Mary Ann Beavis

• PhD
• Head, Religion and Culture, St. Thomas More College at University of Saskatchewan

It has long been recognized that the three striking female figures that punctuate the second half of the Book of Revelation, the Woman Clothed with the Sun, the Whore of Babylon, and the Bride of the Lamb, have affinities with Greco-Roman goddesses. Using the ancient method of interpretation known as the Interpretatio Graeca/Latina, where foreign d...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

This article uses cultic studies to explicate the development of the earliest churches, using Hebrews as a case study. “Cult” is defined as a group that suppresses individuality and critical thinking, demands intense commitment and loyalty to an individual or ideology, and curtails or eliminates personal autonomy to be replaced by the cult’s worldv...

For three decades, the Canadian artist Lilian Broca has been creating art featuring biblical women: Lilith/Eve, Esther, Judith and Mary Magdalene. These are not single artworks, but series, presenting these women in the contexts of their narratives. In contrast with traditional artistic representations of these figures, dominated by the male gaze,...

This Cambridge Companion offers an up-to-date and accessible guide to the fast-changing discipline of biblical studies. Written by scholars from diverse backgrounds and religious commitments – many of whom are pioneers in their respective fields – the volume covers a range of contemporary scholarly methods and interpretive frameworks. The volume re...

This article investigates the question of the influence of Goddess feminism on children's literature (picture books, early readers, young readers, young adult) since its inception in the 1970s. A key finding is that in contrast to earlier decades, a variety of children's books featuring Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, mostly in the young readers...

This article investigates the question of the influence of Goddess feminism on children’s literature (picture books, early readers, young readers, young adult) since its inception in the 1970s. A key finding is that in contrast to earlier decades, a variety of children’s books featuring Goddesses and the Divine Feminine, mostly in the young readers...

The contributors to this book pursue three important lines of inquiry into parable study, in order to illustrate how these lessons have been received throughout the millennia. The contributors consider not only the historical and material world of the parables’ composition, and focusing on the social, political, economic, and material reality of th...

This article interprets St Patrick’s Confessio, supplemented by his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, in the light of North American slave narratives, arguing that Patrick’s account of his enslavement in Ireland shares many of the characteristics of North American slave narratives identified by James Olney. In addition, Patrick’s account of his...

This book of collected essays is one of several recent publications on Mary Magdalene after a hiatus of about a decade (see also Thierry Murcia, Marie appelée la Magdaléenne. entre traditions et histoire: Ier – VIIIe siècle, Collection Héritage méditerranéen [Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2017]; Mary Ann Beavis and Ally Kateu...

This interdisciplinary volume of text and art offers new insights into various unsolved mysteries associated with Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Mary the Mother of Jesus, and Miriam the sister of Moses. Mariamic traditions are often interconnected, as seen in the portrayal of these women as community leaders, prophets, apostles and priests. These...

This interdisciplinary volume of text and art offers new insights into various unsolved mysteries associated with Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Mary the Mother of Jesus, and Miriam the sister of Moses. Mariamic traditions are often interconnected, as seen in the portrayal of these women as community leaders, prophets, apostles and priests. These...

This interdisciplinary volume of text and art offers new insights into various unsolved mysteries associated with Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Mary the Mother of Jesus, and Miriam the sister of Moses. Mariamic traditions are often interconnected, as seen in the portrayal of these women as community leaders, prophets, apostles and priests. These...

This interdisciplinary volume of text and art offers new insights into various unsolved mysteries associated with Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Mary the Mother of Jesus, and Miriam the sister of Moses. Mariamic traditions are often interconnected, as seen in the portrayal of these women as community leaders, prophets, apostles and priests. These...

This article reports on the preliminary findings of a research project on the phenomenon of the blending of Christianity and Goddess Spirituality1 (‘Christian Goddess Spirituality’), with particular reference to the beliefs and values of practitioners. The contours of a grassroots Christian Thealogy (‘reflection on the female divine’) are sketched...

When Paul wrote First Thessalonians shortly after the recipients had accepted the Gospel, many significant issues had already arisen among them. Of great concern was the social complexity, and even persecution, they encountered because they had "turned to God from idols" (1:9). The countercultural stance of those earliest believers, and especially...

Although her work is little known to academics in Mary Magdalene studies, the writings of Margaret Starbird have been, and continue to be, very influential in informing popular understandings of Mary Magdalene, including her portrayal as Jesus's wife in The Da Vinci Code, and, most recently in Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson's The Lost Gospel:...

