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Crispina and Her Sisters: Women and Authority in Early Christianity
Discovering reliable information about women in early Christianity is a challenging enterprise. Most people have never heard of Bitalia, Veneranda, Crispina, Petronella, Leta, Sofia the Deacon, and many others even though their catacomb and tomb art suggests their authority was influential and valued by early Christian communities. This book explores visual imagery found on burial artifacts of prominent early Christian women. It carefully situates the tomb art within the cultural context of customary Roman commemorations of the dead. Recent scholarship about Roman portrait sarcophagi and the interpretation of early Christian art is also given significant attention. An in-depth review of women's history in the first four centuries of Christianity provides important context. A fascinating picture emerges of women's authority in the early church, a picture either not available or sadly distorted in the written history. It is often said "a picture is worth a thousand words." The portrait tombs of fourth-century Christian women suggest that they viewed themselves and/or their loved ones viewed them as persons of authority with religious influence.
- GenresHistory
480 pages, Paperback
Published December 15, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 9, 2026
“In other words, Junia exhorts the living to embrace the Christ who authorized her ministry and to whom she witnesses from beyond the grave. She joins a sisterhood of Christian women, past and present, who obey an authority that supersedes any who would silence them. Junia is one of countless women who witness that they are made in God’s image and called to serve in persona Christi.”
//
“By the early thirteenth century, the ancient tradition of women deacons had been defined out of existence in the West. One wonders if it is more than mere coincidence that as women deacons were being extinguished, a new movement of ministerial women was coming to birth. These were independent female communities, known as Beguines, that operated outside the control of male church leaders. The Beguines served as prototypes (although not without persecution) to the later meteoric rise of women’s apostolic religious communities. Like their foremothers (and still today), these women religious attracted the ire of clerics, perhaps because their advocacy for the marginalized often unsettled the status quo.”
//
“The third and most significant difference made by women in the early church is the transformation of Roman society from a predominantly non-Christian to a predominantly Christian culture. While much necessary scholarly ink has been spilled tracking the decline of women’s public leadership authority in early Christianity, what is easily overlooked is that Christianity’s rapid expansion is largely due to the domestic networking and evangelizing efforts of women.”
//
“Celsus’s critique coincides with evidence from Christian texts that the early Jesus movement expanded through house churches and small business networks such as those of Lydia, Prisca, Grapte, and Paul. Evangelization was conducted person-to-person, house-to-house by women who reached out to other women, children, freed persons, and slaves. Women’s quiet exercise of authority in the context of everyday domestic life is one oft-unheralded key to Christianity’s rapid expansion.”
//
“Throughout the Gospels, we see Jesus challenge deep-seated patriarchal assumptions: that only women bear the burden of sexual sin (John 8:1–11), that Samaritan and Canaanite women are to be shunned and discounted (John 4; Matt 15:21–28), and that prodigal sons are to be disowned (Luke 15:11–32). Instead, men are challenged to own their complicity in adultery; the Samaritan woman becomes a missionary, bringing her whole town to belief in Jesus; the Canaanite woman’s fierce love for her daughter succeeds in broadening Jesus’s own understanding of those to whom the good news is sent; and the wayward son is welcomed home with a huge party thrown by a prodigal father.”
//
“Women’s call to discipleship is most evident in the resurrection accounts, for it is upon the testimony of women that the proclamation of the resurrection depends. All four Gospels show Mary of Magdala leading the other women disciples in accompanying Jesus to his death, anointing and burying his body, viewing the empty tomb, and experiencing his risen presence. That the message of the resurrection was first given to women is regarded by scholars as significant evidence for the historicity of the resurrection accounts. Had overzealous disciples fabricated these texts, it is unlikely they would have included female testimony in a society that did not accept women as legal witnesses.”
