It is one of the peculiarities of Catholicism that while women make up around two-thirds of congregations in churches I attend, they cannot be priests – and are sparsely represented among the lay leadership. Other branches of Christianity may have done rather better on this score, but, even then, in the gospels that are read aloud from the pulpit on a Sunday, the principal figures around Jesus are overwhelmingly male.

Catholicism’s given reason for rejecting women priests is because Jesus picked 12 male, not female, apostles. In Women Remembered, Helen Bond and Joan Taylor, both professors in Christian history (at Edinburgh and King’s, London), take a dim view of the assumption that lies behind this explanation: namely that apostles are more important than Jesus’s disciples, whom the gospels tell us did include women.

“Apostle” comes from the Greek word to send out. Hence the apostles are best seen, they suggest, as envoys rather than a leadership cabal, while “disciple” – rarely used as a word in the Old Testament – derives from a Graeco-Roman term for those who were the closest followers of a teacher or philosopher.

In this new book, therefore, Bond and Taylor turn their spotlight on the shadowy female figures among these disciples in the gospel narratives. This appears to be something of a mission for them. Women Remembered follows on from their well-received and enlightening 2018 Channel 4 documentary on the same subject.

One example is Salome, mentioned as an afterthought in Mark’s gospel (15: 40-41) along with Mary Magdalene and Mary, mother of James, as one of “many other” women on Calvary watching Jesus die on the cross. By this stage, of course, the all-male ­apostles had scarpered.