There Is No Junior Holy Spirit
When I first encountered the writings of Celsus, a second-century Roman critic of Christianity, I thought I'd found a knock-out punch for women in ministry. Here was a hostile witness, an enemy of the gospel, complaining that Christianity attracted women and children and slaves. If even the haters acknowledged women in the church, surely that proved women were leading.
I was partly right and largely wrong. And the part where I was wrong opened a door to something much bigger than the argument I started with.
Let me show you what I mean—because this is one of those places where being honest about what a text actually says leads us into a richer truth than the one we were grasping for.
Who Was Celsus?
Celsus was a Roman intellectual writing around 180 AD, a little over a century after the apostolic period. He wasn't a neutral observer. He was actively hostile to Christianity and wanted to discredit the movement entirely. He wrote a treatise called The True Word, and while the original has been lost, we know what he said because the Christian theologian Origen quoted him extensively in a rebuttal called Against Celsus, written around 248 AD.
Hostile witnesses are valuable precisely because they aren't trying to flatter their opponents. Celsus was trying to expose what he saw as the fundamental flaws in Christianity. So when he describes what the early church looked like from the outside, we can trust he wasn't sugar-coating anything for the Christians' benefit.
What Celsus Actually Said
The most revealing passage is in Against Celsus, Book 3, Chapter 55. It's longer than most people quote, and the full version is more illuminating than the snippets that usually circulate:
"We see, indeed, in private houses workers in wool and leather, and fullers, and persons of the most uninstructed and rustic character, not venturing to utter a word in the presence of their elders and wiser masters; but when they get hold of the children privately, and certain women as ignorant as themselves, they pour forth wonderful statements... And while thus speaking, if they see one of the instructors of youth approaching, or one of the more intelligent class, or even the father himself, the more timid among them become afraid, while the more forward incite the children to throw off the yoke... but that if they wish (to avail themselves of their aid,) they must leave their father and their instructors, and go with the women and their playfellows to the women's apartments, or to the leather shop, or to the fuller's shop, that they may attain to perfection."
Earlier in the same book (Chapter 44), Celsus mocks Christianity for wanting to convert "only the silly, and the mean, and the stupid, with women and children." And again in Chapter 59: "only foolish and low individuals, and persons devoid of perception, and slaves, and women, and children."
Notice the lists. Women appear, yes—but always alongside children, slaves, the uneducated, and the foolish. That's Celsus's whole point. Christianity, in his view, was a religion of nobodies.
Where I Was Wrong
I used to lean on these passages to argue that women must have been leading the early church, because why else would a Roman critic mock their inclusion? But here's the honest reading: Celsus isn't complaining about women teaching. He's lumping women into a list of low-status people he believes Christianity foolishly elevates. The teachers in his caricature are actually men—wool-workers, leather-workers, fullers—uneducated tradesmen. The women appear as recipients of teaching alongside the children.
If the Celsus passage proved women were elders, it would equally prove children and slaves were elders. They weren't. So we can't honestly stretch the quote that far.
But—and this is where it gets good—when I let the passage say what it actually says, instead of what I wanted it to say, I found something stronger.
What Celsus Was Actually Documenting
Look again at who Celsus is sneering at. The wool-workers, leather-workers, and fullers—the working poor. Tradesmen with calloused hands and no rhetorical training, no philosophy degree, no claim to status. The children—legally non-persons in Roman society, voiceless, under absolute paternal authority. The women in the women's apartments—sequestered in the back rooms of Greco-Roman households where elite men didn't bother to go.
These are precisely the people Roman society had decided didn't matter. And what's happening in those back shops and women's quarters? The gospel is pouring out. Wonderful statements. Revelation. Lives reordered. Whole households "made happy."
Celsus thinks this is evidence that Christianity is stupid. I think this is evidence that Holy Spirit was doing exactly what He always does.
The Joel 2 Pattern, Still Operating
When Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost, Peter stood up and explained what was happening by quoting the prophet Joel:
"And it shall be in the last days," God says, "that I will pour forth of My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on My bondslaves, both men and women, I will in those days pour forth of My Spirit, and they shall prophesy." (Acts 2:17-18, NASB)
Read Joel's list: sons AND daughters. Young AND old. Bondslaves—male AND female.
Now read Celsus's list: women, children, slaves, the uneducated, the rustic.
It's almost the same list. Celsus thought he was insulting Christianity. He was actually documenting Pentecost still in motion 150 years after it began. Holy Spirit was bypassing the credentialed male elite—the philosophers, the magistrates, the heads of households—and pouring out exactly where Joel said He would.
The 1 Corinthians 1 Confirmation
Paul saw this pattern coming and named it directly:
"For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are." (1 Corinthians 1:26-28, NASB)
The foolish. The weak. The despised. The things that are not.
That's not an accidental demographic. That's a strategy. God deliberately chose the people Rome considered nothing, so that the wisdom of the world would be exposed for what it was. Celsus is offended by exactly the people Paul said God chose on purpose.
When Celsus mocks Christianity for elevating "the stupid, slaves, women, and little children," he isn't exposing a weakness in the church. He's confirming Paul's thesis statement.