//
“Literary and social conventions in antiquity dictated that if women were mentioned (a very rare occurrence), they were nearly always named by their relationship to the patriarchal household, for example: “Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza” (Luke 8:3). Atypically, Mary of Magdala was named according to the town she was from (Migdal), not by her relationship to a man (see figure 1.2). The scholarly consensus is that she was an independent woman of means not bound to a patriarchal household. After the events of the resurrection, we hear very little about Mary of Magdala except in extracanonical writings. By the sixth century, Gregory the Great, without any scriptural basis, portrayed her as a prostitute. A common misreading of Luke’s gospel attributes the “seven demons” that Jesus expelled from Mary Magdalene to grave sinfulness (Luke 8:2). But Thompson explains, “For people in the first century of the Christian era, the expression, ‘from whom seven devils had gone out,’ would have meant that she had been cured of a serious illness. The number seven would accentuate the seriousness of her condition or possibly its recurrent nature.” Gregory’s powerful sermon on repentance meant that henceforth in the West Mary Magdalene would be remembered as a forgiven prostitute, rather than the influential woman of faith who underwrote Jesus’s Galilean mission and first proclaimed the resurrection.”
//
“The message is clear. The Samaritan woman is as far removed from the proper matrona ideal of Greco-Roman culture as anyone could imagine. And yet, she exhibits significant theological acumen, sparring with Jesus over where true worship is found. Unlike the respected rabbi Nicodemus, who meets secretly with Jesus at night and departs still doubting, the Samaritan woman meets him in broad daylight and departs a true believer. The Johannine author portrays her as the privileged recipient of Jesus’s self-revelation as “Messiah” and the great “I Am,” hearkening back to Moses and pointing to Jesus’s oneness with the divine. On her word, “Many of the Samaritans of that town began to believe in him” (John 4:39). For the Johannine community, the Samaritan woman represents the consummate “outsider” who, after her transformative encounter with Jesus, becomes not only an “insider” but also a leader, publicly proclaiming Jesus the Messiah to both men and women via informal village communication channels. Along the way, the narrative deliberately highlights and then discounts stereotypical female behaviors to which she does not conform. Yet her nonconformity presents no obstacle to her acceptance and subsequent leadership in Jesus’s kinship network.”
//
“From the first century, we see a repeating pattern of prominent women exercising significant initiative and authority in the growth of Christianity. Women founded and led house-church communities (Lydia, Prisca, Nympha, Mary of Jerusalem, Tabitha); prophesied (Philip’s daughters, Corinthian women); taught male evangelists (Prisca); functioned as apostles (Junia, Mary Magdalene), benefactors, and envoys (Phoebe); and probably led communities in Philippi as episcopoi and diakonoi (Euodia and Syntyche).”
//
“It is ironic that the deutero-Pauline author of Colossians acknowledges Nympha as leading a house church, since a main point of the letter is to impose Greco-Roman hierarchical order and subordination in Christian households. As a leader of a house church, Nympha ministered to the church at Laodicea. Two centuries later, a council at Laodicea forbad women leaders to enter the sanctuary or be installed in the church. According to Ute Eisen: “We must presume that these women both led the assembly and presided at the Eucharist.”
//
“It is notable that Shepherd of Hermas sharply reprimands Rome’s diakonoi who “despoil the living of widows and orphans,” in contrast to Grapte who cares for and ministers to them. As Lampe sees it, Grapte “was entrusted with this work by all the communities of Rome.”
Both Grapte and Clement are identified as leaders whose responsibilities involve all the house church communities at Rome. While Clement is remembered in church history, Grapte is not. Many early writings attest that care of widows and orphans was an ethical priority for early Christians. ”
//
“Women preaching and evangelizing, slaves and freed persons converting their counterparts in other households, Christian rituals conducted in private, domestic space—all of these behaviors attracted censure from the larger society. As a result, early churchmen sought to quell criticism by controlling the behavior of Christian households, and particularly the behavior of women. We shall see this pattern repeat itself many times over the next three centuries.”
//
“A highly influential late twelfth-century Western canonist, Huguccio of Bologna, wrote that even if a woman were to be ordained it would not “take” because of “the law of the church and sex.” In other words, the fact of being biologically female prevented women from being ordained, and what is more, because they were biologically female, they never could have been truly ordained in the first place. Therefore, all past female ordinations were not ordinations at all, at least according to the new understanding of ordination. Given that male ordinations in previous centuries also entailed a different understanding of the meaning of orders, one could argue that those male ordinations did not “take” either, a point that seems to have escaped our esteemed canonists.”
