Handmaids of the Gods Divine Women

From the dawn of time, men and women have felt the need to worship.

To make sense of life and what lies beyond.

To find a purpose and to bring a shape to human existence.

Women have always been at the heart of our relationship with the divine.

But this part of our history is often hidden.

If you leave out Jesus and the Apostle Paul,

it's perfectly possible to tell the story of early Christianity

without ever mentioning a man.

I think the wives of the Prophet would be quite shocked

if they saw many Muslim-majority countries today.

For thousands of years, all over the world,

religion has shaped the lives of billions.

This is why I want to go back,

to uncover the remarkable and neglected stories

of women and religion.

Their stories can unlock a secret history of the world.

It's not the male God who created this universe. It's the female.

I've been back to a world where fearsome goddesses

had power over life and death.

Now, I'm travelling to a time

when real women spoke directly with the gods.

If you take women out of Greek religion, it's basically empty.

When the fate of an empire depended on a woman's virginity.

And I discover the true history of the first Christians.

She's wearing a vestment that could only be worn by ordained priests.

I'm going in search of a world

where priestesses walked hand in hand with the divine.

In Ancient Greece, there was a goddess of extraordinary power.

Aphrodite.

We're used to thinking of Aphrodite

as a kind of benign patron of romantic love,

but for the Greeks, she was far more dark and dangerous.

The mother of the gods, Gaia,

had grown tired of having sex with her husband, the god of the sky.

So, in cahoots with her son, she cut off his testicles.

These were flung into the sea.

From the seething waters, the goddess Aphrodite emerged.

She was sex incarnate, with more than a whiff of danger.

"Shimmering-throned, immortal Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus,

"enchantress, I implore thee, O goddess,

"fulfil me in what I yearn to do. Be my ally in all things."

These words are around 2,700 years old,

sung by a female poet called Sappho.

One of the rare images we have of her is from the 5th Century BC,

200 years after her death.

She's an elusive figure, but she's one of my heroines,

because to know Sappho is to enter the charged world

of worshipping Aphrodite.

My Sappho trail starts, not in Greece,

but in a hidden corner of a city here in Britain.

Throughout the ancient world,

she was celebrated as one of its greatest poets.

For centuries, Sappho's poems were lost,

known only through broken lines

reproduced in the works of classical writers.

But today in Oxford,

scholars are transforming our understanding of Sappho.

I'm just about to take you somewhere that I really love.

And I have to say that I'm genuinely excited to be here.

I don't want to overstate the case, but I think what's hidden up here

qualifies as the eighth wonder of the ancient world.

Just over 100 years ago,

two young classicists from Oxford, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt,

came across an ancient rubbish dump

in an Egyptian city called Oxyrhynchus.

The rubbish was being used as organic fertiliser by local farmers.

But Grenfell and Hunt knew that they had struck gold.

They grabbed what they could and shipped it back to Oxford.

Now, when you look more closely at what they brought back,

you can see just why this rubbish is so special.

There were hundreds and hundreds of these tin boxes,

and you can see when this one was packed.

It was March 3rd, 1900.

Underneath the packing paper here, we have the fragments themselves.

And these are covered in words.

Here you've got Egyptian hieroglyphs and Coptic and Arabic

and Latin, and lines and lines of Ancient Greek.

This room holds a library of writing that had been lost

for close on 2,000 years from all over Asia Minor, North Africa

and the eastern Mediterranean.

Among the finds being discovered here

are fragments of Sappho's lost poetry.

Dirk Obbink is in charge of translating this vast archive.

Rumour has it, you think you might have come across

a new fragment of the poet, Sappho.

Er, yes. This is it, or possibly a new fragment of Sappho.

It's actually very damaged, isn't it?

Yes, it's the just the ends of the lines of a poem.

You can see them here. They have uneven endings.

And what makes you think this might be Sappho?

What characteristics has it got?

It's set out in the form of lyric poems

and it contains some of the language that Sappho uses elsewhere.

You can see them here.

