This is far too broad of a question as there are too many flavors of Christianity today to say that it is like one thing and compare it to Christianity in Biblical or post-Biblical times. However, I can attempt to speak about one aspect that many are familiar with in modern Christianity, which is the role of women in the life of the Church. In the last century, women are only now being ordained in put in places of ministry that they have not been allowed in for many centuries.

New Testament and Christian theologians whose eisgetic interpretations radically shifted Christian beliefs about women far away from the original interest of those who started the Christian movement. From the teachings in the four Gospel books, those writers’ intents seemed to point to a new beginning for all people in a radically new way from the separation of people built into Judaism. People trapped in bondage are set free, those condemned by the law have been ransomed, and most importantly women being blamed for Eve’s wrong-doing were now vindicated by Mary giving birth to Jesus. From the very beginning, many women held leadership positions as apostles, deacons, and house Church leaders in the early church. This continued the lineage of Jewish female leaders like Deborah, but went further and seemed to describe a community where women leading was the norm, and not the exception as in the case of those in the Jewish Bible. As Christianity spread and became farther removed from its early roots, however, it became easier for certain cultural prejudices to override early church practices and teachings. Historian James Fischer explains that the “subsequent generation of Christians canonized the Biblical insights into the then prevailing customs as the word of God” as the Jewish theologians had done in Midrash. Where once women leaders were accepted in the Church, soon they were opposed. You can see a transition happen in the Church fathers. Gradually, you begin to see the Church fathers oppose more and more women in leadership. That tradition of women being left out of leadership in the Christian Church is now deeply rooted in the Church.

Textually speaking, however, women were not separated like this. Unlike most works written at the time, women play a prominent role in the four Gospels of the Christian New Testament. Even more remarkable about this is that women are not denigrated or held up as examples of evil or ruin. Jesus’ interactions with them is supportive and comforting, recognizing how scandalous that would seem in a culture that had strict rules and guidelines for who was “worthy” of such attention. Gilbert Bilezikian calls these women that Jesus works with in his public ministry, “the unnoticeable women.” This includes but is not limited to the Samaritan woman at the well, the daughter of Jairus, the woman caught in adultery, and Mary Magdalene. To those women hearing these stories, it sent a clear call to them that this new sect was not merely come also for women, but was coming in equal measure for women to play as grand a role as any men. This new community was not to be a male-only society, but one in which both men and women were equally restored by God. This work started by Jesus, in the New Testament, is most heavily carried by Paul.

Based on what the text attributes to Paul, the biggest push he makes is for a grafting on of non-Jewish people into this new faith. Benjamin Dunning argues that “the apostle announces a universalizing operation whereby truth emerges by radically subtracting itself from the differences of ethnicity, culture, and sex/sexuality.” The people of this new sect, according to Paul, then, were not to be guided by the cultural or ethnic rules set up by the Jewish people or the surrounding populace, but rather be freed of those bondages. Paul’s famous line from Galatians 3:28, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” is the best summary sentence of how Paul viewed the structure this new sect should take. This early Christian appropriation and inversion of the invective from Genesis 1:27 of the creation of men and women as separate entities leads to a restoration in Jesus to an androgynous image, leading to full gender equality, as would have been possible from a direct reading of who God was described to be in the Jewish Bible. Be that as it may, like the Jewish interpreters of the Tanakh, the Biblical texts would soon be read through the lens of the prevailing cultural ideas at the time, tinting how women ought to be viewed and what role they should play in their society.

Let me give you just one example of what Paul said and then how post-Biblical theologians like Tertullian twisted it for their eisegetical interpretations that became the standard definitions for how women were viewed. When Paul talks about men not covering their heads because they are made in the image of God in 1 Corinthians 11 , many believed that men no longer needed to wear the prayer shawls that their Jewish counterparts did in the Temple because they were to speak the Gospel unashamedly. In that same passage, women are extolled for wearing a head covering, as had become customary in many Christian communities at that point. Tertullian in his On the Apparel of Women, argued that this was a sign of the shame of women “to go about in humble garb, and rather to affect meanness of appearance, walking about as Eve mourning and repentant, in order that by every garb of penitence she might the more fully expiate that which she derives from Eve.” This sin that Tertullian was placing on Eve was the eating of the fruit in the Garden of Evil, which Tertullian and many other early Church fathers blamed all women. According to Tertullian, Eve’s sin made all women stand condemned.

In the verse 10 of that chapter in 1 Corinthians, women are told to wear a head covering as a “symbol of exousia” because of the angels. Later translations curiously translate this as a “symbol of submission”, yet the common translation of that word, exousia, used elsewhere is actually “authority”, literally over one’s self. With the literal translation of the word, it seems to suggest that women ought to wear head coverings like the angels did when they presented themselves as the angels of God, coming in power and authority to proclaim whatever it was God had told them to proclaim. In the Asian cities of the Roman Empire, it was common that coins were minted with figures of patron goddesses of the city, with the goddess always shown with a distinctive headdress. This headdress was referred to as an exousia, the sign of the goddess’ authority. Paul seemed to have this common usage of exousia in mind when he said that this is how women ought to present themselves in church. With a mistranslation of that word as submission, as many translations have done since, it makes sense that the rest of that section of Tertullian’s text compares women not to the faithful angels of God who bear His Word, but to the fallen angels who rebelled against God. In this way, they are to wear their head coverings in shame. As he was born during the height of Roman power, not even one hundred years after 1 Corinthians was likely written, Tertullian does not have the excuse of being too far removed from the original language to not have understood what was really meant by the term, yet his understanding about why women must wear head coverings became the common belief for most of the Christian Church’s history and have no authority over themselves or men in Church.

There are many other examples of post-Biblical theology becoming the norm in Christian thought like women not being allowed to be in ordained ministry or to speak in church, but I just wanted to give one singular example of how Christianity at the very beginning during Paul's life changed and shifted in the post-Biblical era with ideas that have continued through to today.

Sources:

• James A. Fischer, C.M, God Said: Let There Be Woman: A Study of Biblical Women

• Gilbert Bilezikian, Beyond Sex Roles: A Guide for the Study of Female Roles in the Bible

• Benjamin H. Dunning, Specters of Paul Sexual Difference in Early Christian Thought

• Tertullian, On the Apparel of Women