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Owen Strachan
Richard Bauckham, emeritus professor of
New Testament studies and Bishop Wardlaw Pro-
fessor at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland,
is a recognized expert in New Testament studies,
having written well-regarded works on Revela-
tion, the New Testament canon, and the testimony
about Jesus.
Bauckham published his Gospel Women eight
years ago. The text takes shape in eight chapters
that generally tackle the role the named women
of the Gospels played in the events of their day,
though the chapters meander into other discus-
sions—extrabiblical literature, the veracity of the
Gospel accounts, and the structure of the texts,
among others.
Chapter one covers how Ruth functions as a
“Key to Gynocentric Reading of Scripture.” Bauck-
ham expresses appreciation for feminist scholar-
ship, which in his judgment has “made the women
in the Gospels visible simply by attending to the
evidence of the texts that generations of male
scholars had (to put it charitably) not found very
interesting or had not thought significant enough
to deserve their labors” (xiii). Bauckham’s study is
clearly a needed one.
Bauckham notes that his essays are “quite
eclectic” and signals his intention to engage both
“intertextuality” and “the distinction between
androcentric and gynocentric perspectives in nar-
ratives,” which seem a good deal less obvious than
Bauckham thinks (xvii, xix). His study, he says, has
caused him to realize that while “the Gospels are
primarily the story of Jesus,” they also comprise
“the stories of many individuals who encountered
him and followed him” (xvii).
From there, Bauckham proceeds to ana-
lyze the “Gentile Foremothers of the Messiah” in
chapter two. He looks into possible reasons for the
inclusion of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and the wife of
Uriah in the genealogy of Matt 1:1–17. He con-
cludes the chapter by noting that Jesus functions as
a New Joshua to the Canaanite woman of Matthew
15 and Mark 7, a nice theological insight (44–46).
In chapter three, Bauckham looks at Eliza-
beth and Mary from Luke 1. He argues that Luke
1:5–80 is, contrary to many of Scripture’s “ando-
centric narratives,” written in a “gynocentric” per-
spective (47). The exact makeup of this kind of text,
it seems to me, is not immediately clear despite the
discussion on 48. As he promised to do in chap-
ter one, Bauckham zips through the canon, finding
profitable connections between Hannah and Mary,
for example.
Anna of the tribe of Asher occupies his focus
in chapter four. Bauckham undertakes significant
historical spade-work in this section as he attempts
to ascertain where first-century Asherites—pre-
sumably one of the ten lost tribes—resided (short
answer: Jerusalem). Bauckham incisively suggests
that exegetes should not gloss over Anna’s Asherite
status, which “ensures that the community repre-
sented in the narrative is Israel as a whole, northern
tribes as well as southern, exiles as well as inhabit-
ants of the land” (98).
Chapter five, “Joanna the Apostle,” features
more controversial fare. He develops the thesis that
Joanna of Luke 8:3 and 24:10 was an apostle and
not merely a disciple. Despite the scarce material
on Joanna and other women disciples in the bibli-
cal text, Bauckham argues with considerable force
that to assert that “the women cooked the meals,
washed the dishes, and mended the clothes” is mis-
guided (114). Bauckham’s language grows even
stronger when he makes a case for Joanna being
the Junias of Rom 16:7 and thus an apostle. He
spends considerable effort in mounting a refutation
of a 2001 New Testament Studies article by M. H.
Burer and D. B. Wallace (who followed John Piper
and Wayne Grudem) entitled “Was Junia Really
an Apostle? A Re-examination of Rom. 16:7.” The
discussion is technical and detailed, but ultimately
Bauckham’s claim seems to rest on highly disput-
able evidence.
Bauckham studies “Mary of Clopas” in chap-
ter six. Essentially nothing is known about this
woman, so Bauckham attempts to figure out who
Clopas was. He concludes that Mary was most
likely the wife of Clopas (207). On this basis he
asserts that Mary’s son was Simon or Simeon of
Clopas, “the most important Christian leader in
Palestine for half a century.” (209)
In chapter seven, Bauckham looks at Salome
of Mark 15:40 and 16:1. He notes that Salome is
a mysterious figure whose identity is developed
in extrabiblical literature like The Secret Gospel of
Mark. In some works (the Pistis Sophia, for exam-
ple), Salome converses with Jesus. In others, like
Secret Mark, she is enigmatically turned away by
Jesus (247). The tour of the extracanonical litera-
ture is engrossing, even fascinating, though it seems
to yield little rock-solid conclusion about the iden-
tity of Salome.
Chapter eight, “The Women and The Resur-
rection: The Credibility of Their Stories,” works
through various issues related to the inclusion and
exclusion of the post-resurrection testimony by
female followers of Christ. Bauckham presents sev-
eral helpful charts to diagram distinctions between
the Gospels and extracanonical sources. He help-
fully points out that the (five) women named did
not simply witness the resurrection and fade into
the background, but “were well-known figures” in
the post-resurrection Christian community (295).
He seems to over-reach, however, when he argues
that “what we have in the Gospel stories in which
they appear is the textualized form of the stories
they themselves told” (303). As he often does, he
qualifies this strong claim a few sentences later, leav-
ing the reader wondering how tensile the claim is.
Gospel Women is an engaging analysis of
unjustly unstudied women. Bauckham has done
valuable work in looking further into the stories
of the women named in the Gospels (and a few
others besides). His grasp of biblical history and
extrabiblical literature is impressive; his exegesis is
lively and creative; and he drops many rich insights
along the way, a number of them already discussed.
However, it must also be said that in the judg-
ment of this young reviewer, Bauckham often lets
possible conclusions assume the place of proven
ones. Though he generally holds pretty strong on
the veracity of the text, Bauckham does reveal a
penchant for adopting nontraditional and even
unscriptural positions, as seen above in the mat-
ter of Junias’s identity. His desire to be needlessly
unbounded by tradition—a sound desire, in the-
ory—seems in practice to skew him in favor of
what one could call the more generous conclusion.
Finally, while one can glean insights from a variety
of sources, and while his interaction with feminist
scholars is not uncritical, his admiration for wom-
anist hermeneutics and “gynocentric” readings of
Scripture is problematic.
For these reasons, this often helpful text
becomes one that the reader must work through
with discernment and a sharp eye. It is difficult to
write it off, but it is also difficult to recommend
it unreservedly. Perhaps it is best to read it with
a good deal of care—mining the good, chewing
on the unproven, remaining aware of the flaws,
standards that any writing, whether on so profit-
able a subject as the women of the Gospels or any
other, deserves.