//
“In the early Jesus movement, women exercised significant ecclesial authority as patrons, itinerant prophets, evangelists, apostles, teachers, and missionaries. They founded and presided over house church worship in most urban centers and held titles such as diakonoi and probably episcopoi as these roles were understood in the first century. Yet, the public leadership of women was unsettling to the mainstream culture. Based as they were on gendered understandings of public and domestic space, hierarchical Greco-Roman household codes eventually became normative—not only in families but also in church structures. As hope for the parousia dimmed, more and more Christian communities sought some level of accommodation with and integration into the dominant culture. This resulted in an ever-increasing resistance to the leadership of women. From the early second century to the early fifth century, male church leaders repeatedly cited 1 Timothy’s admonishment “Women are to be silent in the churches” as justification for curtailing women’s exercise of ecclesial authority. Yet, women persisted in teaching, evangelizing, baptizing, and presiding at eucharistic meals despite official sanctions.”
//
“A second difference is that Christian widows and virgins rescued, socialized, baptized, and educated thousands of orphans who would otherwise have died of exposure or, in the case of baby girls, been doomed to lives of prostitution.”
//
“The Greek tombstone has been translated as: “Here lies the slave and bride of Christ, Sofia the Deacon, a second Phoebe. She fell asleep in peace on the 21st of the month of March . . .” This suggests that the fourth-century Christian community in Jerusalem understood Sofia’s ministry to be part of a three-hundred-year-old tradition dating back to the Phoebe named in Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 16). Phoebe probably carried Paul’s letter to Rome, and Paul validates her ecclesial authority: “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the Church at Cenchreae. I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been the benefactor of many people, including me” (Rom 16:1–2).[89]
In the end, we will probably never know with certainty who the “real Petronella” was. But that may not be nearly as important as recognizing that from earliest history, Christians reverenced the spiritual and ecclesial authority of women. At least some women, such as Sofia the Deacon and possibly Veneranda, modeled their ministry on their early Christian foremothers, proudly leaving their legacy in the archaeological record.
//
“By the early thirteenth century, the ancient tradition of women deacons had been defined out of existence in the West. One wonders if it is more than mere coincidence that as women deacons were being extinguished, a new movement of ministerial women was coming to birth. These were independent female communities, known as Beguines, that operated outside the control of male church leaders. The Beguines served as prototypes (although not without persecution) to the later meteoric rise of women’s apostolic religious communities. Like their foremothers (and still today), these women religious attracted the ire of clerics, perhaps because their advocacy for the marginalized often unsettled the status quo.”
//
“The third and most significant difference made by women in the early church is the transformation of Roman society from a predominantly non-Christian to a predominantly Christian culture. While much necessary scholarly ink has been spilled tracking the decline of women’s public leadership authority in early Christianity, what is easily overlooked is that Christianity’s rapid expansion is largely due to the domestic networking and evangelizing efforts of women.”
//
“Celsus’s critique coincides with evidence from Christian texts that the early Jesus movement expanded through house churches and small business networks such as those of Lydia, Prisca, Grapte, and Paul. Evangelization was conducted person-to-person, house-to-house by women who reached out to other women, children, freed persons, and slaves. Women’s quiet exercise of authority in the context of everyday domestic life is one oft-unheralded key to Christianity’s rapid expansion.”
//
“Throughout the Gospels, we see Jesus challenge deep-seated patriarchal assumptions: that only women bear the burden of sexual sin (John 8:1–11), that Samaritan and Canaanite women are to be shunned and discounted (John 4; Matt 15:21–28), and that prodigal sons are to be disowned (Luke 15:11–32). Instead, men are challenged to own their complicity in adultery; the Samaritan woman becomes a missionary, bringing her whole town to belief in Jesus; the Canaanite woman’s fierce love for her daughter succeeds in broadening Jesus’s own understanding of those to whom the good news is sent; and the wayward son is welcomed home with a huge party thrown by a prodigal father.”
