Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World.

by Ross Shepard Kraemer Oxford University Press, $10.95, 275 pp.

Her Share of the Blessings was first publish in 1992; we now have an inexpensive soft-cover version of a very good book. Unlike Francis who largely sticks to the second century, Kraemer provides us with a tour de horizon of women's ministry from the ancient Greeks through the patristic period. The first seven chapters focus on Greco-Roman religion. Attention is paid both to women's participation in goddess worship (Artemis, Hera, Demeter) and to the worship of male gods like Adonis and Dionysius, as well as Roman matronal rites and such syncretist cults as that of Isis. Chapters 8 and 9 study women in the rabbinical tradition and their leadership roles in the synagogues of the diaspora. Chapters 10 through 13 discuss the attraction of women to the Christian religio and their leadership roles in both heterodox movements (like Montanism) and in mainstream Christian communities.

This is, of course, a lot of territory to cover but, as her ample bibliography indicates, Professor Kraemer has read an enormous amount, synthesized it well, and, blessedly, writes a crisp, jargon-free prose. It is impossible to even summarize the evidence that she studies but some of her conclusions are worth noting. First, there seems not to have been any difficulty with women exercising priestly and leadership functions in the ancient pagan world. Equally, women seem to have had leadership roles in diaspora synagogues, but it is not clear if they were models for such roles in the early Christian ecclesiae or vice versa. Further, while we know that women baptized and taught in the early church, we are still not clear about their precise leadership roles nor the reasons why, in the post-Constantinian world, they were more restricted in their place(s) in the church.

The main arguments tendered to exclude women from leadership roles were rooted in the biblical doctrine of the subordination of women to men and the fact that God did not choose a woman to baptize Jesus, etc. However, Kraemer concludes, "In antiquity, no one argues that women cannot be priests because the priest represents Christ in the congregations and Christ came, necessarily, in the form of a male. Only later, in the Middle Ages, does this become a key weapon in the arsenal against women's ministry...."

Not everyone will be enamored of Kraemer's theoretical model of interpretation (borrowed from the anthropologist Mary Douglas) nor convinced in every instance of how she reads the evidence. But it is hard to think of a more useful work as a survey of the evidence--enhanced by very full notes, a good index, and a bibliography for further reading.