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

If there were ever any doubts that women were ordained to ministerial positions in the early church, such doubts can now be put to rest. Madigan and Osiek have presented overwhelming literary, canonical, and epigraphic evidence for the ordination of women deacons and women presbyters, and for the ordination of women to other offices. The authors have collected, edited, and translated all the extant data in Latin and Greek (and some Syriac) for both the East and the West until ca. 600 A.D., including about seventy-five inscriptions.

Madigan and Osiek present clear and accurate translations of all the items in their documentary history, providing the original Greek or Latin, where appropriate, in footnotes. The documents are preceded by helpful, brief background comments, including biographical statements concerning ancient authors. Commentaries discuss the item's significance for providing evidence concerning the ordination of women. Extensive footnotes provide bibliographical references to the most relevant scholarship. Surprisingly, there is no comprehensive bibliography. There are, however, excellent appendixes, indexes, and maps.

Madigan and Osiek warn against assuming that ordination in the early church meant exactly what it means today. They also distinguish correctly between "ordination, membership in the clergy, and special group status" (p. 5). Chapter Two shows that patristic commentators almost invariably interpreted Rom 16:1–2 and 1 Tim 3:11 to refer to women deacons and that members of the "order of widows" (cf. 1 Tim 5: 3–13) were, at least by one commentator, equated with deaconesses. Similarly, Chapter Five, which contains data from the post-600 A.D. era, demonstrates that later authors and councils took it for granted that there were women deacons in the earlier period. Chapters Three through Seven deal with the extant evidence for women deacons in the East. Chapter Six covers the material on women deacons. Chapter Eight presents and discusses the (far less extensive) data for women presbyters.

Madigan and Osiek take care not to draw conclusions that cannot be supported by the literary texts, canons, or inscriptions they present. Only on one occasion was it unclear to me how a particular literary text (John of Damascus, On Heresies 49) was directly relevant to a discussion on women deacons (pp. 133–134). I also think it would have been better to indicate consistently in the translations themselves, rather than in the commentaries, parts of names or other words which need to be restored because of missing letters in inscriptions (e.g., contrast Arete [p. 72] and Severa [p. 90] with [Ce]lsa [p. 75] and [Epipha]n[e]ia [p. 80]). Similarly, given the extant th^>s before the letters mat in the text of "Matrona of Stobi" (p. 84), it seems to me better to restore the text ths mat[r´vnhs] and to translate the words as "of the matron" rather than "of Matrona." There is an inconsistency between the date of the discovery of Sophia's inscription as given in the caption for figure 9 and the introduction to the inscription (p. 90). The form Theoprepia should have been given in the translation as that is the spelling given in the text of the inscription—or, at least, the alteration should have been indicated by parentheses as in the heading (p. 93). The correct spelling of the findspot of the Ammion inscription is Us¸ak, not Uçak (p. 169). The authors, unintentionally, give the impression that Tertullian thought Montanism to be a "deviant group" (pp. 8–9) and that Cyzicus was closer to Constantinople (p. 47) than the approximately 180 Roman miles which separated the two cities by road. All the above, however, are minor issues.

Madigan and Osiek have produced the best, most comprehensive, and extremely useful documentary history to date regarding the ordination of women in the early church, correcting a number of earlier held false assumptions (pp. 3–4; 204–206).