The circumstances of Christianity in the late second and third centuries threw up a remarkable literary genre, that of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. Continent women play a central role in these narratives. Yet the Apocryphal Acts should not be read as evidence for the actual role of women in Christianity. Rather, they reflect the manner in which Christian males of that period partook in the deeply ingrained tendency of all men in the ancient world, to use women 'to think with.' There is no doubt that women played an important role in the imaginative economy of the Church. Their presence condensed the deep preoccupation of male Christians with their own relations with the 'world,' with the ever present reality of a tainted and seductive pagan society that pressed up against the doors of their houses and abutted the closed spaces of their new meeting places."
Peter Brown, The Body And Society
