Background

Woman as Priest, Bishop and Laity in the Early Church to 440 A.D.
by Arthur Frederick Ide, Ide House 1984, pp. 1-12.
Published on our website with the kind permission of the author

Christianity began in the Age of Augustus. It was the golden age of Roman literature, reflecting a society quite different from the society before Augustus (27 B.C. -14 A.D.), for the old aristocratic order of independent nobles selfishly following their own particular and peculiar interests was gone. So too was the world of minor poets who were patronized by individual aristocrats. The Age of Augustus, instead, centralized the government, and channeled all patronage through the princeps. This beneficium helped support the writings of Vergil (70 – 19 B.C.), Horace (65 – 8 B.C.), and Ovid (43 B.C. – 18 A.D.) poets who had lost their properties (and thus their economic means of survival) during the civil wars. Under the patronage of the princeps they had the leisure and security to write poetry—yet experienced the first real censorship, for being dependent upon the princeps, they were limited in the freedom of their expression and opinions: thus they wrote on subjects useful to, or glorifying the princeps and his family, and the Roman state. Thus Vergil’s Aeneid succeeded in placing the history of Rome in the great tradition of the Greeks and the Trojan War—even though at that time Rome barely existed and had little culture or exchange with the Greek world,(1) and Horace’s Odes adapted Greek meters to the requirements of Latin verse (two directly praising Augustus, and many glorifying the new Augustan order, the imperial family, and the empire). The author of light and entertaining love elegies, Ovid wrote on the sophistication and loose sexual code of the Roman aristocracy—a fact which Augustus believed went too far when the poet penned his Ars Amatoria, a poetic textbook on the art of seduction which so angered the emperor that he exiled the poet in 8 A.D., to Tomi-on-the-Black-Sea, for Augustus was attempting to foster a serious family-centered life throughout the empire. Prose writers also benefited from the Augustan renaissance. Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17), an Italian from Padua, wrote in Latin The History of Rome in which he traced the empire’s record of events from prerecorded, legendary origins to 9 B.C. (only one fourth of his work exists today-and that in only brief summaries); the work is especially significant inasmuch as it gave Rome its first continuous historical narrative of its own evolution.

The visual arts also excelled and expanded during the Age of Augustus. Augustus embarked on a massive and elaborate building program to beautify Rome, glorify his reign, and decrease the number of unemployed and thus increase his own popularity. The popular Campus Martius was filled with beautiful new buildings, baths, basilicas (or law courts) and theaters; the Roman Forum was rebuilt, and on the Palatine Hill a splendid temple to the god Apollo was erected. Most of the architecture was patterned after the Greek classical style—with the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace) being the greatest monument of the age.

