In Enslaved Women in Early Christianity: Invisible Labor, Christy Cobb reclaims the lives of enslaved women, who despite their vital contribution to early Christianity, have been lost to history. Through a combination of feminist hermeneutics, intersectional analysis, and critical fabulation, Cobb brings these women's stories into the light. Focusing on the New Testament and early Christian texts, Cobb imagines the lives of eight enslaved women, as found on papyri, inscriptions, and in other archaeological data in a trailblazing analysis of gender and slavery in the early Church. Cobb interprets the text with an intersectional lens, incorporating status, religion, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, making this volume one of the first to directly tackle issues of gender and slavery in the New Testament.
The stories explored in this book are from texts that range from the first to the sixth centuries CE, and depict the lives of eight enslaved women who labored within early Christian homes, churches, and communities. Each chapter is named after an enslaved female character from the texts of Acts and the Apocryphal Acts. Separately, the chapters stand alone as evidence of one aspect of the lives and work of enslaved women in early Christianity. Read together, the eight enslaved women form a new portrait of early Christianity which incorporates the labor and contributions of enslaved women.