That means flourishing or delighting or revelling

in beautiful, bright, shiny, nice things.

And then the reference to dancing.

I know that sounds a bit tentative,

but that's how the other fragments were built up,

out of jigsaw-like puzzle pieces.

So it's a cumulative process.

One of the reasons Sappho survives in fragmentary form

is that across time her work was censored, destroyed,

considered too hot to handle.

Her sacred poetry opens up a sensuous, remarkable world.

To experience this for myself,

I'm tracing the journey that young girls across the Mediterranean

made 2,700 years ago to study under Sappho on her island home.

I should probably admit that I'm a bit of a Sappho addict.

It's not just because her poems are fragmentary,

and so it's genuinely exciting when any new lines are found.

It's also because she writes so lusciously, so exquisitely,

both about the Greek landscape and about what it is to be human.

She describes winds caressing soft bodies...

And, actually, she's the first ever to describe love as bittersweet,

although she's more accurate, and she talks about it as being sweet

and then bitter.

"When I look at you even a moment, I can't speak.

"My tongue snaps and subtle fire races under my skin."

Thousands of years after these lines were composed,

Sappho's legacy lives on.

It's because of her that we have the words "Sapphic" and "lesbian",

meaning women's love of women,

because many of Sappho's poems are addressed to women and girls.

But, for me, Sappho means so much more.

She offers a window on to a mysterious world.

What you have to remember about Ancient Greece

is that there was no separate word for religion.

There were gods and goddesses everywhere and in everything -

in every breath of wind, around every corner -

and so keeping that supernatural world on-side

was an immensely important job.

Sappho reveals how even falling in love was an act of the gods.

The deity who presided over love was Aphrodite,

along with her tricky consort, Eros.

And this holds the key to understanding who Sappho really was.

Women were believed to be primal creatures,

closely connected to the elemental, life-giving forces of the earth,

and so Sappho was well-placed to interpret the will of Aphrodite.

It seems that through reciting her poetry with young girls,

Sappho was fulfilling the role of a priestess.

'Edith Hall studies the lives of the women of Ancient Greece

'and her research suggests that Sappho was more than simply a poet.'

We don't know whether she actually ran something like a school

or whether it was more that she was in charge of rituals at a temple,

but almost all the poems we've got any substance of,

any kind of length of, are actually hymns to Aphrodite

and they're actually ones where they're asking Aphrodite

to come into the presence of her and other young women.

So we know that those are designed to be performed in temples,

which makes it highly likely that she is some kind of priestess.

Why is it important for people on earth

to understand Aphrodite's power?

Well, the Greeks were just a lot less hypocritical than we are

and they divided up their female gods,

so when you wanted to attract a lover

and asked her to give you special allure, you went to Aphrodite.

Women do seem to have this kind of special relationship with the divine.

Why is that? What do you think is going on here?

Women were certainly seen as being much more in touch with the physical self,

with giving birth and life and with dying.

Women have a particularly close relationship with Aphrodite.

In many temple cults, we know there were lots of women servants.

But there's something about Aphrodite

which means that women were absolutely regarded as symbolising sex.

Through her sensuous poetry, Sappho was performing a vital role -

educating young women about the world ahead of them

and about the charged power of love.

In Sappho's day, poetry wasn't written down, but recited,

accompanied by a lyre and dancing.

And today, in Sappho's birthplace, the ghosts of these rituals survive.

Local girls are taught the very steps

their ancestors would have learnt, close on 3,000 years ago.

Sappho's sacred poetry seemed to give women a sense of themselves,

but Ancient Greece was no feminist paradise.

Women knew their place,

as was all too apparent 200 years after Sappho

in the city that gave birth to one of the greatest political experiments of human civilisation.

You could argue that what happened here in Greece

gave us the building blocks for Western civilisation -

a belief in democracy, a belief in freedom of speech

and a fixed and firm notion

that women were very definitely second-class citizens.

Women were often not allowed out during daylight hours.

Some had their faces completely veiled, few were educated

and a woman's most celebrated virtue was her silence.

