Reading Bodies: Physiognomy as a Strategy of Persuasion in Early Christian Discourse by Callie Callon

This chapter seeks to answer the question is why certain early Christian writers do not enlist the stereotype of the dangerous female sorceress evident elsewhere, especially given the widespread rhetorical war on “heretical” movements, groups that supposedly favored women’s participation and leadership. Instead early Christian writings depict women consistently as victims of men’s magic rather than as magicians themselves. In an effort to understand this peculiarity of early Christian rhetoric, the chapter first provides a context for it by surveying depictions of magic from a variety of ancient non-Christian sources. Next, it examines depictions of magic from diverse early Christian sources, drawing attention to the pattern of male magician and female victim that emerges throughout. Finally, the chapter considers the ideological function of “magic” in early Christian rhetoric and explores possible reasons why Christian writers gendered magic the way they did.Keywords: early Christian writings; female sorceress; gender; magic

Reading Bodies: Physiognomy as a Strategy of Persuasion in Early Christian Discourse. By Callie Callon. Library of New Testament Studies 597. London: T&T Clark, 2019. vii + 173 pp. 35.95 paperback. - Volume 90 Issue 4

Illness, Pain, and Health Care in Early Christianity

Reviewed by: The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied by Marianne Bjelland Kartzow Mary Ann Beavis marianne bjelland kartzow, The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied (Routedge Studies in the Early Christian World; New York: Routledge, 2018). Pp. xiii + 167. $140. This study sets out to explore the slave metaphor, which is ubiquitous in early Christian discourse, using perspectives from metaphor, intersectionality, and embodiment theory. [End Page 149] The “double trouble” of the subtitle refers to the fact that the metaphor of slavery to God/Christ is not “merely a manner of speaking—it is a way of using some people’s vulnerable bodies and lives as source material to talk about abstract and concrete realties in God’s world” (p. 146). Marianne Bjelland Kartzow uses the device of “imaginary scenes” (following Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006] 18–19) to reconstruct the experience of the enslaved in the ancient ecclesia. Kartzow’s analysis ranges from well-known NT passages to the underinterpreted Shepherd of Hermas (chap. 5) and the explicit portrayal of Jesus as a slave trader in the Acts of Thomas (chap. 6). For example, in chap. 2, “Embodying the Slavery Metaphor: Female Characters and Slavery Language,” K. points out that Mary’s self-designation as “female slave of the Lord” (Luke 1:38) resonates with scriptural accounts of the slave girls Hagar, Bilhah, and Zilpah, who served as surrogate mothers for their barren mistresses, and in the interests of patriarchal lineages (pp. 50–51): “When used on a young girl such as Mary, . . . being a woman in reproductive age who is asked to give birth to her master’s son, the metaphor is ‘made real’” (p. 54). K. places the enslaved girl with a python spirit (Acts 16:16–19), dismissed by the text (and by most interpreters) as a nuisance, at the center of attention. By “freeing” the girl from spirit possession, K. notes, Paul causes her to lose her economic value to her owner(s), thus leaving her vulnerable to an uncertain, and likely worse, future (pp. 54–57). In both cases, Paul the “slave of Christ” and his free male com-patriots have very little in common with the metaphorical and real slave women of these narratives. Chapter 3 (“Metaphor and Masculinity”) examines the “no longer slave” formulations of John 15:15 and Gal 4:7, noting that this discourse assumes changes in relationships that are available only to males, whether slave or free: “Women rarely become acknowledged as friends or sons or heirs” (p. 83). Moreover, as chap. 4 argues, if all believers are slaves of the Lord, some (the actually enslaved) are more slaves than others. Chapter 5, on the Shepherd of Hermas, explores a text where a formerly enslaved church leader, the freedman and prophet Hermas, negotiates his transformation from slave of a female owner to metaphorical slave of God—Hermas’s favorite designation for believers. K. pays special attention to the striking parable of the slave and the son (Sim. 5.2), where a faithful slave is not only manumitted but adopted as son and co-heir with his master’s biological son. She speculates, “Perhaps he [Hermas] moved from being a slave of his owner to being a slave of God because he, like the slave in the parable, showed himself worthy of being a freed man and an heir” (p. 113). Paradoxically, K. observes, although metaphorical slavery pervades the Shepherd, actual slaves—apart from the putative author—are invisible, Hermas’s concern for the poor and marginalized notwithstanding (pp. 115–18). For Hermas, especially, the bodily experience of male enslavement and manumission intersects with the metaphorical usage. The last main chapter (“Jesus, the Slave Trader: Metaphor Made Real in The Acts of Thomas”) considers a fictive narrative in which a metaphorical slave of Christ is transformed into a “real” slave when Jesus sells the apostle Thomas to a merchant from India. K. ably unpacks the many ways in which the slave metaphor operates in the text, and how it works with respect not only...

