Women’s Studies Brown-Bag Lecture Series:
“Who Cooked the Last Supper? Bodies, Boundaries, and New Questions of Female Leadership in Early Christianity”
Rebecca I. Denova, Ph. D.
Visiting Lecturer in Religious Studies
Wednesday, September 24
12:00 noon
2201 WWPH
The recent popularity of Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code, and a heightened awareness of “gnostic” gospels, has not only created controversy concerning the relationship of Mary Magdalene to Jesus, but has also motivated renewed discussion of the leadership roles of women in the early Christian movement. We will discuss the evidence available to us, modern scholarly methods of analysis of the material, and modern applications of such conclusions (if any). Were Christian women merely tolerated as “lilies of the field,” or embraced as the “corporate divas”
of their age (ala Martha Stewart)? Did Jesus’s message really proclaim “good news” for women?
