Atheist Memes

Which itself has a very interesting backstory, as around 80% of academics recognize 1 Timothy as a second century forgery, and around half think the part in 1 Cor about women teaching is a later interpolation.

There was a sect of early Christianity which was my main research interest who claimed their sect came from a woman teacher. This group had a fair bit of overlap with the things Paul rejects in Corinth, who he says "recieved a different gospel/version of Jesus."

In the late first century, Corinth deposes the elders sent by the Roman church and the bishop of Rome writes them another letter (1 Clement) where he repeatedly emphasizes that youth should defer to their elders and that women should obey their husbands and be silent.

So you probably had a competing sect of early Christianity with an emphasis on youth and women (as this later 'heretical' sect did) which was causing trouble for the group who had better financing and institutional support, which later forges and possibly alters letters to denounce their competition by attacking their practices, one of which happened to be empowered women.

And then we got two millennia of misogyny that persists until today.

It's a real shame too. That other later sect is the only religious group in Western antiquity I'm familiar with that was centrally incorporating Greek atomism, which was the context in which they interpreted the mustard seed and sower parables - likely coming from Lucretius using the term for 'seed' in place of atomos in his widely celebrated poem on naturalism 50 years before Jesus was born, where he even described failed biological reproduction as "seed falling by the wayside of the path". (The sower parable is much more interesting with this perspective in mind, and might explain why in Mark it's the only one given a secret explanation in private which clumsily interpolates the scene where it takes place.)

While Christianity became unambiguously misogynistic, it's doubted whether or not this sentiment actually reflects the historical Paul and the early churches he moved amongst. Faced with having to choose which of his writings are more genuine: the inclusive writings or heavily patriarchal writings, it really does seem his more radical opinions were watered down by the later church which caved in to the pressure of the existing misogyny.

Paul regarded that men and women had equal access to Christ's grace (Gal 3:28) within a discourse in which he explains the point of law is a temporary restraint to limit sin but ultimately it ought to fall away. He names and thanks dozens of women in helping to run and support the house church networks. He names "Junia" as the only names female apostle (Romans 16:7). Calls others "co workers" and "fellow servants" in the gospel.

It all falls in line with the traditions that are least likely to have been invented given the prevailing sentiment : that women were the financial support of Christ's ministry (Luke 8:3), the first portrayed as gathering others to Christ (John 4:27-30), the first witnesses of the resurrection, the first commissioned by Christ to the take the news to others etc