I recently heard the argument put forth that the early Church permitted female priests, but that this changed at the Council of Nicea. A corollary premise to this theory (which is becoming more absurd and outlandish even as I restate it here) is that Scripture recounts a lack of female leadership in the Church because the writings were gathered by men who wished to preserve their own religious authority.
This view makes a fundamental logical error. It assumes that Church leadership was dominated by males who “rewrote history” in order to exclude the female leaders. But the whole point of the argument was to expose the fiction of the male-dominated Church leadership! Either the Church was dominated by males, who rewrote history, or it was not--in which case the males wouldn’t have been powerful enough to rewrite history. Think about it for a moment; if such a deception were to take place, would there not be a single shred of evidence testifying to such a fact? There is nothing; no ancient traditions, no textual testimonies, nothing.
Furthermore, are we to believe that, in this imaginary situation, not one man stood with these oppressed female priests? Such unanimity of opinion is rather striking…and rather unbelievable.
The only possible impetus for pursuing this as a hypothesis is wishful thinking. And the fact that logic, history, and common sense mount a screaming testimony against it is a rather strong justification for rejecting it as absurd.
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