Women Remembered

Helen Bond (Author) Helen K. Bond is Professor of Christian Origins and Head of the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the social and political history of Judaea under Roman rule, the historical Jesus and the canonical gospels. She is the author of Pontius Pilate in History and Interpretation (CUP, 1998), Caiaphas: High Priest and Friend of Rome? (Westminster John Knox, 2004), The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2012), Jesus: A Very Brief History (SPCK, 2017), The First Biography of Jesus: Genre and Meaning in Mark's Gospel (Eerdmans, 2020), and a number of shorter studies and articles. She has contributed to over 50 TV and radio documentaries, including acting as historical consultant to The Nativity (BBC, 2010) and co-presenter (with Joan Taylor) on Jesus' Female Disciples (Channel 4, 2018).Joan Taylor (Author) Joan Taylor is Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King's College London. She has authored numerous books and articles about Jesus and his world, notably The Immerser: John the Baptist within Second Temple Judaism (1997), Jesus and Brian: Studying the Historical Jesus via Monty Python's Life of Brian (2015) and What did Jesus look like? (2018). She has studied questions of women and gender: Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo's Therapeutae Reconsidered (2006); with Ilaria Ramelli, Patterns of Women's Leadership in Early Christianity (2021). She is currently writing a Very Short Introduction to Mary Magdalene for the Oxford series. She also works in radio, television and film, and co-presented, with Helen Bond, Jesus' Female Disciples: The New Evidence (2018) for Channel Four.

Drawing on fifty years of feminist scholarship, they now expand the story to include most of the women mentioned in Christian scripture. Importantly, they show that the movement that came to be called Christianity was fluid and unstable for its first three centuries, attracting a diversity of women whose leadership was excluded as roles became formalized.