Early Christianity was far better for women than the pagan classical civilization that preceded it.
What a Difference Christianity Makes Women and Honor Killings
A recent issue of Time magazine tells the story of Nirupama Pathak, an Indian journalist murdered by her own mother. Being charged with killing your own daughter by itself is enough to make the news. But what makes this story especially compelling for the Indian media is that Pathak’s mother is alleged to have killed her to avenge her family’s honor. By some estimates, dozens of such “honor killings” occur in India each year. It’s a crime that rightly shocks the Western conscience. It’s also a reminder of the way Christianity transformed the Western world.
According to prosecutors, Pathak was murdered because she wanted to marry a man who belonged to a lower caste. She then compounded her offense by becoming pregnant with his child.
The transgressing of caste boundaries lies behind the large majority of these killings in India. Despite the country’s rapid modernization, relations between upper-caste women like Pathak and lower-caste men are violently opposed, especially in rural areas.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the area where most of the “honor killings” take place is also where sex-selection abortion has created the worst gender imbalance in India. There are only 861 women for every 1000 men. It’s a place where “groups called khaps run kangaroo courts,” enforcing the “vice-like grip” they have over women and the demands of the caste system, and they do it through intimidation and murder.
In other words, it’s a world much like the classical one that Christianity turned upside-down.
In her new book, Paul Among the People, classics scholar Sarah Ruden writes the common view of the Apostle Paul as an “oppressor of women” could “hardly be more wrong.” With the exception of a handful of high-born matrons, the Roman world often treated women worse than it did cattle.
This was especially true of slaves, who comprised one-third of Rome’s population. They could expect beatings, rape, and, if they were “fortunate,” being forced into prostitution. It was a world where unwanted children were left to die of exposure-infanticide.
Even high-status women ranked, at best, third in her husband’s hierarchy of concerns, behind his parents and her children. Sexually, she was expected to be at her husband’s beck and call. Wives could be disposed of when their husbands no longer desired them.
Thus, when Paul wrote that the “husband should treat the wife’s body as his own,” he inverted the way marriage was seen in the classical world. As Ruden put it, the ridiculous idea that some promote that Paul saw women as “sexual and domestic servants” could only be the result of a “brain fever.”
Paul’s’ teaching about equality in the Church was, if anything, even more revolutionary. The distinctions between slave and free, high-born and plebian were so much a part of the classical world that Paul's teaching was scandalous. It was so scandalous that the pagan critic Celsus called Christianity a “religion of women, children and slaves.”
What Celsus thought as a criticism transformed the West and continues to transform communities today around the world.
The outrages in India and elsewhere are a reminder of the difference that Christianity has made, whether its contemporary critics are willing to admit it or not.
Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/what-a-difference-christianity-makes-45445/#0bKcoedKf6sMgVpG.99
The State of Women in Pagan Society
Unknown Christian woman of the early church
Male-biased sex selection is a problem we normally associate with the abortion practices of modern India and China, but in ancient Rome it was not only common, it was legal and socially expected. Stark notes that " Dio Cassius, writing in about 200, attributed the declining population of the empire to the extreme shortage of females," and indeed by modern estimates the population of Italy, Asia Minor and North Africa as a whole may have been 58% male and 42% female.
This disparity was largely brought about by exposure of unwanted newborns to the elements, a practice that was legal for all female and malformed male children under Roman law, and encouraged by both Plato and Aristotle. According to Stark, "A study of inscriptions at Delphi made it possible to reconstruct 600 families. Of these, only 6 had more than one daughter." The Roman historian Tacitus "charged that the Jewish teaching that 'it is a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child' was but another of their 'sinister and revolting' practices." Women's status was especially low in the East. Stark describes the situation for Athenian women:
In Athens, women were in relatively short supply owing to female infanticide, practiced by all classes, and to additional deaths caused by abortion. The status of Athenian women was very low. Girls received little or no education. Typically, Athenian females were married at puberty and often before. Under Athenian law a woman was classified as a child, regardless of age, and therefore was the legal property of some man at all stages in her life. Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. Moreover, if a woman was seduced or raped, a husband was legally compelled to divorce her. If a woman wanted a divorce, she had to have her father or some other man bring her case before a judge. Finally, Athenian women could own property, but control of the property was always vested in the male to whom she 'belonged.'
Stark caveats this depiction with a note that the situation was somewhat better for women in the city of Rome and in the West generally than in the East, but he also notes that Christianity took hold the quickest precisely in those Eastern cities where the status of women was lowest.
He mentions in the passage above that abortion was a factor in the unequal sex ratio in Rome. Again, we tend to think of abortion as a feature only of the modern world, but the ancient Romans practiced it with such frequency that, due to the primitive state of medicine in that period, researchers believe that it "was a major cause of death among women in the Greco-Roman world." In many cases, it was the husband who ordered the woman to abort the child. Under Roman law it was his right to do so; the woman had no legal option but to obey.
The subjection of women to men in Roman society could only have been exacerbated in the extreme by the practice of marrying young, often pre-pubescent, girls to much older men. While men tended to marry late, almost half (44%) of pagan women were married by age 14, and 10% by age 11, according to one study. It was normal and expected that these marriages be consummated immediately; we can only imagine the effect that must have had on these girls.
According to Stark, Rome had "a male culture that held marriage in low esteem." It also had very different standards of chastity for men and for women. He writes,
Although virginity was demanded of brides, and chastity of wives, men tended to be quite promiscuous and female prostitutes abounded in Greco-Roman cities--from the two-penny diobolariae who worked the streets to high-priced, well-bred courtesans (Pomeroy 1975). Greco-Roman cities also sustained substantial numbers of male prostitutes, as bisexuality and homosexuality were common (Sandison 1967).
As to why women were treated so poorly in the ancient world, Stark doesn't have a good explanation, though he argues somewhat circularly that men in societies in which men outnumber women will attempt to dominate them as "scarce resources."
But the fact is that it was so. It was into this world that Christianity came, with a vision of relations between the sexes that was not just attractive to women, it was revolutionary. Christianity would attract women in numbers that flipped the usual state of affairs in Roman society: among Christians women far outnumbered men. Within the Christian world they held positions of power and influence that were extraordinary in that time and place, and they were treated with a humanity that far exceeded anything they would have experienced elsewhere in Roman society.
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