Jesus Said the Same Thing
This isn't just Paul's theology. Jesus said it before him:
"I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight." (Matthew 11:25-26, NASB)
Hidden from the wise. Revealed to infants. Well-pleasing in the Father's sight.
This is the same God who declared in Isaiah 11 that in the Kingdom, "a little boy will lead them" (Isaiah 11:6, NASB). The whole picture is a Kingdom so re-ordered that predators lie down with prey, and the one walking at the head of the procession is a child—not a king on a warhorse, not a Caesar in a chariot, but a child.
Rome could not see it. Celsus could not see it. They were trained to look for status, credentials, rhetorical brilliance, paternal authority. They missed the Kingdom because the Kingdom was being carried by people their society had taught them to ignore.
The Geography of the Gynaeceum
There's one more thing in the Celsus passage worth pausing on. He describes Christian teaching happening in "the women's apartments, or the leather shop, or the fuller's shop." The leather shop and fuller's shop are working-class male spaces. The women's apartments—the gynaeceum—were the back rooms of Greco-Roman households where women lived their daily lives, structurally separated from the public male world.
Elite Roman men did not enter the gynaeceum. That was the whole point of the gynaeceum. So when Celsus complains that Christianity is reaching women in those spaces, he's testifying—without meaning to—that someone was carrying the gospel into rooms that male teachers structurally could not enter.
That someone was other women.
Celsus doesn't explicitly say that. But the geography of his complaint requires it. If women were being discipled in segregated women's spaces, and the male tradesmen-teachers couldn't follow them in there, then the women themselves were doing the work of bringing the gospel deeper into those rooms. Christianity could not have reached half the empire any other way.
That's not me speculating. That's the structural reality of how Greco-Roman household space was organized, and Celsus is the witness.
There Is No Junior Holy Spirit
Here's the line I keep coming back to: there is no junior Holy Spirit.
Holy Spirit doesn't come in smaller doses based on age, gender, education, or social class. The same Spirit who hovered over the waters at creation, who descended on Jesus at the Jordan, who raised Christ from the dead—that same Spirit was in those wool shops and women's apartments and slave quarters. He didn't dilute Himself for the audience.
When Celsus mocked the "ignorant women" in the back rooms, he was mocking people who carried the same Spirit Peter and Paul carried. When he laughed at the children being taught, he was laughing at heirs of the Kingdom. When he sneered at the wool-workers' "wonderful statements," he was sneering at the wisdom that confounds the wise.
A little child shall lead them. The hostile witness saw the procession and didn't recognize who was at the head of it.
Why This Matters for Modern Debates
Here's why Celsus's testimony is so significant for contemporary discussions about women's roles, even though it doesn't directly prove women were elders.
When modern complementarians argue that male hierarchy has been the church's historical position, they're reading later developments back into the earliest period. By the time Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the church had indeed become more hierarchical and male-dominated. But that wasn't how it started.
Celsus gives us a snapshot of Christianity before it accommodated itself to imperial structures. He shows us a movement so radically inclusive that it offended Roman sensibilities at every social level—gender, age, class, education. If the early church had simply mirrored Roman patriarchy, hostile critics like Celsus would have had nothing to mock. Their mockery is the evidence that the church's social shape was scandalously different from Rome's.
Arguments for male hierarchy based on "church tradition" turn out to be arguments for later accommodation to imperial culture, not faithfulness to apostolic practice. The further the institutional church drifted from Pentecost, the more it began to look like the empire it was supposed to be confronting.
What This Means for Us
If Holy Spirit's pattern is to bypass credentialed gates and pour Himself out on the people the world overlooks, then a church that protects credentialed gates is a church that has forgotten how Christianity actually spread.
When our pulpits, elder boards, and ministry platforms are gated by gender, education, polish, or position—when we tell the wool-worker, the young woman, the recovering addict, the immigrant, the unschooled mother, the teenager that they need permission from the institution before Holy Spirit can speak through them—we are recognizing exactly the gates Celsus recognized. We are reading from his playbook, not the early church's.
The first Christians scandalized Rome by refusing to ask permission from Rome's gatekeepers. They believed Holy Spirit landed where He pleased, and they followed Him into back shops and women's quarters and children's bedsides. Celsus tried to embarrass them. The gospel kept moving anyway.
The Hostile Witness, Reread
I started by thinking Celsus proved women were leading. He doesn't, not directly. What he proves is something better: Holy Spirit's preferential outpouring on the people Rome dismissed—women included, but not only women. Children, slaves, tradesmen, the uneducated, the rustic, the back-room people of empire.
That's the demographic of Pentecost. That's the demographic Paul said God chose on purpose. That's the demographic Jesus said the Father reveals Himself to.
If we want to know whether our churches today are operating on Kingdom logic or Roman logic, we can ask one question: who do we expect Holy Spirit to use? If our answer looks like Rome's list of qualified people—credentialed, male, educated, polished—we have drifted further from the early church than we know.
But if our answer looks like Joel's list—sons and daughters, young and old, bondslaves male and female, all the people the world overlooks—then we are still walking where the early church walked. And Holy Spirit is still pouring out.
A little child shall lead them. Pay attention to where Holy Spirit is moving. He has not changed His pattern.
Blessings,
Susan 😊