The Christian west and the Church has a long history of misogyny and denying women their most basic rights, including financial independence, often attempting to use scriptures to justify it.
I have read the Bible and neither the OT law or Jesus forbid women from working or owning property, neither demand that they must get married and have children. There are no OT laws or teachings of Jesus that justify this kind of oppression of women. Both Jesus and Paul suggested that those who could stay single, should, how can a woman achieve this without the right to work and live on her own? Women have historically become nuns to achieve this, but this shouldn’t be necessary. I therefore suggest this: Christian cultures that deny women the means to earn their own living and live independent of men are pressuring women into marriage and sinning by doing so.
I recently took a holiday to Rome and later started studying about the Roman Empire from the time of Julius Caesar.
The attitudes towards women in Roman society were horrific, we can see this from their historians, from 200BC to 200AD
No offices, no priesthoods, no triumphs, no spoils or war. Elegance, adornment, finery – these are a woman’s insignia, these are what our forefathers called the woman’s world
– The Tribune, Valerius 195bc
Women are excluded from all civil and public offices, hence they cannot sit on juries or hold any civic magistracy or bring action in court or act on someone else’s behalf or act as procurators. In the same way children ought not to hold any public office
– The Jurist, Ulpian, 200AD
“Women are excluded from all civil and public offices”….sound familiar to a particular Bible verse in Timothy? Unfortunately this attitude has bled into the church, in part with the help from Paul, who, while a true Christian, was also a Roman and religious extremist, and his attitudes towards women reflect this with:
“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man she must be quiet.” 1 Timothy 2:12
There’s no justification for this statement, Jesus nor any of the other apostles stated a teaching such as this, quite the contrary, Jesus was a defender of women’s rights at time when women were oppressed within a religious extremist culture. Furthermore in contradicts many parts of the Bible. There have been numerous women mentioned in the Bible in leaderships and prophetic positions, such as Deborah.
“4 Now Deborah, a prophet, the wife of Lappidoth, was leading Israel at that time. 5 She held court under the Palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the Israelites went up to her to have their disputes decided.” Judges 4:4-5
One issue we need to consider with Paul’s teaching is, he was never a disciple of Jesus’s. We know Jesus frequently chastised Peter’s behaviour, I can’t help but wonder if he would have likewise berated Paul for his misogynistic attitudes.
One defence of Paul is, it’s possible not all the letters attributed to him were written by him, 6 have been questioned as being legitimately his – inc Timothy, since Paul himself has acknowledged a female deacon in the church:
“I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae.”
Romans 16:1 NIV
Last I checked, deacons weren’t silent in the church.
Added to misogyny that Paul expressed, the church over the years added significantly to it, even Paul did not preach that women shouldn’t be allowed to work or should be treated as property – an attitude practised by “Christian” societies for the majority of Christianity’s existence. But of course, women are treated as property, as slaves in misogynistic societies – and humans do love their slaves, esp sex slaves.
To this day these misogynistic attitudes have survived, though I am no longer surprised, the Roman church has taught Biblical inaccuracies from day one. In many of the churches there are sculptures of women with wings, these are thought of as angels, yet there are no angels of this discription in the Bible, most angels are depicted as wingless men dressed all in white. What did look like these women in ancient times however, were the goddesses Nike and Victoria. The more I look into church beliefs, the Bible and Roman & Greek mythology it’s clear how much of the Roman beliefs have bled (uncontested into our idea of Christianity – including ideas of Hades and Tartarus.
The behaviour of the Catholic Church still reflects Roman mythology. Romans worshipped human looking gods who specialised in helping certain demographic: Hermes/Mercury was the god of travellers and livestock, Aphrodite/Venus the god of love, Apollo the god of poetry, Mars the god of war. The Catholic Church still holds onto this idea, but they call them saints instead, praying to them as Romans did to their gods, Saint Nicholas to god….I mean saint….of children, Saint Valentine the god of lovers.
It’s a shame that those who led the Reformation were too ingrained with misogyny, and happily benefitting from it, to overturn the many non Biblical ideas towards women that had seeped into the church.
For millennia women have been owned, traded, oppressed, tormented and denied their humanity in the name of Christianity – a religion that is SUPPOSED TO – be all about love for your fellow HUMAN. It’s time for this to end, it’s time for Christian men to stop it and for Christian women to reject men who do it.