//
“Women’s call to discipleship is most evident in the resurrection accounts, for it is upon the testimony of women that the proclamation of the resurrection depends. All four Gospels show Mary of Magdala leading the other women disciples in accompanying Jesus to his death, anointing and burying his body, viewing the empty tomb, and experiencing his risen presence. That the message of the resurrection was first given to women is regarded by scholars as significant evidence for the historicity of the resurrection accounts. Had overzealous disciples fabricated these texts, it is unlikely they would have included female testimony in a society that did not accept women as legal witnesses.”
//
“Literary and social conventions in antiquity dictated that if women were mentioned (a very rare occurrence), they were nearly always named by their relationship to the patriarchal household, for example: “Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza” (Luke 8:3). Atypically, Mary of Magdala was named according to the town she was from (Migdal), not by her relationship to a man (see figure 1.2). The scholarly consensus is that she was an independent woman of means not bound to a patriarchal household. After the events of the resurrection, we hear very little about Mary of Magdala except in extracanonical writings. By the sixth century, Gregory the Great, without any scriptural basis, portrayed her as a prostitute. A common misreading of Luke’s gospel attributes the “seven demons” that Jesus expelled from Mary Magdalene to grave sinfulness (Luke 8:2). But Thompson explains, “For people in the first century of the Christian era, the expression, ‘from whom seven devils had gone out,’ would have meant that she had been cured of a serious illness. The number seven would accentuate the seriousness of her condition or possibly its recurrent nature.” Gregory’s powerful sermon on repentance meant that henceforth in the West Mary Magdalene would be remembered as a forgiven prostitute, rather than the influential woman of faith who underwrote Jesus’s Galilean mission and first proclaimed the resurrection.”
//
“The message is clear. The Samaritan woman is as far removed from the proper matrona ideal of Greco-Roman culture as anyone could imagine. And yet, she exhibits significant theological acumen, sparring with Jesus over where true worship is found. Unlike the respected rabbi Nicodemus, who meets secretly with Jesus at night and departs still doubting, the Samaritan woman meets him in broad daylight and departs a true believer. The Johannine author portrays her as the privileged recipient of Jesus’s self-revelation as “Messiah” and the great “I Am,” hearkening back to Moses and pointing to Jesus’s oneness with the divine. On her word, “Many of the Samaritans of that town began to believe in him” (John 4:39). For the Johannine community, the Samaritan woman represents the consummate “outsider” who, after her transformative encounter with Jesus, becomes not only an “insider” but also a leader, publicly proclaiming Jesus the Messiah to both men and women via informal village communication channels. Along the way, the narrative deliberately highlights and then discounts stereotypical female behaviors to which she does not conform. Yet her nonconformity presents no obstacle to her acceptance and subsequent leadership in Jesus’s kinship network.”
//
“From the first century, we see a repeating pattern of prominent women exercising significant initiative and authority in the growth of Christianity. Women founded and led house-church communities (Lydia, Prisca, Nympha, Mary of Jerusalem, Tabitha); prophesied (Philip’s daughters, Corinthian women); taught male evangelists (Prisca); functioned as apostles (Junia, Mary Magdalene), benefactors, and envoys (Phoebe); and probably led communities in Philippi as episcopoi and diakonoi (Euodia and Syntyche).”
//
“It is ironic that the deutero-Pauline author of Colossians acknowledges Nympha as leading a house church, since a main point of the letter is to impose Greco-Roman hierarchical order and subordination in Christian households. As a leader of a house church, Nympha ministered to the church at Laodicea. Two centuries later, a council at Laodicea forbad women leaders to enter the sanctuary or be installed in the church. According to Ute Eisen: “We must presume that these women both led the assembly and presided at the Eucharist.”
//
“It is notable that Shepherd of Hermas sharply reprimands Rome’s diakonoi who “despoil the living of widows and orphans,” in contrast to Grapte who cares for and ministers to them. As Lampe sees it, Grapte “was entrusted with this work by all the communities of Rome.”
