Recent Feminist Approaches to Interpreting the New Testament

Abstract

This article provides an overview of feminist approaches to the New Testament from the period of 2000 to early 2021. Using a broad definition of ‘feminist’ (to include virtually any work focused primarily on women or female issues presented in the biblical text) and a more stringent definition of ‘New Testament’ (including only those texts that are a part of the New Testament canon, but not larger socio-historical studies or extracanonical literature), the article offers an overview of trends in feminist scholarship on the Gospels and Acts, the Pauline epistles, the General Epistles and Hebrews, and Revelation, noting that this body of scholarship may be characterized as being diverse, collaborative, and centered on female characters within the New Testament texts. With open vistas for exploration remaining, the article forecasts a rich future for feminist approaches to the New Testament.

Keywords

Feminist new testament women woman female Gospels Paul Epistles Revelation 21st Century

Introduction

When I was first invited to write this article on ‘recent feminist approaches to the New Testament’ I was both over-joyed and daunted by the task. Afterall, defining what we mean by ‘feminist approaches to the New Testament’ is simultaneously self-evident and laden with several questions. For example, what constitutes a distinctly feminist approach to the New Testament? Must such an approach be particularly geared toward the emancipatory liberation of women and a critique of patriarchy? Or, given patriarchal norms and structures, is the simple choice to center women, women’s experiences, and women characters in the Bible enough to count as ‘feminist’? Perhaps, the publication of any work authored by a woman in a field whose demographics are roughly 75 percent male (Society of Biblical Literature 2019) is itself an act of feminism.

One might also put the stress on the question elsewhere: What constitutes a distinctly feminist approach to the New Testament? Must such an approach attempt to cover the whole of the New Testament, or is a focus on a particular text or texts satisfactory? Does ‘the New Testament’ refer only to the written, literary products that are a part of this collection, or can more socio-historically oriented works that explore the experience of women in the first century count as contributing to an understanding of ‘the New Testament’? Does the delineation ‘New Testament’ rule out extracanonical works that may shed light on the times and cultures that produced the canonical texts?

I ask these questions not because I can provide clear answers to any of them but rather because I wish to highlight the complexity of the task that I am undertaking here. The use of the term ‘feminist’ itself is contested. Some scholars (Schüssler-Fiorenza 2001: 11, 2013: 12) would wish for a more narrow use of the term that limits the use of the title only to those whose scholarship is explicit in its aims for social change or radical transformation of power structures. Others, however, would allow for any examination of women in biblical literature to be branded as ‘feminist’ (Shaner 2019: 19). I do not intend to take a position on this debate, but for the sake of casting the net as broadly as possible in this survey of recent scholarship, I have generally been guided by a more inclusive definition of ‘feminist’ that would count the centering of women’s experiences as itself a radical and ideologically driven choice.

This choice for a more inclusive definition of ‘feminist’ is motivated by several other factors as well. First, given the vast social, ideological, theological, geographical, and other contexts from which feminist interpreters arise, making explicit claims to be working for social change may not always be appropriate, safe, or possible for interpreters who may otherwise be deeply committed to the tenets of a feminist agenda, broadly conceived as being dedicated to the full flourishing of women. Thus, recognizing that scholarship may still subvert patriarchal and hierarchical power structures without explicitly claiming to be doing so, I adopt an expansive definition of ‘feminist’ that can still include the work of those scholars who, perhaps for reasons of their own safety, may not have the privilege to make more radical claims about their work.

Second, as will become apparent below, several recent approaches to the New Testament have taken into account the intersectional identities that inform practitioners of feminist interpretation. That is, even as a particular interpreter might prefer to be identified as a ‘postcolonial feminist’, ‘queer feminist’, ‘womanist’, or ‘mujerista’, this intersectional work nonetheless demonstrates the feminist interpretive tendency to center elements of women’s experiences and to focus on women and gendered issues in biblical literature. Thus, I have opted to use ‘feminist’ as an umbrella term that can cover a broad swath of scholarship not as a way of erasing these distinctions among scholars but rather, as a means of ensuring that these nuanced and important perspectives are also included.

Despite my rather liberal application of the title ‘feminist’, I have taken a more conservative approach to defining ‘the New Testament’, preferring studies that work with the literary products found in the Christian collection by that title over others that explore more socio-historical directions or extracanonical texts. Inevitably, some readers will wonder why I have left out this or that resource in the ways in which I have constructed lines of inclusion and exclusion. However, I readily admit that these choices are somewhat artificial, and I hope that in this approach, I am opening up a space for others to pursue the same question using different criteria than me.

This article also makes the decision to limit its scope to sources published since 2000. In some ways, there is nothing magical about this choice to restrict this article’s purview to works from the twenty-first century. That is, this particular year itself does not demonstrate a clear mile marker in the development of feminist biblical interpretation.

On the other hand, however, the year 2000 serves as a useful boundary for several reasons. At the most basic level, this year marked the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. However, beyond offering a merely numeric boundary, this year may also point to the earliest foundations of contemporary critical feminism.

Some activists and scholars have spoken about trends within feminist scholarship and activism with ‘wave’ terminology (i.e. first wave feminism, second wave feminism, etc.). By rough delineations of these waves, the year 2000 would fall approximately halfway between third wave feminism (with its origins in the late 1980s or early 1990s) and fourth wave feminism (with its origins in the early 2010s). However, many of the characteristics of fourth wave feminism (including online and social media activism) could be pre-dated to the emergence of widespread internet accessibility. It is, of course, difficult to pinpoint a precise date for when the internet became accessible for most scholars and critical theorists. Nonetheless, one United States Census Bureau survey suggests that it was in 2000 that, for the first time, at least half of all households in the United States owned a computer (Ryan 2018: 3). Thus, the year 2000 might serve as something like the date of ‘conception’ for fourth wave feminism, even if its birth was still a few years in the distance.

