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Women In Sacred Texts

Women in the Sacred Texts

Throughout history people have seen the struggles of women to gain equality. Women have fought in the areas of work, play, the government, and general independence. However, one place this fight should not have gone was faith, but it has. Women now fight for equality in the traditions of religions all across the globe. Many of the issues women have, whether real or just blown out of proportion, are rooted in the sacred religious texts of the religion under attack. Three of the most well known and well studied religions of the world Christianity, Islam, and Judaism face some of the harshest feminist criticism. Sadly, more and more of these criticisms are made by people who have no information about the faith they are criticizing. This paper will go to the sacred texts of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and to theological scholars in order to try and determine just how women are portrayed in each text, and how that portrayal has affected the way women live now.
According to The Sacred Worlds Compact Disc, the first religious tradition, Christianity, is the largest, most widespread religion in the world. It was started a little over two thousand years ago with the birth of Jesus Christ. Jesus, a Jew, was a teacher and was eventually killed for political reasons of the era. His followers believed that his death did not mark the end, but a beginning for a new way of looking at life. Jesus’ miraculous resurrection convinced his followers that he was God in human form, he was the Messiah. In that time Judaism also believe in the appearance of a Messiah. However, the expectations for the Messiah in Judaism and what happened with the new way of life were a cause of tension between the new followers and traditional Jews.
Christianity today is made up of a variety of groups which can mostly be broken into three large groups which are Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestantism. In more recent times a movement as appeared with the...