Apart from the kinds of teaching roles exercised in monastery and family, like those of Melania the Younger and Macrina included here, public teaching was forbidden to women in the early church. Those who attempted to teach publicly, like Marcellina (below), were eventually stigmatized as heretics. What follows are selections from the biography of Melania the Younger and a dialogue of Macrina with her brother Gregory, as well as passages from heresiologists describing Marcellina. The section concludes with examples of strictures against women as teachers.

Marcellina was the leader of a group of Christians in Rome in the mid-2nd century...

Women were prophets in some very early Christian communities—most notably, the group of female prophets in the community in Corinth in the mid-first century—and they appear again in prophetic roles in two movements of the second century. Because both of these movements were ultimately declared heretical (in part, it would seem, due to the leadership roles undertaken by women), the information that remains comes largely from sources hostile to these forms of Christianity.

Marcus, after whom this movement is called, was a Christian teacher and theologian active in the mid-second century, probably in Alexandria, Egypt. He was a...

By the end of the first century C.E., being a Christian was a capital offense, since Christianity was not recognized as a legal religion under Roman law. Sporadic persecutions of Christians occurred until 313 C.E., when the emperor Constantine issued an edict of toleration. The worst, government-initiated persecutions were the Decian persecution of ca. 250 C.E. and the so-called Great Persecution of 303–313 C.E. Many women were martyrs for the faith, and their stories were preserved in the acta martyrum, a genre of literature that varied widely from court records of trials to narration of the martyrsʹ bravery and...

In the early centuries, men and women who wanted to join the church went through a period of training prior to baptism. Called catechumens, these people were instructed in the creedal and ritual practices of Christianity. There were a few special regulations for female catechumens preparing for a life as Christians, as the following excerpts from an ecclesiastical rule show.

17. Let catechumens spend three years as hearers of the word. But if a man is zealous and perseveres well in the work, it is not the time but his character that is decisive.

18. When the teacher finishes his instruction, the...

It is clear from the Pastoral Epistles of the New Testament that, by the beginning of the second century C.E., there was an order of widows in the church that was large and active enough to require official specifications for membership and duties. This order not only provided financial assistance and social support for older women but also assigned them the duty of charitable works. Eventually the order of deaconesses supplanted that of the widows in terms of such duties as instructing women prior to baptism. Some scholars have argued that the order of widows, with its emphasis on continence,...

The office of deaconess is well attested by the third century C.E. in the Didascalia apostolorum and is further specified in the Apostolic Constitutions of the fourth century C.E. Duties of this office included assisting at the baptism of women and giving them ethical instruction following baptism. In the fifth century, canon 15 of the Council of Chalcedon (451 C.E.) required that deaconesses be at least forty years of age and that they not marry after appointment to this office. These texts, and indeed the office of deaconess, were indigenous to the eastern parts of the early Christian world.

2.26...

Presented here are representative examples of strictures against the performance of ecclesiastical functions by women, mainly functions pertaining to the priesthood.

That a woman should baptize, or that one should be baptized by a woman, we do not recommend, for it is a transgression of the commandment, and a great danger to the woman who baptizes and to him who is baptized. For if it were lawful to be baptized by a woman, our Lord and Teacher himself would have been baptized by Mary his mother, whereas he was baptized by John, like others of the people. Do not therefore...

Much of what Christian men wrote about Christian women focused specifically on the behavior of virgins and of wives. The author presented in this selection was concerned with describing the comportment of women as a group. Clement of Alexandria (ca. 160–215 C.E.), a man of culture and wide learning as well as a theological writer, did not expound the ascetic vision as it was later elaborated in the fourth century. However, much of what he wrote concerning womenʹs behavior and self-control can be seen as a harbinger of later ascetic ideals for womenʹs lives; for the rest, one sees...

As a form of ascetic practice, voluntary continence was practiced by both men and women in Christianity as early as the second century C.E.; indeed, the apostle Paul already in the mid-first century had described the celibate life as an ideal in 1 Corinthians 7 (see Section IV for this text). Virginal asceticism as a lifestyle for women emerged most fully in the fourth century, when several theologians wrote major treatises on virginity and when virginal women, as well as women who adopted continence during or after marriage, became the subjects of biographies. Virginity for women was constructed as a...

Beginning at least as early as the second century, some Christian ascetics adopted a form of cohabitation called ʺspiritual marriageʺ (syneisaktism), in which a man and woman who had both taken vows of sexual continence lived together in a chaste but non-legalized partnership. The women who engaged in spiritual marriage were called virgines subintroductae in Latin (literally, ʺthose brought in covertly,ʺ suggesting the illicit nature of the relationship) and agapetae (beloved ones) or syneisaktoi (those brought into [the house] together) in Greek. Although spiritual marriage was repeatedly condemned by church councils and by various theologians, it was a widespread and...

