The Contested Role of Women in Early Christianity: An Examination of the Evidence in the Gospels, the Pauline Letters, Deutro-Pauline Letters, and Selected Extra-canonical Texts
Author
Flowers, Elise Carson
Subject
Washington and Lee University -- Honors in Religion
Feminism -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
Women and religion
Church history
Women in Christianity -- Early church
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Feminist Biblical scholarship has begun to present interpretations of the Bible that differ from earlier text and form biblical criticism. Feminist scholars are negotiating the tensions and
contradictions within the text and highlighting the presence and importance of women. Some feminist scholars, cognizant of the powerful influence this authoritative text has exerted and
continues to exert within society, are stressing the presence of women in the text and asserting that women were important members of the early Christian community. These new
interpretations are influencing the way women and men read the texts. However, the conflicting and tension filled status of women within the Christian tradition can not be reconciled solely
through new interpretations. The authoritative nature of the text and the centuries of interpretation that have preceded the feminist scholars must also be acknowledged. . . . The central problem in this paper is to illuminate the conflict and tensions within the text in order to highlight the status of women in the early Christian community. By illuminating
the conflicting texts, I hope to demonstrate the complexity of the issue of the status of women in the early Christian community. I diagram three separate groups of text, written during a period of approximately fifty years, illustrating what the evidence for the status of women is, why this evidence is in the text, and why it is contested. I have chosen the Gospels, the non-disputed Pauline letters, and the one of the Pastoral Epistles, 1 Timothy as illustrations of the tension surrounding the status of women in early Christianity because I think that they portray the
changing nature of the Christian community and have references to the status of women. [From Introduction]