Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church, InterVarsity Press, 2023.
Gupta’s approach in this book is to see and understand, from the biblical text, how women did have leadership roles, especially in the early church, before considering what we might make of biblical texts which appear to restrict or prohibit leadership by women.
He begins with a discussion of Deborah, one of the Old Testament judges, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, before discussing the position of women in general in the world of the New Testament.
Reviewing texts from the times and more recent studies, Gupta concludes that it is simplistic to say that the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament was patriarchal. It was, in that generally men had power, but it was more complex than that. First, society was built on families, and was patri-archal, not andri-archal (i.e. based on fatherhood, not men in general). Second, class also played a significant role, meaning that higher status women held authority over lower class men, and women were regularly found in positions of influence, especially in the absence of a suitable man (for instance upon widow-hood).
In the second part of the book, Gupta points out that women are present throughout the biblical story of the life of Jesus and the growth of the early church. After discussing the words used to describe various forms of ministry and leadership in the early church, he focuses on some of the women who are named in Acts and Paul’s letters (referring especially to Romans 16). Gupta paints pictures of their lives, drawing on the little that is stated about them directly and what we know about the world they inhabited and the expectations of the roles they have.
Detailed pictures are painted of three particular women:
- Phoebe, who Paul trusted as his proxy carrying and interpreting his letter to the churches in Rome
- Prisc(ill)a, who was an expert teacher and church leader and who (with her husband Aquila) moved around the Roman empire planting churches
- Junia, a venerated apostle who may well have been among the seventy disciples sent out by Jesus.
Significantly, Gupta compares the church leadership and Paul’s dealings with women with the historical context. He accepts that the majority of church leaders were very likely to have been men, but clearly not all, and women who were gifted in leadership were in leadership positions on that basis.
At the end of the book Gupta considers biblical texts often used to assert men’s authority over women: 1 Timothy 2, and the household codes. Again, Gupta helpfully reads these in the context of the time, noting that the instructions to Timothy were likely concerned with a specific situation that had arisen in Ephesus, and that the biblical household codes include significant differences from those in contemporary Roman texts.
Reading the text in this way, not as universal commands (and not addressing the specific context of the 21st century), and also in the context of what Acts and the letters show about how women actually led, taught and ministered (and were affirmed by Paul and others in so doing), leads to the conclusion that leading, teaching and ministry are equally open to women and men, and that it is God’s gifting in these areas which is vital, not being male.