It's the Maxwell Institute podcast.

I'm Blair Hodges.

It goes without saying that the Bible was created in a fundamentally patriarchal society.

But a close analysis still staggers the mind.

One study argues that the voices of women only make up about 1% of all the words in the Bible.

So if we want to learn more about women in the ancient world, we'll need more than the biblical text. We'll need to look at other texts and other ancient artifacts, burial boxes,

jewelry, art. Catherine Taylor joins us in this episode. She's the Hugh Nibbley postdoctoral fellow

here at the Maxwell Institute. She specializes in late antique Christian art history and iconography.

Her research shows that there's

much more we can learn about women of the ancient world. We're talking about a book she wrote

on Mary, the mother of Jesus, and about the surprising stories Christians have told about Mary

in word and artifact. Questions and comments about this and other episodes of the Maxwell

Institute podcast can be sent to me at MI Podcast at BYU.edu.

Catherine Taylor, welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast. Thank you. I'm very pleased to be here.

We've known each other for a long time now. You've been here at the Maxwell Institute. How long?

I first did a fellowship with the Institute in 2017, kind of as an honorary fellowship. And now I am the Nibley

postdoctoral fellow, and I started that assignment in September of 2018. And today, we're

sitting down to talk about a book that you published called Late Antique Images of the Virgin

Annunciate Spinning, Allotting

the Scarlet and the Purple. And that title will become more clear as we go along. But let's start

with an apocryphal book. This is a book that was written by early Christians that didn't end up

in the Bible, the Protavangelium of James. And this is a book that offers

...