Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History

Chapter One. INTRODUCTION

While there have been several studies of women in church office in recent years, none has attempted to collect all the evidence, both literary and epigraphical. That is the goal of the present volume. It builds on and supplements the collection of literary texts made by Josephine Mayer, the comprehensive studies of Gryson and Martimort, and the partial collections of inscriptions mentioned or discussed in the works of Susannah Elm, Giorgio Otranto, and Ute Eisen. Thus this volume is intended as a comprehensive resource of all textual evidence—literary, canonical, and epigraphical—in the Greek and Roman worlds, including some of the material from the Eastern churches that interfaced with those worlds. It makes available under one cover to an interested audience not versed in the original languages all the evidence for women in the recognizable titles and functions of church office. The majority of this evidence comes from texts and epigraphical collections that are accessible in a theological and classical research library. The reader who wishes to consult the original texts can easily find them there. Some, however, come from very obscure and old publications, difficult for any but the dedicated scholar to access. In these cases, we have given the original text in a note. This is also the case with the key Latin inscriptions of presbyters, even though they are published in CIL. Since it is clear from texts and contexts that the role of prophet and the order of virgins were not considered church offices, and were not commissioned by ordination , they are not included here. In most cases, the same is true of widows. But there are some exceptions: a few texts about widows suggest that they are ordained and/or are members of the clergy in specific churches. In a few other cases, they are confused with deaconesses. Only such texts about widows are included. Our general cutoff date is 600 ce, though we have included some key documents from after 600 that bear on the interpretation of earlier texts. For example, later commentators are included such as Atto of Vercelli, who takes for granted that women deacons or presbyters did exist at an earlier date, even if he knows of none in the Western church of his day. The earlier diachronic studies of Gryson and MartiChapter One INTRODUCTION  mort show that the institution of the female diaconate continued to exist and develop for many centuries after 600, most extensively in the East but also to some extent in the West. One of the most delicious and tantalizing of the Western diaconal inscriptions is unfortunately known to be a forgery. First published in 1749, it was still thought to be genuine by Henri Leclercq in 1920.1 PREVIOUS STUDIES The study of women’s ministry in the early church is not new. There have been several major and thorough studies published in the twentieth century and earlier, even specifically on female deacons.2 The earliest collection of texts, Mayer’s Monumenta from 1938, begins with the New Testament and continues into the Middle Ages, bringing together literary, historical, canonical, and legal texts in Greek, Latin, and Latin translations of some Syriac texts. It includes no inscriptions . It is fairly comprehensive for legal texts, less so for the rest, but offers no definition of office or analysis of the material, and it does not attempt to distinguish office from recognizable organization, so that consecrated virgins and widows are included along with female deacons. In this regard, it is useful for its inclusiveness, though perhaps it would be more so if Mayer had included titles like prophet and teacher, as Eisen did. Roger Gryson, Ministry of Women, offers a comprehensive interpretive study of literary and canonical texts, using some epigraphical evidence as support. He began, with the help of a student seminar, to compile a complete collection of inscriptions but abandoned the effort before its completion.3 Georges Martimort, in his Deaconesses, went on to do the most comprehensive study exclusively of female deacons, but neither does he attempt a full collection of sources. Susannah Elm’s Virgins of God is really about the development of female asceticism in the context of the wider ascetic movement, but it contains good discussion and some helpful epigraphical references to female deacons.4 Giorgio Otranto’s groundbreaking article on female presbyters in the West (Otranto/Rossi, “Priesthood”), collects and discusses all known inscriptions of female presbyters that can be interpreted as referring to officeholders...