Ordination of Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (review)

My joy at the publication of this beautifully presented book as both a scholar and a woman of the church needs to be stated up front. However, since the scholar is keenly aware that poor scholarship benefits no one, this review keeps a sharp eye on academic rigor while expecting from the editors their usual high standards.

This collection includes all the known evidence for women deacons and presbyters in the Latin- and Greek-speaking churches together with several translated from the Syriac although it is not comprehensive with regard to Syriac sources. Many of the texts have been published before, but many others have been recovered from archival material and are accessible here to a wider audience for the first time. Together they present overwhelming evidence for ordained roles for women in the first six centuries. At the same time, they highlight a plurality of interpretation and definition of roles perhaps somewhat like the widespread use of "ministry" today, which can embrace both those ordained and the laity.

The first chapter defines the scope of the collection, reviews (albeit very skimpily) previous studies, and addresses misconceptions in the literature and in ecclesial contexts. For example, there is now clear and persuasive evidence that there were women officeholders in the west, that the title "female deacon" was not displaced by "deaconess" by the late third century, that celibacy was not mandatory for all women office holders, that the order of deaconesses co-existed with that of widows, so it is unlikely that the former emerged from the latter, and that, contrary to current scholarly consensus, the role of deaconess was not confined to monastic superiors by the fifth to sixth century.

Methodological errors in prior research are briefly addressed by the editors. Future scholarship cannot assume that any mention of diakonoi refers to an exclusively male group or that, conversely, any prominent women in the community were deacons. Fundamental to both errors is the tendency of an interpreter to parse the text through the grammar of her or his own era and community. As a result, the text means what we expect it to mean, not what it meant to the person who wrote it. For research in this area the distinction is paramount, especially when applied to the question of the sacramentality of ordination. The evidence in this collection of texts is so persuasive that gender cannot be used as a simplistic criterion to decide if a role required sacramental ordination. The first chapter concludes with a brief disquisition on the distinction between the application of the masculine title of diakonos to women and the feminine diakonessa, both of which are sometimes found in the same community. The editors highlight this distinction as most significant for scholarship, and I would add that it is equally significant for the wider community. Since this chapter raises scholarly issues in regard to the early Christian communities' use of diakonal language, I would have expected to see in the text and the footnotes more attention to John N. Collins, Diakonia: Re-interpreting the Ancient Sources, which explores in detail the nuances of meaning in the variety of titles used.¹

Each of the following seven chapters focuses on the nature of the specific sources and their geographic location; sources from east and west are treated separately. Chapter 3 deals with literary texts, allusions, and inscriptions; chapter 4 with canons and comments on church practice; chapter 5 with later texts. Women deacons in the west are not so extensively annotated, and only chapter 6 examines all these types of sources. Chapter 7 is devoted to the representation of women deacons in the Testamentum Domini Nostri Jesu Christi and related texts. Chapter 8 reviews all the categories of evidence for women presbyters in both east and west, again treating each region separately. Chapter 9 presents the editors' conclusions.

Each chapter begins with a brief introduction on the nature of...