When Women Were Priests: Women's Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity.

The interesting thesis of Torjesen's book is not difficult to summarize. In Greco-Roman culture the social structure of society was such that the masculine sphere was oriented to public life while that of the feminine concerned itself with the domestic. This division was rigorously observed through custom, ideology, and law. For women to take an direct interest in the public sphere was a shame in the technical anthropological sense. Since early Christianity found its natural locus in the house church, it was possible for women to have leadership roles precisely because the "house church" was, in her words, an "interstitial space" in which "public" and "private" spheres were somewhat mingled. Since the early church was a kind of "domestic sphere" it was possible for Paul, for instance, to salute women who had clear leadership roles in the Pauline communities.

As the Christian church moved from the era of the house church to the public arena of the state-funded basilica (early in the fourth century), it became less possible for women to have leadership roles. To adopt such roles in public life was so culturally unacceptable that women doing so were considered "shameful." What happened in the fourth century, to use Torjesen's words, was a shift from ministry to governance in the sociopolitical sense of the term. Governance was the provenance of the male.

There is much of interest in the book, although in places the nexus between her reflections on pagan culture and the actual life of the early church is not always well spelled out. When Torjesen sticks close to her intended topic, she is persuasive. The last two chapters are the least satisfactory (added to flesh out the volume?), skimming over a millennium of history to link Augustine with medieval misogyny and then on to Luther (chapter 8) and a final brief chapter which deals, quite superficially, with feminine imagery for the divine.

This provocative work would have been better had the author spent more time systematically exploring her basic thesis. By the early second century we already see the emergence of a monarchical episcopate (reflected inchoately in the Pastorals) in some writers. What was the interplay between the shift from charismatic ministry to the institutionalization of charisma into office? Torjesen is well aware of this trend, and remarks on it here and there, but does not explore it in a systematic fashion. A rigorously historical examination of that issue would have enhanced a book which is, despite its somewhat diffuse character, very insightful.