As a young girl, I remember listening to stories about church history, noticing how often they featured courageous men. I was confused and slightly disappointed at finding few stories that featured female characters. Words like “patriarchy” and “feminism” were unknown to me; I simply wanted to see myself in the grand narrative of God’s redemption of the world. As I continued to read the Bible, I highlighted the stories of brave, interesting women like Deborah, Tamar, and Hannah. The stories were there, it just took a deeper look to find them. Mary C. Earle writes, “As has often been the case throughout women’s history, particular women found ways to live within the accepted structures of their societies and yet also to be true to themselves and to Christ.”
From the birth of Jesus to his resurrection, women have always been an intrinsic part of the establishment and spread of Christianity. In spite of this, the past two thousand years of recorded church history have been written primarily by and about men. In Roger E. Olson’s Story of Christian Theology, he remarks that it is unfortunate that women’s contributions to theology are not well documented. However, he goes on to state, this is “not justification for revisionist histories that invent them.” What Olson fails to acknowledge is that the dominant narrative of history is already inaccurate due to its incompleteness. In this paper, I will amplify several stories of women in the early church, demonstrating that without a greater emphasis on their contributions, our understanding of history will continue to centre patriarchal narratives and will miss the undercurrent of feminine resistance.
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