Dancing Girls, Loose Ladies, and Women of the Cloth

The women in Jesus'' life are a raucous and rowdy bunch, including "riotous" foremothers, "loose women," and "distressed daughters of Israel." Reading these new ways of interpreting women in the Gospels, male New Testament scholars have discovered liberating perspectives. In seven scintillating studies, Spencer explores among others the genealogy of Matthew''s Gospel to discover the riotous yet righteous nature of Jesus'' foremothers, slave girls and prophetic daughters in Luke-Acts, and women leading men in the Gospel of Mark 5-7. Scott Spencer, a virtuoso young New Testament scholar, provides his own lively forays into reading the Gospels through women''s eyes. He shows what it is like for a man to read stories about the women in Jesus'' life from a new perspective. Spencer is an able and inventive scholar whose broad-ranging insights and engaging style make his work very accessible.