Women in the World of the Early Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life.

• Author: Wassen, Cecilia
• Position: Book review

Women in the World of the Early Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life. By LYNN H. COHICK. Grand Rapids, Mich.: BAKER ACADEMIC, 2009. Pp. 350, illus. $26.99 (paper).

The "women in the world of the earliest Christians" that Lynn Cohick sets out to explore are the ancient women in the broad Greco-Roman world around the turn of the Era, specifically 330 B.C.E. until 100 C.E., She includes references to New Testament texts in her analysis, but they are only occasionally at the center of her attention. Nevertheless. Cohick's study is very helpful in order to understand the social milieu of the women in the early church, but in most cases the readers themselves will have to make the connections to that particular group of women. While using the term "Christian," Cohick reminds the readers that these early Jesus followers were either Jews or gentiles and that no Christian society yet existed (p. 24). But, she is less discriminating with her use of B.C. and A.D. (rather than B.C.E. and c.E.), using these terms by convention without explanation.

The impetus for undertaking this study, she explains, was a "frustration over the various analyses concerning New Testament women" (p. 21). In her view, previous scholarship on biblical texts has often suffered from either a too sympathetic reading or reluctance to trying to find any evidence about historical women altogether. Scholars' use of Greco-Roman works has been marked by an uncritical reading that takes the information about women at face value and by the misreading of the sources. Cohick aims at rectifying the situation. She succeeds very well, especially when it comes to the non-biblical sources. With a keen critical eye she analyzes a wide range of pertinent material and impresses the reader with her familiarity with the highly disparate sources and her insights into various ancient milieus. She skillfully examines a mass of information on women from Greco-Roman and Jewish writings. as well as the New Testament, in order to reconstruct the social world(s) of ancient women, never forgetting that the lives of women differed radically depending on class and status; she poignantly states that "gender is often trumped by status" (p. 22). Below I can only highlight a fraction of the topics of her survey.

In chapter 1. "Women as Daughters," Cohick examines the power over life and death of the father (patria potestas) at the birth of all children in a household and analyzes the evidence for...