Ritual, Women, and Philippi: Reimagining the Early Philippian Community

As one surveys the scholarship on the canonical letter to the Philippians, one notices the lack of attention to women within many scholars’ analyses. To a certain extent, this lack of attention exists because ancient texts often leave out information about women. Using ritual studies, archaeology, and textual evidence, this work brings life to the ritual lives of ancient Philippian women in their own cultural context. The discipline of ritual studies provides new questions that shed more specific light on the lives of women in this fledgling Jesus group. Therefore, ritual studies brings clarity to early Philippian women’s reception of the letter. Furthermore, this ritual background helps modern readers visualize a more diverse community of Jesus followers in Philippi and provides a clearer picture of the struggles this nascent Jesus community was experiencing.

Jason T. Lamoreaux is adjunct instructor at Texas Christian University. He is coeditor of Finding a Woman’s Place: Essays in Honor of Carolyn Osiek (Pickwick Publications, 2011). He is also a member of the Context Group, a working group of international scholars committed to using the social sciences in biblical interpretation.