The development of the arts in the Augustan Age would not have been possible without a correlating and increasing prosperity: a prosperity that flourished throughout Rome’s imperial days (A.D. 14 – 180). The fiction of Rome being a republic was discarded by Augustus’ successors who came to be called imperator (“emperor”) and Caesar (“emperor” or “great king”)—the latter title signifying connection with the imperial house, and the former indicating the military power on which everything was based. The empire was shakey at first—the occupants of the imperial throne all being descended from either Augustus or his wife Livia. Not until A.D. 69 and the enthronement of Vespasian did the emperor not come from the House of Augustus or the old Roman nobility. The Senate did not elect an emperor until A.D. 96 when it put Nerva (A.D. 96 – 98) on the throne to avoid open anarchy. Nerva was succeeded by five “good emperors”— none of whom had sons (Rome did not allow women to succeed to the throne). Not until the death of Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 161 – 180) did a son of a dead emperor sit on the throne—then the peace of nearly a century was shattered as the incompetent Commodus (A.D. 180 – 192) ascended the throne—with unfortunate results, for he was thoroughly hated, reduced the respect the imperial office had held, and, with his assassination, brought the return of civil war. Iranian tribes, led by the Sassanians, were once more flexing their strength, demanding sovereignty and freedom-when they coupled their strength and zeal with that of the Parthians they restored vitality to Persia, and, after A.D. 224, recovered Mesopotamia and completed raids deep into Roman provinces surrounding their people (they humiliated Rome in A.D. 260 by taking the Emperor Valerian prisoner, he died in their captivity). In the north and west were badly organized. An ever-increasing number of German tribes pounded the frontiers of Rome. They had been in contact with Rome since the second century B.C., and at various times served as sentries for the Roman army stationed along the borders. When they weren’t paid (and when they became increasingly aware of the civilized delights of Roman society) they were eager to plunder, reimbursing themselves for their time and effort, and at the same time increase their stature among the tribes long the borders. By the middle of the third century most of these Germanic tribes were on the rise: the Goths, wandering from their ancestral home near the Baltic Sea into Southern Russia put pressure on the Danube frontier; the Franks and Alemanni pushed in from the west. These barbarians (so termed because the Roman’s pronounced their language to sound as if it was composed of syllables such as “bar-bar”) were not repulsed until Claudius II Gothicus (A.D. 268 – 270) and Aurelian (A.D. 270 – 275) drove them back and stamped out the internal disorder in Rome. From that time on Rome became an armed and fortified camp. In the Historia Augusta, the name given to a collection of lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (A.D. 117 – 138) to Numerian (A. D. 283 – 284; he had accompanied his father Marcus Aurelius Carus, a praetorian perfect under Probus, to the East, when his father was assassinated by the praetorian perfect Aper; as he was returning by way of Asia Minor he was assassinated by his army, probably at Aper’s insistance, hoping that the army would acclaim him [Aper] emperor; instead the army proclaimed Diocles, commander of the imperial bodyguard, as emperor. Adopting the name Diocletian, Diocles promptly had Aper executed.), details what military life was like in the third century A.D.:(2)

Aurelian was so feared by the soldiers that, under him, after offenses had once been punished by him in the camp with the utmost severity, no one offended again. . , . There is a letter of his, truly that of a soldier, written to his deputy as follows: “If you wish to be a tribune, or rather if you wish to remain alive, restrain the hands of your soldiers. None shall steal another’s fowl or touch his sheep. None shall carry off grapes or thresh out grain, or exact oil, salt, or firewood, and each shall be content with his own allowance. Let them have these things from the booty taken from the enemy and not from the tears of the provincials. Their arms shall be kept burnished, their implements bright, their boots stout. Let old uniforms be replaced with new. Let them keep their pay in their belts and not spend it in public houses. Let them wear their collars, arm rings, and finger rings. Let each man curry his own horse and baggage animal, let no one sell the fodder allowed him for his beast, and let them take care in common of the mule belonging to the century. Let one yield obedience to another as a master, and none as a slave, let them be attended by physicians without charge, let them give no fees to soothsayers, let them conduct themselves in their lodgings with propriety, and let anyone who begins a brawl be thrashed.”

Life for the common man and woman had a similar breakdown. Augustus brought stability back to the home. He introduced laws curbing adultery and divorce, while encouraging marriage and the procreation of legitimate children. He set an example by banishing his own daughter, Julia, whose public conduct was universally acknowledged as immoral. He restored the Roman religion by building temples to the gods and goddesses, reviving old cults, and while reorganizing and revitalizing the priestly colleges, banned the worship of newly introduced foreign gods so as to “maintain the pure worship of the gods of Rome”— an act which brought him deification after he died, a state cult being dedicated to his worship.

