Women Remembered. Jesus’ Female Disciples. Helen Bond and Joan Taylor. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2022.
The two authors are in the first rank of scholarship exploring Christian origins and the socio-religious context of Jesus and the Early Church. They are also experienced TV broadcasters, well used to reconstructing historical detail and social settings in their treatment of the New Testament world and the texts that give us windows into the Early Church and its environment.
Both authors are well known for their work in redressing the gender representation and interpretation balance in the contextual and textual world of the New Testament. They are committed to a rehabilitation of the role, significance and pervasive presence of women in Early Christianity. The result in this book is a fascinating study of how women have been “silenced, tamed, or slurred by innuendo” in subsequent representations of women in biblical interpretation, art, inscriptions and archaeological evidence.
The book sparkles with serious wit, sharpened and informed by immersion in the NT world, and the result is a book that compels the reader to look more closely and recognise the prejudice and even misogyny evident in the portrayals of the women around Jesus and in the emerging communities of the early church. Now before we react either in denial or offence to the word ‘misogyny’ being used to describe the depictions and representations of women in Greco-Roman and Jewish culture, it’s a salutary exercise to view and read the evidence – of which there is more than enough to "suffer us to learn in silence”, before pre-judging! And the lessons are well taught and stimulating.
A clearing the ground chapter on women in the world of Jesus explains the experience of women in the cultural and social realities of the first Christian century. The conclusion is that in language, assumed values, attitudes and social expectations women were largely erased from the action, silenced in the big discussions, and in politics, religion and family matters, women lived under a burden of diminished opportunity and constrained expectations. Bond and Taylor convey this in lucid and at times wry commentary with illustrative texts such as Celsus who dismissed the resurrection accounts as the bletherings of delirious women and sorcery. (p.18)
There follows a series of chapters exploring the experience of Salome, Joanna, Mary Magdalene, Martha and Mary, the Anointing Woman, and some mentioned in the apostolic history including Prisca and Junia. Each chapter examines the textual fabric of the stories. A particularly telling example is of the anointing woman. Several stories and allusions in the Gospels are traced into a history of the three main narratives in Luke 7, Matthew 26 and John 11. Far from being a side-show in the male driven narratives of the Twelve, each of the women is seen to have a relationship with Jesus in which they are affirmed and at times become exemplars of what real discipleship actually looks like. This chapter ends, “The moral seems to be: take your cue from what the women do.” (120) The same combination of contextualising the narrative, exploiting evidence of cultural and social practices and attitudes, and careful comparisons of the Synoptic texts and these with John, opens up other key figures, such as a sane yet imaginative account of Mary Magdalene, determinedly earthed in the text, but with illuminating side glances at subsequent portrayals in art and the apocryphal Gospels.
I’m quite sure that any sermon will be the more interesting, and accurate and fair, if traditional commentaries and unexamined assumptions by the preacher are exposed to Bond and Taylor’s careful, well evidenced and soundly argued treatments of the figures, stories and texts of each of the women examined in the chapters of this book. Further, there are times when it should be as clear as day, that certain passages require the insight and empathy that can only come from a female perspective on women’s experience. An obvious example being the sympathetic realism with which they explore the story of the woman with the flow of blood as it is told, with differences, in all three Synoptic Gospels.
Bond and Taylor’s expertise in the social context of the Gospels, and their interest in restoring the portrayals of women in the NT, could be compared to the work of art restorers. In these chapters they set about removing the varnish and accretions of time’s dust, and recovering at least some of the vivid colours to present a fresh perspective on figures too easily ignored, erased or distorted by uninformed or unexamined assumptions, and at times even male prejudice or scholarly laziness.
The book finishes on this optimistic note: “We hope we have set these women disciples of Jesus in their rightful place, close to Jesus in his mission in Galilee, and active in establishing, serving and leading Christian communities as the faith spread around the Mediterranean and the wider ancient world.“ (184)
I think a careful reading of this book will go a long way to achieving that hope. The cumulative case is rather strong.
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