Those pushing deaconesses on the Orthodox Church rely heavily on the argument that since deaconesses were apostolic there is nothing wrong with them. But there are good reasons for believing deaconesses were not apostolic, and also good reasons for making the case that their apostolicity is far from certain. Granting that they were apostolic inevitably entails granting other assumptions about deaconesses that give the lobbyists for deaconesses firmer ground to stand on than they deserve.

Here, on the basis of The Disappearing Deaconess, we will briefly examine the evidence of the earliest existence of deaconesses, starting with three points of fact that are indisputable.

First, we know for certain that deaconesses were an accepted feature of the Church in much of the Greek-speaking East in the late fourth century. We know a few of them by name and by their association with great saints of the Church like St. John Chrysostom. We also know that in the last decade of that century the emperor St. Theodosius the Great set the minimum age for deaconesses at 60, the same age the Holy Apostle Paul set for widows in 1 Timothy 5:9, which St. Theodosius cited in his legislation.

Second, we also know for certain that in the fourth century the Church nevertheless had two traditions regarding deaconesses: The Greek-speaking East understood St. Phoebe of Cenchreae to have been a “deaconess” based on St. Paul’s use of the word diakonos in Romans 16:1, but the Latin-speaking West did not understand St. Phoebe to have been a “deaconess” and therefore never transliterated diakonos in Romans 16:1 as diacona. Westerners were, in fact, surprised to learn in the fourth century that there were deaconesses in the East and continued to regard them as an innovation of Montanist heretics for many years afterwards. (Indeed, their various translations of Roman 16:1 were not changed to say that St. Phoebe was a “deacon” or “deaconess” until the twentieth century.)

We therefore have two different ways of explaining the origin of deaconesses: the Eastern thesis whereby deaconesses were apostolic, and the Western thesis whereby deaconesses were a later innovation based on anachronistic readings of diakonos in Romans 16:1, assuming it meant “deacon” when, in fact, in the New Testament it almost always did not. (Only in Philippians 1 and 1 Timothy 3, where it is used together with episkopos, is diakonos generally agreed to mean “deacon.”)

Third, we know also that all our evidence for the existence of deaconesses before the fourth century comes from the East, which means that it can be used to support either thesis. We would certainly expect to find deaconesses in the East if they were an apostolic institution of the first century, but we would also expect to find deaconesses only in the East if they were a later innovation of Greek-speakers reading Romans anachronistically.

This third point of fact raises the issue of plausibility: How plausible is it that deaconesses were an apostolic institution and an accepted feature of the first-century Church in the East, yet somehow never a feature of the early Church in the West, even though it was to the Romans that the Apostle Paul wrote about St. Phoebe and also in Rome that both he and the Apostle Peter ended their ministry?

Here is where it helps to examine the evidence for deaconesses before the fourth century.

Pliny’s Letter to Trajan

The hardest evidence we have of deaconesses before the fourth century is Pliny the Younger’s letter to the emperor Trajan, written in the early second century, about 112. Pliny wrote the letter while governor of the province of Bithynia and Pontus in Asia Minor (what is now Turkey). In it, he reports that he has interrogated two Christian women (whom he calls ancillae) “who are called ministers (quae ministrae dicebantur)” by other Christians. The Latin word minister was the usual equivalent of the Greek word diakonos, both meaning a trusted helper, assistant, or servant—not a menial, not a slave, and not a priest as the English word minister is now commonly understood, but someone who acts on the behalf of someone else, a minister in the service of a magister (whence the English word master).

Unfortunately, Pliny tells us nothing else about these women, no hint of what their duties were or of their status within their community, although his calling them ancillae (maid-servants and possibly slaves) would indicate low status, at least in his eyes. He also tells us not enough about their community for us to guess how representative it was of orthodox Christianity at the time. We know that second-century Asia Minor produced at least one heretical sect (Montanists) in which women took leading roles. Maybe Pliny has stumbled over something similar.

More important is the timing of Pliny’s discovery. St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans was written between 55 and 57, half a century, or two generations, before Pliny’s letter. In those years, the Church transitioned from the leadership of apostles and elders to the familiar triad of bishops, priests, and deacons. It was in those years that the word diakonos came more and more to mean a deacon of the Church, a rank within the Church’s sacramental and administrative hierarchy.

