Early Christian Women And Pagan Opinion

This is a study of how women figured in public reaction to the church from New Testament times to Christianity's encounter with the pagan critics of the second century CE. The reference to a hysterical woman was made by the most prolific critic of Christianity, Celsus. He was referring to a follower of Jesus - probably Mary Magdalene - who was at the centre of efforts to create and promote belief in the resurrection. MacDonald draws attention to the conviction, emerging from the works of several pagan authors, that female initiative was central to Christianity's development; she sets out to explore the relationship between this and the common Greco-Roman belief that women were inclined towards excesses in religion. The findings of cultural anthropologists of Mediterranean societies are examined in an effort to probe the societal values that shaped public opinion and early church teaching. Concerns expressed in New Testament and early Christian texts about the respectability of women, and even generally about their behaviour, are seen in a new light when one appreciates that outsiders focused on early church women and understood their activities as a reflection of the group as a whole.

The bone gatherers found in the annals and legends of the early Roman Catholic Church were women who collected the bodies of martyred saints to give them a proper burial. They have come down to us as deeply resonant symbols of grief: from the women who anointed Jesus's crucified body in the gospels to the Pietà, we are accustomed to thinking of women as natural mourners, caring for the body in all its fragility and expressing our deepest sorrow. But to think of women bone gatherers merely as mourners of the dead is to limit their capacity to stand for something more significant. In fact, Denzey argues that the bone gatherers are the mythic counterparts of historical women of substance and means-women who, like their pagan sisters, devoted their lives and financial resources to the things that mattered most to them: their families, their marriages, and their religion. We find their sometimes splendid burial chambers in the catacombs of Rome, but until Denzey began her research for The Bone Gatherers, the monuments left to memorialize these women and their contributions to the Church went largely unexamined. The Bone Gatherers introduces us to once-powerful women who had, until recently, been lost to history—from the sorrowing mothers and ghastly brides of pagan Rome to the child martyrs and women sponsors who shaped early Christianity. It was often only in death that ancient women became visible—through the buildings, burial sites, and art constructed in their memory—and Denzey uses this archaeological evidence, along with ancient texts, to resurrect the lives of several fourth-century women. Surprisingly, she finds that representations of aristocratic Roman Christian women show a shift in the value and significance of womanhood over the fourth century: once esteemed as powerful leaders or patrons, women came to be revered (in an increasingly male-dominated church) only as virgins or martyrs—figureheads for sexual purity. These depictions belie a power struggle between the sexes within early Christianity, waged via the Church's creation and manipulation of collective memory and subtly shifting perceptions of women and femaleness in the process of Christianization. The Bone Gatherers is at once a primer on how to "read" ancient art and the story of a struggle that has had long-lasting implications for the role of women in the Church. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The bone gatherers found in the annals and legends of the early Roman Catholic Church were women who collected the bodies of martyred saints to give them a proper burial. They have come down to us as deeply resonant symbols of grief: from the women who anointed Jesus's crucified body in the gospels to the Pietà, we are accustomed to thinking of women as natural mourners, caring for the body in all its fragility and expressing our deepest sorrow. But to think of women bone gatherers merely as mourners of the dead is to limit their capacity to stand for something more significant. In fact, Denzey argues that the bone gatherers are the mythic counterparts of historical women of substance and means-women who, like their pagan sisters, devoted their lives and financial resources to the things that mattered most to them: their families, their marriages, and their religion. We find their sometimes splendid burial chambers in the catacombs of Rome, but until Denzey began her research for The Bone Gatherers, the monuments left to memorialize these women and their contributions to the Church went largely unexamined. The Bone Gatherers introduces us to once-powerful women who had, until recently, been lost to history—from the sorrowing mothers and ghastly brides of pagan Rome to the child martyrs and women sponsors who shaped early Christianity. It was often only in death that ancient women became visible—through the buildings, burial sites, and art constructed in their memory—and Denzey uses this archaeological evidence, along with ancient texts, to resurrect the lives of several fourth-century women. Surprisingly, she finds that representations of aristocratic Roman Christian women show a shift in the value and significance of womanhood over the fourth century: once esteemed as powerful leaders or patrons, women came to be revered (in an increasingly male-dominated church) only as virgins or martyrs—figureheads for sexual purity. These depictions belie a power struggle between the sexes within early Christianity, waged via the Church's creation and manipulation of collective memory and subtly shifting perceptions of women and femaleness in the process of Christianization. The Bone Gatherers is at once a primer on how to "read" ancient art and the story of a struggle that has had long-lasting implications for the role of women in the Church.

