When you think about the earliest Christians you might imagine the twelve disciples, like Peter and John. Maybe Paul comes to mind. But what about women in early Christianity? What drew them to a life of discipleship and what did they bring to the community and the church as it began to spread?

Few people have spent as much time thinking about these questions as Dr. Carolyn Osiek, co-author of A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity. Osiek visited BYU’s Maxwell Institute earlier this year to deliver the keynote address at the conference “Material Culture and Women’s Religious Experience in Antiquity.” You can watch her address now on the Institute’s YouTube channel. In this interview we dig a little deeper into her research and thoughts about how the lives of ancient Christian women wove culture and faith into a tapestry of devotion.

CAROLYN OSIEK, RSCJ is Charles Fischer Professor of New Testament emerita with the Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. She is co-author of A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity. Sister Osiek spent decades teaching scripture at the graduate level to students at Catholic Theological Union at Chicago. She holds a doctorate in New Testament and Christian Origins from Harvard University and is a past president of the Catholic Biblical Association and the Society of Biblical Literature. In March 2019 Osiek delivered the keynote address at the BYU symposium “Material Culture and Women’s Religious Experience in Antiquity.” You can watch the address here: “Between the Holy and the Ordinary: Women’s Lives in Early Christianity.”

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