Examples of sexual violence and mentions of it appear with a disturbing level of frequency in the literature of early Christianity. This collection of essays explores these occurrences in canonical and noncanonical Christian texts from the first until the fifth centuries CE. Drawing from a range of interpretive lenses, scholars of early Christianity approach these writings with the goal of identifying how their authors employ the language of sexual assault, rape, and violence in order to formulate and support various rhetorical and theological claims. Individual chapters also address how and why these episodes of sexual violence have been ignored or, sometimes, read in a way that would make them less problematic. As a collection, Sex, Violence, and Early Christian Texts examines these texts carefully, ethically, and with an eye toward shining a light on the scourge of sexual violence that is so often manifest in both ancient and contemporary Christian communities.

This book examines slavery and gender through a feminist reading of narratives including female slaves in the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, and early Christian texts. Through the literary theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, the voices of three enslaved female characters-the female slave who questions Peter in Luke 22, Rhoda in Acts 12, and the prophesying slave of Acts 16-are placed into dialogue with female slaves found in the Apocryphal Acts, ancient novels, classical texts, and images of enslaved women on funerary monuments. Although ancients typically distrusted the words of slaves, Christy Cobb argues that female slaves in Luke-Acts speak truth to power, even though their gender and status suggest that they cannot. In this Bakhtinian reading, female slaves become truth-tellers and their words confirm aspects of Lukan theology. This exegetical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary book is a substantial contribution to conversations about women and slaves in Luke-Acts and early Christian literature.