This essay delineates the history, scope and mandate of the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (JRPC) in the larger context of Religious Studies. The JRPC produces scholarship on the myriad ways in which religion is presented, produced, studied, interpreted, rationalised, manufactured and disseminated in popular culture. This article explains...

The past 25 years have seen an upsurge of interest in the figure of Mary Magdalene, whose image has been transformed through feminist scholarship from penitent prostitute to prominent disciple of Jesus. This article documents another, non-academic, interpretation of Mary Magdalene-the image of Mary as goddess or embodiment of the female divine. The...

This study investigates the historical evidence for the widespread pop culture assertion, disseminated through popular histories, novels, and spiritual tourism, that the medieval Cathars of southern France treasured a tradition that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had children, and, as such, the holy couple provides a model for human marr...

This article introduces feminist approaches to parable interpretation by summarizing three books published in the first decade of the twenty-first century: Mary Ann Beavis, ed., The Lost Coin: Parables of Women, Work and Wisdom (2002); Luise Schottroff, The Parables of Jesus (2005); and Elizabeth Dowling, Taking Away the Pound: Women, Theology and...

I have argued here that there is a hitherto unrecognized intertextual relationship between Judg 11:34-40 and the Gospel narratives of the raising of Jairus's daughter, especially the Marcan version. Both stories are distinctive in the biblical tradition in that they share a focus on a father and a valued daughter whose death is imminent and who sub...

In recent years, several scholars have challenged the widely held hypothesis that the historical Jesus and the kingdom of God movement were egalitarian, but that as early as the time of Paul the early church began conforming to the nonegalitarian norms of the ancient Mediterranean world. In particular, "feminist myths of Christian origins" have bee...

This article offers a new hypothesis regarding Judg. 11.39d-40, a reference to an otherwise unknown festival celebrated by the ‘daughters of Israel’ in memory of the sacrifice of Jepththah’s daughter. After a survey of feminist and non-feminist speculations as to the nature of the festival, evidence from Greek heroine cults in which daughters are s...

While the phrase 'the kingdom of God' has obvious political overtones, its use by Jesus has most often been interpreted in social, eschatological and theological terms. This paper will survey representative interpretations of this concept in the secondary literature, and attempt to situate Jesus' understanding of 'the rule of God' within the spectr...

This article takes issue, on rhetorical and geographical grounds, with Engberg-Pedersen’s (1999) argument that Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa is a ‘philosopher’s dream’. Further, it is argued that while Philo’s description of the Therapeutai/Therapeutrides is shaped by Hellenistic utopian conventions, particularly Iambulus’ account of the Islands of...

Starting from two well-known avian metaphors for Godde, this article explores non-human and specifically avian imagery for the divine in a variety of contexts, including the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish tradition, the ancient Near East and contemporary world religions. The imagery has wide-ranging symbolic reference. It has the advantage of being count...

This article explores the biblical, theological and philosophical themes in the cult science fiction TV series Prey (ABC, 1998). After a brief introduction to Prey and Prey fandom, the following biblical-theological themes which pervade the series are identified and analyzed: creation, faith, the Christ figure, the Satanic figure, and eschatology....

Parable interpretation is currently dominated by the view that Jesus' parables had a dynamic and life-changing effect on his audiences. This article challenges that view, arguing that it arises from an inappropriate application of the theological view of parables as 'language-events' to historical research. Using J.L. Austin's concept of 'perforrna...

Although early Christianity had a "scholastic" dimension at an early stage, the place of the Greco-Roman urban institution of the school in the lives of Christians and the role of education in the development and dissemination of Christianity has not received much attention in recent scholarship. this article revisits this topic, with special refer...

The author argues that the apparent ineffectuality of efforts to control sprawl is at least in part a result of a failure to distinguish between growth controls, which have rightly earned a shadowy reputation as a thinly-veiled form of NIMBYism, and regional growth management (RGM), which involves the attempt to set out rules for development that a...

In the ears of his Greco-Roman audience, Luke's social teaching would have been heard with shock. In their world, the neh and the powerful despised the poor and the disadvantaged and took pains to preserve the gulf between them. Inspired by the prophetic denunciation of injustice, Luke cnticized the rich and thus transgressed against Greco-Roman va...

Mark contains four anecdotes about women cast in a Greco-Roman literary form, the chreia, well known to the evangelist and his readers (5:24-34; 7:25-30; 12:41-44; 14:3-9). Chreiai, called "pronouncement stories" by form critics, were regarded as "useful for life" by the ancients. Chreiai about women usually related examples of "feminine" virtues a...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Manitoba, 1981. Includes bibliographical references.