It is therefore quite possible that the women interrogated by Pliny came to be “called deaconesses” not as the continuation of an apostolic tradition but under the influence of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans amid the post-apostolic evolution of church administration in the Greek-speaking East.

Alexandrian Exegesis

The next bit of evidence we have of deaconesses before the fourth century is Clement of Alexandria’s defense of marriage (Strom. 3.6) in which he points out that some of the Apostles were married and traveled with their wives (per 1 Cor 9:5), whom he calls “fellow-ministers [syndiakonous] to women in the households” because they could go where men could not and share the Gospel. He then adds that St. Paul wrote to St. Timothy about “women deacons” (Clement’s words), a reference to 1 Tim 3:11, where St. Paul inserts a mention of “women” into his guidance on deacons without calling the women “deacons” and just before he says, “Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife.”

Similarly, a little later, Origen, a younger contemporary of Clement and also of Alexandria, in his commentary on Romans says of Rom 16:1, “This text teaches with the authority of the Apostle that even women are instituted deacons in the Church.” He goes on to praise St. Phoebe’s hospitality before repeating that the text teaches that “there are, as we have already said, women deacons in the Church.”

One could take Clement’s and Origen’s word on the matter, but one could also understand them to be reading St. Paul in Greek and anachronistically, assuming that diakonos meant the same for him in the first century as it did for them in the late second and early third centuries. Scholars taking this second view make three points in its favor:

(1) Both Clement and Origen seem to be arguing for the existence of deaconesses either in St. Paul’s day or in their own, but why would they need to do that if deaconesses did exist in their own? Wouldn’t their readers already know that and therefore need no argument from Scripture?

(2) Neither Clement nor Origen give any evidence of deaconesses in their own day in these passages or in any of their other works, nor does any later writer from Egypt, including St. Athanasius the Great, St. Cyril of Alexandria, and St. Isidore of Pelusium. For this reason, most scholars have assumed there were no deaconesses in Egypt.

(3) Most tellingly, in honoring the wives of the Apostles as syndiakonous for the assistance they provided in evangelizing women, Clement demonstrates a key difference in Eastern and Western terminology. In the East of Clement’s day, the Greek word diakonos could still be used in the general sense of assistant or helper, whereas in the West at the same time the Latin word diaconus meant strictly a rank within the Church hierarchy, a rank with real authority over lower ranks, both clergy and laity. By the third century, the Church of Rome had limited itself to seven deacons, in imitation of the Apostles ordaining seven men to manage the Church’s “daily ministration (diakonia)” to widows in Acts 6. Rome’s seven deacons answered only to the bishop of Rome. Each was served by a subdeacon and five acolytes. Their responsibilities included managing charitable assistance, constructing the catacombs, and recording the acts of martyrs.

This last point explains why the West resisted the designation of women as “deacons,” regularly translating (instead of transliterating) Eastern uses of diakonos when applied to women, as in Origen’s commentary on Romans (which survives only in Latin). The West, of course, had women like St. Phoebe who were active in various ministries, helping and assisting in many works of the Church, but it did not call them “deacons” because that term was reserved for clergymen of a certain rank with certain duties. Terminologically, not every diakonia made one a “deacon,” just as today in English not every ministry makes one a “minister.”

Recognizing this difference in terminology makes early mentions of “women deacons” a lot easier to understand. The word diakonos had two uses in Greek, a general use in describing someone involved in church work and a technical use in referring to a specific rank within the Church’s sacramental and administrative hierarchy. The former could include women, the latter could not.

The Didascalia Apostolorum

Only later, in the third-century Didascalia Apostolorum, do we see evidence of “women deacons” being elevated above a lay ministry to the level of minor clergy, although when this evidence appears it appears not as proof of the existence of deaconesses but as an argument for their existence.

The Didascalia Apostolorum (“Teaching of the Apostles”) is the first of three “church orders” claiming apostolic authority but believed to have originated in Syria, the others being the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions and the fifth-century Testament of Our Lord Jesus Christ. None of the three is associated with any Church Father or local church, and none has been endorsed by any saint or Church council. The Constitutions was based on the Didascalia and widely circulated but contains “certain adulterous material . . . clean contrary to piety,” according to Canon 2 of the Council in Trullo in 692.