In the mid-fourth century a group of bishops from Asia Minor and Armenia met in the city of Gangra in the province of Paphlagonia in northern Asia Minor. A major concern was the extreme asceticism of Eustathius, bishop of Sebaste in Armenia, whose ideas were gaining in popularity. The canons of this council attempted to control the definition and practice of asceticism by rejecting the rigorist Eustathian position, in which sexual intercourse was rejected, marriage was condemned, and monastic clothing was adopted by women as well as men. The conduct of women was of special concern. This selection begins with...

Novelistic literature designated by scholars as ʺApocryphal Actsʺ proliferated in the second and third centuries C.E. Instructive as well as entertaining, this literature narrates teachings and events ascribed to such apostolic figures as John, Peter, Thomas, and Paul, and provides important information about early Christian theological developments as well as views of the relation of Christians to their social and political contexts in the Roman world. A remarkable feature of these narratives is their stories about women, who are credited with such a degree of autonomy and authority that some have suggested that this literature was written for a female...

Contemporary scholars have argued that an ascetic lifestyle, whether as a virgin or as a married woman living in a continent relationship with her husband, freed women to undertake more active leadership roles in the life of the church, especially when the ascetic movement began to flourish in the fourth century. For wealthy, aristocratic women in particular (about whom we know the most, thanks largely to the biographical literature that celebrated their achievements), an ascetic lifestyle offered possibilities for theological and Scriptural education, scholarship, reflection, and friendships with male ascetics. Freedom from domestic confinement and its attendant responsibilities meant that...

In the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine from the fourth century onward, solitary and communal forms of ascetic life and practice began to flourish. Although most of the solitary desert ascetics whose memory was preserved were men, a few women also practiced this extreme form of physical and spiritual discipline. Many more women lived in the nunneries established by Pachomius (ca. 292–346) in upper Egypt. The following passages present both solitary (anchorite) and communal (coenobitic) women.

Palladius, monk and historian of monasticism (ca. 365–425), visited many of the desert ascetics as well as the monasteries in the...

During the period of the Roman Empire, marriage was a private act, usually arranged by the parents of the couple, and was regarded as legal based on the expression of intent to live as husband and wife. Legal documents and dowries were not required by law until the fifth century and, although there were ceremonial rituals that marked the transfer of the bride to the groomʹs residence (see selection 5 below), marriage was not regulated by religious or civic officials as it is today. Early in the imperial era, there was a shift in attitude toward marriage; under the influence...

In the course of the fourth century, patristic authors developed a model of the ideal woman as mentor and paradigm of the spiritual life, as we have already seen in the biographies of women presented in Section III above. Portraits of virtuous female family members were also composed at this time, the most famous of which is Saint Augustineʹs portrayal of his mother Monica in The Confessions. Authors in the Greek East also praised sisters and mothers; for example, see Gregory of Nyssaʹs biography of his virginal, ascetic sister Macrina in Section III. In the following selections we see praise...

The role of Eve in causing human beings to be cast out of paradise into a world of mortality and suffering (Gen 3:1–24) provided early Christian theologians with both an image of human sinfulness as well as a justification for viewing women, the ʺdaughtersʺ of the first woman, Eve, as secondary to and submissive to men, and for denying them institutional authority (see Section I, ʺTeachers,ʺ 4: ʺWomen, the Church, and Teaching,ʺ especially the selection from John Chrysostom). Beginning in the early second century, Mary was presented as the antitype to Eve. Using as a model the Pauline image...

Beginning in the early second century, Mary became the focus of intense theological interest, particularly regarding her status as virgin as well as her implication in the paradox of the union of the divine with the human. Early Christians were curious about her both as a historical figure as well as a crucial figure in doctrinal discussions of christology. The following selections illustrate the wide variety of discussions that the figure of Mary evoked.

Early Christian authors did not hesitate to ʺfill in the gapsʺ of Gospel accounts of various figures, as we saw in the selection from Theodotus of...

Despite the fact that early Christianity marginalized actual women by denying them priestly duties and often denigrated them—physically, by associating them with excessive sexuality and passion, and theologically, by tainting them with the legacy of Eve and thus with sin—writers often used female images to envision theological, anthropological, and institutional aspects of Christianity. God, for example, was imagined as a lactating mother, the church was personified as a woman, and the human soul and virtues were imagined to be female. Some authors, when interpreting the Song of Songs, understood the Songʹs lovers in Christian terms, casting Christ as...