During its early centuries, Christianity did not stress the role of Mary, primarily because church leaders wanted to differentiate their religion from pagan religions with female goddesses. The first recorded prayer to the Virgin comes from the very late fourth century, and rituals and feasts in her honor grew slowly and steadily from that point. By the twelfth century, many churches dedicated to Mary began to be built, some of them on the sites of former Jewish parts of town when Jews were banned from various areas. Poetry and hymns were also written in her honor, special prayers to Mary became a focal point of penitential practice, and she became an increasingly important subject for paintings and statuary. Mary's peculiar status as virgin and mother allowed her to be honored as both pure and nurturing at the same time, and she came to be viewed as the exact opposite of Eve, creating a good woman/bad woman dichotomy that would become extremely strong in European culture. The effects of the cult of Mary on the actual status of women, or even on attitudes toward women, are ambiguous, however. Because Christianity taught that there was and would be only one Savior, Mary represented an unattainable ideal for all other women, for no other woman could hope to give birth to the Messiah. Yet Mary was also fully human and not divine, so that she set a standard for female behavior in a way that Jesus did not for men.