AHC: Female Clergy

Create a timeline in which only women were allowed to become christian priests (and bishops and even patriarchs). When and why did it happen? What is the theologocal explanation? And who is responsible?
 
Not going to happen. Women in power where scrubbed from the bible by Constantine (if not before).

The only way this would work if is the disciples had all been female.

The best way to get get a female clergy is to worship a goddess, so have Christianity to reform around Virgin Mary, not her son.
 
Simply stating that something is not possible, only tells me that someone is too lazy to think about it and does not want others to think about it. It is a challenge. So saying that something is not possible does not count. Finding a way to make it possible is the challenge.
In this case it means to find a way to transform christianity into a religion with a exclusively female clergy without changing the religion too much.
perhaps one of the church fathers wrote that he did not trust his fellow men with so much power and reminds them that Maria Magdalena was the apostle of apostles before his fellow church fathers merged her with two other women. And he reminds them that those letters that speak against women in the church are forgeries. And he then demands that only women should lead the church because they stand outside politics.
 

Delta Force

Banned
Unlikely to occur for political reasons. Ancient Rome was a patriarchy and the male leadership is not going to give up its power without a fight. There may emerge a sect that allows it, but it would likely not last long. Once canon is developed it is highly likely such notions would not be allowed. I think that equal power and role is a lot more likely than matriarchy.
 
The only way I can think of is if Jesus chose only female apostles. It is thought that only men are ordained for that is what was divinely chosen to be proper, for reasons beyond us. The same way we use bread and wine in the Eucharist. It is not that bread and wine are superior, merely it was chosen for some reason. Thus, if Jesus chose only female apostles, it would be thought that females were chosen as the proper gender for ordination.
 
And what about the fact that there were more women than men among the early christians? And that Maria Magdalena was the apostle of apostles before the church merged her with two different (and unnamed) women?
And what abot the fact that exclusively female priesthoods did exist in ancient Rome?

Use your imagination and find a way! And the PoD should not earlier than the legendary foundation of the church and also not later than Constantine the Great.
 
The stumbling block is your saying only women. I might go to bat for gender equity, which appears to actually exist in Acts and has some implied Gospel sanction in the role of Mary Magdalene, the story of (another) Mary and her sister Martha; indeed the whole tone of the Gospels stresses general human equality.

I just can't see how one would go beyond accepting that a woman can be as good as a man for priesthood to excluding men from it. There's just no Gospel precedent for Jesus doing so, and nothing in the dynamic of late Rome that would give such a movement any traction.

To put it bluntly, why would men convert to such a religion? One strength of Christianity OTL was that it didn't exclude women the way Mithraism did. Children have a strong tendency to adopt and retain the religion of their mothers, Christianity could and did establish roles for women within the Church that strengthened it as an institution and I can easily see the parallel hierarchy of women within it growing to be more formidable than OTL. But not to the point of turning the tables and excluding men! Even boys raised to accept their sacral inferiority would be easily drawn, when older, to some countermovement that affirmed them, unless they had at least equality.

Why wasn't the reverse true, and why did Christianity not falter on the stumbling block of patriarchy? Actually, in my personal case, that's a big part of what did happen; I stopped believing, as I was raised to devoutly believe, that the Catholic Church and indeed Christianity in general, was the fount of Truth in large part because of the deep layering of the whole tradition with patriarchy, despite the very large counterweighting of that mindset with an ample legacy of women's powerful and inspirational roles; it seemed clear enough to me that at a deep ideological level the broad message of universal human equality and the specific examples of the importance of thousands of particular women was undermined by persistent patriarchy that had no place in a modern world and was always oppressive throughout history, no matter how rosy a light it was placed in. So I attribute the gender imbalance of Christianity as we know it both to the predominance of patriarchy throughout most of known history and the fact that Christianity grows out of such roots, and such gender balance as it has achieved is due to women showing their worth despite such ideology.

It is, in the last analysis, still a patriarchial religion. To adopt, develop, and defend gender equality, either through leveling roles and making them open to all, or through developing strong interwoven parallel institutions for women with a clear balance of power, seems possible (and good) to me. Maybe I'd still be a churchgoer and believer yet if that had happened. To turn the tables and actually limit men to a clearly secondary role--that's just not Christianity, it's some sort of alternative Goddess religion--at that, probably not a realistic one but some mirror-image caricature imagined and feared by patriarchalists with bad consciences.
 
You are right. It makes more sense if gender equity comes first and then something happens that removes men from playing an important role in the church.
 
The only way this would work if is the disciples had all been female.

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for all we know they originally were if they exsisted...the bible has being rewriten, translated, picked apart and added too for so long, its impossible to be certain whats true and what isnt (minus stuff that can be historically and archeologicaly proven from other sources)
 
Unlikely to occur for political reasons. Ancient Rome was a patriarchy and the male leadership is not going to give up its power without a fight. There may emerge a sect that allows it, but it would likely not last long. Once canon is developed it is highly likely such notions would not be allowed. I think that equal power and role is a lot more likely than matriarchy.

Maybe that is why they do it, so the Church can't be a threat to the political power structure, made up just of women?
 
Maybe that is why they do it, so the Church can't be a threat to the political power structure, made up just of women?
That could work until the end of the WRE. After that they would have found their place in the political power structure and even created a realm under direct control of the Church (in OTL by using a forgery (Donation of Constantine) to persuade a newly crowned king to make a similiar donation (Donation of Pepin)). And even the practice of enfeoffing bishops with fiefs could happen for the same reasons they had happened in OTL.
 
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The way I see it, the only way you're going to get female clergy is if there was a matriarchal nation (ie Amazons), existing during the early Christian time period. If there were missionaries sent to such a nation, even the most deep rooted patriarchal religion would have to bend its rules concerning women in power in order to avoid offending the local power structure.

Because there were no matriarchal nation(s) that existed in OTL however, the early church leaders thus didn't have to deal with the issue of church leadership in an Amazonian society.
 
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