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Reviewed by:
  • Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries
  • Efthalia Makris Walsh
Deborah Sawyer. Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries. Religion in the First Christian Centuries. New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. vii + 186. $17.96.

This book is about images of women in their religious context in the period from 200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E., as viewed by Deborah F. Sawyer, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster University.

Sawyer attempts to refine the fixed categories of the feminist critique asserting the suppression of all women by a patriarchal society. She argues that the early Church of the first century and other non-Christian religions of the period identified as pre-traditionalization, allowed a broader spectrum of beliefs and values and wider gender boundaries than Christianity after this brief period, identified as traditionalism. She also draws a parallel between pre-traditionalization and the current post-traditionalization period, finding both antithetical to “the monolithic Christianity of two thousand years and its essential sexual hierarchy.” And, as Sawyer explains in the epilogue, one of her aims is to assist new age religions, the New Pagans, the Wicca movement, and Goddess spirituality, in rediscovering the great pagan traditions of the past.

The crux of her case lies in a distinction Sawyer makes between the gender theories of Aristotle and Plato. She finds Aristotle’s “essentialist” gender theory, which understood a woman’s gender as identified with her nature and subordinate to the male gender, operative in the Greek and Hellenistic world, and in Christianity as it evolved. Sawyer, citing Saunder’s research, admits that Plato’s writing, also, evinces misogyny. But she finds in it a “constructionist” type of gender analysis “which allowed for some diversity in women’s roles and functions and which challenged the hierarchic structure.”

Two quotations at the head of the Introduction set the tone, or rather, provide the images for Sawyer’s gender analysis. The first quotation, from the third century, C.E., describes Queen Xenobia of Palmyra as a powerful (pagan) emperor, the second from the late fourth century writings of John Chrysostom, states that women would go quite mad if public concerns were turned over to women. Neither citation, incidently, is from the period under discussion. [End Page 598]

Because of the paucity of texts by, and even about, women in this period, Sawyer follows a methodological approach known as “reading against the grain of the texts” in the search for context. Using the research approaches and results of the contemporary feminist scholarship of E. Clark, Schussler-Fiorenza, Beard, Brooten, Rawson, Dixon and others, Sawyer finds diversity of gender roles in Greco-Roman and Judaic texts and archaeological inscriptions of the period. Because Christian texts are so numerous and historical evidence so ample, Sawyer explains she must oversimplify by not allowing “a plurality of belief and practice within Christianity.” She justifies this restriction by citing the catholic nature of the Christian Church and its ideal of unity as expressed in Ephesians 4:5. Reducing almost 2,000 years of religious experience, practice and belief to a limited interpretation of a few texts raises serious methodological questions. There are, indeed, Christian texts and secular documentation that would have provided evidence contrary to her thesis.

In a neo-Eusebian, but anti-hierarchical mode, Sawyer discerns a Golden Age of the early church which anticipated post-modern feminist thinking. In this brief time of true Christian faith in the early charismatic millenarian movement, gender roles were conceived in a constructionist (Platonic) manner, allowing for diversity. Transformation of the self and crossing of gender boundaries enabled women in the believing community to radically change their normal roles and activities, as expressed in such passages as Galatians 3:28. The nascent church, thus, replaced patriarchy with a community of equality.

In a nature versus nurture vein, Sawyer maintains that by the second century, Christianity deviated from this constructionist understanding of gender roles and moved to an Aristotelian essentialist perspective. This “. . . not only makes sexual hierarchy visible both in the domestic and public spheres, but also adds theological underpinning through reflection on the implications of Eve’s sin in order to insure a...

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