Women in the World of the Earliest Christians

Lynn Cohick provides an accurate and fulsome picture of the earliest Christian women by examining a wide variety of first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman documents that illuminate their lives. She organizes the book around three major spheres of life: family (daughter, wife, mother, widow), religious community (including both official and unofficial activities), and society in general (work, slavery, prostitution, benefaction). Cohick shows that although women during this period were active at all levels within their religious communities, their influence was not always identified by leadership titles nor did their gender always determine their level of participation.Women in the World of the Earliest Christianscorrects our understanding of early Christian women by offering an authentic and descriptive historical picture of their lives. The book includes black-and-white illustrations from the ancient world.

Lynn H. Cohick (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and coauthor of The New Testament in Antiquity. She previously taught at Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology.