The letters of Paul.
Occasional letters to specific churches with specific problems, written before anyone wrote a gospel. First Thessalonians, around 50 CE, is the oldest Christian document in existence. Seven are undisputed; the rest are argued about, and the arguments matter, because the harshest lines about women are in the disputed ones.
Paul's letters were written before the gospels, to congregations he knew, about problems those congregations were having, and they were never intended as systematic theology. Reading them as if they were is the source of a great deal of trouble. Scholars distinguish the seven undisputed letters — Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon — from the disputed ones, and the distinction is not academic housekeeping: the sharpest restrictions on women in the New Testament sit in 1 Timothy, one of the most widely disputed, and the line telling women to be silent in 1 Corinthians 14 is regarded by many textual scholars as a later insertion, since it sits in different places in different manuscripts and contradicts what Paul says three chapters earlier about women prophesying. Meanwhile Romans 16 has Paul greeting Phoebe as a deacon and Junia as outstanding among the apostles, and the name Junia was quietly given a male ending in printed Greek editions from the sixteenth century until it was corrected in the twentieth.
The same ground, other faiths
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