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"What women these Christians have!"
--4th-century pagan philosopher Libanius

"Many women have received power through the grace of God and have performed many deeds of manly valor."
--Clement of Alexandria

"Every woman who makes herself a man shall enter the kingdom of heaven."
--the Gospel of Thomas, a 2nd-century Gnostic work

"She was in the front line in condemning the heretics."
--Jerome, on Marcella

"A woman, however learned and holy, may not take upon herself to teach in an assembly of men."
--the Synod of Carthage, 398 A.D.

"You are the Devil's gateway; you are the unsealer of that tree; you are the first forsaker of the divine law; you are the one who persuaded him whom the Devil was not brave enough to approach!"
--Tertullian, to women

"When [the women] came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven... But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense."
--Luke 24:9-11

"These people do not know that while Barak trembled, Deborah saved Israel, that Esther delivered from supreme peril the children of God … Is it not to women that our Lord appeared after His Resurrection? Yes, and the men could then blush for not having sought what the women had found."
--Jerome, after criticism for dedicating his books to women

Copyright © 1988 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christian History magazine.
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