fiction

Reading this book was a profound faith experience. Through her fictional narrative, Mary Ellen Ashcroft takes the reader beyond the stark simplicity of the Gospel accounts and explains the depth of meaning of the lives of the women in the Gospels. The "woman with a hemorrhage," for example, is given life through Ashcroft's moving descriptions of what it MEANT to a first-century Jewish woman to live with a "hemorrhage" - how it made her ritually unclean, shunned by all society, and how her unauthorized touch of Jesus' robe made HIM ritually unclean as well. For readers unfamiliar with the intricacies with the ancient Jewish faith, this book breathes life into Jesus' story, making him a real, true friend of women and a radical thinker with regard to "women's rights" - a concept which didn't even exist at the time.

Sometimes the truth smacks us hard between the eyes. It hurts, but we are better for the encounter. That's the way it is with Dr. Ashcroft's work.

Drawing extensively upon Biblical, archeological and sociological resources, Professor Ashcroft draws a vivid picture for us of the women who followed Jesus. Her end-notes are generous and irrefutable.

Dr. Ashcroft helps us to understand how Jesus' message and ministry liberated these women from unjust cultural and religious bonds. His presence led to freedom for them just as surely as it did for the poor, the sick, the demon possessed, the Gentiles, and all the others oppressed by the religious and secular authorities of his day.

Many Biblical scholars have argued that Jesus' angry exchange with the money changers in the Temple led to his crucifixion. Dr. Ashcroft, subtlely, demonstrates that the incident in the Temple courtyard was part of a larger constellation of his empowering the oppressed and standing against the oppressors, which ultimately led to his execution. In the end, the powerful men of first century, Pallestinian, Jewish society simply could not afford to allow this trouble-maker to hang around. He was just too threatening to their interests to be allowed to live.

Dr. Ashcroft, implicitly, argues that we have not often heard this liberating Gospel, because in a Church controlled by men it is both inconvenient and embarrassing. If that is so, then we have forgotten why Jesus came. If that is so, then we are as wrong, and as subject to judgement, as were the scribes and the Pharisees.