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Interpreting Magic and Divination in the Ancient Near East and Magic and Divination in Ancient Israel

Reviewed by: The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts by Ronald Charles Mary Ann Beavis ronald charles, The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts (Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World; London: Routledge, 2020). Pp. xvii + 272. $124. This book sets out to examine a wide range of early Jewish and Christian texts in which enslaved figures are represented and, according to Charles, rendered silent, by their authors, “who had no intrinsic interest in slaves . . . used, abused, and silenced their enslaved characters to articulate their own social, political, and theological visions” (p. 1) The Jewish texts considered all belong to the so-called Pseudepigrapha: Sibylline Oracles, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Testament of Job, Letter of Aristeas, Jubilees, Joseph and Aseneth, and Wisdom writings that include Ahiqar, 3 Maccabees, Pseudo-Phocylides, and the Sentences of the Syriac Menander. The early Christian writings are both canonical and extra-canonical: 1 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, the Gospels, Acts, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Acta Perpetuae, Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne, and the Acts of Andrew. C. approaches these texts through the lenses of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing [End Page 330] the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), and Subaltern studies, to “uncover small tales constructed around slaves, or better, to consider how particular narratives could be understood differently if the reader pays attention to enslaved persons in their characterizations in the texts” (p. 12). Not surprisingly in a project that covers so much ground, the results are uneven. In my reading, several “small tales” stand out: the slave woman in the Testament of Job who gives her own loaf of bread to Satan, disguised as a stranger, when Job snubs him (7:5). Admittedly, the woman is rebuked for her kind act, but by Satan, hardly a reliable character. C. pays special attention to the slave characters—an unnamed slave girl and Malchus, the male slave of the high priest named in John 18:10—who figure in the scene of the denial of Peter (Mark 14:66–68; Matt 26:69–71; Luke 22:56; John 18:15–26), meticulously detailing the unique features of each narrative. C. highlights both the devalued figure of Rhoda (Acts 12:1–16) and the unnamed fortune-teller of Acts 16:16–18, characters often neglected by interpreters. Although all act/speak truthfully (and, in the case of the slave woman in Testament of Job, righteously), their words are dismissed, like the true words of the women disciples in Luke 24:11. Similarly, the slave Felicitas is sidelined by the freeborn Perpetua in the Passion, and both women are silenced in the Acts. In the Acts of Andrew, the body of the slave woman Euclia is used, abused, and discarded to preserve the chastity of her Christian mistress Maximilla: “The body of the elite woman is protected, while the body of the slave is exploited” (p. 196). Several of C.’s interpretive moves are less compelling. Some of the references to slaves in the pseudepigraphal writings he includes are slight or nonexplicit, as with the figure of Hermon in 3 Maccabees 5, who “is not explicitly called one [a slave] in the text” (p. 47). The observation that “he is an administrative person, who is in danger of being killed because of the king’s caprice” (p. 47), suffices to explain his vulnerability. C. adopts the traditional, but highly contested, hypothesis that Onesimus (Phlm 10) was a runaway slave, although why a fugitive slave would seek refuge by visiting a Roman prisoner is not explained. C. assumes that Epaphroditus (Phil 2:19, 25; 4:18) was a freedman (and thus outside the scope of the study), although he could just as likely have been enslaved or freeborn. To be sure, Eusebius’s construction of Blandina as a Christ figure whose death has cosmic significance (p. 182) subordinates her to a “highly theologized salvation history” (p. 183), but this is no different from his portrayal of other martyrs, enslaved or free. Charles’s study features a conclusion that thoroughly summarizes his analysis, chapter by chapter, seemingly in response to the critiques of...

