This sparkling collection of new essays addresses a wide range of issues surrounding women's lives in the early Christian period. The first set of articles supply the historical and social contexts. The contributors go on to address issues surrounding the representation of women in the Gospels, women in the Pauline tradition, and finally, attitudes toward women in the early church and the roles played by early Christian women. The most comprehensive look available on the Christian origins from women's point of view and Christian feminist theology, this book will be essential reading for students and others interested in these topics.

"The original essays in this collection offer a comprehensive scan of the role of women and attitudes to women in the various New Testament books and their cultural context....The value of this work is its scope in viewing the whole span of New Testament traditions from a feminist perspective."

"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!"

"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."

"Congratulations to Ross Kraemer and Mary Rose D’angelo for giving us this excellent collection of critical, incisive, and diverse essays. We are all in their debt."

Edited by Ross Shepard Kraemer, University of Pennsylvania, and Mary Rose D'Angelo, University of Notre Dame.