Women and Christian Origins - Ross Shepard Kraemer

This is a collection of previously unpublished essays on the role of women in the New Testament and in the early church.
It begins by supplying the historical and social contexts of women's lives in the New Testament period.
In the next sections, the authors address issues surrounding the representation of women in the Gospels and in the Pauline writings.
Finally, they turn to a consideration of attitudes towards women in the early church, and the roles played by early Christian women.

"Women and Christian Origins" will serve its purpose well as a companion to an introductory textbook on New Testament and Christion origins. For those seeking reliable historical information on the women of the New Testament it will also prove useful as a handbook.
Church History, vol.70, no.1

Lynn LiDonnici ... provides a superb synopsis of women's roles in civic religion, as priestesses and patrons, highlighting their public roles.
Church History, vol.70, no.1

The long and excellent introduction ... makes a powerful case for continuity between Christianity and Judiasm and the surrounding pagan culture.
Church History, vol.70, no.1

an excellent survey of the subject
M.J.Edwards, The Classical Review, Vol.51, No.1, 2001

This anthology is a model of comparative, critical scholarship. With shrewd sensitivity to questions of gender analysis, textual exegesis and historical method, the authors canvass a broad range of material-pagan, Jewish, and Christian; literary and archaeological-to assess the roles of women, imagined and actual, in various ancient Christian communities. No orthodoxy, ecclesiastical, academic, or feminist, emerges unchallenged. Kraemer, D'Angelo and their
colleagues deserve our warm thanks. Bravissima!
Paula Fredricksen, Boston University

This superb collection will be an ideal text book for undergraduate and seminary courses on the history of early Christian women. Both students and scholars will appreciate the lucid overviews of the results of over two decades of intensive feminist research on early Christian women. The authors present their material honestly and fairly
without the apologetic tendencies that characterize some Christian treatments of women in the New Testament. The attention to the
Jewish and other neighbors of early Christian women continues the valuable inter religious model pioneered by Kraemer in her earlier works.
Bernadette J. Brooten, Brandeis University

Congratulations to Ross Kraemer and Mary Rose DAngelo for giving us this excellent collection of critical, incisive, and diverse essays. We are all in their debt.
Elaine Pagels, Princeton University