Urban life became the foundation of Roman society. Cities grew in both number and size. Baths, public buildings, temples, and theaters, each glorified with statuary, hallmarked each city. More time and currency was paid to develop the externals of society, with little thought, time, or money devoted to the internal development of the people: education suffering the most grevious neglect. The state provided none, and so education became the privilege of only the wealthy. There was no uniform system of education, for elementary education was left to the localities and then to the suffrance and pay of the parents who would afford it. Only an extremely limited number of students went beyond primary school to study rhetoric and literature in preparation for a career in law or the imperial service. Most of Rome’s higher education was still taken in Athens where philosophy, medicine, and rhetorical theory were still prized and studied. Because advanced students had to journey to Greece to advance their learning,bilingual education was the rule and those who returned were fluent in both languages, and thus preserved the tradition of Graeco-Roman culture. Those who were educated became quite conservative and had little time for innovations in thought or act becoming the most zealous persecutors of those who strayed from custom or tradition—as would be the case with St. Paul. It taught the values of the ruling class, gave little thought to or recognition of women and women’s contributions to society, and at the same time provided little stimulus for criticism or innovation—a characteristic which had little effect on the early Church or Christian community, but would lace up and ossify the later Church and Christian community which would reject the advances of its own primitive beginnings: from communal suppers to the ordination of women as deacon, priest, and bishop—a fact which the twentieth century Roman church and its popes fail to acknowledge and accept.

As time advanced towards the debacle of invasions those who controlled the means of production, distribution, and education became increasingly staid, unwilling to share or assist those who had little, and society strayed from any form of equality to one of polarized inequities. As Gaius Plinius (Pliny the Younger, ca. A.D. 61 – 114) acknowledged in his letter to Paulinus, the poor gave up hope of escaping their lot in poverty.(3) For many the only escape was the military, but as the military increased in size new monies had to be raised to pay for the soldiers food, weapons, and time. Proportionately, as the military budget increased, so, too, did the taxes; at the same time the amount spent on assisting the poor decreased. Still, many of those who could have paid taxes, including a dwindling number of tenant farmers who were forced off their farms, turned to the cities where free bread and circuses were offered them by aspiring politicians, and ultimately by the emperors themselves. To pay for this early welfare, taxes were raised; those who weren’t able to get out of paying them by bribing a tax collector or petitioning the Senate or emperor, were soon closed out of their homes, businesses or farms and joined the unemployed. The depression of society led to an insensitivity of feeling for one another; compassion disappeared, as Seneca defined so graphically in his Moral Epistles:

i chanced to stop in at a midday show, expecting fun, wit, and some relaxation, when men’s eyes take respite from the slaughter of their fellow men. It was just the reverse. The preceding combats were merciful by comparison; now all trifling is put aside and it is pure murder. The men have no protective covering. Their entire bodies are exposed to the blows, and no blow is ever struck in vain. . . . In the morning men are thrown to the lions and the bears, at noon they are thrown to their spectators. The spectators call for the slayer to be thrown to those who in turn will slay him, and they detain the victor for another butchering. The outcome for the combatants is death: the fight is waged with sword and fire. “But one of them was a highway robber, he killed a man!” Because he killed he deserved to suffer this punishment, granted. . . . “Kill him! Lash him! Burn him! Why does he meet the sword so timidly? Why doesn’t he kill boldly? Why doesn’t he die game? Whip him to meet his wounds! Let them trade blow for blow, chests bare and within reach!” And when the show stops for intermission, “Let’s have men killed meanwhile! Let’s not have nothing going on! ”

The terror increased proportionate to the increase of the military’s size and budget—until even the military could not economically sustain itself, leaving Marcus Aurelius to tartly answer his victorious troops petition for an increase in pay “Anything you receive over and above your regular wages must be exacted from the blood of your parents and relations.”(4) This financial stringency, like the economic plights of the past, led to a debasement of the currency: Nero reduced the silver content of the denarius by 10%, Trajan debased it another 15% by adding copper; Marcus Aurelius increased the debasement with copper another 25%, and under Septimius Severus it increased almost 40%. At the same time, the aureus, or gold coin, was equally reduced in weight, yet these inflationary expedients brought no permanent relief—even when Caracalla issued a new silver coin, the Antoninianus, supposedly equal to two denarii—but it contained scarcely 60% silver.

