The Bible is irredeemably patriarchal and sexist.
"Wives, submit to your husbands" (Eph 5). "Women should remain silent in the churches" (1 Cor 14). Concubines, polygamy, levirate marriage, daughters sold into servitude, rape victims forced to marry their attackers (Deut 22), no women in the Twelve, no women priests for most of church history, a God referred to exclusively in masculine terms. Women have been told for two millennia that their place is silent, subordinate, and reproductive. A book that warrants this much harm to half the human race cannot be a moral authority.
The critique lands on real historical damage, but the biblical material is more subversive than the pop-atheist reading allows. (1) Genesis 1:27: "male and female he created them, in the image of God" - in a Near East where female humans were frequently treated as property or image-bearers of their fathers, this was radical parity. (2) Jesus' treatment of women - the Samaritan woman as the first evangelist, Mary of Bethany commended for taking the rabbinic posture of a disciple, Mary Magdalene as the first witness of the resurrection (legally inadmissible testimony in the period, which argues strongly for historicity), women funding and traveling with the Jesus movement - was astonishing for his culture. (3) Paul names women as co-workers, deacons (Phoebe, Rom 16:1), apostles (Junia, Rom 16:7), and house-church leaders (Priscilla, Nympha, Lydia). Galatians 3:28: "neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ." (4) The "household codes" (Eph 5, Col 3, 1 Peter 3) lift the pagan pater familias structure and reshape it: the famous line "wives, submit" is preceded by "submit to one another" (v. 21) and followed by an astonishing charge to husbands to love as Christ loved the church - to die for her. In the ambient Greco-Roman culture, no one told husbands they owed their wives anything. (5) Historical effect: infant exposure (overwhelmingly of female infants) was illegalized under Christian emperors; the status of wives and widows improved measurably wherever the gospel spread; universities and hospitals run by Christian women; Wilberforce-era abolition included female emancipation. Places where women's status is highest today correlate with historically Christian influence, not its absence. (6) Concubinage, polygamy, and brutal ANE practices are described, not endorsed, in the OT - and the trajectory of the canon bends against them. Jesus rolls back divorce to the Genesis ideal ("from the beginning it was not so," Matt 19).
Read the whole canon, read it in its ANE and Greco-Roman setting, and read the historical record of what happened to women's status wherever the gospel actually took root. The critique survives against some Christian uses of the Bible; it is much harder to maintain against the text itself.
Sources & citations
- Unimaginable: What Our World Would Be Like Without Christianity — Jeremiah J. Johnston (2017)popularFind on Amazon
- Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God — Paul Copan (2011)scholarlyFind on Amazon