How Catholicism Changed Summary

Professor Brooten Lecture on “How Catholicism changed: From Official Approval of it to Prohibiting it”
In her lecture professor Brooten discusses the Pentateuch and the notion of a gender dichotomy present in the early church. In particular, she notes that enslaved men and women were different in the eyes of law. She begins by contrasting the rules for holding Hebrew slaves in the various books of the Pentateuch. She claims that in Exodus 21 men had to be released from slavery after six years of service, whereas this right was not extended to women. This changes in Deuteronomy where both Hebrew men and women had to be released after six years of service, at which point their master often gave them some sheep, wine, or other means to support themselves.
Gonzalez claims that Gnostics gave women power that they did not have in regular society because Gnostics were focused primarily on the spirit of Christ and considered his body to be unimportant. As a result, they did not value the physical differences between men and women and granted women more power in the church. As a response to Gnosticism granting women more rights, according to Gonzalez, Christianity began to restrict women’s role in the church. As a result, women during the second century had a noticeably diminished role then they had previously held in the first century (Gonzalez 73). Therefore, whether it is in the differential treatment and enforcement of laws for enslaved Israelites or in the role of women in the church, females in the early church were treated as subservient and had their rights unfairly limited when compared to their male counterparts in both early Judaism and