Women in Christianity

Based on Wikipedia: Women in Christianity

Mary Magdalene stood at the empty tomb on that first Easter morning and became, in that moment, the very first person to announce the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Think about that. The central event of the Christian faith—the moment that changed everything—was first witnessed and proclaimed by a woman. And yet, for fifteen centuries, she was remembered primarily as a reformed prostitute.

This strange inversion tells us something profound about how the story of women in Christianity has been told, retold, and systematically distorted over two thousand years.

The Magdalene Mistake

In the year 591, Pope Gregory the Great delivered an Easter homily that would reshape Christian memory for over a millennium. He conflated three different women from the Gospels into one figure: Mary Magdalene, who appears in Luke chapter eight; Mary of Bethany, the contemplative sister of Martha; and an unnamed "sinful woman" who anointed Jesus's feet with perfume and tears.

None of the Gospel writers suggest these were the same person. The conflation was Gregory's invention. But it stuck.

The result? A woman who the Gospels describe as a devoted disciple—one who traveled with Jesus, supported his ministry financially, stood at the cross when the male disciples fled, and served as the first witness to the resurrection—became synonymous with sexual sin and redemption through repentance. Her actual role as what scholars now call "the apostle to the apostles" was buried under a false narrative.

Karen King, a Harvard professor specializing in New Testament studies and ancient Christianity, has spent decades recovering the real history. She argues that recent discoveries of neglected biblical texts, combined with more rigorous scholarship, have proven beyond reasonable doubt that the disreputable portrait of Mary Magdalene is entirely inaccurate.

The real Mary Magdalene was a prominent disciple and significant leader in the early Christian movement. Her story matters because it exemplifies a pattern: women at the center of Christian history being pushed to the margins by those who wrote that history down.

What Jesus Actually Did

The Gospels present a Jesus who was strikingly countercultural in his treatment of women. In a society where rabbis typically did not teach women, where women's testimony was considered legally unreliable, where public conversation between unrelated men and women was scandalous—Jesus consistently broke the rules.

He taught women directly. He spoke with them in public. He allowed a woman to anoint his feet with expensive perfume—an act of intimate hospitality that scandalized his host. He regularly visited the home of Mary and Martha in Bethany, eating meals and teaching in a domestic space where women were present as participants, not just servants.

When the Pharisees tested him with a question about divorce—could a man divorce his wife, as Moses permitted?—Jesus's answer was radical. In a legal framework where only men could initiate divorce, Jesus declared that men and women were equals in God's eyes. "In the beginning," he said, "God made them male and female." If divorce was possible at all, it should be equally available to both.

One of the most famous scenes in the Gospels shows this egalitarian impulse dramatically. A woman caught in adultery is dragged before Jesus. Under Jewish law, she could be stoned to death. The men gather rocks. Jesus bends down, writes in the dirt, and says: "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her."

One by one, the stones drop. The crowd disperses. The woman goes free.

Women disciples—Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and others—traveled with Jesus throughout his ministry and supported his work "out of their private means." This detail, recorded in Luke, suggests these were women of independent wealth, choosing to fund a religious movement led by an itinerant preacher. That was not a small thing.

And at the end, when it mattered most, the women stayed. When Jesus was arrested, the male disciples scattered and hid. The women followed him to the cross. They watched him die. They returned to anoint his body. They discovered the empty tomb.

The Great Reversal

How did a movement founded with women at its center become, in many of its branches, so hostile to women's leadership?

The answer lies partly in the cultural world early Christians inhabited. The Roman legal framework called Patria Potestas—literally, "the rule of the fathers"—gave male heads of household extraordinary power. A Roman paterfamilias had legal authority over his wife, children, slaves, and adult dependents. In some circumstances, he had the legal right to kill his wife.

Early Christian writers like Paul and Peter faced a practical problem. They were building communities within this legal structure. New converts still lived in Roman households, still operated under Roman law. Some of the more radical implications of Jesus's teaching—that in Christ there is "neither male nor female," as Paul wrote to the Galatians—could not be immediately implemented without putting vulnerable people at risk.

So the New Testament contains what scholars call "household codes"—instructions for how Christian families should operate within the constraints of their society. Wives should submit to husbands. Slaves should obey masters. These passages, found in letters to the Colossians, Ephesians, and elsewhere, represent an accommodation to a brutal reality.

The question that has divided Christians ever since: Were these accommodations meant to be permanent rules? Or were they temporary concessions to a particular historical moment?

