Osiek, Carolyn; MacDonald, Margaret Y.; Tulloch, Janet H.
A recommendation by Diarmuid O’Murchu in one of his videos led me to this book. It provides a detailed account of the political, social and religious environments within which early Christianity flourished, despite persecution. It takes a female lens to the study, which is refreshing given that most of our inherited wisdom was written through a male lens.
The authors point out the difficulty of being definitive about the role of women. Problems included translation from Hebrew and Greek, the paucity of stories about women in the literature, and the cultural bias of male writers. There is a significant degree of assumptions and suppositions in the authors' conclusions. Nevertheless, one is left with the clear impression that women played a far greater role in the nurturing of the early church than history recorded, and the male hierarchy of the church acknowledged down through the ages.
I finished the book with the following conclusions:
women, in their primary roles of house maker and hospitality provider, were more often than not the organisers and leaders of the Eucharistic celebration.
it was common for married couples (like Prisca and Aquila) to act as community leaders and evangelisers.
women, female slaves and nursemaids were often primary educators of children in Christianity.
compared to Western society today, there were more widows, abandoned children, and, of course, slavery.
divorce and re-marriage by the husband would often leave the first wife destitute.
the social hierarchy in the Greco Roman world was husband as head of the household, wife, children, male slave, female slave, slave children.
There was enormous complexity of relationships and difficulties in the daily expression of faith, where for example, the husband was not a Christian, but the wife was, or especially where the female slave Christian was required to accommodate the legally accepted demands of the non-Christian male head of the household.
I found the book enlightening and worthwhile, if at times overly speculative.
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