This course explores women’s lives, leadership, and portrayals in the New Testament and early Christian literature, considering both named and unnamed figures across diverse social statuses and environments. Students analyze how women appear in assemblies, households, and patronage networks in the first-century Mediterranean world, drawing on historical, literary, social-scientific, and archaeological approaches to New Testament texts alongside early Christian and Greco-Roman sources. The course engages womanist, feminist, Latina/mujerista, Asian, and other interpretive perspectives, and examines how gender-aware readings of the New Testament developed in relation to the nineteenth-century women’s suffrage movement and continue to shape ongoing efforts for dignity and justice.

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