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One of the most striking phenomena about the early Jesus people is that women appear to have been exceptionally involved in the spread of the movement. Almost all the house churches named in the New Testament are identified by the name of the women who apparently led them: Chloe, Nympha, Apphia, Priscilla, Lydia, and Mary the mother of Mark. 1 In Romans 16, Paul recognized the work of several women-Phoebe, Prisca, Mary, Junia, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Rufus's mother, Julia, and Nereus's sister. 2 Debunking the idea that only men were apostles, Paul called Junia an apostle. 3 There Junia stands, in plain view: a woman apostle. Paul introduces her as an apostle without comment or explanation, suggesting none was needed, as if everyone knew there were women apostles. 4 Roman and Greek writers outside the Jesus movement also indicated that its women leaders were in the majority, or at a minimum, that they were more publicly visible than the men. For example, the first Roman to write about "Christians" was Pliny the Younger, the governor of Bithynia and Pontus. Around the year 113, Pliny questioned several Jesus followers-and when he wanted to know even more about their assemblies, he interrogated two women whom he called ministrae, or ministers, CHAPTER 2 More Collyridian Déjà vu

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This chapter considers artistic representations, showing evidence of ‘Women Church Leaders in and around Fifth-century Rome’. It focuses on two artefacts that portrayed women church leaders operating in this broad context. It addresses frescoes of deceased women painted with open gospel books in the San Gennaro Catacombs in Naples; it proposes that the most logical interpretation of the iconographic motifs associated with them is that they were women bishops, perhaps two of the women about whom Pope Gelasius complained to male bishops in southern Italy c.496. For cultural context it next considers an ivory reliquary box discovered in 1906, which depicts three pairs of men and women in the altar area of Old St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. This scene has recently been re-analysed; one of the pairs appears to have been sculpted jointly officiating the Eucharist at the basilica’s altar. Additional fifth- and sixth-century artefacts that portray women as clergy, sometimes paired with men, sometimes independently, affirm both the identification of women bishops in the two Naples catacomb frescoes and also the scene of the woman and man officiating at the altar in Old St Peters on the ivory box.