Contextualizing Gender in Early Christian Discourse

This is an introduction to feminist and gender-critical perspectives on the New Testament and other early Christian writings.In this introductory book, Vander Stichele and Penner outline a gender-critical approach to the New Testament and discuss the issues involved. Building on feminist analysis, gender-criticism explores the place of both women and men in, behind, and in front of the text, but also understands sexual identities as part and parcel of the study of gender identities in both text and context, assessing the relative configuration of such identities through their broader, rhetorical, ideological, and socio-cultural contexts in the ancient (and modern) worlds.The authors clearly set out the methodology and hermeneutical issues and then give concrete examples of how gender-critical exegesis affects the reading of texts. The New Testament is not considered in isolation, rather the book deals with early Christian Literature in a more general sense, in that the issues discussed are related to the study of that broad body of literature and concrete examples either come from those texts or tackle issues at stake in them. This book is unique in terms of its range as well as in the explicit methodological focus that is fostered. Furthermore, it is a joint project of scholars from different cultural backgrounds, but with a similar interest and complementary skills.