Female Deacons, 3

In the previous post on this subject, my goal was a simple one. I wanted to show that there's plenty of evidence to indicate that at least some of the Judaisms in the ancient world recognized female leaders. There were, in fact, women who served as heads of the synagogues. And some synagogues had priestesses.

Again, here's the connection I want to make. More than anything else, it is the synagogue that provides the setting for the establishment and growth of earliest Christianity. Recording the first mission trip, Luke tells us "At Iconium Paul and Barnabas went as usual into the Jewish synagogue" (Acts 14:1).

Evidently, Christian assemblies were even called "synagogues." Here I'm referring to the Greek text of James 2:2. Most English translations lose their nerve and say something like, "Suppose a man comes into your meeting . . . " (NIV). But the text quite literally says, "For if a man comes into your synagogue . . . "

When we put the facts together, what seems clear enough is that the earliest Christians wouldn't have blinked at the idea of a female appointee called a diakonos, an official "servant." If we have a problem with the idea, it must be remembered that it is our problem. It certainly would not have been theirs.

One reason I mention this has to do with an objection to my theory. That objection goes something like this: Because Judaism in particular, and the ancient world in general, were so very patriarchal, female appointees among the earliest Christians would have been unthinkable. But in light of the evidence, it should be obvious that this objection survives only by ignoring the facts. To the next point.

I mentioned in the first post that female deacons are known in early Christian history, the New Testament foreground. The earliest and best support for this view can be found in an ancient letter.

In the year 112 A.D., less than two decades after the death of the Apostle John, a Roman governor named Pliny (the Younger), wrote to his boss, the Emperor Trajan.

What I find especially interesting about their correspondence is that Pliny asks what he should do about one of the many odd and suspicious groups in the province he now governs. What should he do with people publicly accused of being Christians?

Trajan had previously sent Pliny to serve as governor of a rough and rebellious part of the Empire, the Province of Bythinia, a region where strange and superstitious clubs were common, one of them being the church. Pliny wants to know if the way he has handled things so far is the right way, or if there something more the Emperor can tell him regarding interrogations, trials, and sentencing.

In one section of his letter, Pliny explains that, in order to enforce his prohibition of political associations (here we must remember that the expression "Jesus is Lord" would have been heard by Romans as political, rather than religious, speech), Pliny had found it "necessary to extract the real truth" from the Christians. He had done this, he says, "with the assistance of torture, from two female slaves, who were styled deaconesses."

The significant Latin word in this passage, of course, is ministrae, rendered "deaconesses" in the standard English translation of the correspondence, and rightly so. Had Pliny wanted to say that these two women were simply members or were a part of the Christian community, he could and certainly would have said so without using what can only be understood as a sort of technical term: ministrae, which means "ministers" or as I would call them, "deaconesses."

Thoughts? Comments? Criticisms?

A Bit of Bibliography:

I do not currently have access to a copy of the standard text of Pliny which is found in the Loeb Classical Library. The Loeb series is so nice because you get the Latin or Greek text on one side of an opening, and translation into English on the opposite side. To read, in the Loeb edition, the letter quoted in this post, you would need to get this volume of the series.

In this post, I have quoted from an English translation of Pliny that I found on-line. You can read the letter I'm referring to here.