28: WOMEN BISHOPS IN THE EARLY CHURCH? 217some kind of disclaimer, such as, “This type of figure is common in early
Christian art, and there are several competing theories about what these
praying figures mean. My proposal is unusual, since no scholar who spe-
cializes in the study of ancient Christian art has ever proposed the inter-
pretation I am giving, but it still seems right to me.” Then the author
could give reasons and arguments for his or her interpretation. Such a
procedure would be honest and fair to readers who have no opportu-
nity to check the relevant sources for themselves. But Kroeger has not
given any such disclaimer.
We might also expect that the editors of a journal such as Christian
History either would have enough knowledge of the field themselves to
know that Kroeger’s statement was unprecedented in the history of
scholarship concerning early Christian art, or would have access to
reviewers who would have sufficient knowledge to tell them that,^5 so
that at least readers would not automatically take Kroeger’s interpreta-
tion as a reliable testimony from an expert in the field. If Kroeger is
unaware of this other scholarly work, then one wonders how she can be
considered competent to write about it herself. If she is aware of this
other scholarly work but fails to mention it to her readers, then she has
not met fundamental demands of honesty in an article such as this.
The procedure followed in this egalitarian claim troubles me more
than most of the other claims that I consider in this book. When no
explanations or disclaimers are made alerting readers to the uniform
lack of support from scholarly specialists for such an interpretation, this
wild speculation (or so it seems to me, after reading these other articles)
is taken as truth by unsuspecting readers.
Cindy Jacobs, for example, simply trusts Kroeger’s interpretation of
this fresco as truthful, and counts it as evidence for women’s participa-
tion in high positions of governing authority in the early church.^6
Thousands of readers of Jacobs’s book will also take it as true, thinking
that since it has a footnote to a journal on church history, there must be
scholarly support for the idea. And so something that is a figment of
(^5) It is not clear to me that complementarian scholars had any opportunity for input in this issue
of Christian History. The entire issue was devoted to the history of women in the church, and
five of the six “contributing editors” were women who have been authors and leaders in the
egalitarian movement: Patricia Gundry, Nancy Hardesty, Catherine Kroeger, Aida Spencer,
and Karen Torjesen (page 3).
(^6) Cindy Jacobs, Women of Destiny (Ventura, Calif.: Regal, 1998), 189.