From Storytelling to Written Text: The Loss of Early Christian Women's Voices

Abstract

Scholars today generally agree that women were more prominent in early Christianity than the evidence of the Second Testament suggests. In this article I argue that a major reason for the loss of early Christian women's voices was the shift from an oral to a manuscript medium. The few men who were literate tended to minimize and trivialize the stories about women in composing the written manuscripts. First I retell an ancient story, then briefly describe literacy and orality in antiquity. Then I discuss the question of oral vs. written media and access to authority. Next, I describe what happened to women's folk tales as they were transformed into the print medium by men. Finally, I describe the traces of similar minimalizing and distortion of stories about women to be found in the Gospels.