Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha

This article explores the intersection of gender and trauma in the narratives of Judith and Susanna. While these novels focus on threatening situations ranging from cultural assimilation to genocide, scholarship has yet to examine them through the lens of cultural trauma theory. Written during a period of unprecedented globalization and the mingling of various cultures in the pluralistic melting-pot of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean world, Judith and Susanna provide a window into the complex anxieties and concerns Jews faced during this period. This article reads these narratives through the lens of cultural trauma theory and examines how the authors depict women as resilient figures, who overcome threatening situations. Specifically, this article (1) considers the historical context of Judith and Susanna, (2) examines the portrayal of trauma in these female-centered narratives, and (3) explores the role of women as figures of resiliency. This article demonstrates that the authors of Judith and Susanna interweave traumatic experiences into female-centered narratives that depict women as resilient, through their perseverance and faith in the face of danger.

The four earliest extant resurrection narratives record that women find the empty tomb first. This consensus suggests that although the resurrection narratives diminish the roles of women in these scenes, women undisputedly witness the resurrection. The details of women’s authority and leadership that remain in the narratives preserve their primacy. Isolating these details reveals a pattern of gendered redaction in the three endings of Mark and the four canonical resurrection narratives that diminishes, obscures, and excises women from these texts. This study rediscovers these women. Buttressed by early Christian art, the details of women’s authority and leadership evince new evidence for Historical Jesus reconstructions of these events, the priority of the longer ending of Mark, vestiges of women’s leadership in early Christian worship, and a strong affirmation for the reliability of women’s witness. Analyzing redaction that erases women reveals that the heroines are in the details. By recovering women’s narratives, this article contributes to the study of ancient Jewish and Christian Pseudepigrapha by giving a model of how to recover women’s narratives in other literature as well.

This article considers anti-adornment rhetoric circulating in Roman antiquity and in two of the earliest and most extensive treatments of dress by early Christian writers, namely, treatises by Tertullian of Carthage and Clement of Alexandria. It treats ancient Roman-period discourses of anti-adornment to reveal how configurations of gender were entangled in Roman-imperial race–making and colonial projects. Tertullian’s and Clement’s treatments of adornment, it argues, likewise rehearse Roman colonial imaginaries. Their declamations against luxurious dress and adornment are read here as registering Roman colonial anxieties about the intermingling of populations, the influx of goods and peoples, and the fluctuating dynamics of social belonging and self-display Roman imperial order demanded. It concludes that these Christian authors’ discourse on gendered adornment indicates their investment in and contributions to ancient Roman ethno-racial and imperial formations. Finally, in conversation with Americanist Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of “ornamentalism,” it offers a brief consideration of how their rhetoric figures in the longue durée of western imaginaries of Asiatic femininity.