Central argument
Helen K. Bond (Edinburgh) and Joan E. Taylor (King's College London), two historians of Christian origins, argue that Jesus had female disciples who travelled with him, funded the mission, healed, taught and later led churches, and that the all-male picture we carry comes from how they were remembered, not from what they did. The Gospel writers weren't interested in the women, so they show up only in passing, and in Mark only at the cross. The authors read those traces as "the tip of the iceberg": in a society that rarely recorded what ordinary women did, every mention counts. From there they go woman by woman (Salome, Joanna and Susanna, Mary Magdalene, the healed women, Martha and Mary, the anointing woman, Mary the mother of Jesus, Tabitha, Prisca, Phoebe and Junia), using the Gospels together with non-canonical texts, art, inscriptions and archaeology. The second half of the argument is about loss: as the movement had to look respectable to Roman society, and even more after Constantine, the women were edited down, veiled and shrunk, until the memory of the first sisters became the exception.
Objections
- The authors ask for "a good dose of informed imagination", and they use a lot of it. Men and women sent out in pairs, Joanna healing and baptising other women, Junia being Joanna under a Latin name: each step is plausible, but the chapters pile one plausible step on another, and by the end conjecture reads like a result.
- Their rule that a text telling women to be silent proves women were speaking is a good tool, but used everywhere it can't lose: if women appear it's the tip of the iceberg, if they don't they were erased.
- Later and non-canonical material (Gospel of Thomas, Pistis Sophia, Epistula Apostolorum, Hippolytus) gets real weight as "memory". The book says how late each one is, but a reader has to keep track of what is first-century evidence and what is third-century legend.
- The book is openly polemical ("certain church groups have a vested interest") and ends on a question ("where will we go from here?") without engaging the theological arguments on the other side. It's a historical case, and it leaves the church questions open on purpose.
Examples / Notable passages
- The Last Supper. The book opens with Leonardo's painting, cited as the image that fixed the all-male table in our heads; whoever served the food "has clearly departed". Their point is that it shapes boardrooms and cabinets too, not only churches.
- Romans 16. Of the twenty-nine people Paul greets in Rome, eleven are women. The letter itself was carried by Phoebe, deacon and benefactor, who probably read it out and explained it.
- A family with no fathers. When his mother and brothers come to take him home, Jesus says anyone who does God's will is my brother and sister and mother (Mark 3:35). Sisters and mothers are in the new family; fathers are missing, because the only father left is God.
- Women revealed at the cross. In Mark 15:40-41 we learn, only as Jesus is dying, that many women had followed him from Galilee to Jerusalem. That one line changes the picture of the road.
- "Two by two". The Twelve are sent out duo duo (Mark 6:7), the same Greek used for the animals entering Noah's ark, male and female. The authors suggest mixed pairs, like Prisca and Aquila: in a segregated world a woman was needed to anoint and heal other women.
- Joanna, wife of Chuza. Luke 8:1-3 names her as the wife of Herod's steward, a woman from the court who paid for the mission "out of her resources".
- "The Magdalene". "Magdala" means "tower" and there were many such towers in Galilee. Jerome, who knew Aramaic, said she got the name for her great faith: "the tower-ess", the one made great. In Mark and John she is the first witness of the risen Jesus (Mark 16:9-10, John 20:11-18).
- The anointing woman. In Mark she pours the perfume on Jesus' head, the way Samuel anointed David (1 Samuel 16:13): a private ceremony recognising the Messiah, the "anointed one". The nard also eased headaches, a kind act for a man about to be arrested. Jesus' answer is in Matthew too: "wherever the Good News is preached throughout the world, this woman's deed will be remembered and discussed" (Matthew 26:13). The book's title comes from that promise, and in the Gospels the woman doesn't even have a name.
- Martha. In John it's Martha who says "I have always believed You are the Messiah, the Son of God" (John 11:27). In Luke 10:38-42 the same woman is told she worries too much, and the authors read that scene as a curtailed "ministry". Neither sister seems to have been married: following Jesus was their own decision.
- Junia becomes Junias. Paul greets Andronicus and Junia, "prominent among the apostles", who were in Christ before him (Romans 16:7). Early readers took her as a female apostle; medieval translators made her "Junias", a man's name found nowhere else.
- The copyist of Codex Vaticanus. In the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus, cited for its scribe's choices, the copyist kept 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (wives silent in church, probably a later addition) and dropped the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), even though both passages were known to be textually insecure.
- Women shrinking in stone. On fourth-century sarcophagi Martha and Mary at the raising of Lazarus get smaller and smaller, until they become one tiny veiled figure, no larger than a small animal (Ally Kateusz's research).
- Cerula of Naples. A fifth-century catacomb portrait: a woman with arms raised in prayer, a liturgical pallium, the chi-rho above her head and open books of the four Gospels beside her. Kateusz reads her as a bishop; in the same years (495) Pope Gelasius was writing to the bishops of the area to stop women serving at the altar.