removed from a Christian house church in North Africa listed 16 men’s tunics and 82 women’s tunics, along with 47 pairs of specifically female shoes and no men’s(4) . Adolf Harnack notes that the early source documents “simply swarm with tales of how women of all ranks were converted in Rome and in the provinces…the general truth that Christianity was laid hold of by women in particular" (5). Henry Chadwick likewise: “Christianity seems to have been especially successful among women. It was often through the wives that it penetrated the upper classes of society in the first instance”(6) .
Notes
(1) Dio Cassius, The Roman History (London: Penguin Classics, 1987 ed.).
(2) J.C. Russell, Late Anicent And Medieval Population, published as vol. 48 pt. 3 of the Transactions Of The American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1958.
(3) Jack Lindsay, The Ancient World: Manners and Morals (New York: Putnams, 1968).
(4) See R.L. Fox, Pagans And Christians (New York: Knopf, 1987).
(5) Adolf Harnack, The Mission And Expansion Of Christianity In The First Three Centuries (New York: Putnam’s, 1908) Vol. 2 p. 73.
(6) Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) p. 56.
