Women and Ministry in the New Testament
Swidler, Arlene
In Brief Commonweal: 668 Women and Ministry in the New Testament, by Elizabeth M. Tetlow, Paulist, $6.95, 164 pp. The status and role of women in the primitive church become increasingly...
...In the third section, dealing with the ministry of women as presented in the New Testament, Tetlow comes into her own, questioning, analyzing, interpreting...
...There must be other books later, but this is a good step forward...
...In this book Tetlow gives us a good summary of current scholarship plus a few questions that we wish had been asked long ago...
...As the old objections to the ordination of women—the argument from creation or nature, the Old Testament tradition—fade into oblivion, precisely how the earliest Christians perceived the example of Jesus and what they themselves practiced are the remaining foci...
...A large amount of material is digested and presented directly and plainly...
...Our author, for example, states flatly that "all of the New Testament writers were men of the first century," ignoring the theory going back to Von Harnack that Priscilla was the author of the Letter to the Hebrews...
...After all, what once was can again be...
...The first two sections of the book are background: the status of women in the ancient world, and religious office and ministry in the Bible...
...Mary of Magdala, she argues, clearly meets the biblical criteria for apostleship and with her witness "I have seen the Lord'' becomes the first apostle...
...why should we assume women were excluded...
...things we missed a few years ago we pick up this time around...
...The status and role of women in the primitive church become increasingly of interest today...
...Questions still remain, of course...
...ARLENE SWIDLER Commonweal: 670...
...The biblical texts, she shows, suggest that disciples beyond the Twelve were present at the Last Supper...
...And why has it always been assumed that the unnamed "beloved disciple" was a man...
...Treading over the same ground again is not necessarily repetitious, as we are all only slowly recognizing and discarding our prejudices...
Vol. 107 • November 1980 • No. 21