Meet the heroines of Christianity's formative years! The Witness of Early Christian Women: Mothers of the Church demonstrates the radical nature of Christianity's understanding of women and their roles, especially in a pagan society that viewed them as little more than property. The variety of women here is striking: poor widows, consecrated virgins, heroic martyrs, but also businesswomen, the wealthy, and an indomitable traveler on a world tour. Each chapter features a concise biography accompanied by writings from the early Church about the woman in question. The Mothers of the Church include: Holy Women of the New Testament St. Blandina St. Perpetua and St. Felicity St. Helena St. Thecla St. Agnes of Rome St. Macrina Proba the Widow St. Marcella St. Paula St. Eustochium St. Monica Egeria the Tourist Explore the impact of each of these women on the Church, then and now. Their stories will enthrall you. Their writings will inspire you. Their witness will empower you.

Lynn Cohick provides an accurate and fulsome picture of the earliest Christian women by examining a wide variety of first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman documents that illuminate their lives. She organizes the book around three major spheres of life: family, religious community, and society in general. Cohick shows that although women during this period were active at all levels within their religious communities, their influence was not always identified by leadership titles nor did their gender always determine their level of participation. The book corrects our understanding of early Christian women by offering an authentic and descriptive historical picture of their lives. Includes black-and-white illustrations from the ancient world.

It has often been said that rich pagan women, much more so than men, were attracted both to early Judaism and Christianity. This book provides a new reading of sources from which this truism springs, focusing on two texts from the turn of the first century, Josephus's Antiquities and Luke's Acts. The book studies representation, analyzing the repeated portrayal of rich women as aiding and/or converting to early Judaism in its various forms. It also shows how these sources can be used in reconstructing women's history, thus engaging current feminist debates about the relationship of rhetorical presentation of women in texts to historical reality. Because many of these texts speak of high-standing women's conversion to Judaism and early Christianity, this book also engages in the current debate about whether early Judaism was a missionary religion. The author argues that focusing on these stories of women converts and adherents, which have been largely ignored in previous discussions of the missionary question, sets the missionary question in a new, more adequate framework. The first chapter elucidates a story in Josephus's Antiquities of the mishaps of two Roman matrons devoted to Isis and Jewish cults by considering the common Hellenistic topos linking high-standing women, promiscuity, and religious impropriety. The remaining chapters demonstrate that in spite of this topos, Josephus, Luke, and other religious apologists did tell stories of rich women's associations with their communities for positive rhetorical effect. In so doing, the book challenges the widespread assumption that women's association with "foreign" religious cults was always derided, questions scholarly arguments about public and private roles in antiquity, and invites reflection on issues of mission and conversion within the larger framework of Greco-Roman benefaction.

The richness of recent research on women's worship gives witness to the scholarly interest in its contemporary practice, reflection, and construction. On the other hand, feminist scholarship has had little impact on liturgical historiography. In Women's Ways of Worship Teresa Berger reconstructs liturgical history from the perspectives of women. She shows that the invisibility of women in the traditional liturgical narrative draws into question the credibility of that narrative, especially at a time when research into women's history has unearthed much material relevant to women's liturgical lives. Berger focuses on thirteen key interpretative principles that guide the reconstruction of women at worship - from a re-configuration of the canon of sources and a re-Visioning of liturgical periodization to re-interpretation of anthropological basics and of liturgical texts. On the basis of these principles, she analyzes liturgical dynamics in two time periods crucial to the history of women at worship: the early centuries of the Christian Church and the twentieth-century liturgical renewal. Within the twentieth-century liturgical renewal, Berger focuses on two specific foci of renewal: the classical liturgical movement of the first half of the century, and - as a case of history-in-the- making" - the women's liturgical movement of the present day. Women's Ways of Worship narrates both past and present liturgical developments from the perspectives of women's lives, heeding such dynamics as the genderization of liturgical space, women- specific liturgical taboos, gender-specific devotional practices, and the emergence of feminist liturgies. An epilogue confronts the question of a future liturgy "beyond gender." Convinced that reconstructing the history of women at worship will offer a new Vision of the place of the women's liturgical movement within liturgical history as a whole, Berger puts this movement on a continuum of women at worship, which is a continuum of struggle against the historic marginalization of women in most liturgical contexts. As this struggle has come to the forefront today, Women's Ways of Worship provides a context for change, with women themselves being agents of both the questioning and the transformation. Chapters are "Reconstructing Women's Ways of Worship: In Search of Methodological Principles," "Liturgical History Re-Constructed (I): Early Christian Women at Worship," "Liturgical History Re- Constructed (II): Women in the Twentieth-Century Liturgical Movement," and "Liturgical History in the Making: The Women's Liturgical Movement." Teresa Berger is associate professor of Ecumenical Theology at the Divinity School of Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. She is the author of numerous books and contributor to a variety of journals including Worship, published by The Liturgical Press. "

From facing wild beasts in the arena to governing the Roman Empire, Christian women--as preachers and philosophers, martyrs and empresses, virgins and mothers--influenced the shape of the church in its formative centuries. This book provides in a single volume a nearly complete compendium of extant evidence about Christian women in the second through fifth centuries. It highlights the social and theological contributions they made to shaping early Christian beliefs and practices, integrating their influence into the history of the patristic church and showing how their achievements can be edifying for contemporary Christians.