yalla

I followed this thread loosely for a while until it went into areas unknown to me.
So I may have missed seeing if the point I wish to make has already been covered cos I don't want to go back thru 16 pages.

The OP asked "What do you think would have been different if there was no Christianity?" and then focused on science.


I think a valid speculation would be to ask the same question but to focus it on social and political matters.

I suggest that questioning the extent of patriarchal dominance of women in western society and the correlation, if any such is perceived, to Christianity might be entertaining and informative.

That would entail asking:
Was [early] Christianity male focused and male dominated, ie "patriarchal"?
Did the influence of Christianity as a political force exacerbate an existing patriarchal society and entrench such for millenia in Western societies?
In other words if Christianity never existed would present society be [a] more patriarchal [b] less [c] not at all?

Bede

Early Christianity was much less patriarchal than surrounding society, but this lessened to some extent as it went mainstream.

For example, Christianity banned infanticide which was aimed at reducing the number of women. It banned abortion that massively decreased female mortality. It insisted on fidelity in marriage that improved the status of women as their husbands couldn't go elsewhere for their fun. It venerated virginity so allowed women to be something other than baby making machines. It didn't encourage remarriage so improved the status of widows who could keep their husband's property. It encouraged later marriage (Roman men commonly married pre-pubescent children and consummated the marriages). The net effect of all this was to even out the sex ratio which anthropologists believe is an automatic sign of female status (the fewer women, the more they are treated as chattels and shut away).

Rodney Stark's Rise of Christianity covers all this with the references.

Best wishes

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

countjulian

When a woman became a Christian, she was renouncing many of the rights and privileges allowed her in pagan society. Women were valued for renunciation of their wealth, or more importantly, their sex; virginity was the greatest thing a Christian woman could ever achieve. Take for example a letter written by Leo, where he advises that nuns, who had been raped by Vandals, through no fault of their own, must now be placed in a subordinate role, forever below "uncontaminated virgins" who they should "not dare to compare themselves to." Although some heretical sects, the Montanists come to mind, were supportive of women's roles in worship and liturgy, orthodox Christians severely restrained women's public involvement in religion; they were barred from entering a saint's martyrium to offer prayers, to approach the altar, teach or preach. In paganism, by contrast, you not only had very powerful and worshiped goddesses (Christian conceptions of the diving were explicitly masculine, and worship of the "theotokos" in Byzantium would lag behind for several hundred years), but you also priestesses who presided over large, influential cults (including the imperial cult). They were alowed to pray, sacrifice, lecture on religion, and participate in the full range of religious expression without fear of being harmed or expelled. There were also many cults just for women. By contrast, we do not hear of any full-fledged priestesses in the orthodox Church, only deaconesses and very few at that.
As to the treatment of women in both traditions, a good juxtaposition here offers intriguing insights: in the 380s, in Thebaid, Egypt, a man was brought before a pagan judge for murdering a prostitute. The man was put to death, and the judge gave a tenth of the man's property to the prostitute's bereaved mother. By contrast, Jerome around the same period was fully supportive of beheading woman for extramarital fornication.

Ramsay MacMullen's two fabulous books, Christianizing the Roman Empire 100-400 AD and Christianity and Paganism in the 4th to the centuries are probably the best books available on the subject. I cannot recommend them enough. Also good is Robin Lane Fox's Pagans and Christians [Christianity and Paganism ?], which covers the same period of time as Christianizing of the Roman Empire.

Bede

Robin Lane Fox is indeed very good, although he says none of the things that CJ is alleging. MacMullen's last lot of references supplied by CJ didn't check out so I'd be interested in whether he has any more.

This is odd. A prostitute in the Graeco-Roman world was always be a slave so they had no family. Killing someone else's slave could be punishable by death. I suspect the compensation was paid to the berived madam of the brothel for loss of livelihood.

I suspect the rest of CJ's post is a similar mix of confucion, half truth and the odd genuine fact thrown in to put us off the scent.

Best wishes

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

countjulian

You don't seem to have responded in your blog, how is the search coming? In our previous exchange on the other thread, I misquoted MacMullen's cite; when Pearse pointed out my error in citing De viris ill 113, it was my mistake alone. MacMullen says "Contrast the careful copying of accepted writing on the best materials, e.g. Heir. De viris ill 113." Other than my mistakes, when have MacMullen's sources "not checked out"? I think you are just trying to smear someone who points out the myths of Christian origins.

Seems like a simple ad Hominem to me. Care to back up either assertion? And for the record, the quote is from (and I'm very certain this timejudge) Codex BGU 1024-1027, in the Sixth International Congress of Papyrology, 1980. It said "I direct that you be struck with the sword as a murderer. Theodora, the poor and elderly mother of the dead woman, who because of her poverty deprived her daughter of modesty and through which also killed her, will inherit a tenth part of the propert (of the murderer), the law suggesting this to me and magnanimity, philanthropia."

