From Mark:

WOMEN ‘DEVIL’S GATEWAY’

The adherents of the new religion soon developed an obsessional horror of sex — a desperate fear that found much of its motivation in the belief that man had been created a pure being in the image of God and that he had been defiled by woman. And they turned against woman with a hatred so bitter and intense no language could be found strong enough to express their horror.

The early leaders of the Christian Church — to whom the female was clearly an instrument of the devil — set the pace for the condemnation of women.

Saint John Chrysostom1 described women as a “necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill.” Women should keep silence and obedience, maintained Saint Paul; and he taught that it was a shame for them to speak in church.2

Best expressing the view of the early Church, Tertullian3 wrote: “God’s verdict on the sex still holds good, and the sex’s guilt must still hold also. You are the devil’s gateway!” Women should go about “clad in mourning and ashes, her eyes overflowing with the tears of remorse,” he added, “to make us forget that you have been man’s destruction.”

Clement4 was so disgusted at the thought of anything feminine he felt that every woman ought to be filled with shame at the mere thought that she was a woman. To Cyprian,5 woman was the instrument which Satan employed to possess men’s souls. Woman was even blamed for the death of the Christian savior-god. “For your deceit,” raged Tertullian, “the very son of God had to perish!”

To destroy the flesh on which Eve had put the curse Christians began to maim and torture the body in every way imaginable. Convinced that practically all the ills of the earth had been caused by women, hysterical monks fled into the wilderness to wrestle with Satan, to endure the most hideous forms of torture and self-mutilation, and to try to erase their terrible fear of the Bitch of Eden. “These unhappy hypochondriacs,” as the noted historian Jules Michelet6 called them, roamed the desert “full of self-loathing and self-horror.”

They buried themselves to the neck in the burning desert sands. They let blood-sucking insects eat at their eyelids and crawl into the opening of their bodies. They withdrew into tiny stone hovels never again to emerge and there they lived in their own filth until they died. The more dedicated the ascetic the more vigorously he abused himself. The greatest monk was the one who could fast the longest, sleep the least, endure the most or invent the most extreme forms of bodily punishment.

One of the more famous ascetics of the time was Saint Simeon Stylites.7 A rope encircling his body had become imbedded in his flesh which putrefied around it. His biographer writes that Simeon ordered him to pick up worms that fell from his body and replace them in the sores. In Syria, Simeon was worshiped by multitudes. “When he walks vermin drip from his body,” commented an admiring disciple.

By the time of the Middle Ages the principle of magical contamination had crept into the condemnation of women. Not merely the sexual act but the mere presence of a woman was liable to attract evil, so that during a plague it was inadvisable to sleep with a woman or even go near her bed. A good woman, the wise and virtuous were wont to observe during those perilous times, “was but like one eel put in a bag amongst 500 snakes, and if a man should have the luck to grope out that one eel from all the snakes, yea he had at best but a wet eel by the tail.”

And why not?

Had not woman been made from a crooked rib? . . . a rib distorted and turned against man? Indeed no other than the great Solomon saw fit to lament one of the more pernicious aspects of womanhood: “As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion8 . . . Her mouth is smoother than oil: but her latter end is bitter than9 wormwood.10” (And who among you would dare to contradict wise old King Solomon, I wonder?) — CARTER, Nicholas, The late great book, the Bible, 1985, Truth Missions, (PO Box 3849), Manhattan Beach (California 90266 USA), pp 11-12. (Also see a section of page 179) WomenTwiceAsWicked 12Mar03.doc (26Apr, 07Jul03)

(Footnotes added by Religion Clarity Campaign, 46 Cobine Way, Greenwood, WA, 6024; 07-08 Jul 2003)

_____________________ 1 Saint John Chrystostom, a Father of the Greek-language section of the early Church, writer, preacher, archbishop of Constantinople, lived 347-407 A.D. 2 Bible: 1 Corinthians 14:34, seemingly however contradicting in part the same book, 11:5 3 Quintus Tertullian, born in Carthage, a convert who became a married clergyman, became leader of the rigorous Montanist sect (later declared heretical), wrote in Latin, author of Apologeticus, De Praescriptione Hereticorum, etc.; many books are declared correct by the Roman Catholic Church, 150? – 230 4 Possibly Clement of Alexandria (Greek Father of the Church), 150? – 220?, or perhaps, St Clement I of Rome, 30?-101?, Pope 5 St Cyprian, converted from paganism around 245,.author of De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate, bishop of Carthage (North Africa), beheaded in 258 6 Jules Michelet, noted French historian and author, 1798-1874 7 St Simeon Stylites, Syrian ascetic, spent last 30 years of life atop a 60ft (18m) pillar, 390-459 8 Bible: The Proverbs 11:22 9 “than” ought to be “as”, if following the Authorised Version (King James bible), and for correct meaning. 10 The Proverbs 5:3,4

from http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/religion/gateway.htm