"The World's First Feminist Work"

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry explores the New Testament:

The Gospels often show how, in the context of a patriarchal society, women played a very important role in the early Church. It is Mary who initiates Jesus’ miracle, and when she brings it up he dismisses her, calling her “woman”. Throughout the Gospels, whenever the men dismiss the women, it is later found out that the women were, in fact, right. After Jesus is resurrected, it is women who first find the empty tomb and, when they report this to the Apostles, they are first dismissed. In a matter of days, the Apostles, the leaders of the Church, have forgotten Jesus’ words about rebuilding the Temple, but the women remember, and accept the revelation. And it is the women, of course, who are right.

And this, of course, makes the modern Catholic church's refusal to grant women the full equality Jesus did all the more pernicious and un-Christian.

(Painting: El Greco's imagined Mother of God.)