Masculinity in the New Testament and Early Christianity

Abstract

Building on the work of feminist queries regarding the social construction of gender, scholarship beginning in the 1980s began to interrogate masculinity as a culturally constructed category. Scholars focusing on the New Testament and early Christianity, building upon significant studies in both gender theory and the social construction of masculinity in ancient Greek and Roman contexts have produced a substantial amount of significant research in the last thirty years. Despite the proliferation of scholarship, significant questions remain as to how best to understand Jesus and his early followers in light of Greek and Roman understandings of masculinity. Some scholars see descriptions of Jesus, his disciples, and other key figures in the Jesus movement significantly resistant to key elements of Roman or Greek understandings of what it meant to be a man, while others argue that New Testament authors present these same figures substantially corresponding to hegemonic masculinity in the Roman world.