In some ways, fourth wave feminism may be discerned at the heart of many recent feminist explorations of New Testament literature. However, this ‘wave’ language for feminism is problematic and further illustrates the complexity of setting a date for what might be counted as ‘recent’ feminist approaches to the New Testament. As Evans and Chamberlain (2015) have demonstrated, the ‘waves’ of feminism are not neatly demarcated given that multiple waves are coterminous and continuous. Thus, as much as the so-called ‘fourth wave’ of feminism may have introduced something new with its widespread use of social media activism, as Evans and Chamberlain (2015) observe, this twenty-first century brand of feminism cannot be cleanly separated from its older sisters.

Thus, the choice of the year 2000 as the historical limit for this article is complex. Though somewhat artificial, this chronological boundary nonetheless accounts for the changing nature of critical feminist exploration even beyond the discipline of biblical studies. So, while slightly pre-dating the naissance of the so-called ‘fourth wave’ feminism that is in progress at the time of this article’s publication, the limitation of post-2000 publications allows for the capture of changing trends that have led to the most recent feminist explorations of the New Testament.

The criteria that I have developed here are far from perfect. Nonetheless, these criteria allow for the capture of the full scope of what we might mean by ‘recent feminist approaches to the New Testament’. While that topic first struck me as a daunting one, I quickly realized that the scale of this exploration could be vastly underestimated depending on one’s criteria.

To demonstrate the usefulness of the criteria that I have constructed here, in early June 2021, I conducted a non-scientific survey of the number of articles that had been published in select peer-reviewed journals. Using EBSCOhost’s ATLA Religion Database, I performed searches within three flagship journals for biblical and/or New Testament studies and three journals devoted to interests more closely aligned with feminist aims. In reviewing the search results, I narrowed down the results further to eliminate book reviews and to determine the number of results written by at least one author whose name presented as normatively female. (Of course, I recognize that male and non-binary scholars have also taken up the cause of feminism, but for the purposes of this survey, I was most interested in how the work of female scholars was being published, or not.) Because some of the publications surveyed had broader scopes beyond the study of New Testament texts, I then further narrowed down the results to articles whose titles suggested that they were focused on some issue related to the study of the New Testament. (I tended toward a liberal application of this criterion in areas of doubt.) While this was, of course, a non-scientific approach, the results (detailed in Table 1) were jarring. By the culling process described here, these six publications, which published a total of over 3,300 articles among them from 2000 to mid-2021, published fewer than 30 articles related to feminism and the New Testament that were written by women. In other words, less than one percent of the publications in these journals over the past 20+ years featured the voices of women scholars exploring explicitly feminist approaches to the New Testament.

Table 1.

Survey of articles related to feminism and the New Testament written by women since 2000.

Journal	Number of non-review results for ‘Feminist’ since 2000	Number of non-review Results by women	Number of non-review results by women on the New Testament
Journal of Biblical Literature	10	6	1
New Testament Studies	2	1	1
Journal for the Study of the New Testament	7	6	6
Priscilla Papers	21	13	2
Lectio Difficilior	74	65	16
Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion	116 (search limited to results in article title only)	113	2

Non-scientific though it was, this survey suggested to me that the broad criteria that I have outlined above may allow for a clearer picture of how feminist approaches to the New Testament have taken shape over the past two decades. In other words, while some of the authors mentioned here might be slightly surprised at (and may, perhaps, even resist) seeing their work appearing under the moniker ‘feminist’, I would suggest that ‘feminist approaches’ to the New Testament may expand beyond the pool of those works who explicitly claim the term.

As a committed feminist scholar myself, I should, perhaps, pause here to observe the ways in which my own positionality and social location affects my work. As a white cis-gendered female scholar, I readily claim the title of ‘feminist’. Yet, despite my deep sympathies for feminist positions, much of my own work never claims to be explicitly ‘feminist’. Rather, my feminism emerges more subtly in my choice of methods and texts for study. I do not presume that this is true of all feminist biblical scholars, but I hope that my expansive definition of ‘feminism’ will allow for the inclusion of feminists, allies, and supporters of feminist approaches to the New Testament.

In what follows, I offer a very brief overview of the history of feminist approaches to the New Testament as well as some general observations of the shape of the scholarly literature on the topic over the past two decades. After that, I follow the canonical order of the New Testament to offer some reflections on the contours of feminist approaches to parts of the New Testament canon: the Gospels and Acts, the Pauline epistles, the General Epistles and Hebrews, and Revelation. As I hope this article will illustrate, feminist approaches to the New Testament have much to offer to the larger discipline of biblical studies, and such approaches demonstrate potential for significant contributions to the field for decades to come.

A Very Brief History of Feminist Approaches to the New Testament

The decision to impose a date restriction on this examination of current feminist approaches to the New Testament means that the long and established history of such approaches before 2000 will, unfortunately, not be granted the attention it deserves. Many important foremothers in the academy paved the way for the feminist scholarship of the recent two decades, and that work has inevitably formed and shaped the scholarly literature of the twenty-first century. Thus, while the present investigation will sadly pass by much of this work, this section at least tips a proverbial hat to some of the more influential thinkers and publications whose legacies inform the current scholarship that will be the object of investigation throughout the remainder of this essay.

