The Triumph of Christianity

The best estimate is that there were 131 males per 100 females in Rome, rising to 140 males per 100 females in the rest of Italy, Asia Minor, and North Africa.

The second chapter of the Didache (an early Christian text probably written in the first century) orders: “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.”

nearly half of Christian women (48 percent) had not married until they were eighteen or older.

writing in the second century, the historian Dio Cassius noted the extreme shortage of Roman women. In a remarkable essay, Gillian Clark pointed out that among the Romans, unmarried women were so rare that “we simply do not hear of spinsters.... There is not even a normal word for spinster.”

In keeping with their Jewish origins, Christians condemned the exposure of infants as murder.31 As Justin Martyr (100–165) put it, “we have been taught that it is wicked to expose even new-born children... [for] we would then be murderers.”32 So, substantially more Christian (and Jewish) female infants lived.

Christian women did enjoy far greater equality with men than did their pagan and Jewish counterparts. A study of Christian burials in the catacombs under Rome, based on 3,733 cases, found that Christian women were nearly as likely as Christian men to be commemorated with lengthy inscriptions. This “near equality in the commemoration of males and fe

Christians differed in this respect not only from pagans, but from Jews: “The Christian clergy... took a step that separated them from the rabbis of Palestine.... [T]hey welcomed women as patrons and even offered women roles in which they could act as collaborators.”25 As Wayne Meeks summed up: “Women... are Paul’s fellow workers as evangelists and

As Rabbi Eliezer is quoted in the Babylonian Talmud (ca. 90 CE ), “Better burn the Torah than teach it to a woman.” Indeed, elsewhere the Talmud advises: “Everyone who talketh much with a woman causes evil to himself.”11

Women were especially drawn to Christianity because it offered them a life that was so greatly superior to the life they otherwise would have led.