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If some “Gnostics” seemed to defame women and the Old Testament, so did the “orthodox” in a different way. Among the Church Fathers, death was explicitly connected with sin, particularly with Eve’s sin rather than Adam’s, functioning to define all future human existence without Christ. This interpretation, which is based on Genesis 2-3, as interpreted through a tendentious reading of Paul, especially in Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, can be seen as early as the Epistle of Barnabas 12:5b6 It is more characteristic of Latin than Greek fathers.

Vilifying Eve and women as the agents of “sin,” at the same time, is parallel with or even dependent on a Jewish apocalyptic context in which the sinfulness of humanity is stressed. Even in Paul, the theme receives unusual emphasis (Romans 5:12-13). The interpretation that death is a punishment due to the sin of sexuality is massively developed in later church tradition, which we now associate preeminently with Augustine but was present already in the second century.7 The progressive identification of sin with sexuality more and more came to define a state that humanity enters at birth and that can only be remedied through the sacraments of the church.

The “feminization of Original Sin” may be related to the equally polemical attempt to show that the Jewish religion has been entirely surpassed in the faith of Christianity. If Jews did not accept Jesus, they could be vilified as Satan’s accomplices.8 Thus, the Jews become the symbols for whatever the Gospel is not. Although the patriarchs might escape Original Sin, the Jews remain forever in sin and sexual lust; lack of Jewish interest in asceticism only furthered the stereotype. The need to reverse an Original Sin, so that without Jesus’ sacrifice all humanity is condemned by Eve’s sin, preserves the unique importance of the church’s ritual and sacramental life for Christian life. Original Sin makes for very effective missionizing, especially as the fear of the end of days dissipate once the millenarian context of the Jesus movement and the Gospel period is vitiated. Original Sin replaced the coming eschaton as the guarantor of faith. Both created a world in which only Christians could achieve salvation; thus, all need the ritual sacramants of the church. Under these circumstances not to proselytize is a moral failing because it witholds the gift of salvation from those outside the church.

This development, which we have already seen in abundance in the Christian apocrypha, a result of the combination of notions of resurrection with the Platonic notion of the immortal soul, parallels the demotion of Mary Magdalene in the post-Gospel tradition. Mary Magdalene was already understood as a woman of low repute redeemed, due to her being (dubiously) equated with the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53-8:11). Peter is normally considered the head of the church not only because he was given the keys to the kingdom in Matthew but because he was the first apostle to view Jesus in the resurrection.9 Yet, strictly speaking, it was Mary Magdalene (possibly together with Mary the mother of Jesus and other women of the movement) who first saw Jesus in his resurrection state.

The notion that Christianity was due to the theophanic visions of women was evidently too dangerous to be allowed to stand. Since men had the opportunity to build careers within the church, it was Peter rather than Mary who was given the right of priority. The apostolic succession was founded upon the list of early appearances of the resurrected Jesus, almost unconsciously honed down to the men who first saw the resurrected Jesus. Thus, the apostolic tradition is quintessentially a male tradition while there is good evidence that the religious experience on which the church was founded occurred quite frequently in women as well. One of the characteristics of the Gnostics is that they valued this experience more highly; some Gnostics raised women to the level of priests and even bishops.10