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.

In this book, Vander Stichele and Penner introduce their own gender-critical approach to the New Testament and other early Christian writings. Building on feminist and post-colonial insights, they explore the importance of gender in both text and context and discuss the diverse issues involved in interpretation as they relate to gender, sex, and sexuality. The authors also set out their methodology and highlight the various hermeneutical issues involved, such as the complexity of gendered and sexed identities in antiquity and the gap that exists between modern and ancient conceptions thereof. They further illustrate their gender-critical approach with concrete examples from the Acts of the Apostles, the letters of Paul, and the Acts of Paul and Thecla, in order to demonstrate how a gender-critical approach works in practice. As such, this book is unique in terms of its range as well as in the explicit methodological focus that is fostered throughout.

In "Christian Origins and Greco-Roman Culture," Stanley Porter and Andrew Pitts assemble an international team of scholars whose work has focused on reconstructing the social matrix for earliest Christianity through the use of Greco-Roman materials and literary forms. Each essay moves forward the current understanding of how primitive Christianity situated itself in relation to evolving Hellenistic culture. Some essays focus on configuring the social context for the origins of the Jesus movement and beyond, while others assess the literary relation between early Christian and Greco-Roman texts.

At once brave and athletic, virtuous and modest, female martyrs in the second and third centuries were depicted as self-possessed gladiators who at the same time exhibited the quintessentially "womanly" qualities of modesty, fertility, and beauty. L. Stephanie Cobb explores the double embodiment of "male" and "female" gender ideals in these figures, connecting them to Greco-Roman virtues and the construction of Christian group identities. Both male and female martyrs conducted their battles in the amphitheater, a masculine environment that enabled the divine combatants to showcase their strength, virility, and volition. These Christian martyr accounts also illustrated masculinity through the language of justice, resistance to persuasion, and-more subtly but most effectively-the juxtaposition of "unmanly" individuals (usually slaves, the old, or the young) with those at the height of male maturity and accomplishment (such as the governor or the proconsul). Imbuing female martyrs with the same strengths as their male counterparts served a vital function in Christian communities. Faced with the possibility of persecution, Christians sought to inspire both men and women to be braver than pagan and Jewish men. Yet within the community itself, traditional gender roles had to be maintained, and despite the call to be manly, Christian women were expected to remain womanly in relation to the men of their faith. Complicating our understanding of the social freedoms enjoyed by early Christian women, Cobb's investigation reveals the dual function of gendered language in martyr texts and its importance in laying claim to social power.

Postcolonial biblical criticism took shape, largely, by critiquing the book of Exodus. Because of the eventual dispossession of Canaanites in the conquest narratives, so goes the thinking, the Hebrews’ God amounts to little more than a dangerous, destructive, and ethnocentric figure. In Hyphenating Moses Federico Alfredo Roth challenges this consensus by providing an alternative reading of its early narratives (1:1-3:15). Redeploying postcolonial theory and themes, Roth presents a reading of these well-known scenes as orbiting around the topic of identity formation, climaxing in the burning bush episode. In the giving of the name, YHWH promotes the virtue of conceiving identity as a malleable reality to be sought after by all parties caught in the dehumanizing discourse of colonial subjugation.

In the last two decades, feminism has often been declared dead. One reason for this was the overwhelming success of gender and queer studies; another was supposedly nurtured by the hope of conservatives that girls and women should return to that which is traditionally perceived as “female”. This volume, which brings together the most interesting papers of the feminist exegesis section of the recent International Meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature, offers vivid proof that feminist studies did not lose their appeal to young scholars, and that there is still enough potential for fresh and interesting research in this field. Gender agendas still matter, especially when the feminist option is not forfeited as a political aim.

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 volume explores the rhetorical role that miracle discourse plays in the argumentation of the New Testament and early Christianity. The investigation includes both the rhetoric within miracle discourse and the rhetorical role of miracle discourse as it was incorporated into the larger works in which it is now a part. The volume also examines the social, cultural, religious, political, and ideological associations that miracle discourse had in the first-century Mediterranean world, bringing these insights to bear on the broader questions of early Christian origins. The contributors are L. Gregory Bloomquist, Wendy Cotter, David A. deSilva, Davina C. Lopez, Gail O'Day, Todd Penner, Vernon K. Robbins, and Duane F. Watson.

The thesis shows that the Song of Songs can be read as a circular sequence of sub-poems, that follow logically from one another if they are understood as contributing to two main points, made in a woman's voice. The woman urges men to take romantic initiative to be committed exclusively and for life, and urges women three times to wait until they are approached by such men. If this reading is the best explanation of the text of the Song, then the Song is a unified work centered on a woman singing about human romantic love from a woman's perspective.

In her latest book, Ross Shepard Kraemer shows how her mind has changed or remained the same since the publication of her ground-breaking study, Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions Among Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman World (OUP 1992). Unreliable Witnesses scrutinizes more closely how ancient constructions of gender undergird accounts of women's religious practices in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Kraemer analyzes how gender provides the historically obfuscating substructure of diverse texts: Livy's account of the origins of the Roman Bacchanalia; Philo of Alexandria's envisioning of idealized, masculinized women philosophers; rabbinic debates about women studying Torah; Justin Martyr's depiction of an elite Roman matron who adopts chaste Christian philosophical discipline; the similar representation of Paul's fictive disciple, Thecla, in the anonymous Acts of (Paul and) Thecla; Severus of Minorca's depiction of Jewish women as the last hold-outs against Christian pressures to convert, and others. While attentive to arguments that women are largely fictive proxies in elite male contestations over masculinity, authority, and power, Kraemer retains her focus on redescribing and explaining women's religious practices. She argues that - gender-specific or not - religious practices in the ancient Mediterranean routinely encoded and affirmed ideas about gender. As in many cultures, women's devotion to the divine was both acceptable and encouraged, only so long as it conformed to pervasive constructions of femininity as passive, embodied, emotive, insufficiently controlled and subordinated to masculinity. Extending her findings beyond the ancient Mediterranean, Kraemer proposes that, more generally, religion is among the many human social practices that are both gendered and gendering, constructing and inscribing gender on human beings and on human actions and ideas. Her study thus poses significant questions about the relationships between religions and gender in the modern world.