Both Grapte and Clement are identified as leaders whose responsibilities involve all the house church communities at Rome. While Clement is remembered in church history, Grapte is not. Many early writings attest that care of widows and orphans was an ethical priority for early Christians. ”
//
“Women preaching and evangelizing, slaves and freed persons converting their counterparts in other households, Christian rituals conducted in private, domestic space—all of these behaviors attracted censure from the larger society. As a result, early churchmen sought to quell criticism by controlling the behavior of Christian households, and particularly the behavior of women. We shall see this pattern repeat itself many times over the next three centuries.”
//
“A highly influential late twelfth-century Western canonist, Huguccio of Bologna, wrote that even if a woman were to be ordained it would not “take” because of “the law of the church and sex.” In other words, the fact of being biologically female prevented women from being ordained, and what is more, because they were biologically female, they never could have been truly ordained in the first place. Therefore, all past female ordinations were not ordinations at all, at least according to the new understanding of ordination. Given that male ordinations in previous centuries also entailed a different understanding of the meaning of orders, one could argue that those male ordinations did not “take” either, a point that seems to have escaped our esteemed canonists.”
//
“In the early Jesus movement, women exercised significant ecclesial authority as patrons, itinerant prophets, evangelists, apostles, teachers, and missionaries. They founded and presided over house church worship in most urban centers and held titles such as diakonoi and probably episcopoi as these roles were understood in the first century. Yet, the public leadership of women was unsettling to the mainstream culture. Based as they were on gendered understandings of public and domestic space, hierarchical Greco-Roman household codes eventually became normative—not only in families but also in church structures. As hope for the parousia dimmed, more and more Christian communities sought some level of accommodation with and integration into the dominant culture. This resulted in an ever-increasing resistance to the leadership of women. From the early second century to the early fifth century, male church leaders repeatedly cited 1 Timothy’s admonishment “Women are to be silent in the churches” as justification for curtailing women’s exercise of ecclesial authority. Yet, women persisted in teaching, evangelizing, baptizing, and presiding at eucharistic meals despite official sanctions.”
//
“A second difference is that Christian widows and virgins rescued, socialized, baptized, and educated thousands of orphans who would otherwise have died of exposure or, in the case of baby girls, been doomed to lives of prostitution.”
//
“The Greek tombstone has been translated as: “Here lies the slave and bride of Christ, Sofia the Deacon, a second Phoebe. She fell asleep in peace on the 21st of the month of March . . .” This suggests that the fourth-century Christian community in Jerusalem understood Sofia’s ministry to be part of a three-hundred-year-old tradition dating back to the Phoebe named in Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 16). Phoebe probably carried Paul’s letter to Rome, and Paul validates her ecclesial authority: “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the Church at Cenchreae. I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for she has been the benefactor of many people, including me” (Rom 16:1–2).[89]
In the end, we will probably never know with certainty who the “real Petronella” was. But that may not be nearly as important as recognizing that from earliest history, Christians reverenced the spiritual and ecclesial authority of women. At least some women, such as Sofia the Deacon and possibly Veneranda, modeled their ministry on their early Christian foremothers, proudly leaving their legacy in the archaeological record.
July 21, 2019
Thorough study of the topic
The early Church was predominantly nurtured and enlarged by the work of women in evangelizing and preaching and serving as deacons, teachers, and even as presbyters. The evidence is here .
The early Church was predominantly nurtured and enlarged by the work of women in evangelizing and preaching and serving as deacons, teachers, and even as presbyters. The evidence is here .
August 2, 2018
The first two chapters of this book made me excited about what was to come and then I was sorely disappointed with the rest. The author makes some great points and teases some interesting bits of history in the beginning that made me think that there was going to be more to come that might change the way we view hierarchical structures and the history of the church. Unfortunately the rest of the book was a compilation of data that seemed like it should be the annex to a doctoral thesis. There is a lot of good information and important insights into the history of Christian women leadership in this book, but it should probably be reorganized and condensed into a readable and useable format.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews