When Women Were Priests -- By: Brent E. Kassian

Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 02:5 (Dec 1997)
Article: When Women Were Priests
Author: Brent E. Kassian


When Women Were Priests

On Conspiracy Theories, Goddess Worship, Ms. Magazine And Oliver Stone

When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity, by Karen Jo Torjesen. New York: Harper San Francisco, 1993. 271 pp.

Reviewed by

Brent E. Kassian

According to the endorsements on the back cover and inner jacket, which come from sources such as Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Matthew Fox, and John Spong, the book claims to be a sophisticated and powerful analysis which sheds new insight into the historical evidence that women were priests and bishops in the early church. In her preface, the author tells us that her work evolved from a series of conversations with other feminist authors, with people who attended her public lectures, women who participated in her retreats, and her own students.

This volume will be of little value or interest to many evangelical readers as Torjesen writes from a liberal theological perspective and the manner in which she deals with her subject matter is clearly guided by her feminist presuppositions as a professor of Women’s Studies and Religion at Claremont Graduate School in California. The book is important, however, owing to its claim that women in the early church functioned in positions of ultimate church leadership equal to men. If the primary sources bear out Torjesen’s thesis, as she claims they do, this would obviously have major ramifications on the current complementarian- egalitarian debate.

Conspiracy Theories

The book is divided into nine chapters. In her introduction, Torjesen argues that “women are to reclaim their rightful, equal place in the church today” (p. 7) and they will accomplish this by understanding “why and how women, once leaders in the Jesus movement and the early church, were marginalized and scapegoated as Christianity became the state religion” (p. 7). She equates women’s equality with women’s ordination.

In her opening chapter, and throughout her work, she claims to unveil a “hidden history of women’s leadership, a history that has been suppressed by the selective memory of succeeding generations of male historians” (p. 10). She declares that this conspiracy to suppress women’s leadership began with the original authors of the New Testament. For example, she complains that Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15:1–4, “purposefully omitted the announcement of the resurrected Christ to Mary” (p. 35) and in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 and 14:34–35 she “catches tones of ambivalence and anxiety” (p. 13).

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