Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History.

Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History. Edited by Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 2006. xiii and 220 pages. Cloth. $48.00.

Kevin Madigan and Carolyn Osiek provide a history of the ordination of women in documentary form, ranging from first-century New Testament texts to canons regarding female presbyters in the eighth century C.E. Once colleagues at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Madigan and Osiek bring considerable scholarly expertise and experience to this difficult task.

A major contribution is the breadth of its collection of literary and epigraphic evidence for the ordination of women to the offices of deacon and presbyter. Madigan and Osiek have, to their knowledge, collected all the relevant evidence in the East and West in both the Greek and Roman worlds, presenting the texts in their original languages and in English, including many sources not previously published. Like Ross Shepard Kraemer's Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World: A Sourcebook (Oxford University Press, 2004) and Patricia Cox Miller's Women in Early Christianity: Translations from Greek Texts (Catholic University of America Press, 2005), this volume allows the sources to speak for themselves. A typical source entry nevertheless includes all the necessary information to identify the source: the name of the author (in the case of a literary text), a brief description of the find spot (for inscriptions), the date, and concise comments about the source's significance.

The book is divided into three major areas: New Testament texts and their patristric commentators; women deacons in the East and West; and women presbyters. Madigan and Osiek maintain that the ordination of female deacons was more prevalent in the East. They could have speculated to a greater extent about the causes and significance of this regional difference.

The book is not a comprehensive study of women in authoritative roles in Christian assemblies. For example, prophets, virgins, and widows exercised authority and carried out various forms of ministry, but their roles did not develop into ordained offices. Therefore, texts and inscriptions that relate to their ministries do not appear in this volume. However, the editors describe the evolution of the offices of deacon and presbyter, including what duties belonged to each office and how those duties changed over time.

Given the abundant ancient evidence for the ordination of women, it is striking that the ordination of women has sparked intense modern controversy. Romans 16:1-2, for example, describes the deacon Phoebe as Paul's ambassador to Rome who read his letter aloud in the Roman assembly. However, as Madigan and Osiek note, controversy over the ordination of women did not begin in the modern age. Writing in the fourth century C.E., John Chrysostom described Phoebe as one "who is able to help [Paul] set the whole world straight," while Theodoret of Cyrrhus, writing in the same time period, characterized Phoebe's ministry as hospitality: "[Paul] opened the world to her and in every land and sea she is celebrated." Debate over the ordination of women thus began quite early and continues to the current day.

This volume calls for reexamination of theological assumptions and prescriptions regarding the ordination of women to modern pastoral ministry. It also calls for the celebration of the diaconal ministry of women and men, still practiced today. In the ELCA, deacons are consecrated rather than ordained, but this volume lifts up the diaconate as a ministry that belongs to the very beginnings of the Christian church.

Bonnie Flessen

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago