The creep of culture

An overview of When Women Were Priests

Mar 19, 2025

You might wonder why on earth anyone should care about when women were priests. You’re Protestant after all! Why does what happened in the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, or 4^th centuries matter to you? But many great matters of the faith were decided in those centuries. Central doctrines were articulated. Heresies were named and denounced. The church moved from private spaces in households to public spaces in basilicas.1 It was that movement from private space to public space that made women’s leadership controversial.2

If you’ve had the almost-nonexistent church history lessons that most of us in evangelicalism have had, you might be asking “what women’s leadership?” The public opinion is often that women leading in the church is new, a product of feminism, a capitulation to culture that we should resist as people who accept Scripture as our authority of life. However, the early church had a “fluidity and flexibility that allowed women, slaves, and artisans to assume leadership roles.”3

In When Women Were Priests, Torjensen says the reason women were forced out of leadership and the reasons we don’t know that women were ever leaders are grounded in “cultural views about gender.”4 While Torjensen takes a slightly different view of Scripture than I do in many places and assumes that the writers either overlooked women or shared the cultural stereotypes,5 she does a great job articulating the cultural place of women in society during the time of the early church and explaining how these views of women shaped theology.

Women lead in the early church

Many women leaders are mentioned in Scripture. Most often those leaders are mentioned without titles, just as the men were, but where there are titles there has also been a history of trying to argue about what the titles mean. In the case of the apostle Junia, a scribe added an “s” to her name to make it a man’s name because women couldn’t be apostles. Interestingly, if you believe a woman can be an apostle, like Junia, or a deacon, like Phoebe, you don’t have to explain these passages. However, if you do not believe that women should be in those roles, you have to explain how it did not mean that Junia was an apostle or how Junia was actually Junias (which is not a recognized as a name at all) or that Phoebe was a servant and not a deacon. You can watch Dr. Lynn Cohick talk about Junia here.

Dr. Nijay Gupta talks about Junia as well.

Paul commended many women and men as coworkers in the faith. We only quibble about what they did and who they were when they are women.

Torjensen cites some evidence of women in leadership of Jewish synagogues and notes that when Christian communities followed Jewish models of organization, women continued to lead there.6 There is much inscriptional evidence7 that women served as elders of Christian communities.8 However, as Christianity became more public, leaders began to demand that the women conform to the values of Greco-Roman society.9

Women were able to lead in the early church because the early church gathered in private spaces. Women possessed great authority in private spaces, acting as household managers.10 The home in that society was a place of production and not just consumption.11 The person in charge of the household12 would have produced food and clothing for the household, and often extra that would have been sold for profit. A household manager then had little similarity to either the stereotypical housewife of the 50s or a stay-at-home parent of today. The heads of households had many connections and resources that would benefit a church community.13 Many of the skills they had would have easily transferred from the household to leading a church community. As long as the leadership of these church communities was modeled after the household managers, there was no cultural barrier to women leading the christian communities.14 They even could have taught in these assemblies. The problem with women teaching in public was not that women could not teach, but that women were not supposed to be in the public spaces where most teaching occurred.15

When the church goes public

The Greco-Roman world objected to women having public power, often they even objected to women having a public presence.16 The Roman gender code specified that men were made for public roles and women for roles in the domestic sphere, ie, the household.17 Women “gained honor by guarding their sexual purity,”18 which meant that shame, described as “discretion and timidity,” was “the appropriate and natural expressions of female nature.” Good women stayed home, were silent, did not wear jewelry, or go out in the evening.19 When women acted in public—as patrons, for example—their political enemies could criticize them, not for their lack of ability or competence, but for their refusal to behave as women should.20 Women were nominated and rejected from being named to position of honor because it was improper “for a woman to receive conspicuous public honors.”21 The problem was not that women did not operate in public. They did. The problem is that they were constantly vulnerable to charges of being unchaste simply for being in public.22

The developing theology of the church was influenced by these societal values. As the church moved from the household to public spheres, leadership models changed. The role of leaders was reimagined from ministry to governance.23 The shift from private space to public space meant that women’s leadership was more noticeable and more controversial.24 Tertuallian,25 an early church father, patterned his Trinitarian teaching, his teaching on the relationship of God and humans, and humans with other humans all “on the relationships that existed in the public political sphere.”26 Tertuallian said that women who performed public leadership in the church were “wanton. They were usurping rights that did not belong to them because they were women; legal rights could belong only to men.”27 The biggest shift that Tertuallian made was not in what he said. He was agreeing with the Latin writers of his time. The shift was that “his justifications are Christian.” 28 They became part of his theology because they were part of the way he imagined the world.

Transcending being a woman

Nevertheless, we still find some women leading in the church. They had found the secret that matched their calling and circumvented the standards of society. They simply transcended being women. Torjensen writes, “The inferiority of women and their subordination to men was directly linked to their reproductive sexuality and two their social role of care for bodily life.29 By renouncing the body and sexuality and following the ascetic ideals, women, in effect, transcended their femaleness.”30 They became men, of sorts.

This, too, matched the perspective of the surrounding culture. A Roman woman “who exhibited astute political judgement succeeded by transcending her female nature.”31 The highest praise they had was for men and for women to attain it meant that they were somehow themselves men. Women were stripped of their identity because of their competence. Toward the end of the book, Torjenson writes, “As Christianity became a state religion and adopted the attitudes toward gender roles of Greco-Roman society, fewer women held church office.”32 Not because the Bible said so. Because society did.

Research reveals that women have, in fact, served in positions of leadership throughout church history. They were often pushed out of those positions as movements gained status or popularity. Often the church stopped remembering their influence and authority or attributed it to men. They were frequently prevented from participating in the same opportunities for education and service that men had. Nevertheless, motivated by their deep love for God, women have persevered in service to the church either by subverting the rules or by working outside of pre-established spaces.

Becoming by Lisa Hensley

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