While the full history of feminist approaches to the New Testament will not be rehearsed here, several recent works recount some of the earliest feminist approaches to the New Testament. For example, Schüssler-Fiorenza (2014) has collected several essays that explore the development of feminist biblical studies throughout the twentieth century. Some of these essays examine the developments in feminist biblical scholarship through particular decades of the late twentieth century (Plaskow 2014; Scholz 2014). Given that these decades contributed significantly to the shape of contemporary feminist approaches to the New Testament, such essays provide a helpful backdrop for understanding the shape of the field today. Similarly, although Koosed (2017: 10–25) explores larger methodological considerations of feminist biblical scholarship, she nonetheless provides an important history of the key developments and key scholars who contributed to what is today a flourishing field of study.

In short, while a longer history of scholarship is beyond the scope of the present article, it is important to note that more contemporary trends in feminist approaches to the New Testament have not arisen ex nihilo. Rather, as many of the recent works cited below attest, the early days of feminist biblical interpretation laid an important foundation upon which much of the contemporary scholarship explored here has been built.

General Feminist Approaches to the New Testament

Despite the long history of feminist exploration of biblical texts, scholars maintain an active discussion about the place and future of such approaches within the larger field of biblical studies. That is, even as feminist scholarship explores the actual texts of the New Testament, this scholarly field has also maintained a self-aware conversation about how feminist methods can be applied and where such approaches fit within the larger discipline.

In one example of how this conversation has unfolded, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion published an issue in 2009 that devoted significant space to bringing together the voices of various practitioners of feminist biblical interpretation. These scholars reflected on the place of feminist biblical interpretation within the larger guild of professional biblical scholars (Baker et al. 2009; Byron 2009; Kalmanofsky 2009; Mbuwayesango and Scholz 2009; Nadar 2009; N. N. H. Tan 2009; Wacker 2009; Yang 2009). As the essays demonstrate, the perceptions of the place of feminist interpretation within the larger academic discipline of biblical studies are as varied as the scholars who practice these methods.

While there continue to be advancements in feminist approaches and the field has continued to grow since that 2009 collection, attempts to characterize feminist approaches to the whole of the New Testament remain difficult. As F. S. Spencer (2004: 1) describes it, feminist criticism is a ‘sprawling “big top”’ that includes any number of characteristics, motivations, attitudes, and methodologies. Nonetheless, I would like to suggest three very generalized qualities that might capture the essence of such approaches: they are diverse, collaborative, and centered on female characters.

The diversity of feminist approaches is immediately evident as they have been as varied as their practitioners. Nonetheless, in her survey of feminist biblical interpretive methods, Shaner attempts to offer a categorization of these approaches, suggesting five general motivations for feminist biblical interpretation:

1. ‘Expose Modern Assumptions That Hide Women’

2. ‘Recover Women as Positive Role Models’

3. ‘Analyze How Texts and Contexts “Think with” Women’

4. ‘Shift from Author to Communities and Pluralities’

5. ‘Attend to the Ethics of Interpretation and Liberation of Women’ (Shaner 2019)

As Shaner’s delineations illustrate, there are several ways of interpreting New Testament texts that may be in tension with one another even as they share an interest in feminist methods. Thus, Schüssler-Fiorenza’s (2001) metaphor of dancing to describe the process of feminist biblical interpretation is particularly apt for describing these approaches to the New Testament.

Yet, rather than leading to separation or animosity among scholars, the diversity of feminist approaches to the New Testament complements what might be identified as a second major attribute of feminist scholarship: the collaborative nature of such approaches. Several feminist approaches to the New Testament have been intentionally collaborative works that have pulled together voices from feminist scholars across the New Testament canon and across the globe (Dube 2001; Beavis 2002; Matthews, Kittredge, and Johnson-DeBaufre 2003; Hearon 2004; Wicker 2005; Wicker, Miller, and Dube 2005; Boer and Økland 2008; Newsom, Ringe, and Lapsley 2012; Schottroff and Wacker 2012; Navarro Puerto and Perroni 2015; Glahn 2017a; Sherwood 2017; Dunning 2019). Such collections reflect not only a valuation of collaboration in the task of feminist biblical scholarship, but also a recognition of the deeply contextualized work of feminist criticism. That is, feminist approaches explicitly embrace and celebrate the unique social locations of their interpreters, falling back on the rallying cry of second wave feminism that ‘the personal is political’. These edited volumes, then, demonstrate the importance of attending closely to an interpreter’s context as they seek to include the voices from interpreters spanning a range of canonical expertise, geographical location, ethnic identity, and sexualities. This emphasis on intentional collaboration suggests that feminist approaches to the New Testament have a future in the discipline for as long as there are scholars from a variety of social locations to engage this work.

This feminist valuation for scholarly collaboration is perhaps most apparent in the many Feminist Companion volumes to individual books and collections within the New Testament that have substantially aided in normalizing such approaches (Levine 2001a, 2001b, 2004, 2009; Levine and Robbins 2005a, 2005b; Levine and Blickenstaff 2003a, 2003b, 2003c; 2004, 2009). These collections have covered the whole of the New Testament canon, offering diverse feminist perspectives on these texts. Similarly, Levine’s editorial shaping of all these volumes creates a consistency in the quality and scope of these volumes even amid the diverse essays that they contain.