One popular saying by the poet Semonides described,

"Her man couldn't stop his wife barking,

"even after he'd knocked her teeth out with a stone."

Most histories lionise the glorious achievements of Athens' men.

But by focusing just on the obvious triumphs, conquests in war

and monumental buildings, a truer, richer picture is missed.

Up on the sacred Acropolis rock,

most tourists head straight for the Parthenon,

ignoring an overgrown corner that was once home to a group of young girls,

tasked to serve the Athenian state.

I've come here with historian Judy Barringer.

This was the location where the Arrephoroi lived.

These are young girls who were between the ages of seven and 11,

who lived here on the Acropolis for a period of time -

about nine months -

and there were two to four of these girls.

And these were from elite, aristocratic families.

On the brink of puberty,

these young girls were here to enact a mysterious religious ceremony.

They had to leave from the Acropolis with some baskets on their heads

and in these baskets were unseen things,

things they were forbidden to look at.

And they had to take them down a staircase to a place near,

or in, a shrine of Aphrodite in the gardens.

These are the steps they'd have used?

These are the very steps they'd walk down. They'd go down here.

Well, as a mum, my heart goes out to these little girls.

because we're not going to dare go down those steps,

-which are pretty steep, and they were doing it, on their own, at night...

-Yes, it's at night.

Walking down here with their baskets of mysterious goods.

Which they can't drop and they're not supposed to look into.

What we hear from ancient sources is what was in the baskets

were clay models of either fruits or snakes,

or phalluses, genitalia, or all three.

And so these were really sacred objects, important things.

If you say they're walking down here to the shrine of Aphrodite,

there must be something sexual going on here as well.

Because they're on the cusp of puberty, aren't they,

if they're kind of up to age 11, 12?

Girls married very young in antiquity.

We think as soon as they had passed puberty,

as soon as they were menstruating and ready to bear children,

they would be married.

Many scholars have seen this as moving from the realm of Athena,

here on the surface of the Acropolis, down the staircase

to a shrine of Aphrodite, that is moving from virginity to sexual love

or preparation for marriage and motherhood, eventually.

And if it's a rite of passage to marriage,

then it's extremely important in terms of symbolic fertility.

These girls were enacting a ritual to safeguard the fertility of the whole society.

What was at stake was nothing less than the survival of the Athenians themselves.

Religion gave these young women a vital role.

And they weren't alone.

All over Athens, women served as priestesses.

They were physically the keepers of the keys of huge temples,

personally wealthy, and their voices, even in the male-only,

democratic assembly, could be heard.

Religion made them matter.

In a world which treated women as worthless,

priestesses enjoyed high status.

Life's quite tough for women,

so do you think this is kind of one moment

where it becomes more bearable and more than that,

where they really do have some kind of power and control?

They certainly do have power and control in religion.

If you take women out of Greek religion, it's basically empty.

They are really central in virtually every aspect of Greek religion,

from ritual to the goddesses themselves.

My next destination is a place where a group of women

were considered so sacred, the fate of a civilisation depended on them.

The Romans aped Greek art, Greek ideas, Greek gods.

Aphrodite became Venus.

Zeus, Jupiter.

Rome did everything Greece did to the power of X.

Mighty Rome also permitted the influence of women in the religious sphere

and one story in particular reveals an intriguing insight

into how Rome viewed its women.

The Roman Forum was once the political and religious centre of the Eternal City.

Here, right in the heart of ancient Rome,

there was a religious institution

that the Romans believed pre-dated even Romulus and Remus.

Its initiates were thought to be responsible

for the security of the city itself.

And each and every one of them was a woman.

Their cult was said to have lasted for over 1,000 years.

They were six priestesses, known as the Vestal Virgins.

The criteria for becoming a Vestal was very strict.

Only prime specimens would pass the test.

The highest-ranking priest in Rome, the Pontifex Maximus,

selected the girls between the ages of six and ten.

They had to be of noble birth, both their parents had to be alive

and they had to be free of any kind of mental or physical deformity.

