The Revolt of the Widows
The Revolt of the Widows

Author: Stevan L. Davies

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9780809309580

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No child of this century, women’s liber­ation existed as a Christian movement in the 2nd century. In this first study of the social context that produced the Apocryphal Acts, Stevan L. Davies con­tends that women wrote the Acts and that the “Acts appear to have been a striving by Christian women for both a mode of self-expression and a way to preach rebellion for the sake of sexual continence.” These early rebels—called widows because they left their husbands for the church—refused absolute subservience to the male hierarchy of the church. The three parts of Davies’s study in­clude an investigation of the magical world view of late 2nd-century Christen­dom; a close look at the people the Acts describe as new Christian converts; and a summary and analysis of the nature of the authors of the Acts. These women, like their sisters today, were seeking equal standing with men in the Chris­tian church.

Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses
Mapping Gender in Ancient Religious Discourses

Author: Todd C. Penner

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 601

ISBN-13: 9004154477

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A collection of essays on early Christian, Jewish and Greco-Roman religious discourses in antiquity, focusing on the construction of gender in relationship to broader cultural and religious themes, argumentation and identity formation in the early centuries of the common era.

Of Widows and Meals
Of Widows and Meals

Author: Reta Halteman Finger

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0802830536

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Though "community" has become a common byword in the contemporary Western church, the practice of communal sharing has effectively fallen by the wayside. Unfortunately, it is often the poor who are left wanting because we no longer come together. Reta Halteman Finger finds a solution to this modern problem by learning from the ancient Mediterranean Christian culture of community. In the earliest Jerusalem church, in holding the responsibility for preparing and serving communal meals, women were given a place of honor. With the table fellowship and goods sharing of the early church, Luke says, there were no needy persons among them (Acts 4: 34). Finger thoroughly examines this agape-meal tradition, challenging traditional interpretations of the community of goods in the Jerusalem church and proving that the communal sharing lasted for hundreds of years longer than previously assumed. "Of Widows and Meals" begins a discussion of need in community that can revolutionize the contemporary church's interaction with the world at large.

Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity
Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity

Author: Dr. Katherine A. Shaner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-03-01

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190275073

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Enslaved persons were ubiquitous in the first- and second-century CE Roman Empire, and early Christian texts reflect this fact. Yet the implications of enslaved presence in religious practices are under-examined in early Christian and Roman history. Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity argues that enslaved persons' roles in civic and religious activities were contested in many religious groups throughout ancient cities, including communities connected with Paul's legacy. This power struggle emerges as the book examines urban spaces, inscriptions, images, and literature from ancient Ephesos and its environs. Enslaved Leadership breaks new ground in analyzing archaeology and texts-asking how each attempts to persuade viewers, readers, and inhabitants of the city. Thus this book paints a complex picture of enslaved life in Asia Minor, a picture that illustrates how enslaved persons enacted roles of religious and civic significance that potentially upended social hierarchies privileging wealthy, slave-holding men. Enslaved persons were religious specialists, priests, and leaders in cultic groups, including early Christian groups. Yet even as the enslaved engaged in such authoritative roles, Roman slavery was not a benign institution nor were all early Christians kinder and more egalitarian to slaves. Both early Christian texts (such as Philemon,1 Timothy, Ignatius' letters) and the archaeological finds from Asia Minor defend, construct, and clarify the hierarchies that kept enslaved persons under the control of their masters. Enslaved Leadership illustrates a historical world in which control of slaves must continually be asserted. Yet this assertion of control raises a question: Why does enslaved subordination need to be so frequently re-established, particularly through violence, the threat of social death, and assertions of subordination?

Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion
Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion

Author: Margaret Y. MacDonald

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-10-03

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 9780521567282

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This is a study of how women figured in public reaction to the church from New Testament times to Christianity's encounter with the pagan critics of the second century CE. The reference to a hysterical woman was made by the most prolific critic of Christianity, Celsus. He was referring to a follower of Jesus - probably Mary Magdalene - who was at the centre of efforts to create and promote belief in the resurrection. MacDonald draws attention to the conviction, emerging from the works of several pagan authors, that female initiative was central to Christianity's development; she sets out to explore the relationship between this and the common Greco-Roman belief that women were inclined towards excesses in religion. The findings of cultural anthropologists of Mediterranean societies are examined in an effort to probe the societal values that shaped public opinion and early church teaching. Concerns expressed in New Testament and early Christian texts about the respectability of women, and even generally about their behaviour, are seen in a new light when one appreciates that outsiders focused on early church women and understood their activities as a reflection of the group as a whole.

The Sorrows of Mattidia
The Sorrows of Mattidia

Author: Curtis Hutt

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-18

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0429018746

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This volume offers a new translation of the Pseudo-Clementine family narrative here known as The Sorrows of Mattidia. It contains a full introduction which explores the obscured origins of the text, the plot, and main characters, and engages in a comparison of the portrayal of pagan, Jewish, and Christian women in this text with what we encounter in other literature. It also discusses a general strategy for how historians can utilize fictional narratives like this when examining the lives of women in the ancient world. This translation makes this fascinating source for late antique women available in this form for the first time.

Luke, Widows, Judges, and Stereotypes
Luke, Widows, Judges, and Stereotypes

Author: Febbie C. Dickerson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-08-01

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1978701241

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Biblical narratives are not simply sacred stories for religious communities: They are stories that provide transformative insight into cultural biases. By putting historical criticism and reception history into dialogue with womanist biblical hermeneutics, Luke, Widows, Judges, and Stereotypes offers a provocative reading of Jesus’ parable about a widow who confronts a judge and obtains what she seeks by means of physical threat. Rather than simply reading the widow as the model for “one who prays always and does not lose heart” (Luke 18:1), Dickerson shows that read in the context of Luke’s wider narrative, the widow, domesticated and robbed both of her agency and moral ambiguity, is more likely demanding vengeance instead of justice. Likewise, rather than simply reading the judge as one "who neither feared God nor had respect for people" (Luke 18:2), Dickerson argues that the judge is both an ideal man and one who compromises standards of ancient masculinity. Then, reading both the widow and judge through African American stereotypes (Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Cool Black Male, Master-Pastor, and Foolish Judge) that are used to degrade, debase, and control, and reading them into and in light of the parable, Dickerson demonstrates how the parable calls into question these stereotypes thereby producing new liberative readings.

Christianity and Society
Christianity and Society

Author: Everett Ferguson

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9780815330684

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First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Prayers of Jewish Women
Prayers of Jewish Women

Author: Markus H. McDowell

Publisher: Mohr Siebeck

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9783161488504

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Markus McDowell examines how the literature of the Second Temple period portrays women at prayer through an examination of the literary context and character of those prayers. The goal of this work is a greater understanding of how women were portrayed in literary sources and an offering of some fresh insights for the study of women's religious and social roles in the ancient world. The texts are analyzed and categorized within five areas: social location, content, form, occasion, and gender perspective. The prayers are also compared and contrasted with men's prayers in the same sources. The analysis includes locating (as much as possible) the historical, literary, and cultic context of each document in which these prayers appear. By examining all prayers in these texts uttered by women (not just prayers of named or prominent women), and then comparing them with all the prayers of men in those same texts, certain patterns appear. This study adds to our knowledge of women and religion in Second Temple Judaism by primarily exploring patterns that appear among the prayers in the literature of the Second Temple period. While there are fewer prayers by women than men in this literature, the prayers of women are not portrayed as significantly different from those of men in terms of social location, content, form, or occasion. At the same time, the prayers of women exhibit other patterns of language - and in a minor way, form and occasion - that differ from the prayers of men.