Women in the New Testament

The New Testament is often read as offering a restricted vision for women’s leadership in the church. This course exposes some of the misunderstandings that have led to that conclusion and considers exegetical arguments in favour of a New Testament vision for the full inclusion of women at all levels of church leadership. Part One of the course looks closely at the New Testament's narrative portraits of women in the early church, beginning with the gospels' depictions of forerunners (Anna, Elizabeth) and disciples of Jesus (Joanna, Salome, and Mary Magdalene) before moving to the Acts of the Apostles and its account of Paul’s female coworkers (Lydia, Priscilla, and Phoebe). Part Two then turns to Paul’s letters themselves, looking at some of the named women of Romans 16 before turning to well-known ‘problem passages’ such as 1 Corinthians 11, 1 Timothy 2, and Ephesians 5, considering how a close study of these texts in their social, historical, and theological context, with the benefit of recent scholarship, can shed much-needed light on Paul’s understanding of women's roles in the churches.