But the key condition that they had to agree to

for at least the next 30 years was to remain virgins.

And every day of their service,

each of the girls was to wear a wedding dress.

Free from any male guardianship,

they became the brides of Rome itself.

To find out about their extraordinary lives,

I've come to the remains of the extremely grand villa where the Vestals once lived

to meet Corey Brennan from the American Academy in Rome.

In a weird way, the individual Vestals were the embodiment of the Roman state

and they had no family. They were totally on their own.

This was unique for women. No-one owned them.

But, on the other hand, all eyes were on them, as well.

And how far would these lives bear any relation

to the lives of ordinary women in Rome?

For ordinary women, there could not be more of a gulf.

If you were going to a gladiatorial game at the Coliseum,

where you would see the Vestal Virgins is in the front rows.

Where the other women would be would be at the top tier,

in the nosebleed section with the slaves.

So there's an enormous, enormous gap between the Vestal Virgins

and ordinary women.

Right next to the house of the Vestals

was the temple of the goddess they served.

Her name was Vesta,

and she was the deity in charge of the hearth and of fire.

And the single most important duty of the Vestals

was to keep her sacred fire alive.

The Romans believed that if the sacred fire kept burning,

then Rome would survive.

And the fire of Rome holds the key

to why the Vestals had to be virgins.

Why was this virginity so important?

I mean, for the people of Rome, what did their virginity represent?

The virginity goes part and parcel with a larger idea of perfection.

Their purity resembled, or mirrored, the purity of the flame itself.

They have to remain virgins, in a way,

because they really had to keep the fire going at all times.

Any distraction whatsoever from this very important work

was too great to risk.

So the whole idea of having sexual liaisons

or really any sort of non-prescribed activity,

all of this was a danger to the flame that represented a continuity

and safety of the Roman state.

The Vestals' virginity, their capacity to create life,

stored and held back, was the potent force which fuelled Vesta's flame.

The Vestals, arguably, had the most important job in Rome.

But status came at a price.

They lived on a knife-edge.

For the crime of allowing the fire to go out,

a Vestal would be taken to a dark room by the Pontifex Maximus,

where she'd be stripped and beaten.

But there is another crime that carried an even greater punishment.

If the Vestals lost their virginity,

then they were no longer able to protect Rome,

and that deserved more than just a beating.

Ancient historians Cicero and Asconius tell us

that in 114 BC, not one, but three Vestals were accused of the crime of incestum -

losing their precious virginity.

Their names were Marcia, Aemelia and Licinia.

A slave who worked for the Vestals

let slip that the three were no longer virgins.

Marcia, he said, had taken just one lover.

But the other two had slept with many men,

including one another's brothers.

There were even rumours of group sex.

But it was only Marcia who was found guilty and condemned to death.

And the way she was killed is the stuff of nightmares.

To harm a Vestal was to threaten the very existence of Rome...

..and so an elaborate, chilling method of disposal was devised

to free the city and its occupants from blame.

Marcia was dressed in her funerary clothes

and her hands and her feet were bound.

She was put into a sedan chair and carried through the streets of Rome

with family and priests either side, as if they were going to her burial.

But, of course, at this point, Marcia was still alive.

After being paraded before the citizens of Rome,

the funeral procession arrived at the entrance to an underground tomb.

With her hands still tied, the Pontifex Maximus himself led her in.

When she reached the ladder at the entrance to the tomb,

all the priests present turned their back on her.

Once she reached the bottom, the ladder was taken away

and the entrance to the tomb was sealed.

She was left on her own with a lighted lamp, her blankets,

a little bit of water and some bread, milk and oil.

Marcia was left to face her fate alone.

Some say the food was left as a gift for the goddess, Vesta,

or as a final act of kindness.

But, actually, it was just a pretence.

It was a way the Romans could convince themselves

that they didn't have the blood of a Vestal on their hands.

Whereas, in fact, of course,

they'd left her to a lonely, lingering death.

One of the sad facts of life, or sad facts of death in this case,

is that the execution of Vestals lines up pretty closely

with Rome's great military disasters.

