Part I: The Women Within

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This chapter is part of the book The Sacred Editors: Lost Women.

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Sacred texts are filled with women—prophets, teachers, poets, and leaders whose voices shaped the earliest communities of faith. Yet over centuries of transmission and interpretation, many of these figures were recast, diminished, or pushed to the margins of their own stories. This section recovers the women who appear within scripture itself: Mary Magdalene transformed from apostle to penitent, Aisha bint Abi Bakr whose scholarly authority was later constrained, the Buddhist nuns whose enlightened poetry survived in canon but faded from memory. These are the women whose presence in sacred texts reminds us that divine revelation has always included female voices—even when later editors preferred to forget.