A final trend observable in some feminist approaches to the New Testament is a tendency to focus on specific women within biblical texts. Particular women in the Gospels and Acts have attracted scholarly attention and have been subject to more literary-critical approaches used in conjunction with feminist ones (Bauckham 2002; Gench 2004; Miller 2004; F. S. Spencer 2004, 2013; Waweru 2008; Reid 2016a, 2016b; Wray 2016; P. E. Spencer 2017; Lyons-Pardue 2020). This method of investigation prioritizes more literary approaches to feminist interpretation that focus especially on the narrative portrayal of female characters. That is, these approaches recognize that the biblical authors make literary choices in their characterization of female characters that can indicate aspects of those individual authors’ perspectives on women and/or the societies out of which and for which those authors wrote. Thus, rather than seeking to ascertain only the actual historical realities of women in the first century, scholars who pursue these literary approaches inquire into how first century literature chooses to portray women in the context of a constructed literary world.

As this general overview suggests, there are a multiplicity of feminist approaches to the New Testament as a whole. Thus, even as we turn to examine explorations of particular parts of the New Testament canon, some of these larger characteristics (diversity, collaborative scholarship, and a focus on female characters) will continue to appear.

Feminist Approaches to the Gospels and Acts

Within feminist scholarship on the Gospels and Acts, particular directions for exploration vary widely. In many cases, such scholarship focuses on a particular Gospel, examining how Matthew (Botha 2003; Weaver 2010; Clements 2014; Pillay 2015), Mark (Mitchell 2001; Dewey 2006; Cadwallader 2008; Betsworth 2010; Kim 2010; Aernie 2018; Connolly 2018; Lyons-Pardue 2020), Luke (Elvey 2005; F. S. Spencer 2013; Forbes and Harrower 2015; Dale 2017), or John (Lee 2002; Beirne 2003; J. K. Jones 2008; Kearney 2017) individually portray the women in their respective accounts. However, beyond this focus on a particular part of the canon, this otherwise vast body of work might be loosely categorized by the methodological approaches of its practitioners. Generally, as will be explored in greater detail below, scholarship in this area has tended to make use of narrative-critical methods, social-scientific methods, ideological-critical methods, and theological methods. While such methods are not always used to the exclusion of all others, these four general approaches emerge as popular means of engaging with the Gospels and Acts from a feminist perspective.

The Gospels and Acts, perhaps because of their literary genre, have been a site of more narrative-critical scholarship. That is, because these narratives present women as characters, these female characters offer opportunities for explorations of how they are portrayed within their literary settings. This trend has remained visible in feminist scholarship from the earliest to the latest points of the two decades of scholarship under review here (Bauckham 2002; F. S. Spencer 2004, 2013; Gench 2004; Miller 2004; Waweru 2008; Forbes and Harrower 2015; Reid 2016a; Malick 2017; P. E. Spencer 2017; Aernie 2018; Lyons-Pardue 2020). In many cases, these narrative approaches have revealed greater narrative roles for women in the Gospels and Acts than what might otherwise be expected.

Of the female characters in the Gospels and Acts, perhaps the most explored in feminist circles is Mary, the mother of Jesus. Several works have been dedicated to exploring the mother of Christ (Gaventa and Rigby 2003; Levine and Robbins 2005b; Reiprich 2008; Price 2016; Maunder 2019; Kateusz 2019) or sorting out which of the multiple Marys named in the New Testament might correspond with this figure (F. S. Jones 2002; Good 2005; Beavis and Kateusz 2020). Given Mary’s on-going centrality as a figure of religious devotion, this focus is, perhaps, not surprising. On the other hand, though, Mary as a character within the biblical narratives plays a relatively minor role throughout most of the Gospels, and so the focus on her role within the text perhaps exaggerates her literary presence. In many cases, however, these works on Mary are not solely driven by a narrative-critical method, and they often tend to display some methodological overlap with the more theologically driven works explored below.

Although literary-critical views have been popular in feminist approaches to the Gospels and Acts, several scholars employ social-scientific methods as well (Kitzberger 2000; Nelavala 2007; Houghtby-Haddon 2011; Manyika 2019). For example, Betsworth (2010) combines these two approaches in her study of daughters in the Gospel of Mark. Similarly, Calpino and Dale take such combined approaches in their studies of women in Luke-Acts (Calpino 2011, 2014; Dale 2017). Love (2009), on the other hand, takes a more strictly social-scientific approach in his study of marginal women in the Gospel of Matthew. These more social-scientific approaches seem to recognize that even as feminist perspectives prize the question of an interpreter’s own social location and context, so too are the social constructions of the first century important to understand because of the light that they can shed on the lived experiences of the women described in the pages of the New Testament.

Beyond a focus only on female characters within the Gospels and Acts, some studies have pursued more ideologically focused directions that have traced how such female characters are used within their respective narratives and the ways in which this use highlights ideologies of the authors and/or audiences of New Testament texts, including Matthew (Botha 2003; Dube 2000, 2007; Wainwright 2009), Mark (Mitchell 2001; Cadwallader 2008; Kim 2010; Fletcher 2014), and Acts (M. J. Smith 2011) in particular. In applying postcolonial and Marxist lenses, for example, such studies have been able to discern both liberating and oppressive tendencies within these texts. Within these ideologically oriented pursuits, one often encounters questions related to how the texts of the Gospels and Acts contribute to or hinder the liberation of women in social contexts today.

