91 BTB Readers’ Guide Masculinity in the New Testament and Early Christianity Eric C. Stewart Abstract Building on the work of feminist queries regarding the social construction of gender, scholarship beginning in the 1980s began to interrogate masculinity as a culturally constructed category. Scholars focusing on the New Tes- tament and early Christianity, building upon signifcant studies in both gender theory and the social construction of masculinity in ancient Greek and Roman contexts have produced a substantial amount of signifcant research in the last thirty years. Despite the proliferation of scholarship, signifcant questions remain as to how best to under- stand Jesus and his early followers in light of Greek and Roman understandings of masculinity. Some scholars see descriptions of Jesus, his disciples, and other key fgures in the Jesus movement signifcantly resistant to key elements of Roman or Greek understandings of what it meant to be a man, while others argue that New Testament authors present these same fgures substantially corresponding to hegemonic masculinity in the Roman world. Key words: Masculinity-New Testament; Gender theory; Roman masculinity; Greek masculinity Eric C. Stewart, Ph.D. (University of Notre Dame) is Associate Professor of Religion at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. His address is Augustana College, 639 38th Street, Rock Island, IL 61201; email: estewart40@gmail.com. He is author of Gath- ered Around Jesus: An Alternative Spatial Practice in the Gos- pel of Mark (Cascade Books, 2009) and Peter: First-Generation Member of the Jesus Movement (Michael Glazier Books, 2012). Although historiography has focused predominantly on the world of men, the treatment of men as gendered beings has a surprisingly short history (Kimmel 1993; Clines 1998; 2003). Michael Kimmel, a leading scholar of masculinity in the United States says of American men that they “have no history as gendered selves; no work describes historical events in terms of what these events meant to the men who partici- pated in them as men” (Kimmel 1993: 28). Biblical studies, too, has a limited track record regarding the study of mascu- linity. Feminist scholarship produced much of the early work on gender in biblical studies, and it focused primarily upon women. In fact, early efforts to focus on gender, both with- in and outside of biblical studies, were sometimes treated as synonymous with women’s studies (Burrus 2007: 2). Feminist scholars’ analyses of women’s lives in the ancient Mediterra- nean world have added vastly to our knowledge of the social contexts of the people, both men and women, who inhabited the “worlds” of the Bible and to our understanding of gender in ancient contexts. While such studies are far too numerous to list here, key studies by feminist scholars approaching the Greek, Roman, and Judean contexts of the New Testament BiBlical T heology BulleTin Volume 46 Number 2 Pages 91–102 © The Author(s), 2016. Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0146107916639211 http://btb.sagepub.com at AUGUSTANA COLLEGE LIBRARY on April 22, 2016 btb.sagepub.com Downloaded from