Reviewed by: Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West by Philippe Buc Michael Stewart Buc, Philippe, Holy War, Martyrdom, and Terror: Christianity, Violence, and the West (Haney Foundation), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015; cloth; pp. 496; R.R.P. US$49.95, £32.50; ISBN 9780812246858. No topic from medieval historiography sparks as much controversy in today’s world as Western Christianity’s historical attitudes towards holy war, martyrdom, and terror. Unquestionably, developments since the attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 have highlighted the importance of understanding the origins of religiously sanctified warfare, martyrdom, and [End Page 274] terror. Into this divisive environment arrives the timely new monograph by the medieval historian Philippe Buc. In a rich and sophisticated study, Buc explores what he describes as the long roots of ‘Western violence’ through a dizzying array of texts, time-periods, and historical cultures as diverse as the late Roman Empire, crusader Catholic Europe, Revolutionary France, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and George Bush’s post-9/11 United States of America. Confessing that he will be focusing primarily on the ‘dark side of Western Christianity’, Buc relies on what he sees as the commonalities and not the diversities among these premodern and modern societies’ attitudes towards violence, maintaining that the ‘degree of regularity’ in their views makes his macro-approach credible and, indeed, necessary. Countering current thinking, which postulates that a more militant and more violent Christianity was a particular feature of the post-Constantine Church, Buc argues forcefully that Christianity had always paired irenic and militant ideologies. While this thesis is less revolutionary than his bibliography suggests, it is this yin and yang of pacifism and bloody militarism that forms the monograph’s core. His disparate chapters illustrate that despite outwardly irenic tendencies, the smouldering embers of intolerance could be, and often were, stoked by Christian intellectuals into conflagrations of brutal intolerance. As Buc rightly cautions, in early Christian rhetoric, ‘peace, pax, did not mean the absence of conflict but victorious conflict leading to right order and justice, iustitia’. So, while many Christian rulers and intellectuals preached pacifism and religious tolerance, they spent much of their time engaging in spiritual and material warfare. Certainly, a deft intermingling of spiritual and physical warfare had always played a role in Christian ideology. The Church Fathers were fully aware of the paradoxical pairing of militarism and pacifism in scripture. Devout fifth-century Christian intellectuals like Augustine had famously come to accept (though perhaps not as enthusiastically as Buc suggests) that ‘good’ Christians could serve in the military and destroy Rome’s enemies without committing sin. This position was not limited to a Christian society’s foreign enemies. Buc argues that from its origins, ‘Christendom struggles simultaneously against physical enemies outside, against vices inside the human being and against vicious men inside Christendom – for instance, resident Jews, false brethren (falsi fratres, see Galatians 2. 4), bad clergy, perverts, heretics – and against demons’. Buc posits that it is only by understanding these ancient Christian attitudes that we can begin to appreciate the lingering vitality of such views in both the Christian and post-Christian West. Chapter 1 reveals how American [End Page 275] war ideologies echo these early Christian militant themes. This helps to explain why America has frequently fought ‘moral wars’ against internal and external enemies. I would agree with Buc that the Christian Roman Emperors, Constantine and Justinian, would have understood the notions of exceptionalism and the easy mingling of ‘mildness and strength’ preached by American presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush. While recognising the innovative aspects of medieval crusade, Chapter 2 rightly points out the dangers of underestimating the extent to which these earlier militant Christian ideologies motivated eleventh-century Western crusaders. According to Buc, ‘late antique holy war slowly morphed into high medieval crusade’. So, rather than considering the indiscriminate slaughter of Muslim men, women, and children in the First Crusade of 1096–1100 as an aberration of a violent age, Buc believes we should seek its origins in the late Roman and early medieval Christian worlds. Moreover, we should not underestimate the extent to which Western crusaders were motivated by...

The emergence of early Christianity during the first century C.E. is a truly remarkable phenomenon. An excellent Afterword in the 2003 publication of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (2003) explains the relation of Conceptual Blending (Integration) Theory to conceptual metaphor theory. The first programmatic conceptual blending interpretation of a New Testament passage in a socio-rhetorical framework has now been completed and will be forthcoming soon as a published book. This chapter focuses on six rhetorolects: wisdom, prophetic, apocalyptic, pre-creation, miracle, and priestly rhetorolect. One of the challenges is to discover how these rhetorolects blend with one another. Perhaps certain blends of two, or perhaps three, rhetorolects create emergent blend structures that are especially generative in early Christian discourse. The chapter gives a preview of blending in early Christian miracle discourse. It analyses and discusses the nature of some of the blending in early Christian miracle rhetorolect. Keywords: conceptual blending theory; early Christianity; New Testament passage; rhetorolects; wisdom

