Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion The Poer of the Hysterical Woman [Paperback]

This book studies the public reaction to the church, and its influence on the lives of early Christian women.The respectability of women is seen in a new light when one appreciates that outsiders focused on early church women and their activities as a reflection of the group as a whole. This text reveals the conviction of pagan writers that female initiative was central to Christianity's development.The respectability of women is seen in a new light when one appreciates that outsiders focused on early church women and their activities as a reflection of the group as a whole. This text reveals the conviction of pagan writers that female initiative was central to Christianity's development.A study of how women figured in public reaction to the church from New Testament times to the second century CE. MacDonald shows the conviction of pagan writers that female initiative was central to Christianity's development, and the belief that women inclined toward excesses in religion. Concern in the New Testament and early Christian texts about the respectability of women is seen in a new light when one appreciates that outsiders focused on early church women and their activities as a reflection of the group as a whole.Introduction: 1. Defining the task; 2. Women's studies in early Christianity and cultural anthropology; 3. Honour and shame; 4. Public, male/ private, female; 5. A social-scientific concept of power; Part I. Pagan Reaction to Early Christian Women in the Second Century CE: 1. Pliny; 2. Marcus Cornelius Fronto; 3. Lucius Apuleius; 4. Lucian of Samosata; 5. Galen of Pergamum; 6. Celsus; 7. Conclusion; Part II. Celibacy, Women, and Early Church Responses to Public Opinion: 1. Paul's teaching on marriage as a 'conversionist' response to the world; 2. Paul's focus on women holy in body and spirit in 1 Corinthians 7; 3. A focus on women in light of the values of honor and shame; 4. 1 Timothy 5.3-16 - second-century celibate women under public scrutiny; 5. When the privlã7