Two Readings of the Same Text

Contemporary Christians who take the Bible seriously divide sharply on this question. They generally fall into two camps: complementarians, who believe men and women have different but complementary roles ordained by God, with male headship in church and home; and egalitarians, who believe the Bible ultimately points toward full equality of men and women in all spheres.

Both sides claim to be faithful to Scripture. The disagreement is about how to read it.

Complementarians point to passages like Ephesians chapter five: "Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church." They argue this reflects God's created order, not merely cultural accommodation. They note that the twelve apostles Jesus named were all male. They emphasize that distinct roles do not imply inequality of value—just difference of function.

Wayne Grudem, a prominent complementarian theologian, frames the debate in stark terms. He argues that what's really at stake is whether Christians will obey Scripture "when its teachings are unpopular and conflict with the dominant viewpoints in our culture."

Egalitarians read the same texts differently. They point to Galatians chapter three: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." They argue this represents the trajectory of the Gospel—a movement toward radical equality that was constrained by first-century circumstances but should now be fully realized.

William Webb, a New Testament professor, developed what he calls a "redemptive movement" approach to these questions. He asks: which biblical commands are meant to be permanent, transcultural principles? And which were accommodations to specific historical circumstances that should now be left behind?

His key example is slavery. The Bible contains extensive regulations about slavery and never explicitly condemns it. Yet almost all Christians today believe slavery is wrong. They've concluded that the deeper principles of Scripture—human dignity, the image of God in all people, the trajectory toward liberation—point beyond what the text explicitly says.

Webb argues women's subordination should be understood the same way. Just as Christians came to see that the Bible's accommodation of slavery didn't represent its final word, they should recognize that its accommodation of patriarchy was similarly temporary.

The Church Fathers and the Convents

As Christianity spread and organized itself over the centuries, institutional leadership became increasingly male. The language of leadership tells the story: father, abbot (from the Aramaic "abba," meaning father), pope (from "papa," also meaning father). These titles defined authority in explicitly masculine terms.

But something interesting happened alongside this male hierarchy. The church developed a robust monastic tradition that included convents—communities of religious women who lived apart from the ordinary structures of marriage and childbearing.

For women with intellectual ambitions in the medieval world, the convent offered a remarkable alternative. In an era before reliable birth control, when most women spent their adult lives pregnant, nursing, or caring for children, religious life provided an escape hatch. Nuns could read, write, study, and teach. Some became scholars, artists, and administrators.

Consider this striking detail: King John of England—the villain of Robin Hood stories, the king who signed Magna Carta—was educated by nuns. These women were running schools and shaping future monarchs while formally excluded from the priesthood.

The tradition of religious sisters continues today. Catholic and Orthodox nuns have established schools, hospitals, and nursing homes across the world. They've served communities, educated generations, and exercised enormous practical influence—all while being barred from ordination.

Who Gets to Preach?

The question of whether women can be ordained—can serve as priests, ministers, or pastors—remains the most contested issue in contemporary Christianity.

The Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches maintain that only men can be ordained as priests. Only men can serve as bishops, patriarchs, or pope. These churches argue that this reflects the tradition Jesus established by choosing male apostles, and that the church lacks the authority to change what Christ instituted.

But the picture becomes complicated when you look at the full Christian landscape.

Many Protestant denominations began ordaining women in the twentieth century and continue to expand women's roles. The Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, most Presbyterian bodies, and the United Methodist Church all ordain women. The Church of England began ordaining women as priests in 1994 and as bishops in 2015.

Some Protestant traditions were ahead of the curve by centuries. The Quakers, founded in seventeenth-century England, recognized women's preaching from the beginning. George Fox, the movement's founder, argued that the same Spirit that could move a man to speak could equally move a woman. Quaker women preached, traveled as missionaries, and served in leadership throughout the movement's history.

The Shakers, a monastic offshoot of Quakerism that flourished in America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were radically egalitarian. They were founded by a woman, Ann Lee, whom members believed embodied the female aspect of God's nature. Leadership was shared equally between men and women.

Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, which emerged in the early twentieth century and have grown explosively worldwide, generally welcomed women preachers from their inception. The logic was simple: if the Holy Spirit gives a woman the gift of prophecy or teaching, who are humans to forbid it?

Today, some of the most prominent Christian preachers in America are women. Joyce Meyer commands audiences of millions. Paula White served as a spiritual advisor to a president. Their influence challenges any simple narrative about women's exclusion from Christian leadership.

The Woman at the Center

No woman in Christian history has received more veneration than Mary, the mother of Jesus. Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians call her Theotokos—a Greek term meaning "God-bearer" or, more loosely, "Mother of God." They honor her with prayers, processions, feast days, and centuries of magnificent art.