Roman forces lose in the field, something horrible must have happened

in the relationship between the Roman Empire and the gods.

And so who's to blame?

Vestals were the first folks to get fingers pointed at them.

They were scapegoating, for want of a better word.

You could argue that the sacred nature of the Vestals' lives

paid them the ultimate honour,

but their story's also a gruesome example

of how controlling and brutal ideas about a woman's sexuality could be.

These women may have carried the fate of Rome in their hands,

but men still held their lives by a thread.

In Ancient Rome, religion gave a select group of women

a key role as priestesses...

..at the price of their freedom.

But a new faith was about to appear,

which would offer all female followers a radically new lifestyle.

By the fourth century AD, Christianity would become

the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Unlike the religions of Ancient Greece and Rome,

there was room for only one deity in this new faith,

and He was very definitely male.

There's long been an underlying assumption

that to be a true representative of the Christian God,

you really need to be a man.

In the Church of England and across the world,

the issue of whether women should be bishops has caused turmoil,

and most Catholics believe that women shouldn't even be priests.

Amongst them is Catholic writer and broadcaster Joanna Bogle.

God became incarnate as a man. That's not an accident.

Christ was born and grew up in a world

where every religion had priestesses.

He knew what he was doing. He's Almighty God.

This was the plan from the beginning, that men would be priests.

Priests are there to serve the Church,

but it's not a question of allowing women to be priests.

It's in the nature of woman that she has another task to do.

So God loves you, He just doesn't want you to give the sacred Eucharist?

I could if I needed to distribute Holy Communion, but no.

A priest in the person of Christ, who was male,

will preside saying, "This is my body".

And I think that's very profound.

So you think for the future of the Church,

it's entirely appropriate that there are no female priests,

there are no female bishops?

It's not that we MAY not, we CANNOT have them.

That's a bit like saying, "What a pity men can't give birth."

There are not going to be, there cannot be women priests.

It's not in the nature of womanhood. That's the deal.

That's the deal.

I have to admit that I find Joanna's position hard to accept.

But she reflects the views of no lesser an authority

than the Pope himself.

In 2010, the Vatican declared that to ordain a woman was a serious crime.

Now that seems to me to be very shocking,

but, also as a historian, it's just rather odd,

because if you investigate the foundations of Christianity,

they tell a very different story.

I'm going to travel back to those crucial first few centuries.

To the time when this new faith was merely a splinter group

from the existing religion of Judaism.

The new movement, the Christ cult,

had a vigorous champion, the convert, Paul.

It was Paul who took this fledgling Jewish movement

and opened it up to non-Jews.

He made it his mission to spread the new faith

right across the Roman Empire and, as he did so,

he carried with him one particular message

that had huge impact in its time,

but is often underplayed or forgotten today.

I'm heading to one of the places where this message was first declared.

The ancient Greek city of Corinth once had a bustling port

and was one of the main hubs of the Roman Empire.

It was to the people of Corinth that Paul directed his most famous teachings -

what would become crucial passages in the New Testament.

His first letter to the Corinthians contains some troubling lines.

"What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that time is short.

"For this world in its present form is passing away."

Paul's message was stark and unforgettable.

What he was saying was that soon, the world was going to end.

The early followers of Christ were told that they were living in the end of days.

And so for them, earthly matters were no longer a concern.

What this meant for women was nothing short of remarkable.

There's an early Christian text that you won't find anywhere in the Bible,

but that is a vital bit of historical evidence.

It's called the Acts of Paul and Thecla.

Scholars believe this text was written in the second century AD.

Later Church leaders decided that the contents

of this Christian narrative were not suitable for the Bible.

It describes how one day in the first century AD,

Paul was preaching to a group of people in a town called Iconium,

in what's now modern-day Turkey.

The key character of our story wasn't allowed out onto the streets,

so we find her eavesdropping at the window of a nearby house.

She was a young girl, only around 13 or so, and her name was Thecla.

