Scholars today generally agree that women were more prominent in early Christianity than the evidence of the Second Testament suggests. In this article I argue that a major reason for the loss of early Christian women's voices was the shift from an oral to a manuscript medium. The few men who were literate tended to minimize and trivialize the stories about women in composing the written manuscripts. First I retell an ancient story, then briefly describe literacy and orality in antiquity. Then I discuss the question of oral vs. written media and access to authority. Next, I describe what happened to women's folk tales as they were transformed into the print medium by men. Finally, I describe the traces of similar minimalizing and distortion of stories about women to be found in the Gospels.
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