One of the topics that is very dear to me is the role and function of women in early Christianity (both canon and post-canon).  A few days ago, I came across a post by the warm and fussy Jim West who linked to Gary Macy’s podcast on women being ordained until the 12th Century.  Edgar asked me why none of this shows up anywhere.

In this series, I’d like to highlight some of the primary sources for women being ordained in the early church.  I’ll cover official church documents, Roman sources, and unofficial church documents.  Today I am going to look at a letter dated in the early second century concerning a Roman governor’s report of Christian activity to the Emperor.

Source one: Pliny the Younger’s Letter to Trajan.

If there was one thing the Roman’s did not get, it was supertitio such as Christianity.   Christianity befuddled the Romans.  Why should a group Jews [1] revere a executed Roman criminal as a God?   Furthermore, why would people show such an excessive devotion to this person.  As weird as the Jews were to the Romans, these Christians  were even more excessive.

Viewing Christians through the eyes of the Romans helps us negate a certain bias inherent in any internal Christian writing.  Quite naturally, Christians writers were/are heavily invested in painting their brand of Christianity as the correct one over and against all other brands of Christianity, including internal dissenters within their own community (Think about a Cowboys or Boston fan writing about the NFL or the NBA).  Roman sources, while handicapped as mentioned above, bypass this bias.

In this letter from a Roman governor to the Emperor, Pliny asks Trajan what he should do with these darn Christians that have been rounded up.  There are a couple of telling passages in this letter, both about early Christian practice and for our immediate purposes, women’s roles in the early Church:

…They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food–but ordinary and innocent food. Even this, they affirmed, they had ceased to do after my edict by which, in accordance with your instructions, I had forbidden political associations. Accordingly, I judged it all the more necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female slaves who were called deaconesses. But I discovered nothing else but depraved, excessive superstition.

I therefore postponed the investigation and hastened to consult you. For the matter seemed to me to warrant consulting you, especially because of the number involved. For many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms. But it seems possible to check and cure it…

(it is worth mentioning that this is the earliest non-christian course for christian practice)

What do we see here?  We see, around 110CE, a local assembly of Christians in the Bithynia-Pontus province that consisted of the complete strata of Roman society.  Slaves, freed persons, rich, poor, young and old.  Pliny, in his quest to find something prosecutable among their deeds, tortures two of the leaders of the community.  Horrifyingly enough (for an elite Roman) the leaders of this community were two slave women.

Thus, we see in unbiased Roman sources that historically women served as deacons in the early Church and, at least in Bithynia-Pontus, they were the leaders of the community, as least as it related to outsiders.

Now, there are some things that need to be held in tension here.  First, is this representative of Christianity of this period?  It is only one source, after all.  Secondly, how do we know that these were the leaders.  All Pliny really mentions is that they are deaconesses (the female form of deacon).  To be minimal in our interpretation of the letter, perhaps that there were women deacons is all we can say.  But, we can say that.  Additionally, it is these two and only these two that Pliny plucked out and tortured.  He would have gone right to the top of the community’s hierarchy to do this.  So, assuming these were the only leaders is a bit of a stretch, but, as stretching goes.  It is about two miles short of the gymnastics Christian historians go through when they try to make the whole of the Bible historically accurate and consistent.  So, as leaps go, it is pretty small.

1. Romans saw them all as Jews [↩]