Thecla was betrothed to a man called Thamyris,

but she was about to do something radical.

Thecla listened intently while Paul dropped his bombshell.

"Forget the traditions of the past" he said.

"Give up your ideas of marriage and children, because the end is nigh."

For three days and nights, she sat transfixed at her window,

absorbing everything she heard.

And then she committed the ultimate act of rebellion.

She hurried through the house to break the news to her mother.

She wasn't going to marry.

Instead, she was going to stay a virgin.

She would leave home and follow Paul and his incendiary words.

Thecla's mother was, of course, horrified.

This broke with centuries, if not millennia, of tradition.

And you can gauge the scale of her outrage from her reaction.

We're told that she cried out, "Burn the lawless one!

"Burn her that is no bride,

"so that all the women who've been taught by this man may be afraid."

Thecla ran.

She hit the road with Paul.

With her hair cut short and wearing boys' clothes,

she travelled with him everywhere.

She abandoned everything she'd known for this new religion.

What can the Acts of Paul and Thecla tell us

about the role of women at the beginning of Christianity?

To find out, I've come to one of the premiere cities in the ancient world

A place visited by Paul.

'I think Thecla was really an image

'of what it was to really listen to the word of God.'

Kate Cooper is a leading authority on the role of women in the early Church.

The thing is, ancient people are burdened by the need

to constantly be worrying about keeping the birth rate up,

so every generation has got to reproduce itself,

and in that sense, the idea that the world is ending,

and that you don't HAVE to keep the population up,

opens a whole horizon of liberated energy

-for people to think about other things.

-Amazing.

So they don't have the pressure to bear children the whole time?

Exactly! And think about how that influences women's positions.

What does that mean for the ordinary Christian woman

on the street in the first or second century AD?

Well, one of the things that's really interesting

is there's a lot of evidence that women played a different kind of role

in the early Christian communities.

That they were seen as equal sharers in the job of preaching and teaching.

In a way, it offered them a kind of opportunity

that may not have been available to them

in other religious communities.

Without the pressure to have sex, women's lives were transformed.

Now they could be guardians, not just of sexual, but of divine love.

Of course, Paul was wrong about the Apocalypse.

The world didn't end,

and Christians quietly abandoned the belief that it would.

Women instead started to look to the future,

hosting prayer meetings in their homes

and financially supporting the new movement.

In the first two centuries of Christianity,

at least 50% of the churches in Rome were founded by women.

And although we're now used to Christian worship

being led by male priests and bishops,

there's evidence to suggest the picture was once very different.

Hidden beneath the streets of Rome lies an intricate labyrinth of tunnels,

known as the Catacombs of St Priscilla.

They date to between the second and fourth centuries AD,

when to be a Christian in Rome was to be a criminal.

Down here lies a neglected piece of early Christian history.

This is where Christians were brought to be buried

and where they came when they were being persecuted.

The catacombs were carved out of the bare rock.

You can still see all the pickaxe marks on the ceilings and the walls.

It's almost as if you're being transported back

to the very moment of Christianity's inception.

This was only discovered a few years ago,

and it dates from the second century AD,

which makes it the oldest surviving image anywhere in the world

of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

And that's what's so fantastic about coming down here,

because you're absolutely up, face to face,

with the very earliest days of Christianity.

But what I find especially fascinating about these tunnels

is what they tell us about the role of women.

In one corner, we find an image detailing what appears to be

women presiding over a religious ritual,

what today we might recognise as the Eucharist or Holy Communion.

In another alcove

is an image which some people would consider incendiary.

There are two things that strike you about this particular painting.

The obvious one is that the scene is dominated by a figure of a woman.

But then just have a look at this little group of three in the corner.

There's a bishop,

and he's got his hand on the shoulder of a woman.

Now, she's wearing a piece of white cloth called an alb

and that was a vestment that could only be worn by ordained priests.

All over this subterranean world there are images

of not just men leading worship, but women.

Being here, it appears to me

that the early Christians had an inclusive, egalitarian take

on who should lead their faith.

