Feminist Companion to the New Testament Apocrypha

Amy-Jill Levine is the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies, Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, and director of the Carpenter Program in religion, gender and sexuality in Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Maria Mayo Robbins is a doctoral candidate in religious studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

• Preface; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; List of Contributors; Introduction Amy-Jill Levine; Drusiana, Cleopatra, and Some Other Women in the Acts of John Jan N. Bremmer, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands; Thecla 'Tried and True' and the Inversion of Romance Susan A. Calef, Creighton University, Omaha, NE, USA; Sexual Defense by Proxy: Interpreting Women's Fasting in the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena Jill C. Gorman, Rollins College, Winter Park, FL, USA; 'Her Own Proper Kinship': Marriage, Class, and Women in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles Andrew S. Jacobs, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA; When is a Text About a Woman a Text About a Woman: the Cases of Aseneth and Perpetua Ross S. Kraemer, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA; 'Blessed are the bodies of the virgins...' Magda Misset-Van de Weg, Katholieke Theologische Universiteit, Utrecht, The Netherlands; Buying the Stairway to Heaven: Perpetua and Thecla as Early; Christian Heroines Gail C. Streete, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN, USA; The Question of Early Christian Identity: Three Strategies Exploring a Third Genos Richard Valantasis, Iliff School of Theology, Denver, CO, USA; Construction of Culture Through the Construction of Person: the Acts of Thecla as an Example, Johannes N. Vorster, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa; Bibliography; Index of References; Index of Authors

"Edited by Amy-Jill Levine, a Feminist Companion to the New Testament Apocrypha is an anthology of essays by a wide variety of learned authors exploring apocryphal New Testament texts such as the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Peter, Thecla, the Apocalypse of Peter, and much more, as well as Irish apocrypha and Greek novels, from a feminist perspective. Specific topics discussed include Christian identity, Christian martyrdom, heterodoxy and orthodoxy, conjugal ethics and apostolic home wreckers, asceticism, eroticism, and much more. An extensive bibliography and index of references rounds out this scholarly and at times technical close analysis. Enthusiastically recommended for advanced theology and Biblical literature reference shelves."