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In reply to the discussion: Fox News Guest: Allowing Women To Vote ‘One Of The Greatest Mistakes That America Made’ [View all]antigone382
(3,682 posts)...Paul's letters repeatedly reference important women serving prominent roles in the church and in missionary work. There are of course texts in the New Testament that bear Paul's name and declare that women should remain silent, but most scholars do not believe they were actually written by Paul, because the language used is not his style, and the events referenced are more in keeping with a later time period than when Paul actually lived. It was quite common at that point in history for works to be written in the name of a famous teacher or philosopher (which Paul certainly was to the early Christians) as a way of honoring that person, or claiming that one's work was written in the same spirit as that teacher's works. It was a literary convention and was not considered dishonest, but it is quite confusing today.
In actuality, many early Christian sects were remarkably egalitarian, so much so that they challenged and undermined Roman social structure. Paul himself writes that in Christianity there is no longer male and female, no longer master and slave, as all are equal in Christ. However, Paul also advocated an adaptability to the existing social structure in order to avoid what he perceived as unnecessary offense, and thus further the spread of the gospel, as in his perspective that women should wear veils in Church if it is the social norm where they are, rather than cause scandal. Unfortunately, this adaptability inevitably led to a more mainstream and less revolutionary early church. As the more radically liberal Christian sects were weeded out through persecution, the sects that were better able to conform to mainstream Roman mores, survived and eventually dominated the religion. Many of the descriptions of appropriate family relations found in the later Christian works, particularly those (most likely) falsely attributed to Paul, could have been lifted straight out of Aristotle.