All three orders speak of deaconesses, but with different degrees of emphasis. The Didascalia argues in favor of deaconesses; the Constitutions adds to their duties; the Testament of Our Lord leaves them little to do and ranks widows over them. This approximates what we know from other sources—that the heyday of deaconesses was in the fourth and fifth centuries, after which they began a slow decline into nonexistence, their place being taken by nuns.

The Didascalia says nothing about how deaconesses are to be made, but it enhances their status by extending an analogy made a century earlier by St. Ignatius of Antioch in his epistle to the Magnesians: St. Ignatius wrote that the faithful should honor the bishop as God, the deacon as Christ, and the presbyters as the Apostles; the Didascalia adds the deaconess as the Holy Spirit (the word for spirit being feminine in Syriac, although neuter in Greek and masculine in Latin).

The Didascalia does not develop the analogy, but it goes to some length to justify the need for deaconesses, an indication that deaconesses were not a well-established tradition at the time.

It does not mention St. Phoebe but does speak of “women deacons” who served the Lord such as “Mary Magdalene, Mary the daughter of James and mother of Jose, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee,” and unnamed others.

The need it sees for deaconesses is a matter of modesty and propriety. Deaconesses are to assist in baptizing women by completing the anointing, to instruct the newly illumined women immediately after baptism, and to visit women at home among unbelievers, bathing them when sick and assisting those in need, which a man could not do in that world without arousing suspicion or causing scandal. “For this cause we say that the ministry of a woman deacon is especially needful and important.”

Elsewhere in the Didascalia, the deaconess’s duties are limited by the apostolic prohibition on women teaching (1 Cor 14:34–35, 1 Tim 2:12), with the Didascalia naming the same three women as above and saying, “For if it were required that women should teach, our Master Himself would have commanded these to give instruction with us.” Likewise, the duty of assisting women in baptism is limited by a general prohibition on women baptizing, in support of which the Didascalia says that if Christ had meant women to baptize, he would have been baptized by his mother.

Conclusion

This is all we know of female “deacons” in the Church’s first three centuries, and it is not much—certainly not enough to establish the apostolic origin of the order of deaconesses as it appeared in the late fourth century. Before the fourth century, we have the casual use of the term diakonos in the East—but not in the West—to mean someone involved in church work of some sort, and then in the early third century we have a call from the unknown author of the Didascalia to exalt women as deaconesses for modesty’s sake. That’s all.

The next appearance of deaconesses in history is at the First Ecumenical Council in Nicaea in 325, where the issue is what to do with the deaconesses of the heretical Paulicianist sect when they return to the Church. These deaconesses were the former followers of the renegade Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch from 260 to 272, who preached an early form of the Christological heresy known as adoptionism. Eusebius of Caesarea reports that he also organized a choir of women to sing hymns of praises of himself, at Pascha even. Paul’s deaconesses could have been this choir, or maybe his “spiritual brides” who were also mentioned by the bishops who condemned him. Canon 19 of Nicaea directs that Paulicianist deaconesses be received as laywomen. The wording of the canon does not make clear why or settle the issue of whether the orthodox Church at the time already had deaconesses.

Did Paul of Samosata have a hand in drafting the Didascalia? He was old enough and from that part of the world, but, to my knowledge, no one has proposed this.

Between 325 and the late four century, all we can add to the history of deaconesses is a few names, but by the end of the century, as said above, deaconesses were an accepted feature of the Church in much of the East, with no less a saint than St. John Chrysostom reading Romans 16 and 1 Timothy 3 the eastern way.

Was he wrong? Saints are sometimes wrong. St. John himself was also of the opinion that the seven men appointed by the Apostles in Acts 6 to manage the Church’s assistance to widows were not deacons. Centuries later, the Council in Trullo agreed with him, and yet the earliest tradition, attested by St. Irenaeus of Lyon and by the churches of Rome and Neocaesarea, is that the Seven were deacons, and hardly anyone now disputes this.