How we view these women has impacts far beyond biblical interpretation, he said.
“An accumulation of modern life experiences tells us if the Bible is God’s word, if it’s the authority for Christians, we need to take seriously everything in there, and that’s going to affect how we treat women today,” he said.
Other scholars have focused their attention on individual women who receive passing reference in the New Testament.
Phoebe, whose name appears in a list of greetings from the apostle Paul at the end of the Book of Romans, takes center stage in Susan Hylen’s book “Finding Phoebe: What New Testament Women Were Really Like,” which published in January. The two verses about Phoebe describe her as “sister,” “deacon” and “benefactor.”
Hylen, professor of New Testament at Emory University, uses those lines as a jumping-off point to investigate some of the “vague clues” the New Testament gives about the lives of the women in its pages. She offers historical context to help readers reach their own conclusions about the roles women may have played in the early church and beyond, which may look different than they had assumed.
“I sense right now that there are a lot of churches where it hasn’t been conventional for women to have leadership roles, but people are open to it,” she said.
The scholars argue much of what they’re writing isn’t new.
Gupta describes “Tell Her Story” in its introduction as an “exercise in amplification” of the stories of women in the biblical text.
Taylor points to the work of German theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who pioneered the field of feminist biblical interpretation in the 1980s and 1990s with such works as “In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins” and “But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation.” Taylor, professor of Christian origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College London, said she still was surprised to encounter women as more than “light relief” in the biblical texts while learning about Schüssler Fiorenza’s methodology at Harvard Divinity School.
“This is genuinely part of the story that hasn’t filtered out from academic towers and academic institutions,” said Bond, professor of Christian origins and head of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh.
Much of what is being written now about women in the New Testament “is really an evangelical phenomenon,” according to popular author and public scholar Diana Butler Bass.
“I think these questions have been, by and large, explored very thoroughly, and pursued with great success, in Catholic and liberal Protestant circles for more than four generations already, but now evangelicals are just finding them.”
The 1970s and 1980s saw a surge of feminist biblical scholarship as mainline Protestant denominations began to ordain women, Butler Bass said, pointing to the work of Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elizabeth Johnson.
Still, Butler Bass said, she was surprised when a sermon she delivered last summer sharing new scholarship about Mary Magdalene — whom she called “first among the apostles, really, when it comes to women in the New Testament” — went viral.
In the sermon, she pointed to the work of Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, incoming assistant professor of New Testament at Villanova University. Schrader Polczer’s research suggests the oldest text of the Gospel of John was altered to split in two the character of Mary in the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.
As a result, today’s Bible translations place sisters Mary and Martha — who are featured in a different story in the Gospel of Luke — in the passage. Schrader Polczer argues instead it should be Mary Magdalene in the passage, making one of the first statements of belief in Jesus as the Messiah.
That would put Mary Magdalene, who is named elsewhere in the Bible as traveling with Jesus and his disciples and as the first witness to Jesus’ resurrection, on par with Peter among Jesus’ disciples, Butler Bass said
After delivering the sermon to a largely progressive Christian audience of mainliners and exvangelicals last July at the Wild Goose Festival, Butler Bass sent the audio to her Substack subscribers. By the time she arrived home a few hours later, it had been downloaded nearly 100,000 times.
To date, she believes it has been listened to 750,000 times.
But imagine, she said, if the church had been listening to Mary Magdalene and other women named in the New Testament all this time.
“Is there a pathway to finally reimagine the nature of leadership in early Christian communities and the ways in which Jesus understood the callings of men and women?” Butler Bass said.
This article originally appeared here.