A view at odds with that of many Christians today.

Questo e il mio corpo offerto in sacrificio per voi.

Father Scott Brodeur is a Catholic priest and respected theologian

at the prestigious Gregorian University in Rome.

He prepares men for the priesthood.

He believes that key evidence

about the role women should play in the Church

can be found in the Bible itself,

in a letter St Paul wrote to the citizens of Rome.

And what he has to say may come as a surprise to some.

St Paul in... May I read this verse?

..in the Letter To The Romans, Chapter 16, Verse 1,

St Paul is writing, of course, and he says,

"I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchrea."

And Paul, by sending her to Rome, is saying,

"Look at this extraordinary woman and I'm sending you one of our best

"and because I trust her,

"she's going to interpret this letter for you.

"So if you have any questions, ask Phoebe."

It is significant that, because that's pretty much

the most important job that you can give someone -

to ask Phoebe to take the teachings of Christ,

the message of Jesus, to Rome, to the centre of the Roman world.

Absolutely. Paul is so aware of the importance of this letter.

So she has a crucial role.

So do you think he's consciously making a point by choosing a woman?

Absolutely. The entire Letter To The Romans is about

that there is now this common equality among us,

that we all share the same value and worth.

It's interesting though, isn't it?

It's not the commonly held opinion. When you talk to people, they say,

"Oh, you know, Christianity just caused terrible problems for women."

Precisely. Or that St Paul was very much anti-women or so forth,

but nothing could be further from the truth.

Women were essential in the early Church.

Even the Bible itself suggests

that in the first few centuries of Christianity,

women played similar roles to men.

But there were clearly some who were troubled by this state of affairs.

Evidence of a centuries-old struggle

can be found in the church of Santa Prassede.

In a side chapel here, which is normally very dark,

there's a tantalising bit of evidence.

On this mosaic, you've got images of four women.

There's the Virgin Mary, very obviously, in the middle there

and on either side of her there are two saints.

But then this woman on the left is really intriguing.

She's been given this strange blue halo,

which tells us she was actually alive when the mosaic was made.

And her title is written above - Episcopa.

Now, Episcopa is the female version of Episcopus,

the Latin for a bishop.

Look at her name, though, down the side.

She's obviously a woman, so she'd be called Theodora,

but somebody's tampered with the mosaic.

They've put some new gold mosaic at the end,

so she's no longer "Theodora", but "Theodo",

so she could almost be a man.

It's almost as if somebody is trying to pretend

there were no female bishops here in Rome.

Time and time again, we find that women

are not properly represented in Christianity's history.

The story of Thecla isn't found in the Bible.

The evidence from the catacombs

of women leading worship is disregarded.

And there are no churches or cathedrals

dedicated to female priests or bishops.

If women were once so crucial, when did it all go wrong?

Christianity may have begun by championing women,

but not everyone was happy with this situation.

Many eminent theologians were deeply uncomfortable

with women taking such a prominent position.

How dare women presume they could play a leading role

when their very essence was an affront to God?

One Christian, Clement of Alexandria,

wrote in the 3rd Century AD,

"The very consciousness of their own nature

"must evoke feelings of shame."

And another said that women were not created in God's image,

but instead they destroyed God's image.

But there would be one man

whose glittering intellect and powers of persuasion

would make this hotchpotch of women-hating bile stick.

I've come to the place where, for him, it all started.

Beneath Milan's cathedral lie the ruins of a 4th-century baptistry.

It's where people once came to be baptised into the Christian faith.

What happened here was perhaps

one of the most critical developments in Christian history.

Here, in 387 AD, a man called Augustine became a Christian.

And he'd go on to be one of the most brilliant

Christian theologians of all time,

but his attitudes would cause trouble for women

for the next 1,700 years.

We know an awful lot about Augustine's life,

thanks to his detailed autobiography, his Confessions.

Augustine tells us that in his younger days,

he was obsessed with sex and that, as a teenager,

he spent every waking hour hungry with desire.

