262 - Searching the Scriptures Volume 2: A Feminist Commentary

Searching the Scriptures Volume 2: A Feminist Commentary
Edited by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza with the assistance of Ann Brock and Shelly Matthews

New York, Crossroad, 1994. 894 pp. $49.50.

Using the traditional format of biblical commentary, Searching the Scriptures (volume 2) establishes some boldly atraditional approaches to the foundational texts of Christianity. Forty articles, each on a different early Christian text and by a different scholar (all female), discuss the issues usually associated with the commentary genre: authorship and date, textual transmission social-historical situation, literary characteristics, and religious-theological themes. The commentators utilize a challenging array of historical, social-historical, literary, and postmodern/deconstructionist methods. Each author also explains how her methods carry out a specifically feminist and/or womanist agenda. Fairly extensive footnotes and well-chosen recommended reading lists follow each article. The content and writing style should make this volume useful for those preparing sermons or education classes on these texts.

The inclusion of sixteen early Jewish and Gnostic texts that are not part of the Christian/New Testament canon makes this work atraditional. The editors take the position that political forces surrounding the consolidation of Roman imperial power in the fourth century C.E. had much to do with the choice of texts included in the canon. This political canon not only drew sharp boundaries around what could be considered orthodox belief but also gave preference to texts that supported, or at the very least, did not seriously threaten, the hierarchical social structures of the empire. Since women, slaves, and poor people were on the bottom rungs of the empire's social ladder, they lost the most when it came to the content of the texts chosen to serve as the very foundation of Christian faith throughout the ages.

This commentary challenges that ancient wrong by placing left-out texts right beside canonical texts as legitimate representatives of early Christian faith and practice. We are treated, for example, to articles on The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and The Acts of Thekla, right beside articles on The Gospel of John and The Acts of the Apostles. For both types of texts, the commentators aim to read against the grain, searching for the silent or

263 - Searching the Scriptures Volume 2: A Feminist Commentary

submerged voices attesting to the living faith and spirit of those whom the texts left out. Anyone looking for sugar-coated apologetics explaining away aspects of these texts that are misogynist, androcentric, or soft on slavery and social hierarchy (such as those found in the household codes of the Pastoral epistles), had best read a different commentary. These commentators look the shadow side of Christian history straight in the eye and never wince. They also manage to retrieve from that shadow some priceless pearls of early Christian life and thought.

A second atraditional element of this commentary lies in its organization based on wisdom theology (or using the Greek term for wisdom, sophia theology). Wisdom/sophia theology emphasizes the one aspect of God that has traditionally been imagined as female (see, for example, Proverbs 8). Like the long-established idea of salvation history, or more recently introduced liberation theologies, wisdom theology emphasizes one particular aspect of divine character and activity. What sets sophia theology apart from these earlier theologies is that both God and the aspect of God that inspires Jesus are imagined in female terms: Revelatory discourses become manifestations of sophia; the canonical epistles are viewed as containing submerged sophia traditions; and biographical discourses (such as the Gospels and Acts) are labeled as representing envoys of sophia, that is, envoys of God's wisdom.

From this structure, the reader might anticipate that a major goal of the articles would be to develop a sophia theology. However, except in some obvious contexts like the articles on The Book of Sophia, Pistis Sophia, and Paul's wisdom texts, wisdom/sophia is really a rather minor theme, present to varying degrees, and rarely the focal point. To some extent, this is probably the fraction of the diversity of commentators, who write from a variety of Christian, post-Christian and Jewish perspectives. A common commitment to sophia theology was not what brought this particular group of women together. In addition, the commentary format with its strict adherence to elucidating the meaning of the text at hand, does not lend itself to the kind of creative interpretation that a rich sophia theology will require. The commentary can provide a well-researched textual basis for such creativity, but genres more akin to the flexible and imaginative midrashic traditions of Judaism will have to take over from here.

AMY L. WORDELMAN
Canisius College
Buffalo, NY