These two volumes cover much the same material from a similar point of view; each demonstrates that women in the New Testament world were not submissive, but were active and influential (and officeholders!). Tell Her Story is the more academically-framed work, with detailed footnotes at the bottom of the page, while Finding Phoebe places its few notes at the end. Neither volume has a full bibliography, but each offers a list of readings. The audiences of the respective volumes correspond: Gupta’s work is suitable for seminaries and upper-level undergraduate courses (more advanced students can profit from its footnotes), while Hylen’s is clearly designed for group Bible study, and is an outstanding example of that genre.

The authors are both Protestants; Hylen is a professor of New Testament at Emory University while Gupta holds a corresponding post at Northern Seminary.

As Carolyn Osiek writes in her endorsement, Finding Phoebe is “a welcome correction to stereotyping of ancient Mediterranean women as passive and helpless.” Phoebe performs the role of representative figure for women active in the ancient economy and the upper levels of society. Sections include “Part 1: Wealth and Property” (chapters on property ownership and management, marriage, and occupations), “Part 2: Social Influence and Status” (including patronage, social influence, and education), “Part 3: Virtues of Women” (modesty, industry, loyalty, marital harmony), and “Part 4: Speech and Silence” (with chapters on everyday speech, prayer and prophecy, silence, and “speech and silence”). There is rich reference to Greek and Roman inscriptions featuring active women. Each chapter is followed by reflection questions, suitable for private study but probably more productive in a group setting.

Telling Her Story is organized in two parts, “Before the Women Leaders of the Early Churches,” with chapters on Deborah, on Genesis 1–3, on women in the NT world, and on women in Jesus’ life and ministry; “The Women Leaders of the Early Churches” speaks of the churches themselves, women as “co-laborers” in ministry leadership, and of Phoebe, Prisca, and Junia. A final “What About . . . ?” section is devoted to Paul’s supposed prohibition of women teachers and to the “submission texts” in the NT household codes.

Hylen’s book has the virtue of quoting the “Pastoral Epistles” for themselves (e.g., “1 Timothy says . . .”) rather than attributing them to Paul; Gupta takes the lot as Pauline and justifies his doing so—though only for 1 Timothy—in a note on p. 164. In non-fundamentalist scholarship this is rather old-fashioned, and not very helpful. It causes Gupta to engage in quite a bit of special pleading, which recurs from time to time because his book is somewhat loosely organized and is repetitious in places. He also concentrates his references on the Bible itself; while he refers to other ancient sources, those references are far fewer than those in Hylen’s volume. His discussion of the exact meaning of certain Greek and Latin words and titles of office, however, is extremely helpful. An extremely important point they both make is that in the Roman imperial period married women were almost never under the authority of their husbands; marriage sine manu was the general rule. Practically nothing is said about women’s sexuality, however.

Both these books are recommended, Gupta’s with the caution that the leader or instructor will have to fill in certain gaps with regard to the authorship of biblical sources, but with the accolade that the author provides the perfect comeback for statements that “women cannot . . .”: “But Deborah did!” I myself intend to use Finding Phoebe for a parish study course in the near future.