St. Paul, Friend or Enemy of Women?
excerpt
There was probably no moment in early Christianity where women were totally included as equals with men. Christianity was born and developed in the context of patriarchal social structures in both the Jewish and Hellenistic worlds. But there were radical ideas floating around in early Christianity that suggested that gender hierarchy had been dissolved through baptism into Christ for a new humanity beyond gender. This is expressed in the baptismal formula used by St. Paul in Galatians 3:27-8: "For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
This baptismal formula was not invented by Paul, but belonged to the Hellenistic Jewish-Christian church that he joined upon his conversion. This church included women and men, slaves or former slaves, and freed men and women from Greek and Jewish backgrounds. This baptismal creed assured them that all the hierarchies between these different social statuses had been dissolved in Christ, that they all shared a new oneness in Christ. The gender part of this formula was probably linked from its beginning with celibacy. Women became equal with men by dissolving their traditional relations with men as wives. Thereby they were also freed to teach and preach in local assemblies and as traveling evangelists.
Although he accepted the practice that women could speak in church worship assemblies, Paul demanded that they should do so with veiled heads to indicate their continued secondary status in the order of creation (I Cor. 11:5). But the passage in I Corinthians 14: 33b-35--where it is said that women should not speak at all--is generally conceded by scholars today to have been an interpolation from the next generation after Paul. It was not part of the original text.
In the generation following Paul, Christian churches that looked to Paul as their founding evangelist became split on these teachings about women's role. Some groups in these second-generation Pauline churches continued and expanded the view that gender hierarchy was overcome through baptism. In Christ there was no more male and female. This also meant that reborn Christians should transcend marital relations and anticipate the Kingdom of God in which there will be no more marrying and giving in marriage (Luke 20:35). These Pauline Christians wrote texts, such as the "Acts of Paul and Thecla," which celebrates the story of a woman converted by Paul who rejects her fiancé, adopts men's clothing, and travels as an evangelist. Persecuted by the agents of family and state, she is vindicated by God through miraculous protection from harm. Paul reappears at the end of the story to affirm her role and commission her to preach in her hometown.
Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2004/03/St-Paul-Friend-Or-Enemy-Of-Women.aspx?p=2#ixzz20rPlNjXu
Yet Paul is credited for spreading the Christian faith.