Bede

Oh well. As the cite comes from a papyrus dating from fifty years after the Empire went Christian, I don't think it helps your case. It directly contradicts everything else we know about ancient prostitution as well. Very odd.

Please explain to us which rights a woman signed away when she became a Christian?

Best wishes

Bede

Bede

CJ, we checked all the cites you gave except Michael of Syria. None backed up what you said MacMullen said. Roger explained how Michael of Syria was far too late to be any help. You tried to allege thatb Christians were burning pagan literature in the streets. You were wrong.

I must concede, though, that you are an expert quote miner. You dig up unrepresentative stuff, string it together, editorialise and end up badly misleading your readers. MacMullen nowhere says that pagan women had higher status than Christian women (IIRC). The opposite conclusion is reached explicitly by Stark and he explains why (I gave the reasons in my first post). If Toto is reading, he could back me up here (although, I kind of doubt he'd want to).

Best wishes

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

countjulian

If we took your advice, we'd be dating Tacitus to the 14th century. Just because a manuscript was copied in the 5th doesn’t mean it was originally written then. The codex itself refers to events in the 380s. And what other info about prostitution does this contradict?


The right to be a priestess, the right pray with men, the right to have sex outside of marriage and before, and the right to be valued for something other than her virginity. Prostitutes lost much under the Christian empire, since now prostitution was no longer a protected industry with the state oversight and control; now, women where executed for using their bodies as they wished. don't get me wrong; nobody exactly idolized prostitutes in classical antiquity, but in Christendom they were looked down upon as the most filthy scum on the planet. In Pompeii, an inscription reads "Here Phoebus the perfume seller had a really good fuck." Not only were prostitutes accepted as part of the culture, but people apparently were not ashamed to tell that they had been to them. I can hardly imagine this sentiment being shared by patrons of a Christian brothel.

Bede

You mean a vestal virgin or holy prostitute? Women could be Christian nuns and deacons. They could not be priestess in most pagan cults. The mystery religons wouldn't even allow women to be members.

You're just making this up, aren't you? Christians all prayed together.

You are still making it up. No such right existed in pagan society.

As a baby making machine. Christian women had far more respect, they could expect their menfolk to be faithful and they were not expected to murder their daughters.

As for prostitutes, they were exploited slaves pushed into the game at the age of ten or so, dead from repeated abortions long before they reached twenty, thrown on the scrap heap if they survived at all. If this is what you think is good about pagan society then God help you.

Best wishes

Bede

Bede's Library - faith and reason

countjulian

You ignorance is simply breathtaking. Women held prominent roles in the imperial cult, in the Artemis cult, the Athena cult, and the Dionysus cult, the Magna Mater cult, the Apollo cult (prophetesses), and pretty much every other major mainstream cult. There were even some Dionysus cults that only allowed women as members. Many other mystery religions were female-only. The only Mystery religion I know of that did not allow women was the Mithras cult. The Christians, on the other hand, never let women serve as priests, let alone bishops. Our evidence of female deacons is rare, and I know of none past the fourth century. As for nuns, they were always subservient to the priests; I do not see how you could possibly compare the status of nuns to pagan priestesses. The Suda, amongst other chronicles, records that Hypatia taught at the Museum, and even had male students (and we all know what the Christians thought of her); how many Christian women in the following centuries could claim the same? Sosipatra, another neo-Platonist, is recorded in Eunapius' "Lives of the Philosophers," 466-70 to have been a great teacher of philosophy and religion, and there are more records of pagan women "preaching", if you will, in the open. How many such cases does Christendom hold?


Not in martyriums (martyrae?). Women had to give their prayers to men to say at the martyr’s tomb, which was significant because martyr tombs were places of important social gathering to Christians in Late Antiquity.

Excuse me, but when exactly did the Greeks ever warrant beheading for pre-marital sex? I'm not talking about cheating on your husband, I'm talking about have sex with a man before you married him. Did the Greeks even care about this at all?

That's a pretty funny thing to say, considering what Augustine wrote: "I don't see what sort of help woman was created to provide man with, if one excludes procreation." You really seem to take pride in the anti-infanticide thing, despite that (a) the Stoics were against infanticide way before the Christians were and (b) infanticide in the world is often highest in very Catholic countries today, because woman are forbidden to use birth control and do not want their church to know that they have been having pre-marital woopie. This is especially true in Ireland.

No doubt that went on, as it does in Christian dominated areas today, like Sudan, but Roman brothels, for instance, where monitored by the state and had to meet certain regulations. And as for getting pushed into the “game� at an early age, Homie G, Christians never stopped slavery, and after the bloated slave market collapsed it continued on in the much worse form of feudal serfdom, and I suspect that more than one medieval girl was persuaded to bend over to the front, and touch her toes at the urging of the local knight Whateverlot.