In most modern interpretations of Paul's writings and early Christian history, ethnicity is implicitly or explicitly defined as natural, inherent, immutable, or otherwise given. Paul's letters are often read to support the view that the identities of Christ-believers, in contrast to other Jews, transcend fixed, bodily characteristics we associate with ethnicity and race. After all, Paul's writings include such powerful passages as Gal 3:28: There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, male and female: for you are all one in Christ Jesus. This verse is frequently invoked to support reconstructions of an inclusive and egalitarian impulse in the Jesus movement. For example, Rosemary Radford Ruether echoes Gal 3:28 when she writes that class, ethnicity, and gender are . . . specifically singled out as the divisions overcome by redemption in Christ.1 Our goal is to challenge the conceptualizations of race and ethnicity in such interpretations of Paul and early Christianity. This task arises out of our own interest in the politics and ethics of interpretation, specifically from the view that all reading is ideological.2 As scholars culturally marked as white and Christian, we feel an obligation to struggle against both racist and anti-Jewish interpretive frameworks that have served to mask and sustain white Christian privilege.3 This twofold ethical commitment leads us to favor a view of race and ethnicity that is widespread today but not typically used to interpret Paul's writings or early Christian self-definition.4 Specifically, instead of presuming that ethnicity and race are fixed aspects of identity, we approach these concepts as dynamic social constructs.5 We see them as characterized by an interaction of appeals to fluidity and fixity that serve particular political and ideological interests. Using this dynamic approach allows us to transform the ways we have been trained to think about race and ethnicity and their saliency for interpreting Paul. Our proposed model encourages a rethinking of traditional interpretations in which the understanding of ethnicity or race as given operates as a foil for a non-ethnic, all-inclusive Christianity. In this binary understanding, earliest Christianity is conceived of as a universal, voluntary movement that specifically rejected the significance of ethnoracial identification for membership and thereby broke from its Jewish roots.6 Since the universalizing image of Christianity is emphatically portrayed as voluntary or achieved, the implied or explicit contrast is a form of community that is involuntary and particularboth features frequently attributed to ethnicity and race. This understanding of early Christianity has had paradoxical effects.7 On the positive side, if Paul is interpreted as having defined religiosity as distinct from ethnoracial identifications, then Christian practices and structures that contribute to racist and ethnocentric oppression can be viewed as contravening universalitic and egalitarian ideals inherent in earliest Christianity. This kind of universal and inclusive vision of early Christianity has enabled antiracist reforms and has been central to the biblical interpretations of many ethnic and racial minorities.8 When ethnoracial differences are understood as natural and are used to explain and justify social inequalities, then it can be liberative to argue that some of Paul's teachings-and subsequent Christian interpretations of them-offer an alternative vision for human community, in which such differences are transcended, made irrelevant, or obliterated. On the negative side, however, this understanding of Christianity can have both racist and anti-Jewish effects. The view of early Christian universalism as non-ethnic can lead us to ignore the racism of our own interpretive frameworks and overlook how early Christian discourse relies on ancient modes of othering. Gay Byron's recent study demonstrates the polemical use of color symbolism in early Christian writings, including polemics that uncomfortably anticipate modern forms of racism. …

Neither Jew nor Greek: A Contested Identity. By James D. G. Dunn. Christianity in the Making, Volume 3. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing, 2015. xiv + 946 pp. $60.00 (cloth).This book completes Dunns Christianity in the Making series by sketching the development of Christianity from the destruction of the Second Temple to Irenaeus (roughly ad 70-180). Within this large series, the final volume is the most ambitious due to its attempt to cover such a broad time period. Dunn's clear presentation is commendable and mitigates the length of this sizable contribution to early Christian history.The opening chapter outlines the emergence of the great church tradition and argues that Christian identity was forged through various struggles in the first and second centuries. Many of these struggles were intraChristian debates. Dunn focuses his attention on the impact that major players from the first generation of Jesus' followers had on generations that followed. This interest frames much of the book's structure.After introducing the sources on which he bases his study, Dunn looks at Jesus' impact on early Christianity. He outlines how gospel came to be associated with a particular type of writing, the way in which the canonical Gospels and Thomas remember Jesus, and the references to Jesus in the diverse writings of the second century. The presence of orality even in written documents forms an underlying theme in these chapters. Dunn presses beyond form-critical questions regarding the oral forms of particular stories before they were written. Instead, he argues that the Jesus tradition was known in oral form well into the second century. He suggests that allusions in early second-century literature may be part of catechetical, liturgical, and apologetic traditions. As the century progressed, texts were increasingly known in written forms. Although some of Dunn's specific examples may be disputed, this presentation is a helpful reminder that the oral telling of the Jesus story likely continued to influence other early Christian writers after the written Gospels appeared.The next two chapters consider the relationship of Judaism and Christianity. Identifying these two entities clearly during the first two centuries is far from simple. Dunn shows that Israel's scriptures undergird early Christian writings, that Jewish Christians continued to form part of Jewish communities in Syria and Palestine, and that the process by which Judaism and Christianity came to be separately identifiable entities cannot be mapped as a single parting at one point in history. Rather, he proposes multiple partings and crisscrossed tracks. …

