Priscilla and Aquila Paul's Coworkers in Christ Jesus

A marvelous addition to parish reading circles and libraries. It includes detailed notes, bibliography, and indexes-a real bargain for the price!

We really enjoyed reading this book and were pleased about two things in particular. The content of the book is informative and is so in plain, understandable, and non-challenging language; and Priscilla and Aquila are shown to be warm, admirable, and true-to-life people, not implausible artificial types. Noël Keller has made them a couple with whom it would be a delight to share hospitality, a privilege to have available for guidance, and a blessing to be ceaselessly certain of their friendship and love.

Dr. Keller has achieved a perfect example of that rare book which is both rigorously scholarly and completely readable. Without polemic, she illuminates Priscilla's prominence in this ministerial couple whom Paul commended as fellow workers and upon whom he depended. She leads the reader through the Priscilla and Aquila material in the New Testament, filling in the context in ways that make their ministry and house churches come alive and their relevance for contemporary church practice clear. Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in early Christianity, the history of missions, the authority and ministry of women in the church and paradigms for new forms of mutual ministry.

If anyone still thinks that history is boring, they should read Marie Noël Keller's book. By drawing out the historical implications of clues found in six short passages, she has reconstructed the history within which Priscilla and Aquila lived and enabled that couple to come alive. Though she reinforces her careful exegetical work with the insights of other scholars in the field, she has produced a work that even the non-scholarly will find imminently readable. By the end of the book, Pricilla and Aquila have become people you want to know and model your life after.

Noël Keller produces a surprising, fascinating interpretation of Priscilla and Aquila as missionaries for Christ, 'advance workers' for Paul in Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome, playing a unique role among Paul's social network. The household was the primary setting for their activity, combining as it did work space, retail shop, and living quarters, interpreting this from the social world of the Eastern Roman empire. They prepared for and enabled Paul's evangelistic activity in these major urban centers of the Greek east, thus making clear that Paul was not a loner, but the center of a lively group of people who supported and enabled his missionary activity.

While teaching Paul over a twenty year span I often called attention to the importance of Paul's missionary co-workers, Priscilla and Aquila, but with little follow up. Noël Keller offers a superb close reading of all New Testament references, making this couple come alive, while offering great insights into Early Christian communities. Carefully researched, with ample bibliography and evocative suggestions about how their lives challenge the church today, this book should be a vade mecum for anyone interested in Pauline Christianity.