Is the Bible sexist?
Some of it describes a world that was, and some of it commands things Christians argue about to this day. But the thing to weigh is what it did in its own century: in a culture where a woman's testimony was inadmissible in court, all four Gospels make women the first witnesses of the resurrection — which is not what you write if you are managing your reputation.
Two things have to be held together, and most treatments of this drop one of them.
The Bible contains a great deal that is hard to read — women counted with property, laws that assume a man’s ownership of a household, passages telling women to keep silent. Christians who skip over those are not defending anything.
And the Bible did something in its own century that nothing else was doing. Both are true, and the second is easy to miss if you have never seen what it was standing next to.
What the alternative actually looked like
To judge a first-century text you have to know what first-century normal was.
Josephus, the Jewish historian, states plainly that a woman’s evidence should not be admitted in court, on account of the levity of her sex. Aristotle taught that a man’s virtue lies in commanding and a woman’s in obeying. In much of the Greek and Roman world women had restricted education, little legal standing and almost no public voice.
That is the water everyone was swimming in, including the writers of the New Testament.
The detail nobody would have invented
Now consider how the central claim of Christianity is reported.
Jesus is executed. The tomb is found empty. And the discovery is made by women, who are sent to tell the men — and the men do not believe them.
Luke 24:10-11KJVIt was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles. And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.Put yourself in the position of someone constructing a persuasive account in that culture. You would never do this. Your key witnesses would be men of standing. Making the whole thing rest on testimony that was legally worthless is the single worst decision available.
All four Gospels do it anyway. Historians treat that as one of the strongest signs that the accounts are reporting rather than composing — and it is also, in passing, an extraordinary thing to say about whose word counts.
How he behaved
The pattern runs through the ministry.
He talks theology at length with a Samaritan woman with an irregular marital history — crossing three lines at once, of sex, ethnicity and reputation. He defends a woman who chooses to sit and learn with the disciples rather than work in the kitchen, which was a student’s posture and not a woman’s place. Women travel with the group and fund it.
Rodney Stark, a sociologist rather than a theologian, argues that this is a major part of why the early church grew: women joined in disproportionate numbers because of how they were treated inside it compared to outside.
The passages that are genuinely hard
Honesty about the other side.
Paul writes that women should be silent in the churches. He tells wives to submit to their husbands. Those sentences exist and Christians read them differently.
Some things worth knowing before deciding what they mean. The same Paul greets a woman as a fellow apostle, names another as a deacon, and lists women among his most trusted colleagues — so whatever the silence passage means, he did not mean women had no role. The submission passage is preceded by a general instruction that everyone submit to one another, and followed by a command to husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church, which in context means dying for them. That was not the standard advice to Roman husbands.
And Christians disagree, sincerely and along denominational lines, about how far those instructions were addressed to particular situations. Anyone telling you their reading is the only possible one is not describing the state of the argument.
Objections answered
The Old Testament treats women as property.
Parts of it describe a society that did, and the law regulates that society rather than inventing it — while including provisions that were unusually protective for their time. It also opens with both sexes made in God’s image, in the same sentence, before any of the rest. That is where any Christian argument about equality starts.
If it's so pro-women, why has the church treated them badly?
It often has, and that is a fair charge that Christians should not dodge. Institutions with power tend to reproduce their surroundings. The measure is whether the failure is the teaching being followed or being ignored, and here the founder is the one who put women at the centre of the story.
Isn't 'equal in worth, different in role' just a way of dressing it up?
Many people find it so, and it is one of the sharpest disagreements inside Christianity rather than between Christians and everyone else. There are churches that ordain women and churches that do not, both arguing from the same texts. It is not a settled question with a public relations answer.
Shared ground, and where traditions differ
All Christians hold
All the traditions hold that men and women are equally made in God’s image and equally redeemed, and none of them teaches that women are of lesser worth.
Roman Catholic
Reserves priestly ordination to men while affirming equality of dignity, and gives Mary a place higher than any other created person.
Eastern Orthodox
Similarly ordains only men, and has a long tradition of women as saints, martyrs and theologians.
Protestant
Divided: many denominations ordain women and read the restrictive passages as addressed to specific first-century situations; others hold them as permanent.
Related questions
Inspired by OCCA, The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics — "How Does Jesus Revolutionise Attitudes Towards Women?". The argument is theirs; the words here are ours.
Did this answer the question?