This new textbook outlines a gender-critical perspective on the New Testament and other early Christian writings.

This book looks at the Acts of the Apostles through two lenses that highlight the two topics of masculinity and politics. Acts is rich in relevant material, whether this be in the range of such characters as the Ethiopian eunuch, Cornelius, Peter and Paul, or in situations such as Timothy's circumcision and Paul's encounters with Roman rulers in different cities. Engaging Acts from these two distinct but related perspectives illuminates features of this book which are otherwise easily missed. These approaches provide fresh angles to see how men, masculinity, and imperial loyalty were understood, experienced, and constructed in the ancient world and in earliest Christianity. The essays present a range of topics: some engage with Acts as a whole as in Steve Walton's chapter on the way Luke-Acts perceives the Roman Empire, while others focus on particular sections, passages, and even certain figures, such as in an Christopher Stroup's analysis of the circumcision of Timothy. Together, the essays provide a tightly woven and deeply textured analysis of Acts. The dialogue form of essay and response will encourage readers to develop their own critiques of the points raised in the collection as a whole.

This collection of essays focuses on issues related to gender at the intersection of religious discourses in antiquity. To that end, an array of traditions is analyzed with the aim of more fully situating the construction and representation of gender in early Christian, Jewish and Greco-Roman argumentation. Taken as a whole, these essays contribute to the goal of displaying the wide range of options that are available for examining the interconnection of gender, rhetoric, power, and ideology, especially as they relate to identity formation in the ancient world during the early centuries of the common era. The focus on ancient conceptions of gender makes this collection particularly useful not only for biblical scholars, but also for classicists and researchers working in the field of gender studies, as well as for those interested in exploring similar issues in other religious traditions or in Western religious traditions of different time periods.

In Women in Their Place Jorunn Økland takes the archaeological remains at Corinth as a starting point from which to develop an interdisciplinary, theoretically informed reading of Paul's utterances on women in 1 Corinthians 11-14. In this section of the letter Paul deals with the ritual gatherings and describes the ekklesia as a of ritual space distinct from domestic space. Økland assesses the text within a larger context of four different gender models found in temple architecture, rituals and literary texts. Whilst Paul's teaching in the letter effectively engendered 'church' as male space, his use of a variety of gender models left early Christian women with many other notions of ritual space to explore.

This book endorses feminist critiques of gender, yet upholds the insight of traditional Christianity that sex, commitment and parenthood are fulfilling human relations. Their unity is a positive ideal, though not an absolute norm. Women and men should enjoy equal personal respect and social power. In reply to feminist critics of oppressive gender and sex norms and to communitarian proponents of Christian morality, Cahill argues that effective intercultural criticism of injustice requires a modest defence of moral objectivity. She thus adopts a critical realism as its moral foundation, drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas. Moral judgment should be based on reasonable, practical, prudent and cross-culturally nuanced reflection on human experience. This is combined with a New Testament model of community, centred on solidarity, compassion and inclusion of the economically or socially marginalised.

This book brings together a number of ground-breaking essays that explore the interface of language and gender-consciousness in foundation texts of Judaism and Christianity. Using critical perspectives that derive from a feminist revaluation of traditional religious discourse, the contributors to this volume address basic questions of meaning and interpretive freedom that are integral to a contemporary reading of Scripture and liturgy. They raise such issues as the relevance of a liturgical tradition in which the Deity is addressed in exclusively masculine terms, and the continued viability of scriptural texts that reflect consistently androcentric values. In each of these essays the authors can be seen to respond to the challenge of the feminist critique of patriarchalism in the Western religious tradition, as well as to the perceived need, within contemporary Judaism and Christianity, for new interpretive models for the reading of sacred texts.