Biblical scholarship will never yield Bibles full of women. Nonetheless, closer scrutiny and improved methods in this expanding field have shown a remarkable and often overlooked tradition of female authority. Further, critical attention to the history of Biblical interpretation has revealed two and a half millennia of repeated efforts to suppress traditions of female authority and to present misogynistic readings as normative. Most modern appeals to biblical precedent on this subject fail to account and adjust for the cultural medium and biases by which that precedent was established. Reconstructing a world based on a thoroughly androcentric text produces a thoroughly androcentric world. Recognizing this, biblical scholars like Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza have largely abandoned the attempt to recover a robustly egalitarian ministry between the pages of the text partly because it results in the misguided search for pristine origins that conform to the observer’s desired view of the future. Instead Schüssler Fiorenza focuses, as I will here, on possibilities opened by historical accounts in which the struggle between egalitarianism and hierarchy is visible, thereby revealing a past not so dissonant with the present. Attention to the implicit and explicit evidence of struggle within the text has the potential to inform current discourses.
-Cory Crawford, Dialogue, A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 48, No. 2
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