Metaphor of Slavery in Writings of Early Church: From New Testament to Beginning of Fifth Century, by I. A. H. Combes. JSNTSup 156. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Pp. 210. $57.50. Commenting on Rom 1:1, Origen speculates on reasons behind Paul's selfdescription as slave in light of his insistence elsewhere that those who live in Christ have received not spirit of slavery but rather spirit of adoption as sons. problem is one of logical inconsistency, and Origen explores number of possibilities for reconciling disparity. His ingenious solution is to infer that Paul understands marriage as form of slavery, and that Rom 1:1 is evidence that when Paul received his call he had wife. This solution has not been influential in history of interpretation. Nonetheless, Origen identifies conundrum with important theological ramifications: seemingly incommensurable uses of tropes of slavery in NT and other early Christian writings. Metaphor of Slavery in Writings of Early Church, revision of 1991 University of Cambridge dissertation, offers thorough introduction to complexities that inform early Christian reliance on metaphors rooted in discourse of slavery. Combes approaches Christian appropriation of language of slavery as case study in religious metaphor. Problems arise when those who deploy religious metaphors confuse them with literal descriptions of world: The area in which this problem probably causes most consternation today is that of use of 'social relationship' terms in speaking of (p. 11). Can society that has rejected monarchy still rely on metaphor of God as King, for example? Combes sets out to examine early Christian permutations of metaphor of human being as slave of God or Christ. Combes concedes that social structure of slavery in ancient influences development of Christian metaphors of slavery, but argues that the theology which makes sense of use of such metaphor creates its own dynamic which results in this metaphor unfolding at completely different pace from any discernible change in relevant culture (p. 15). More strongly, Combes suggests that results of case study supply a reason for disentanglement of religious language from contemporary society, freeing it from need to seek social relevance and (p. 171). first chapter offers an overview of slavery in antiquity, drawing on recent scholarship to provide background for argument of volume. As Combes rightly acknowledges, the ancient world is not itself coherent entity for study, but consists of number of societies geographically and chronologically distant from one another. In light of this acknowledgment, emphasis on classical Greece in section on GrecoRoman seems peculiar. section on slavery in ancient Near East draws largely on OT, but relevance of OT representation of slavery for understanding practice and ideology of slavery in early Christian era is not articulated. More helpful is section offering brief survey of metaphoric uses of slavery in ancient world. Combes also devotes chapter to early church's treatment and perception of actual (rather than metaphoric) slaves. earliest sources take for granted that gospel reaches out to slave as to free. Later sources, however, document some of obstacles that slaves encountered in their pursuit of Christian life, including restrictions on baptism or ordination of slaves in absence of owner's consent. heart of Combes's argument lies in chapters on metaphors of slavery in NT and patristic writings. …

Book Review| October 01 2004 The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World, Richard A. Horsley Neil Asher Silberman. Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Biblical Literature (2004) 123 (3): 564–568. https://doi.org/10.2307/3268058 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte; The Message and the Kingdom: How Jesus and Paul Ignited a Revolution and Transformed the Ancient World. Journal of Biblical Literature 1 January 2004; 123 (3): 564–568. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3268058 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveSBL PressJournal of Biblical Literature Search Advanced Search Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This work provides a reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, the author of this book demonstrates that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity. Rather, she shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways which reveal insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with a command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, the author investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, elucidating their ideas on sexual reform. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the importance of the Temple for the early Christians and the diversity in the attitude toward the Temple found in the New Testament (NT). The Temple is the heart of ancient Judaism, in both an institutional and a symbolic sense. Meanwhile, early Christian discourse about the Temple engages with Judaism or with early Christianity's own Jewishness. This discourse is laden with deep religious sentiments, both positive and negative. Most NT texts allude to the Temple at a time when the physical structure is no longer in existence, and yet the Temple remains significant and even central to the authors of Luke, Hebrews, and Revelation. It is commonly argued that there are at least four ways in which the Temple is superseded in the NT texts: the church is the new Temple; the individual believer is the Temple; the Temple is in heaven; and the Temple is Jesus's body.

Exaggerating in the direction of truth so as to provoke historiographical thought, this article claims that formative Christianity was wholly an androcentric project. Oft-cited women-friendly texts (Luke, Galatians, Gospel of Thomas) are not exceptions to early Christian masculinised gender ideology. The article locates early Christian commitment to a piety of 'andreia' (manliness) within the similar hegemonic Graeco-Roman gender ideology. It concludes with some reflections on the effects ofa hegemonic ideology and raises questions on the possibility of emancipatory agency.