Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion

In recent years many scholars have suggested that women's attraction to early Christianity was related to the freedoms offered in celibacy. Dennis R. MacDonald, for example, estimates that groups of widows, which in some early Christian circles may have included virgins who had never been married (cf. Ign. Smyrn. 13.1), were a counter-cultural force within their patriarchal society: ‘Perhaps we should interpret this virginity as a rebellion – conscious or unconscious – against male domination. Perhaps it symbolized not only moral purity, but also independence, dedication to a calling, and criticism of conjugal society.’ The criticism of society that MacDonald and others associate with celibate early church life is of particular importance for this book because it implies confrontation between early Christians and public opinion about the proper behaviour of women. When scholars address the situation of married women in the church, they often come to very different conclusions about the role these women played in church relations with the world. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza contrasts the liberation from social constraints offered to celibate women by early Christianity, with the fate of the married early Christian women. Unmarried women acquire an independence which produces conflict with society; but married women remain, in conformity to society, confined within the patriarchal family: