Product Description

Why did some early Christians consider Mary Magdalene to be an apostle while others did not? Some Christian texts, underlining her role as one of the very first witnesses to the resurrection, portray Mary Magdalene as the "apostle to the apostles", while other sources exclude or replace her in their resurrection accounts. This book examines how the conferral, or withholding, or apostolic status operated as a tool of persuasion in the politics of early Christian literature. Drawing on both canonical and noncanonical literature in her comprehensive sd<"@tudy, the author reveals some intriguing correlations between the prominence of Peter in a text and a corresponding diminishment of women's leadership and apostolicity. This historical study of early Christian tensions has serious implications for current denominational discourse because authority, apostolic status and the ordination of women continue to be highly disputed topics within many Christian circles today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #513298 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 270 pages

Customer Reviews

The (nearly) invisible woman made visible again
This is an absorbing and closely-argued study that does significantly more than just argue for the importance of Mary Magdalene as a figure of apostolic authority in the early church. In part a social history of early Christianity as seen through its many and diverse writings, the book is also an implicit plea to us to read more carefully and questioningly those early texts that - sometimes very subtly - downgrade women to the point of invisibility. On a broad but rarely superficial tour through the canonical Gospels, apocryphal Acts and other early writings (such as the Gospels of Peter, Mary and Thomas and the Dialogue of the Saviour), Ann Graham Brock draws a persuasive picture of what might have been the interplay between Peter and Mary Magdalene, or the ideas and ideals they stood for. The author draws out the complex of patriarchal assumptions that seem to have underlain Peter's role in this interplay, assumptions that necessarily raise questions about the authority of the Scriptures that seem to favour him. A more thorough analysis of the implications of this 'hermeneutic of suspicion' for us today, and the prospects of using it to render Mary Magdalene more 'visible' in contemporary faith practice, would have pushed the rating up to five stars for me.