The economic problems were worse outside of the City of Rome. The combined weight of imperial and local administration was even heavier than the rich could support. Everyone complained. And if one tax payer could not meet his tax obligation the entire community was forced to make good the deficit, or face the untold horrors of police and military brutality. When harvests failed, farmers fled their lands to escape the torture that would be their sentence when the tax collectors came and could not be paid—leaving their lands untilled for the next season and for seasons following. So great was this plight that the population of many cities was cut in half by A.D. 60. As personal fortunes dwindled, so too did the civil revenue, for those peasants who had been able to lease government lands ceased doing so; to prevent the loss of this revenue, officials assigned unleased lands to villages or to private persons, requiring them to cultivate it and pay the taxes on it. This led not only to more peasants fleeing the land but even to entire communities deserting their homes and farms; sometimes they broke into armed revolts, as occurred in A.D. 152 and 172.

When communities rose in revolution, Rome stepped in and set administrators over them: to see that the people worked and paid their taxes. Additional military personnel were needed to enforce the rule of the administrators, additional military personnel required more taxes, more taxes led to more uprisings and sudden emigrations which further worked to tear down the empire. Rome hoped that the majority of the administrators would be local people, but when few citizens volunteered for the office, eligible candidates were forced to run for the magistracies. Public office was an inescapable obligation for the propertied. To avoid it. required surrendering property or abandoning it. When few citizens were found to assume this responsibility, Rome sent military administrators, who organized people into guilds to control their work as well as their lives. The guilds encompassed every profession: from the navicularii (shipowners), olerarii (oil merchants), pistores (bakers), suarii (pork merchants), to the vinarii (wine merchants). Since it was recognized that they were performing necessary labor, they were exempted from certain municipal obligations and were allowed to assume public contracts. In time these guilds were permitted to accept apprentices and defined as colleges. As colleges they passed under the jurisdiction of the Roman courts, and henceforward operated under governmental supervision. To strengthen the sense of brotherhood among the individuals within a guild or college, a patron god of the function, product, or task of the unit was established, given special characteristics and abilities ranging from healing to increasing personal wealth, and refined as the mainstay of the unit. Special holidays were set aside for the god of the unit when the brotherhood would mass and celebrate his or her feast with a parade, special worship ceremonials, a feast, and renewed commitment to live by the guild’s credo. Many members of a guild, towards the third century, declined to marry except on their god’s day; a few of the more radically zealous guild members refused to consumate any contract or even bury their dead if it was not the day of their patron deity. An entire priestly class developed out of this religiosity—supported by the guild and obeyed by the guild. At the same time, Rome made certain that the god or goddess of the guild was a deity officially sanctioned by the state so that the deity would not be in competition with one approved by Augustus. If it was an approved deity, the guild could venerate and worship the deity provided that the guild reserved some place and some time for veneration of the Caesars: which was in fact reverence for the state. Once approved by the state, the godling of a guild was also given compensation in various forms by the state-from sacrificial animals to oils for holy lamps.

spite of the official religion and the godlings of the guilds, the majority of the people of the Roman empire adhered to emotional mystic religions-many coming out of the Near East. Widely practiced in the Hellenistic East during the Republic, their converts spread throughout the Empire during the early Principate, existing side by side with the state’s official gods and the cult of living and dead emperors. While the cult of Isis was prohibited on the grounds that it was orgiastic, the private practice of Mithraism won official approval since it preached soldierly ideals compatible with imperial policy. Mithraism was a totally masculine religion. In Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia, Mithra was the chief spiritual agent of the god of light Ormuzd, in his struggle against Ahriman, the god of darkness. Mithra was a beneficent force in the world who championed righteousness against the powers of evil. A patron of soldiers and god of battle, Mithra was identified with the sun and appeared in Rome under the title deus invictus sol Mithra (Unconquered Sun-god Mithra). He appointed apostles to carry his message—the majority of who were soldiers who became zealous missionaries to frontier camps. He demanded that believers be baptized and later confirmed with a slap to caution them against deserting the faith. Members of the cult were then initiated into a select circle (excluding all women) where they shared a common meal of bread and wine. If they lived by the precepts of Mithra the faithful would go to heaven after death; if they betrayed the faith, they would be sent to a firey hell.

Women played no role in the cult of Mithra. Women played but a minor role at best in the other faiths that came out of the East, with the main exception being the cult of Isis.

Isis was identified as both goddess of life and death. She was also the goddess of love. She could work miracles ranging from curing the sick to making the blind see. She accepted men and women as equals and promised all who would worship her eternal life. For her sex was important and so women were encouraged not only to experience sex but also to enjoy it—both for itself and for the procreation of another soul. Many women found fulfillment in this faith— in spite of the fact that Rome not only disavowed it but outlawed it.

The one faith that was not tolerated by the Romans was the faith of YHWH (Yahweh). It was constantly in conflict with the empire, yet was left relatively alone since it won few converts—and disavowed the majority of those who did since the converts were for the most part loathe to surrender their own gods and worship Yahweh exclusively, primarily because they were abhored by the Jews insistance on circumcision, and by the unattractive Jewish dietary rules. The most educated Romans disavowed the Jewish faith because of its demands for orthodoxy which insisted that Jews alone were a “Chosen People” and set themselves apart from gentile communities. Other eruditii abjured and denounced Judaism because of what they believed were inconsistencies within the faith: especially as to the nature of Yahweh since the deity was both a “man” and a “woman”: a seamstress (Gen. 3:21), mother and nurse (Num. 11:12; Hos. 11:1,3,4, 9; Is. 49:14-15, and 66:12-13), who has a womb (Jer. 31:20; Is. 46:34) from which the deity experiences birth pains (Is. 41:13. 14), and at the same time is a father (Is. 63:14-15, Job 38:28-29), yet in spite of the deity being ish/ishshah and ha adam/ha adamah rejects that it is androgynous. The priestly class, worshiping YHWH for the sons of Israel, were men who rejected the role of women in worship ceremonies, even though they applauded women who were prophets (cf. Num. 26:59; 1 Chron. 5:29; Joel 2:28; Micah 6: 34), some of whom were also judges (Judg. 4:4, 6, and 5:1-31; II Kings 22:14-20), and founders of religious studies.(5) It appeared contradictory-and thus a threat to established society and thereby to the state as a whole.

Since Christianity emerged from the Jewish community, and its founder was a circumcised Jew, Christianity was also met with little tolerance. The intolerance toward Christianity escalated when the early community of Christians elevated women to equal status with men, ordained women to serve as both priests and bishops, and recognized the power of ordained women as equal to that of any ordained man. As long as women enjoyed a role equal to any man within the early Christian community the early Church was persecuted, with “women filled with the Spirit of God” leading men to “their witnessing the Resurrection of Christ” “entering into the lions den without fear”. Uncounted numbers joined the growing list of martyrs because of the zeal and calm acceptance of the women who laid down their lives for their belief in a man called Jesus. The Church did not experience peace and the opportunity to grow until it suppressed women, relegating them back to the kitchen, and placing men over them, rejecting the work of so many women who laid the foundations of the Christian church and community.(6)

Notes

1. See my Woman in ancient Rome (Mesquite, 1980); and my forthcoming Woman in Roman Civilization to A.D. 305.

2. In N. Lewis and M. Reinhold, Roman Civilization, Vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), p. 423.

3. Ibid., p. 177.

4. Cassius Dio, Epitome, LXXI, 3,

5. See my Woman in ancient Israel under the Torah and Talmud with a complete translation and critical commentary on Genesis 1-3 (Mesquite, 1983); Arlene Swindler, “In Search of Huldah,” in The Bible Today (November, 1978), p. 1783, and cp. II Kings 22:14-20.

6. See my Woman in the Apostolic Age (Mesquite, 1980; and, forthcoming in 1984 in expanded form under the title Woman, Jesus, the Apostles, and the Primitive Church), and my Woman in the Age of Christian Martyrs (Mesquite, 1980).


Contents Page of Book

Support our campaign

Sitemap

Contemporary theologians

Go back to home page