What did women do in the early church?

The last chapter of Romans is a list of greetings, and it is the most concrete evidence there is for who was doing the work. Phoebe is "a servant of the assembly that is at Cenchreae", a word the translation notes can also be rendered deacon, and Paul asks the Roman church to assist her. Prisca is named before her husband as a fellow worker. Andronicus and Junia are "notable among the apostles", and were Christians before Paul was.

None of this is argued for. It is a man asking a congregation to look after people he works with, which is why it is useful.

Junia is a woman’s name, and a search of the Hellenistic literature, the papyri and the inscriptions turns up the feminine form. The masculine alternative, Junias, has to be read as a short form of a longer man’s name, and that hypothesis is what carried a man into print in the nineteenth century. The Nestle and United Bible Societies editions accented the name as masculine from 1927 to 2001, and translations gave a man from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s.

The manuscript evidence did not change. The editions did, and the female reading has since been restored in the scholarly debate. It is a rare case where you can watch an interpretative assumption enter the printed text and then be argued down.

1 Timothy is direct: "Let a woman learn in quietness with full submission. But I don’t permit a woman to teach, nor to exercise authority over a man." 1 Corinthians 14 says "let the wives be quiet in the assemblies", three chapters after the same letter gave instructions for how a woman should cover her head while "praying or prophesying", which is not a silent activity.

Galatians, meanwhile, says there is "neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus".

All of these are in the same canon. Any account of what the early church did has to hold all of them at once.

Most scholars regard Romans, 1 Corinthians and Galatians as Paul’s and 1 Timothy as written later in his name. Some call that forgery; how such letters were written and received in the ancient world is a field of argument in itself. On that reading the ban on women teaching in 1 Timothy belongs to a later generation than the greetings in Romans, but the silence in 1 Corinthians does not, unless it was added.

Scholars who hold all of them to be Paul’s have to reconcile them instead. Some read the restrictions against the false teaching Timothy is told to stop in Ephesus; others take them as general, grounded, as the letter grounds them, in the order of creation.

The 1 Corinthians silence passage has a further problem: in a few western manuscripts the two verses come after verse 40 rather than where the printed text puts them. Some read a dislocation like that as the signature of something inserted. Others read it as later editors moving an awkward passage to sit beside the call for order.

Deacon, fellow worker and apostle in Paul’s letters did not mean what the same words mean in an institution with centuries of structure behind it. Reading later offices back into them overstates the case; reading them as merely honorary understates it, given that Paul uses the same words for himself and the men.

Junia’s title is disputed down to two Greek words. The phrase rendered "notable among the apostles" has been argued to mean "well known to the apostles", on how the adjective takes its complement, and answered by a survey of Hellenistic usage that found the inclusive sense without exception. Translations have gone both ways since: the NET and the ESV give "to".

The honest position is that women held recognised roles in the earliest congregations, that those roles are named without apology, and that their exact content is not recoverable.

Not one text in the New Testament is attributed to a woman. Everything it says about them comes under a man’s name or under none.

So the record shows women at work and is silent on what any of them made of it.

Christian bodies read this material to opposite conclusions. Some ordain women to every office and some to none. Some hold both views inside one church: the Church of England opened the episcopate to women in 2014 and undertook to keep a place for those who, on grounds of theological conviction, cannot receive their ministry.

The Catholic Church, which ordains only men, grounds that less in these letters than in the choice of men for the twelve apostles. Where the argument does turn on these chapters, it is partly about what the words mean, as with Junia, and partly about which passages are the governing ones and which are addressed to a situation.