Related to these more ideologically driven works, another category of scholarship has pursued more theological directions. Scholarship in this vein has considered both the theology of the Evangelists themselves as well as how this theology drives modern theologies of construction and practice (Belleville 2000; Finger 2005; Reid 2007; Waweru 2008; Weaver 2010; Pillay 2015; Lee 2021). Like other ideologically driven approaches, these theological explorations also display a keen interest in the question of how the biblical texts in question contribute to the circumstances of women today, especially in explicitly religious and ecclesial settings.

Characterizing the many feminist approaches to the Gospels and Acts is a challenging prospect, and any such categorization of the vast scholarship on this area will necessarily oversimplify the otherwise careful and nuanced work of scholars in this area. Nonetheless, despite the challenge of trying to categorize this large body of scholarship, one conclusion can be made definitively: the Gospels and Acts have continued to remain a site for feminist engagement with biblical texts. That is, there is no evidence to suggest that this area of feminist biblical study is declining in any way. Indeed, of all the parts of the New Testament canon, the Gospels and Acts have, perhaps, received the majority of feminist scholarly attention over the past two decades.

Feminist Approaches to the Pauline Epistles

Feminist scholarship on the Pauline epistles differs from that on the Gospels and Acts, likely due to the differences in genre, authorship, and historical setting between these parts of the New Testament canon. Among feminist approaches to the Pauline epistles, three larger scholarly trends deserve to be highlighted: a trend toward examining Paul’s use of feminine imagery, a trend toward contextualizing Paul’s work (including a decentering of his voice to listen for lost voices from his community), and a trend toward the use of postcolonial methods paired with feminist approaches for interpreting the Pauline epistles.

While the Pauline epistles are not, perhaps, brimming with feminine imagery, one trend among feminist interpreters of Paul’s letters has been to explore those places in the epistles where Paul does adopt feminine imagery. Among such works, Eastman’s (2007) and Gaventa’s (2007) are prominent. Eastman (2007) devotes attention to Paul’s use of relational language and imagery, such as his claim to be in labor pains with the Galatians (4:19) and his use of the barren woman analogy (Galatians 4:21–5:1) to illustrate God’s transformative power. Where Eastman focuses primarily on the Paul of Galatians, Gaventa (2007) offers a more wide-ranging exploration of Paul’s feminine and maternal imagery, such as claims likening himself to a nursing mother (1 Thessalonians 2:7; 1 Corinthians 3:1–2) and his references to labor pains (Galatians 4:19; Romans 8:22). Gaventa’s work itself serves to support a more recent examination by McNeel (2014) on the ways in which Paul makes use of infant and nursing mother imagery in 1 Thessalonians 2:5-8.

The second trend in feminist approaches to the Pauline epistles, a tendency toward contextualizing and decentering Paul’s own voice, is admittedly narrower in scope than the previous one. Nonetheless, this represents an important newer direction of study. That is, while other feminist interpreters have taken for granted the importance and centrality of Paul’s own voice in the letters, scholars like Krause (2010), Johnson-DeBaufre and Nasrallah (2011), and Fox (2017, 2020) have observed that Paul’s voice is just one among a chorus of other voices in emerging Christian communities and should thus be rightly heard within a broader context. This instinct to place Paul’s teachings within the larger framework of his ancient settings is, as Ehrensperger (2004; 2005: 243) observes, consistent with feminist trends to take contexts (both of the interpreted and the interpreter) into consideration when approaching biblical texts.

The final trend I wish to highlight is a trend toward the incorporation of feminist and postcolonial approaches to the study of the Pauline epistles. Scholars have applied such combined approaches to parts of Romans (Auga and Schirr 2014), Galatians (Kahl 2013, 2014), and Philippians (Marchal 2005, 2006, 2008). This frequent combination of hermeneutical approaches may well be due to the approaches’ shared interest in issues of power and identity (Horsley 2003). In other words, the often explicit commitments to liberation in both feminist and postcolonial approaches makes these two approaches well-suited for each other, especially in interpreting texts that are steeped within a colonial and patriarchal framework.

Beyond these three broad trends in feminist approaches to the Pauline Epistles, it is also worth observing two particularly fraught sites for feminist study of the Pauline Epistles: Paul’s instructions regarding women’s veiling in 1 Corinthians 11:1-16 and the identification of Junia in Romans 16:7. While examinations of these texts have not been limited to feminist approaches, these texts have received special attention from feminist scholars.

Several scholars have attended to questions of how to understand Paul’s instructions on women covering their heads (1 Corinthians 11:1-16). Some have sought to understand Paul’s larger theology of gender in conjunction with his statement in Galatians 3:28 where he seems to minimize gender distinctions (Standhartinger 2002; Matthews 2015). Others have used this text as a way into exploring some of Paul’s motivations and theology (Penner and Vander Stichele 2004; Westfall 2016). Still others have explored this text within its particular socio-historical context (Kimesa 2017) and have found indications in the text of historical women who resisted domination (S. T. Smith 2019). In other words, while the precise direction and conclusions of these explorations differ, they share an interest in this text as one site where larger questions related to gender, power, autonomy, and agency coalesce.

While examinations of the veiling passage in 1 Corinthians 11 have produced differing views, that scholarly debate has been relatively mild. By contrast, feminist approaches to the Pauline Epistles have found disputed ground when it comes to the exploration of one figure in particular: Junia. Named only once by Paul in Romans 16:7, Junia’s name and position as an apostle has been hotly contested. On one side of the debate, some scholars have argued from philological grounds that the name does not refer to a woman (Wolters 2008) or that the phrase describing this figure (ἐπíσημοι ἐν τοĩς ἀποστóλοις) is better translated as something like ‘well-known to the apostles’ rather than ‘prominent among the apostles’ (Burer and Wallace 2002; Huttar 2009; Burer 2015; Ng 2020). On the other side of the debate, some scholars have defended the female identity of the bearer of this name as well as her apostolic status (Epp 2002, 2005; Belleville 2005; Clark 2018; Hartmann 2020; Lin 2020). On its face, the Junia debate proports to be a scholarly conversation about philology or early Christian leadership practices. However, this superficial view belies the deeply ideological and theological substratum of the debate. That is, it is notable that many of the scholarly views opposing an identification of Junia as a female apostle are being published within the more theologically conservative space of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. This suggests that the debate, then, is likely being motivated by theological and ideological presuppositions to a greater degree than what may appear at face value.

The Junia debate is, perhaps, only one manifestation of a larger current within feminist approaches to Pauline literature: a recurring interest in how the Pauline (as well as the Pastoral) Epistles impact larger issues of gender relations, liberation for women, and female leadership in contemporary settings. For example, in their collection of essays related to Romans and gender, Grenholm and Patte (2005) note the importance of making issues of power explicit. Likewise, Merz (2012) explores similar questions of power and gendered expressions of such power. Finally, several scholars demonstrate interest in the implications raised especially by some of the texts in the Pastoral Epistles that lead to similar questions about women’s roles, in both ancient and modern settings (Polaski 2005; Payne 2009; Gench 2015; Hylen 2015, 2019; Westfall 2016; Davis 2017; Peppiatt 2019).

Compared to scholarship on the Gospels and Acts, feminist scholarship on the Pauline corpus has, perhaps, been a bit more contentious. Whether due just to the differences in genre between narrative and epistle or to the more prescriptive nature of some of the Pauline texts, this collection has been a site for more intense scholarly debate. As feminist scholars have wrestled with the implications of these texts for issues of the power, leadership, and agency of women today, the scholarly conversation has often been characterized not just by examinations of the textual details but also by investment in the real-world outcomes of biblical interpretation.

Feminist Approaches to the General Epistles & Hebrews

Given that they are a part of the New Testament canon, the General Epistles and Hebrews have received at least cursory attention from larger volumes that engage feminist aims (Levine and Robbins 2005a; Marquis 2019). However, of all the parts of the New Testament, these books have received the least attention from a feminist perspective. While one can only speculate about the reasons for this, several factors may contribute: the relative brevity of this portion of the New Testament canon compared to others, a diminished scholarly interest in this section of the canon generally, and a relative lack of texts within the General Epistles that deal explicitly with women or feature female characters. However, whatever the reasons for fewer publications on this part of the New Testament canon, the neglect of these works has not been absolute. Among the feminist approaches to the General Epistles and Hebrews, two areas of interest emerge: the re-use of female characters from the Old Testament and a focus on the household codes of 1 Peter 3.

Several scholars who have taken feminist approaches to the General Epistles and Hebrews have engaged especially with these books’ portrayal of women from the Old Testament. Although the nod to Rahab in James has received some minor attention (Cargal 2004; Charles 2011; Tichý 2020), the inclusion of Sarah in Hebrews and in 1 Peter has attracted far more scholarly interest. As Bar-Asher Siegal and Dinkler (2020) observe, the use of Sarah provides an intriguing test case for understanding how New Testament authors made use (or not) of the original contexts from which Old Testament source material was drawn (so also Punt 2009). In the case of Sarah’s appearance in 1 Pet. 3.6, several scholars suggest that the epistle’s author uses her as an example of a woman who behaves appropriately (A. B. Spencer 2000; Dinkler 2007; Bott 2015), even when dealing with a husband who ‘does not obey the word’ (1 Pet. 3:1). In a similar vein, others have asked how Sarah’s appearance in this text would have been received by women in the earliest audiences of the epistle (Rensburg 2004; Bauman-Martin 2004). Finally, while Sarah’s appearance in Hebrews 11 has not received quite the same level of scholarly attention, the question of her role in this text has also been of interest to some (Bott 2011; Cos 2011).

A second primary site of feminist interaction with the General Epistles has been the household codes of 1 Pet. 3.1-7. While some modest attention has been given to the particular issue of adornment (Batten 2009; Glahn 2017b), interest in the code’s interaction with social mores of both the past and present has been more evident. Explorations of these codes have considered larger questions of how to interpret them, especially in light of their original context (Bauman-Martin 2004; Christensen 2016). Despite what might appear at face value to be repressive for women (Bird 2008, 2011), several explorations of the codes have considered the ways in which they might have offered at least subtle notes of liberation or of subversion of existing patriarchal structures in their time (Brown 2004; Horrell 2015; Reeder 2015; Le Roux 2019). Given the prescriptive nature of these codes, other scholars have been particularly interested in the implications for interpreting the codes in modern contexts where questions about ecclesial leadership (Slater 2020) and domestic violence (Tracy 2006) demand answers.

Beyond these areas of exploration, there have been modest feminist probes into other parts of the General Epistles. For example, Baker (2007) has offered an exploration of the birth imagery and the gendered nature of soteriology in James. Likewise, Nortjé-Meyer (2015) and Reese (2012) have offered readings of Jude that have mined that epistle for material that may be sympathetic to feminist emphases.

