The Bible is a patriarchal document — women are property in the Old Testament and told to be silent and submissive in the New. Christianity has oppressed women for two millennia.

Why people find it persuasive

Texts like 1 Timothy 2:12 and 1 Corinthians 14:34 are read aloud in churches today, and the historical record of women's exclusion from ordination, education, and authority across much of Christian history is real and extensive.

Important distinctions

• • Descriptions of a patriarchal ancient culture vs. prescriptions endorsing patriarchy as ideal.
• • Local, occasion-specific instructions (Corinth's particular disorder, Ephesus's particular false teachers) vs. universal, timeless commands.
• • Complementarian and egalitarian readings, both held by serious biblical scholars today, vs. one single 'the Bible says' position.
• • The text's own countercultural moments vs. the surrounding culture's norms it sometimes simply reflects.

Christian response

• • Genesis 1:27 makes both male and female equally the image of God, a strikingly high anthropology for its milieu, given that surrounding Ancient Near Eastern creation myths (Enuma Elish, Atrahasis) do not extend that dignity to women as such.
• • Jesus' own practice was remarkable for his context: he taught women directly (Luke 10:38-42, Mary at his feet — the posture of a rabbinical disciple), spoke theology with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) despite double social taboo, and made women the first witnesses to the resurrection (Matthew 28:1-10, Luke 24) at a time when women's testimony was not even considered legally valid in Jewish courts — a detail that counts as strong evidence for the honesty of the resurrection accounts, since a fabricated story would not choose women as its star witnesses.
• • Paul names and commends female co-workers with real authority: Phoebe as deacon (Romans 16:1), Junia as 'outstanding among the apostles' (Romans 16:7), Priscilla instructing Apollos alongside her husband (Acts 18:26), and states the baptismal principle that 'there is no male and female... in Christ Jesus' (Galatians 3:28).
• • The disputed passages (1 Timothy 2, 1 Corinthians 14) are read by a substantial body of contemporary evangelical and mainline scholarship (egalitarians such as N. T. Wright, Craig Keener) as addressing specific disorders in specific congregations — Ephesus troubled by false teachers targeting untrained women (1 Timothy 1:3-7), Corinth's chaotic worship gatherings — rather than as timeless universal bans; complementarian scholars dispute this, and the matter is genuinely contested among faithful readers, not settled by either side alone.
• • The historical record is mixed rather than uniformly oppressive: women led significant movements within Christianity (medieval abbesses with real ecclesial and even political power, Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Ávila as a Doctor of the Church, the Salvation Army's co-founding by Catherine Booth, and the ordination of women in a large share of contemporary Protestant denominations).

Christian counterresponse

That gap between principle and practice is real, and many Christians, including complementarians who still affirm women's full dignity and significant ministry roles, would concede that specific historical restrictions (denying women education, property rights, or a public voice) went beyond anything scripture requires and reflected surrounding culture rather than the text's own trajectory.