"To love and to be loved was sweet to me,

"particularly when I enjoyed the body of the one I desired.

"And so I polluted the spring of friendship

"with the filth of concupiscence and I dimmed its lustre

"with the slime of lust."

But after becoming a Christian,

Augustine embraced a life of celibacy.

His preoccupation with sex, however, was far from over.

He'd go on to develop a theory

which would shape how humanity viewed itself.

It was a theory so powerful,

we're still living with its consequences today.

Augustine developed the concept of original sin.

He believed that the crimes committed by Adam and Eve

in the Garden of Eden, when they ate the forbidden fruit,

would be perpetuated down the generations,

thanks to the act of sex.

In other words, when any of us are born,

we're already creatures infused with sin to the very core of our being.

Women, in particular, come out of this very badly.

Carved into the wall of Milan's cathedral

is the moment when Augustine believed

it all went wrong for humanity.

It was Eve who'd encouraged Adam to sin.

Eve becomes an archetype for all women, weak and easily fooled,

but also a temptress who leads men astray.

Rather than eroticism and sexual desire

being considered a gift of the gods as they were in the classical world,

now these things were thought of as unremittingly dark and sinful -

a betrayal of God himself.

Sex was the work of the devil and women were his agents.

It fed into a growing notion

that women weren't worthy representatives of God.

And over the centuries, this belief

became so pervasive that eventually history was rewritten.

Today, there are many who believe that Christian women

never did play an equal role to men.

-Augustine is massively influential in the 4th Century AD.

-Yes.

Some would argue that up until the point that his ideas of original sin

become part of the living tradition of the Church,

actually women have a better deal before then

and after that, there is a lot of trouble for women.

Well, they're quite wrong to do so.

Augustine simply said what the Church taught.

It's not a shift. His understanding of original sin was very, very much

what the earlier Church fathers had been saying.

But why did so many, then, in early Christianity,

in the first, second, third, fourth centuries AD,

manage to misinterpret Jesus' teachings so spectacularly?

Because there definitely were female priests in the early Church.

There weren't so many. They didn't misinterpret it. No.

The Church has been run for 2,000 years and she does know her history.

From all the evidence I've seen,

I have to disagree with Joanna on Christian history,

but, of course, she's right -

men and women don't have equal roles today.

You've spent your life studying the teachings of Jesus.

Do you think he would have wanted to have seen a Church develop

where women played a key role?

The early disciples of Jesus were both men and women.

There was a very special, important group of women

who closely followed him all through his public ministry

in an important role of service to him and I do think that's important

for the Church in every age, including ours.

I can imagine that for liberal Catholics like Father Scott,

it must be difficult reconciling what they see

as the correct interpretation of the Bible

with the position that their Church now holds.

As the Church grew,

the freedoms initially open to women were crushed.

At the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD,

the fate of priestesses was in the balance.

Because Christianity now had not just a faith,

but a massive territory to call its own,

there was a compulsion to tidy things up,

to sort out the new Church

and the Council made all kinds of key decisions.

The council proposed that those women,

who for centuries had played a vital role in the Church,

should now be considered laity and not to be ordained.

Women were being pushed to the margins

right across the spiritual landscape.

Two generations after the Council Of Nicaea,

they received the killer blow.

In 394 AD, the Christian Emperor, Theodosius I,

ordered the end of all pagan worship.

Temples were closed or pulled down,

the old gods and goddesses were declared officially extinct

and the flames of the Vesta,

which had been kept alive for over 1,000 years by the Vestal Virgins,

were finally put out.

For millennia, women had walked hand in hand with the divine.

For some, this privilege had cost them their lives.

For many more, it had brought status, authority and respect.

But now, for better or for worse,

the age of the priestess had come to an end.

But the story of divine women wasn't over.

Drawing on the power of the written word,

indomitable women would fight back to become Queen Of Heaven,

Empress On Earth, to found a new faith

and transform a great civilisation.

For a free Open University booklet

covering the issues and themes featured in this programme

and to learn more about controversies surrounding

women in religion, ring...

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