Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 24:4 (Autumn 2010)
Article: Book Review: "Women In The World Of The Earliest Christians" By Lynn H. Cohick (Baker Academic, 2009)
Author: Shirley L. Barron

PP 24:4 (Autumn 2010) p. 27

Book Review: Women In The World Of The Earliest Christians By Lynn H. Cohick (Baker Academic, 2009)

Shirley L. Barron

Shirley L. Barron, MA, M.D., taught Latin briefly at Wheaton College while in graduate school. She has practiced medicine in public health, pathology, and general practice for many years. She is a faculty mentor for Columbia Evangelical Seminary, Fair-view, Washington, teaching Greek and New Testament studies. She has also taught basic Koine Greek to interested members of her local church.

Lynn Cohick’s extraordinarily detailed book shows us an accurate reconstruction of women’s ways of life in the Greco-Roman world of the first century a.d. The book seems to be aimed toward academics and other well-informed readers.

The author wants to show the reader the differences between prescriptions for women’s life and behavior (often by biased writers of philosophy, theology, or satire) versus descriptions of women’s lives as seen in letters, inscriptions, business documents, and such. The former information is often uncritically accepted by contemporary persons without considering the motives of the ancient writers. The latter seems more likely to be fairly unbiased.

Cohick wishes to tell the story of average women, their life passages, opportunities, limits, joys, and sorrows. She investigates women as daughters, as mothers, as wives, as slaves, as businesspeople, as benefactors, both Jewish and Gentile, as well as those who became Christians.

One prominent point the author makes is that Roman women in general were much freer than Greek women of previous centuries. We have been told about the extreme backwardness and seclusion of Greek matrons, and we have often extrapolated this to the first-century world. Not so! Roman women were not sequestered: They owned property; they could engage in business; they had some religious rites and customs that excluded men; they could be patrons and benefactors of their own clients. Of course, slavery was everywhere present in the Greco-Roman world, so slave women were also numerous. Slave women were often used in the sex trade or were taken as concubines by free men. Still, many slaves obtained their freedom and often prospered afterward, women as well as men. Regardless of their work or position in society, “women drew social status from their character, not their work. Unlike men, who derived their social esteem from their work, women gained social prestige from their virtues . . . being a faithful wife and mother, working diligently, and caring for the home” (241).

The chapters on marriage and wives have copious quotations from Roman, Greek, and Jewish authors on how marriage is “supposed” to be and what married women are “suppo...