This project began with the discovery of a lacuna in the gospel narratives, namely that no women were commissioned to heal. This was accompanied by an awareness of the popular claim that women had always been healers. The task undertaken, therefore, was to test the popular claim and to determine, by way of a careful examination of the evidence available from a variety of sources, whether women were healers in the Graeco-Roman world of the Hellenistic and early Roman eras, the period most influential of early Christianity. The pastiche woven from the glimpses gained of healing women in such a context informed a new reading of women healing in the gospel narratives.

The careful development of a multidimensional hermeneutic fusing postcolonial and eco-feminist perspectives provided the categories and the questions that guided the reading of a wide variety of sources. Women healing emerged from the stone, the papyrus and the parchment as midwives and physicians shaping, even in small ways, the construction of gender, offering resistance in the face of a process of genderization informed by the master paradigm. The multidimensional hermeneutic allowed new questions to be asked of these women in order that they might be encountered with as much subjectivity and particularity as possible. Our separation from them in time, however, and the paucity of data preserved meant that many of the questions asked of them and their context were not able to be answered.