Female Priesthood

Female priesthood, as currently conceived in mainline monotheistic religions, is a cultural and historical aberration. There is a fascinating article in Wikipedia on ordination of women which, if the reader is patient and thorough in reading and "drilling down" to source articles, clearly demonstrates the following points of interest to this issue:


 * Not every instance of ordained priesthood covered in the article is actually a ministerial function. Case in point: Buddhist priesthood is actually a kind of life devoted to advanced Buddhist discipline, with no particular emphasis on ministry and no concept of divine intercession.
 * No regular instance of ordained woman priesthood for a monotheistic religion existed prior to the 20th century.
 * The only contemporary monotheistic faith which boasts a regular female priesthood is Christianity, and the Christian sects which have a regular woman priesthood account only for a small minority of all Christians. In particular, no Catholic (whether Orthodox or in communion with Rome) religion recognizes a female priesthood.
 * Judaism is separated into multiple sects in the contemporary world. None have a ministerial priesthood, as such, though ancient Judaism had a major role for this position. Among contemporary Jewish sects, only the one known as Orthodox excludes women from the position of ministerial teacher, or rabbi, which, in many respects, emulates the role of priest.
 * Likewise, Islam has no specific priesthood, but the role of imam comes close. (Indeed, the role of imam most closely resembles that of rabbi.) There does not appear to be a regular place for women imams in any major Islamic sect, however.
 * The only contemporary non-Christian religions with a regular woman ministerial priesthood are polytheistic.

Clearly, this article is mostly concerned with contemporary female priesthood, but it begins with a discussion of historical polytheistic religions that had a regular female ministerial priesthood. Indeed, a survey of polytheistic religions makes clear that every one of them in all periods of history had a female ministerial priesthood. No monotheistic religion of antiquity recognized a regular female priesthood.

This disparity is of considerable interest to anyone seriously concerned with this question. It clearly begs the question, why this historically consistent difference?

One possible explanation is that all genuine monotheistic religions (arguably, even the religion of Zoroaster) trace their pedigree to ancient Judaism, and Judaism was highly paternalistic from the beginning. Men were the heads of families and men led their families in the practice of prayer. Indeed, much of the Bible is concerned with the religious corruptions that crept into families when male descendants of Jacob married women from other cultures, and the latter introduced polytheistic devotional practices.

While this may be satisfying to some, it fails to account for any female priesthood of Christianity (up until the 20th century), even though polytheistic cultures, especially Greeks and Romans, had a female ministerial priesthood. The male leaders of Christianity, known as apostles, were clearly ready to credit women in special roles of witness, even prophesy and intercession, but not priesthood, and, in at least some instances, not even as teacher. They were, however, satisfied to eject any religious requirement for other practices that remain unique to Judaism, such as male circumcision or dietary restrictions.

It's important to recognize that one of the key functions of the ministerial priesthood is ritual sacrifice for the purpose of divine intercession. Roles like imam and rabbi do not perform such a function, and contemporary Judaism and Islam do not have such practices.

For some reason, the subject has failed to attract the kind of deep historical or theological analysis that it clearly needs and clearly deserves.

To quote Church Lady, "Well, now. Isn't that interesting?"

Given the post-modern presupposition of gender equality, however, I suspect no serious study of this topic is possible in contemporary society.