The relative dearth of feminist engagement with the General Epistles and Hebrews raises questions about the applicability of such an approach to all parts of the canon. Must a text contain an explicit reference to women or female characters in order to attract scholarly feminist attention? Are texts that do not explicitly engage themes of power and gender less amenable to a feminist lens? Or, is the decreased feminist attention to this corner of the New Testament canon simply mirroring a larger trend in New Testament scholarship to devote increased attention to the Gospels and Pauline Epistles? While I do not presume to answer these questions, they bear consideration in light of the limited feminist approaches to the General Epistles and Hebrews.

Feminist Approaches to Revelation

While I have examined all the other texts of the New Testament within the context of larger collections, the Apocalypse of John is so unique as to deserve its own treatment. Indeed, despite the presence of apocalyptic elements elsewhere, Revelation is the only true full-length apocalypse within the canonical New Testament. Yet, despite its singularity in this regard, it has certainly not been ignored among feminist scholars.

Feminist perspectives on Revelation have been varied in their assessments of how amenable the Apocalypse is to feminist views. However, carefully nuanced perspectives are probably right in detecting the presence of both liberating and oppressive tendencies within the text (Lee 2001; Hylen 2003; Samuelsson 2012). Among the varied feminist approaches to this text, one might distinguish two larger and often overlapping trends: one trend toward more ideologically driven examinations using imperial or mythic lenses and one trend toward examining particular female characters within the text.

The first of these prevailing tendencies within feminist approaches to the Apocalypse is an inclination to combine feminist and postcolonial perspectives. Several scholars approach Revelation with an eye toward the presence of empire and imperial power (Omerzu 2006; Frilingos 2007; J. W. Marshall 2009; Nelavala 2009; S. T. Smith 2014). This combined feminist-postcolonial approach lends itself well to the text, especially in connection to Revelation 17–18 where the whore of Babylon serves as a thinly veiled metaphor for the Roman empire itself. In other words, the application of a feminist-postcolonial lens is particularly well-suited to these chapters.

In a similar vein, the mythic quality of Revelation has also given rise to feminist approaches that take this quality into account (Lee 2001; Omerzu 2006; Collins 2009; Stenström 2015). Økland (2005) and Samuelsson (2012), for example, apply insights from Irigaray’s (1977) work on myth to explore the Apocalypse. Despite Økland’s (2017) own exploration of the Apocalypse as a part of the ‘manifesto’ genre, viewing Revelation through the lens of myth is particularly helpful both for understanding the text itself and its interpretation. Such a perspective accounts for how mythic elements reproduce and reinscribe mythic and gendered views within this text.

Beyond these more ideologically oriented approaches (and often making use of such approaches), another prominent trend among feminist approaches to Revelation is an examination of the text through the lens of one or more of the female ‘characters’ who appear in the text: ‘Jezebel’ (Rev. 2.18-29), the woman clothed with the sun (Rev. 12), Babylon the whore (Rev. 17–18), and Jerusalem the bride (Rev. 21–22). While perhaps motivated by other ideological perspectives, such approaches are not out of line, especially in light of Tavo’s arguments for the ways in which at least two of these figures (the mother of Rev. 12 and bride of Rev. 21) serve important structuring roles for the text (Tavo 2007).

Scholars who have turned their attention to the woman named as ‘Jezebel’ (Rev. 2.20) have attempted to consider how the woman behind the author’s condemnation might be recast in a more positive light (Thimmes 2003, 2009; S. T. Smith 2019). That is, as S. T. Smith (2019) observes, whatever the identity of the historical woman behind this epithet, she clearly exhibits initiative and agency.

Several feminist approaches have also explored the woman in ch. 12. This strange figure’s description has led to differing suggestions about her function or symbolism, with some arguing that she symbolizes the ecclesial community (Häfner 2005; Sechrest 2016) and others tracing a connection between her and Hagar, another woman who retreats to the wilderness with a child (Treacy-Cole 2005). Likewise, as Lee (2001) observes, this figure herself is ambiguous as she both highlights the androcentrism of the text while simultaneously offering some glimpses of hope.

Of all the female characters in the Apocalypse, however, the whore of Babylon seems to have attracted the most attention from feminist interpreters. Some explorations of this figure have attempted to situate her within a first century context of slavery and/or prostitution in order to compare her description in the text with historical practices (Glancy and Moore 2011; Valentine 2015). Others have taken a closer look at the gendered dynamics of the figure’s portrayal (Pippin 2005; Nelavala 2009), though at least Hylen (2003) has cautioned against taking an all or nothing approach to reading this text through a lens of gender only (so also Økland 2003, 2005). Still others have drawn attention to the horrific nature of this text (Vander Stichele 2000, 2009), not only in its original context but also in its application to contemporary problems of sex trafficking (Carson 2011) or violence against women (Pillay 2019).

The final female character of the Apocalypse, the bride, has received a bit less attention, but she has not been wholly overlooked. Huber (2007, 2009) especially has attended to the bride’s function and nuptial imagery in the text (so also Zimmermann 2003). Like the women of chs. 12 and 17–18, the bride of chs. 21–22 also seems to serve as something of a metaphor, as Huber (2007) observes.

