On women in authority

No, not That woman.

I've just been watching a debate on whether women are called to authority in the church, and two things leaped out at me that haven't occurred to me before. The female Baptist minister (no rosette for guessing which side of the debate she was on) made two assertions. Firstly, she said that the biblical injunctions specifically against women teaching, and the fact that Jesus did not have male disciples, were primarily because of the culture of the time.

Now, the most obvious objection to that is to ask if Jesus strikes anyone as bound by the traditions of human beings? If He had intended women to have a role of authority in the church, there's not the slightest chance that He would have been bound by the need not to offend. The idea is preposterous.

But her second point, which I've also heard before, does something rather fatal to the first point. She made much of the scriptural evidence for women in authority. Now, she did this by the common method of listing all the women named in the New Testament, which always bugs me, because no complementarian has ever claimed that there weren't women in the early church, nor that women play no role. She then said that women held the same authority in the church as men until the council of Laodicea. My church history is sketchy at this point, perhaps someone who knows more than I do on that point could enlighten me in the comments (but it sure doesn't sound accurate to me...)

But hold on, I thought. If the clear passages that forbid women to teach, and define the authority in the church as a male role, are because of the early church being bound by cultural mores - how come there were women in leadership authority anyway? It seems to me that egalitarians need to pick one of these arguments and stick to it...