Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine

Central to debates about Jesus is the issue of whether he uniquely embodies the divine. This debate continues unabated, but both sides of this debate eclipse the reality that in many of the earliest strands of the Christian tradition when Jesus' divinity is proclaimed, Jesus is imaged as the female divine. Sally Douglas investigates these early texts, excavates the motivations for imaging Jesus as Woman Wisdom and the complex reasons that this began to be suppressed in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The work concludes with an exploration of the potent implications of engaging with the ancient proclamation of Jesus-Woman Wisdom in contemporary context.