ABSTRACT
According to the Protevangelium, Mary was introduced into the temple at the age of three. Like other Byzantine homilists, Neophytos wondered how a young female child was able to enter the sanctuary of the temple in the first place, for in the context of the Byzantine church this was inconceivable. St. Neophytos’s remarks gained force from a circumstance that was known to all his hearers: at the time that he spoke, no woman was ever allowed into the sanctuary of a Byzantine church. Byzantine canon law stipulated that no lay person could enter the sanctuary and take communion there. The clearest evidence that it was unthinkable for the Byzantine church to admit women to the bema comes from anti-Latin diatribes, such as one written by the Byzantine rhetorician Constantine Stilbes shortly after the sack of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204.
