Peter Costello
Women Remembered: Jesus’ Female Disciples by Joan Taylor and Helen Bond (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)
Published last week on St Patrick’s Day itself, this may seem an unusual book to read for Lent. But on deeper consideration I think not. Many readers will welcome it.
Inspired by the authors’ Channel 4 documentary, which was filmed in Jordan, Israel and Italy, readers will find that it takes them as well to other interesting places of the past. The documentary which was first broadcast in 2018 enjoyed worldwide attention and was widely discussed in the media.
During these penitential weeks Christians have traditionally been urged to fix their thoughts on the events of Good Friday. But in another sense the purpose of that week of suffering should also be suffused with thought of the joy to come, as Christians see it.
In bringing the initial news of the resurrection to the world the voices of announcement were not those of men but women. For many this has always posed a problem of the real role of women in the very first days of the new faith.
But before that I had my thoughts about the details of the Gospel narratives. In the week of Easter, for instance, who arranged for the donkey on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem – it does not seem to have been the Apostles, they merely collected it.
And who obtained the use of the upper room and saw to the food for the Passover meal, including of course the bread and the wine? There were people behind the scenes.
We are not told by the Evangelists who they were. But I suppose we have always really known in an unthinking way that a woman’s hand managed it all. That women were an essential part of the very early, months and years, is the idea explored in this book.
Limits
But unlike too many widely read books on early church, let us say those about Mary Magdalene, this book nowhere seems to step beyond the limits of what can be demonstrated by actual history and real evidence, some of it of very recent discovery by scholars around the world, and much of it quite unknown to many of us in the pews.
For a long time the authors have wanted to reach beyond the strict limits of academic inquiry to share what is now known, thought or speculated about Christian origins. This is a controversial area, but one which is perilous to explore given the amount of misleading information now at large in the infosphere.
Here, however, is a book which can be read with the hope of learning what is really thought today by the vanguard of scholarship, for as they used to say in Victorian times, where the vanguard stands today, the rear guard camps tomorrow. Time and knowledge move on.
They show what women were said to have done or must have done, and what an equal role they played in the early days of the new faith. Of course we know that in our hearts of hearts, for we can see in our churches every week from the role of parish administrator down to altar girls (altar boys seem to have vanished in some parishes). As it is now so it was then.
Confused
Later centuries have not read the words of the gospels in the same way as those in the first century, hence the confused interpretations that gave rise to so much dispute, division and even schism in later eras.
An example they put forward is the occasion in which the Apostles are sent out two by two, but they make it clear that this did not mean two men going together, but a man and a female colleague.
This is a continually interesting book, full of (to me) new information. For instance, their account of the discovery during excavations near ancient Maresha, in south-west Palestine, at a site now called Horvat Qasra.
It was an underground chapel made out of a Jewish rock-cut cave dating from the early roman period. “This cave, where the soot of ancient candles still adheres to the walls, is covered in graffiti in Greek, Syriac and Arabic, testifying to a long veneration of a ‘holy one saint Salome’, at the shrine of Salome. There were prayers for healing and for mercy on those who venerated her.
“This is an example,” the authors’ write, “of ancient memories and traditions relating to Jesus’ female disciples that have been lost over the course of time, and we can only imagine what sorts of stories were told.”
Salome was the second most common name it is thought of women in first century Palestine, so we cannot leap to any definite identification with a named Salome in history. But she can stand, as the authors suggests, for thousands of women whom history has left unnamed.
Yet one feels one might almost reach out and touch the life of long dead people of those ancient days, in the pre-Latin Church.