What does it mean to be male and feminine? Do people have different intellectual, religious, moral, or emotional capacities? Are females especially fitted to serving and men for leading? Are men and women equal? While these might seem like relatively recent queries, they have been a topic of discussion throughout Christian background. At the guts of this discussion is the biblical character Eve, the archetypal female of Genesis 1-3. Not only one girl among many, Eve comes to signify about The Gospel according to Eve: A History of Women’s Interpretation all women, defining the fact of what it is to be feminine.

While Eve was a woman, so all ladies were Eve, the conditions of her creation and her participation in the Fall frequently serving as a justification for restrictions placed on females and for their subordination to males. Over the generations, women themselves have go through and interpreted the storyplot of Eve, scrutinizing the details of the text to discern God’s phrase for them. Often their investigations led these to insights and interpretations that differed from prominent views, shaped because they were by males.

The Gospel According to Eve traces the annals of women’s interpretation of Genesis 1-3, readings of Scripture that affirmed women’s full humanity and equal worth. Biblical scholar Amanda Benckhuysen enables the voices of ladies from the past to speak of Eve’s story and its own implications for relationship, motherhood, preaching, ministry, education, function, voting, and even more.