Article Series - Sources for Women Leadership in Early Christianity
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Update: This never got off the ground due to my schedule. As such, I am including in the series on historical women in the Early Church.
This is my first post in my series of real women in Paul. This series is inspired and based heavily on “Reading Real Women Through the Undisputed Letters of Paul” as found in Women and Christian Origins. We will be looking at all of the women mentioned by name in the undisputed letters of Paul, which incidentally, are about the only place in the Pauline corpus that women are mentioned by name. The undisputed letters of Paul consist of 1st Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, Philemon, and Romans. Since these are the only places where women are mentioned by name in the Pauline corpus, we won’t bother ourselves with the merits of dividing the Pauline corpus into the undisputed, disputed and pastorals, for our focus is on the real women with whom Paul dealt. As such, we will be examining the following historical Christian women in this order: Chloe, Prisca, Euodia and Syntyche, Apphia, Phoebe, and Junia. With these preliminaries out of the way, will will now turn to our first actual woman Paul wrote about : Chloe (part I).
We begin with Chloe because out of all the women on our list, her mention is the briefest. 1 Corinthians 1:11 is all we hear from Paul about Chloe:
For information has been given to me concerning you all, my brothers (and sisters), by those of Chloe that there is strife among you. [1]
Τῶν Χλόης: “those of Chloe” is all we hear from Paul about Chloe. How much can we really say about this woman? More than one might think. We will try to answer three questions: 1) Who were Chloe’s people? 2) Was Chloe a member of the Christian community in Corinth? and 3) If any, what influence did Chloe have in the Christian community at Corinth? We will answer the first question here and deal with the last two in the next post on this topic.
Who were Chloe’s People? The only real attribute we can assign to Chloe is the fact that she had “people.” And we even have to infer that from the text. [2] It is these people who have informed Paul about the strife or discord among the Corinthians. They were most likely members of the Christian community at Corinth. They could have been specially commissioned by Chloe to seek out Paul for the purpose of reporting a community update.
There were four general poles of status in the Roman empire: family status, gender, birth into freedom/slavery, and wealth. Depending on the the values of each resulted in greater or lessor autonomy. For example, slaves of the wealthy, which ran their owner’s household and often their business affairs, lived better and enjoyed a higher status than those who were free, but of poor familial status and were poor. Thus, for these people to be sponsored for travel meant that it is very likely that they were slaves of a person of high class. (We’ll deal with Chloe and her relatively high class in the next post.) What is certain, is that they needed no introduction and were respected within the Corinthian Christian community. This does not mean they were leaders, but they were in high standing.
Even though there is no indication that Chloe’s people were leaders in their community, that does not mean that slaves were not leaders of Christian communities. We have the Roman governor Pliny the Younger asking the emperor Trajan for advice on how to deal with some Christians he had rounded up. The interesting thing for us is that chief among them were two female slaves that served as leaders for the group. [3] The only Christians that Pliny mentions specifically are two female slaves which he terms deaconesses. In dispatches of this nature, it was common only to mention the leaders of the group in question. This is not surprising, given Paul’s incorporation of an early baptism ritual in his letter to the Galatians which declared an abandonment of gender, class, and race as status markers upon entrance into the Christian community. [4]
Later interpreters of Paul would advise slaves to accept their Roman class status and to lay low in their real-world freedom for the sake of keeping the Romans off their backs. [5] If there was anything the Romans hated, it was a disruption of the status quo. This is why private associations were so dangerous. The Romans thought that anything done in private was meant for political subversion and upheaval – why else would they be meeting in private? So strong was this thinking, the emperor Trajan let a city burn down instead of allowing Pliny the Younger to fund a fire brigade. Let that soak in for a second – the Romans would rather let a perfectly good city to burn to the ground than allow firefighters have an association!
All official mention of Christianity by the Roman governmental officials indicates that they were seen as either a voluntary association or burial society. For a slaves to start proclaiming that they were free (politically, not just metaphorically) by virtue of their religion would only invite the wrath of the Roman government upon the Christians.
Back to Chloe’s people. While we don’t know a whole lot about them, they were likely prominent members of the Christian community at Corinth and slaves of a wealthy woman. They were most likely not leaders in the community, but they did seem to carry some influence. Additionally, we see that by the end of the first century and the beginning of the second, there were (female) leaders of Christian communities who were slaves.
What does this mean for us, as American Christians living in a situation where there are no slaves? Firstly, we see a early Christian opposition to slavery, but an subsequent drive to not rock the boat in the Roman empire. There is a contradiction here: at once there is a delegitimization of slavery [6] and a impetus to begrudgingly accept this ungodly institution for the sake of the Kingdom of God. I don’t like this, but it is there. It is there as a survival strategy, not because God was down with slavery. Violence is discouraged as a means for obtaining political freedom. The lesson that we can learn today is that we Christians should not accept the evils of this world, but work against them especially now that we are politically free. Additionally and most importantly, we should concern ourselves with Christian witness to others above all.
The next post in the series will look at Chloe herself. Stay tuned!
- εδηλώθη γάρ μοι περὶ ὑμῶν, ἀδελφοί μου, ὑπο τῶν Χλόης ὅτι ἐπιδες ἐν υμῖν εἰσιν. [↩]
- The text in question reads τῶν Χλόης. Τῶν is an genitive plural pronoun which seems to introduce Χλόης, but Χλόης is singular. Thus we know that we are talking about a masculine group of things which belong to Chloe. Since the presence of a single male in a group changes the group from feminine to masculine, this could be a mixed group or an all male group. [↩]
- See Pliny the Younger, Letters 10.96-97, 111-113 CE. [↩]
- See Gal 3:28 [↩]
- see Eph 6:5-8 [↩]
- See Gal 3:28 and 1 Tim 1:8-11 [↩]
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