Despite the varied nature of feminist explorations of Revelation, such scholarly forays are more similar to than they are different from feminist approaches to other parts of the canon. The penchant for a combination of feminist and postcolonial approaches to Revelation is not unlike a similar trend that is emerging within Pauline studies (Marchal 2005, 2006, 2008; Kahl 2013, 2014; Auga and Schirr 2014). Likewise, the focus on particular characters within the Apocalypse is not dissimilar from the trend within scholarship on the Gospels and Acts to adopt more narrative-critical approaches (Bauckham 2002; Gench 2004; Miller 2004; F. S. Spencer 2004, 2013; Waweru 2008; Forbes and Harrower 2015; Reid 2016a; P. E. Spencer 2017; Lyons-Pardue 2020). In short, despite its unique setting as the New Testament’s only full-blown apocalypse, Revelation has earned feminist attention that is comparable to that paid to other parts of the canon.

Recent Trends and Future Directions in Feminist Approaches to the New Testament

In the past two decades, feminist approaches to the New Testament have charted new directions that move beyond the early decades of critical feminist biblical interpretation. While the hermeneutics of suspicion that was evident in early feminist works has certainly not disappeared in contemporary studies (Russell 1976, 1985; Schüssler-Fiorenza 1983, 1992, 1994; Trible 1984; see also Dreyer 2011; Johnson-DeBaufre and Nasrallah 2011; Charles 2011; Fox 2017, 2020; Reinhartz 2021), the current directions of feminist approaches to the New Testament appear to be considering new vistas. As Koosed (2017: 26) has observed, intersectionality has become something of a hallmark of the feminism that has dominated much of the past few decades. Even as scholars have issued calls for more intersectional approaches (Marchal 2017: 433; Janssen 2018), this intersectional work is already happening, especially from scholars who have taken explicitly womanist (Douglas 2001; St Clair 2008; Junior 2015; M. J. Smith 2015; Byron and Lovelace 2016; S. T. Smith 2019) and postcolonial approaches (Dube 2000; Y.-H. Tan 2003; Kwok 2006, 2012; Kim 2010; Moore 2013; Choi 2015; Nelavala 2016; Vander Stichele and Penner 2005). The growing prevalence of intersectionality is perhaps most apparent in Yee’s recent Presidential Address to the Society of Biblical Literature (Yee 2020). The delivery of this address in such a prominent venue in the field suggests that rather than being restricted to the margins of biblical research, feminist and intersectional approaches are gaining significant ground in the field.

While many of the feminist approaches to the New Testament that have been explored here have focused on examinations of the biblical text itself, it is also important to recognize another venue in which feminist approaches to the New Testament are occurring: in the study of the Bible’s reception history. Reception history has been emerging as an increasingly popular approach to biblical studies. As this approach has gained traction in the field, it has also witnessed increasing attention to female biblical interpreters whose voices have often been overlooked in the pages of history. Thus, while they might not articulate their projects as specifically ‘feminist’ in nature, several scholars have undertaken to attend both to the voices of female interpreters of the Bible and to the ways in which female characters within the biblical text itself have been recast since the time of the text’s composition (de Groot and Taylor 2007; Joynes and Rowland 2009; Calvert-Koyzis and Weir 2010; Taylor 2012; Økland 2014; Taylor and Weir 2016; J. E. Marshall 2017; Schuller and Wacker 2017).

Despite the significant developments that have occurred in feminist studies of the New Testament over the past two decades, several intersectional vistas remain open for greater exploration. While several of these could be listed, I will identify just three such approaches that might benefit from further combination with feminist approaches: ecological, childist, and disability approaches. To be sure, ecofeminism is not unknown to biblical studies. However, with only a few exceptions (Wainwright 2008, 2015; Elvey 2015), the combination of feminist and ecological lenses has not gained as much attention from New Testament scholars as it has from theologians, ethicists, and religious studies scholars.

Similarly, a combined feminist and childist approach seems to offer rich opportunities for biblical scholars, as Elkins (2013) has observed. However, the field remains nearly as open for exploration here as when Elkins offered this suggestion in 2013, with only a few works attending to the intersection of feminist and childist concerns (Aymer 2016; Green 2016; Allen 2019; Elkins 2020). A combination of feminist and childist approaches may prove especially helpful in navigating the terrain of motherhood and the function of maternity within biblical texts, a topic of on-going interest (Kirk-Duggan and Pippin 2009; Howard 2015, 2019; Myers 2017).

Finally, I would like to suggest that there would be rich opportunities for a combination of feminist and disability approaches to the New Testament. That this particular combination of approaches has not garnered more attention is surprising. Several feminist scholars have pursued issues related to embodiment and how bodies become sites for interpretive work (Fletcher 2014; Buell 2017; Glancy 2017). This feminist interest in bodies would seem to make it a well-suited partner for disability approaches, as some feminist theologians have already explored from more theologically oriented perspectives (Freeman 2002; Belser 2010; Betcher 2010). However, up to this point, feminist interpreters of the New Testament have not yet adopted a feminist-disability approach.

As this article has demonstrated, feminist approaches to the New Testament are diverse and wide-ranging, even as they leave open unexplored territory for future inquiry. In many of the works referenced here, authors approach the New Testament canon not from a posture of alleged objectivity (as early historical-critical scholarship was wont to do), but from an explicit naming and embracing of their own social location and the ways in which that positionality impacts their readings. Because these questions and insights arise from a centering of women’s contemporary experiences, there is the promise of a rich future for feminist approaches to the New Testament. As long as biblical scholars continue to recognize women’s experience as an important lens through which to interpret the Bible, feminist approaches to the New Testament should continue to thrive for years to come.

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