Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 35:4 (Autumn 2021)
Article: A Religion Of “Women And Children”? A Christian Woman’s Place In The Greco-Roman World Before AD 300
Author: William B. Bowes

PP 35:4 (Autumn 2021) p. 14

A Religion Of “Women And Children”? A Christian Woman’s Place In The Greco-Roman World Before AD 300

William B. Bowes

William B. Bowes is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He holds an MDiv and an MA in counseling from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and works as a mental health counselor.

Much can be learned about the values of a movement from its critics. For the earliest Christians, part of what made them a target was the inclusivity they showed toward the overlooked and marginalized, which was a subversive aspect of their movement in the largely exclusive Greco-Roman culture they inhabited. The second-century philosopher Celsus was perhaps the first non-Christian to articulate a developed critique of Christianity, and his understanding of the values of the early believers speaks to their unique and countercultural way of life. The Christian theologian Origen, in his response to Celsus some sixty years later, quoted Celsus as saying that the teaching of Christianity was especially attractive to “the silly, and the mean, and the stupid, with women and children.”1 Part of Celsus’s excoriation of the developing movement, therefore, was related to its appeal to, acceptance by, and elevation of the lower strata of society. Amidst the patriarchy of the ancient world, this openness that Celsus critiqued had a particularly liberating and redemptive place for women, one that was significant enough in its difference to be mentioned by Christianity’s first major critic.

Celsus’s work, entitled “The True Word,” was probably composed in the second half of the second century and did not encounter a major reply until Origen begrudgingly responded in AD 248.2 One of the reasons Celsus believed Christianity should be rejected was his view that it was intended for the ignorant and wicked. As Bernard Pick writes, “the Christians appeared to him to belong to the class of those who engage in their low trades in public places and do not enter into respectable society.”3 Celsus seemed to believe that the church was filled with “thieves, burglars and poisoners,” showing that there was indeed a freedom within the early movement that opened acceptance and equality to the socially marginalized (such as women) and did not define them by the role or identity that Greco-Roman society provided.4 And, in the case of the early Christian women, it is beyond dispute that the Greco-Roman society and culture they inhabited were intensely patriarchal, did not value them as men were valued, and did not frequently recognize their contributions or typi...