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A review by clairetrellahill
Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church by Nijay K. Gupta
4.0
So often we paint our own flawed perceptions about the past onto the Bible when really, we do not have a complete understanding. Tell Her Story contextualizes the mentions of women in both Old and New Testaments in their places in history and serves as a basic building block to understand what the world was like for women both culturally and in the early church. The author takes many preconceived notions about what men and women may and may not do in ministry and points out the women noted in scripture for in fact, doing those things.
The author digs into how the contemporary culture of the time would have viewed women and how the church sometimes did not align with that. Women found a great freedom and even leadership opportunities in the early church. The book also digs into the Biblical text, looking at word choice and meaning of the Greek and Hebrew. I really appreciated how the author would expand upon the one-line mentions of women in the gospels and Paul’s letters such as Damaris or Lydia and extrapolates what we can understand about who they were and what their impact was in both the early church and their inclusion in the Bible by the writers.
The sections that I loved, however, were the portions on Luke and how interested his gospel is in the lives of women and Jesus’s interactions with women, and the section on Junia and so many facets around her controversy and things I had never considered before!
While not as impactful as other books I have read concerning women’s roles in the church (I think of The Making of Biblical Womanhood) I think Tell Her Story is a great starting point for those interested in history and the early church as well as a great refresher to really see the women that we far too often skip over in our studies of scripture.
The author digs into how the contemporary culture of the time would have viewed women and how the church sometimes did not align with that. Women found a great freedom and even leadership opportunities in the early church. The book also digs into the Biblical text, looking at word choice and meaning of the Greek and Hebrew. I really appreciated how the author would expand upon the one-line mentions of women in the gospels and Paul’s letters such as Damaris or Lydia and extrapolates what we can understand about who they were and what their impact was in both the early church and their inclusion in the Bible by the writers.
The sections that I loved, however, were the portions on Luke and how interested his gospel is in the lives of women and Jesus’s interactions with women, and the section on Junia and so many facets around her controversy and things I had never considered before!
While not as impactful as other books I have read concerning women’s roles in the church (I think of The Making of Biblical Womanhood) I think Tell Her Story is a great starting point for those interested in history and the early church as well as a great refresher to really see the women that we far too often skip over in our studies of scripture.