apologia


	Female Friendly: Part One One of the more unpleasant insinuations made by the novel The Da Vinci Code is that Christianity is a religion designed to oppress women. In fact there are many examples from Jesus’ life and resurrection that prove the opposite. What’s more, a look back at the early days of Christianity shows that women openly embraced the new faith faster than men, and with good reason. A dear female friend of mine who had been reading The Da Vinci Code recently said that it was making her re-evaluate how closely she should follow the words of the New Testament. The cause of her doubts was the book’s ‘factual’ assertion that the Gospels were put together by a group of conspiratorial men several hundred years after Jesus. In Dan Brown’s vision, this meeting – the Council of Nicaea - formed part of a giant plot by the emerging Church to steal from women the feminist freedoms they had enjoyed under "the pagans" who worshipped "the Goddess”. In addition to being historical baloney, this assertion is actually insulting to pagans: After all, no self-respecting pagan would worship a single Goddess! What is more, during the Roman period Christian women had many more benefits than their pagan counterparts. While most pagan girls were married off at around 11 years old before they even reached puberty (and often to men three times their age or more), Christian women had plenty of say in the issue and tended to marry around age 18. Moreover, both abortion (a huge killer of women at the time) and infanticide (the killing of newborn girls) were strictly prohibited by Christians. In fact, the sex ratio changed among Christian communities, which didn’t have the enormous shortage of women that plagued the rest of the Roman Empire. The Da Vinci Code states that “the sacred feminine" was at the heart of the early church, but was ruthlessly suppressed. In fact the church quickly proved to be a liberating force for women. The Apostle Paul instructs husbands to "love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her" (Ephesians 5:25). In other words, men were to be self-sacrificing and even to lay down their lives, if necessary, for their wives. Paul also affirmed spiritual equality for women in Galatians 3:28: "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." It is also clear from Paul’s writings that women were leaders in the early Church. Secular verification of this includes a letter by the Roman author and historian Pliny in which he says that the people he had tortured included two “deaconesses.” The early church fathers often noticed that the movement had more women than men. The idea that the Catholic Church (a particular bugbear for Brown) kept women down in later centuries also ignores some fundamental facts. What other religion made women writers like St. Theresa of Avila and St. Catherine of Siena part of the canon of religious literature? What other religion encouraged women to found and run giant hospitals? Women have since achieved rights, wealth, education and power in the nations of Christendom (and Israel) that remain missing even today in all other cultures. If the Apostles or the later compliers of the Bible intended to produce propaganda that would transfer power from women to themselves, they failed miserably. The New Testament depicts the disciples as men who were slow to understand, unwilling to suffer and incapable of loyalty. Women come out as the noble opposite, not least Mary Magdalene, on whom so much of the fantasy that is The Da Vinci Code is based. Jesus, who claimed to be the divine Son of God, was pro-woman like nobody else in his day, or ours. And, as we shall see in part two, this is the real story told by the Gospels.