Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership by Ally Kateusz (review)

What did the Virgin Mary mean to ancient Christians? Many historians of the early church might say "very little," given the slim record of her significance in the New Testament and patristic sources prior to the Council of Ephesus in 431 ce. Accordingly, Mary's then-authorized status as "Mother of God" (theotokos) prompted the church to sponsor her veneration, elevating her status to something quasi-divine, while increasingly holding her up as a model of obedience, submission, and self-sacrifice. Over the last decades, however, new insights have emerged about the Virgin's prominence prior to Ephesus, thanks to the concerted efforts of Marian scholars like Ally Kateusz, who have highlight Mary's conspicuous roles in apocryphal and "heretical" sources. Contrary to patristic writings, extracanonical sources portray Mary as a liturgical and apostolic leader. Several of Kateusz's previously published articles on these topics were revised and expanded for the book under review.

How ancient, widespread, and enduring were these views of the Virgin Mary's authority? Ironically, feminist scholarship most accustomed to investigating this question, as it has in the case of other Marys (most prominently the Magdelene, less so Martha's sister), has resisted including the Virgin among its cast of exemplars of women's leadership. As Kateusz observes, "modern Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic interpretation, not to mention layers of their associated gender theology" has conditioned scholars to deny the Virgin the same favorable treatment as other New Testament women, despite the abundance of extracanonical literary and artistic evidence of her leadership (13). Kateusz's goal is to recover this history, "hiding in plain sight," of Mary's authority as priest and bishop—roles which indicate a persistent "discipleship of equals" (as Elizabeth Shüssler Fiorenza described the Jesus movement), which ancient scribes, the church of the West, and modern researchers have occluded.

The first three chapters establish the book's aims, methods, and scope. Chapter 1 (re)introduces readers to the Virgin Mary as a founding Abrahamic figure through a cursory survey of principal sources, such as the Proto-gospel of James and the Gospel of Bartholomew. Kateusz foregrounds redaction analysis in her methodology, a means to investigate the ancient church's ideological struggles over gender roles. Kateusz approaches iconographic artifacts in much the same way, treating outlying depictions of women's leadership in the early record as evidence of wider patterns of female authority based on their unlikely survival through centuries of suppression. In Chapter 2, Kateusz challenges the standard of lectio brevior potior (preferring the shortest reading) by meticulously demonstrating the tendency of scribes to excise or shorten texts around the markers of female authority. She notes especially the offense scribes took to women exorcising demons and bearing censers and incense—activities attributed to Mary in the earliest layer of the dormition narratives and several iconographic remains associated with the Anastasis shrine in Jerusalem. Chapter 3 extends the analysis to the testimonies surrounding extracanonical women like Mariamne, Irene, Nino, and Thecla, whose narrative traditions likewise expose a scribal bias against women prophesying, preaching, and baptizing.

The next three chapters explore various dimensions of Mary's authority as priest and bishop. Chapter 4 analyzes iconographic scenes depicting Mary with arms raised—a gesture of blessing which Kateusz links to the high priesthood of the temple—and donning the episcopal pallium—a cloth worn by bishops while officiating the eucharist. By studying them alongside literary evidence of women's leadership, Kateusz argues that these scenes of Mary both idealized and reinforced clerical offices for women. Chapter 5 investigates liturgical objects, like chalices and censers, that pair Mary and Jesus, much as the earliest layers of the Proto-gospel of James and the dormition narratives invite comparisons between the Virgin Mother and her Son. Kateusz argues that the conventional dating of these artifacts to 500 ce or later may be too conservative, for it partly rests on the fraught premise that the Council of Ephesus...