Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life

Written by Lynn H. Cohick Reviewed By Robert W. Yarbrough

The author is associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and coauthor (with Gary Burge and Gene Green) of The New Testament in Antiquity (2009).

At one level the goal of this book is transparent: “to fairly and accurately describe women’s lives” at the time of the earliest Christians (p. 27). But precisely here lies enormous challenge. Cohick’s sources for “the world of the earliest Christians” range from 300 years prior to Jesus’ birth to 400 years or more after it. Moreover, the sources are Roman, Greek, and Jewish, and many of them are rooted in two or all three of those cultural backgrounds. And the sources vary in nature. Many are literary, i.e., written for reading or performance purposes. But that could mean history, novel, drama, letter, philosophical treatise, political essay, religious reflection, or some other form of literary expression. And there are other kinds of sources, like artistic, epigraphic, archaeological, and commercial. What hope of an integrated portrait of “women’s lives” is apt to emerge from such a disparate range of sources? To take an analogy: what definite results could come of a book treating such vast temporal and cultural reaches and attempting to address “men’s lives”? It seems there is a dubious abstraction embedded in the book’s very conception.

Cohick brings order to what at first might seem only chaotic, irreducibly complex, and frustratingly vague. She does this, first, hermeneutically. She rejects “an extreme hermeneutics of suspicion, which understands all texts written by men (and most were) to be irredeemably androcentric, partriarchal and misogynistic” (p. 22). She affirms the possibility of arriving at “retrievable history” despite “the postmodern conclusion that rhetoric is reality and the attending corollary that history is lost behind this veil” (pp. 27–28). This claim is stronger in the book’s introduction than in the flow of the book itself, where Cohick often must “read the literary evidence against the grain” (p. 161), since she seeks something in the texts that is normally oblique if not foreign to what the authors intended to convey. But it is a salutary and welcome ideal toward which to strive.

Second, Cohick’s portrait is integrated thematically. Her nine chapters deal with (1) women as daughters, (2) marriage and matron ideals, (3) wives and marriage, (4) motherhood, (5) religion among Gentile women and god-fearers, (6) religion and “informal power” among Jewish and Christian women, (7) the work women performed, (8) women slaves and prostitutes, and (9) women as benefactors and the institution of patronage. By delimiting her focal points, the author ensures that a view of at least some parts of the forest will emerge despite the rank protrusion of so many trees.

Third, the book is integrated methodologically. It is, in essence, an exposition of primary sources arrayed under nine chapter headings and then subheadings within each chapter. This lends a clarity and coherence to the whole that is one of the book’s strongest suits.

Fourth, Cohick hopes she has “encouraged the reader’s imagination to think beyond the stylized snapshots of ancient women sequestered in cramped homes, barefoot and pregnant” (p. 324). In other words, a subplot of the book is to rescue the NT from readings in which women do no more than toil at home and care for children under the authority of overbearing males. This subplot helps hold the book together, though one wonders whether the implied Neanderthal reader is to some extent a straw man.

While claiming to remain aloof from the contemporary issue of women’s ordination (p. 21), there is a consistent undercurrent of overturning how the NT has been interpreted through the centuries. The Samaritan woman was not immoral, nor does Jesus take a negative stance toward her marital or moral state (pp. 122–28). Lydia was Paul’s benefactor and a leader in the church (pp. 188–90); later she might have left the faith and returned to the synagogue, which Cohick thinks could have existed at Philippi. Christianity had no more to offer the “women God-fearers” in the NT than Judaism did (p. 192). (At a number of points the author does not sound too thrilled with either religion.) Cohick does not depict Phoebe as a “servant of the church in Cenchrea” (diakonon tēs ekklēsias tēs en Kenchreais; Rom 16:1); rather, Phoebe’s diakonia (normally translated “service” or “ministry”) has to do with her acting as Paul’s “agent” or “intermediary” in carrying the Letter to the Romans, which then segues over into bearing Paul’s “authority” (p. 305) as he writes, “lauding her” for the sake of enhancing his own status (p. 306). “Paul, in benefiting from Phoebe’s patronage, was himself showing his loyalty to her by recommending her to one of his patrons, the Roman church” (pp. 306–7). This sets up a tension with the Paul who scorned all personal rank and status as rubbish (Phil 3:8) and verified his apostleship by his stigmata (Gal 6:17), not by the support of people who were classier than he, whether female or male.

The strength of this book is its attention to primary sources. It is generally helpful in giving depth and texture to the real lives of women (whether actual or fictive) in the Hellenistic age. In this Cohick’s work has lasting value and sheds welcome light on the social world of the first century church.


Robert W. Yarbrough

Bob Yarbrough is professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, an editorial board member of Themelios, co-editor of the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament as well as the Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament (Broadman & Holman), and past president of the Evangelical Theological Society.

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