This veneration might seem paradoxical in traditions that exclude women from priesthood. But it reveals something important about how Christianity has always contained competing impulses about gender.

Mary represents the highest human holiness—a person so favored by God that she was chosen to bear the incarnate divine. In Catholic teaching, she was conceived without sin and assumed bodily into heaven. Billions of prayers have been directed to her over two millennia. Churches across the world bear her name.

Yet the qualities Mary is praised for—humility, obedience, maternal care—fit neatly within traditional gender roles. Her "yes" to God's messenger, her nurturing of the Christ child, her suffering at the foot of the cross: these have been held up as models specifically for women to emulate. The Virgin Mary, in other words, has often been used to reinforce the very gender hierarchies that her son's ministry seemed to challenge.

Christian feminists have tried to reclaim Mary differently—emphasizing her courage in accepting a socially dangerous pregnancy, her prophetic voice in the Magnificat (her song declaring that God has "brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly"), her persistence in following her son to his death when others fled.

The Numbers Tell a Story

Here is a curious fact: Christianity, despite its complicated history with women, attracts more women than men.

In 2020, women made up about fifty-two percent of Christians worldwide aged twenty and over. The Pew Research Center studied religiosity across fifty-three countries and found that Christian women are generally more religious than Christian men—more likely to attend services regularly, more likely to pray daily, more likely to say religion is important in their lives.

The one exception? African countries, where Christian men and women show equal levels of religious participation.

Why this gender gap exists remains debated. Some researchers point to socialization—women being raised to be more nurturing, communal, and emotionally expressive in ways that align with religious practice. Others note that throughout history, churches have provided women with community, mutual support, and meaningful roles even when excluded from formal leadership. Still others suggest that religious belief addresses existential concerns—mortality, meaning, moral guidance—in ways that resonate differently across genders.

Whatever the explanation, the pattern is striking. A religion whose institutional leadership has been predominantly male has always depended on women as its majority constituency.

Scripture as Battleground

The debate over women's roles in Christianity is ultimately a debate about how to read the Bible. Both sides claim scriptural authority. Both accuse the other of misinterpretation.

Consider one contested passage. In his first letter to Timothy, Paul writes that women should "learn in silence with full submission" and should not "teach or have authority over a man." This seems clear enough. But Paul also, in his letter to the Romans, commends Phoebe as a "deacon" of the church at Cenchreae and calls Junia "prominent among the apostles."

Were there female deacons and apostles in the early church? The text seems to say yes. So how do you reconcile that with the injunction to silence?

Complementarians typically argue that women could serve in certain roles but not others—that Phoebe's service didn't include teaching authority over men, that Junia's prominence didn't mean she held the office of apostle in the same sense as the Twelve.

Egalitarians counter that the restrictive passages were addressing specific local situations—a particular church with particular problems—while the broader arc of Paul's theology moved toward equality. They note that the silence passage appears in a letter dealing with false teachers in Ephesus and may have been addressing women who had been deceived by those teachers, not establishing a universal rule.

The debate continues with no sign of resolution. What's clear is that both positions require interpretation—neither falls simply and obviously out of the text. The Bible is not a rule book with clear bullet points on gender roles. It's a complex collection of texts written across centuries, containing multiple voices in conversation and sometimes tension with each other.

Where Things Stand

The landscape of women in Christianity today is fractured and contested. In some traditions, women serve as bishops overseeing entire regions. In others, they cannot speak during worship. In some churches, female pastors preach to thousands each week. In others, the question of women's ordination is settled doctrine that cannot be revisited.

The arguments on both sides are sophisticated and sincere. Complementarians genuinely believe they are preserving divine order against cultural pressure. Egalitarians genuinely believe they are completing a revolution Jesus began. Both read the same sacred texts and reach opposite conclusions.

What seems undeniable is that women have always been central to Christianity's survival and growth—as disciples who followed Jesus, as witnesses to the resurrection, as martyrs in the early persecutions, as monastics who preserved learning through the Dark Ages, as missionaries who spread the faith across continents, as the majority who fill the pews and sustain congregations.

Whether that centrality will translate into formal institutional authority everywhere remains to be seen. History suggests Christianity is capable of dramatic changes in its understanding of gender, just as it changed its understanding of slavery. But history also shows such changes happen slowly, unevenly, and against fierce resistance.

Mary Magdalene waited nearly fifteen hundred years to be rehabilitated. The church moves in centuries, not decades. But it does move.