Mistranslations, Misinterpretations,
and Misunderstandings
The Dominant Narrative of Male Bias
IN THIS CHAPTER, we will examine the role of women in the early church as depicted in the New Testament and look at the weight of evidence for women’s involvement in the church at every level.1 There are now a growing number of resources from Bible scholars, theologians, and historians charting the role and influence of women in the first centuries and throughout the ages.2 In this chapter, however, I focus on the women involved in the spread of the gospel and church leadership in the New Testament church (as far as we have access to that information), and highlight the diverse roles they occupied, focusing mainly on their roles as leaders and pastors, teachers, prophets, and apostles. Most of the evidence for this comes in Paul’s letters but is also present in Acts. What is clear to anyone who studies the role of women in Acts and the Epistles is that the involvement of women has so often either been ignored, glossed over, or presented in a particular way so as to strip them of their influence, their authority, and their status. Elizabeth McCabe writes of the importance of studying the original language because so much can get lost in translation. “While English translations generally provide a satisfactory reading, some passages are more accurate than others. In particular, verses detailing women’s roles may not provide an accurate description of the nature of their status in antiquity, often slighting women of their function in the early church.”3 And this is not just a problem with translations of the Bible but in the telling and retelling of church history throughout the ages. The result of all of this is that women have been either directly and intentionally or indirectly and unintentionally excluded from many forms of ministry, teaching, and leadership. We will look at how this has happened.
In previous chapters we saw that Jesus’ interactions and friendships with women were unqualifiedly affirming. In my view, a woman should feel confident to proceed in any form of ministry or service in the church simply on the basis of Jesus’ treatment of women and the promise of the pouring out of the Spirit “on all flesh,” empowering the people of God for works of service. A Christ-centered (christocentric) and Spirit-centered (pneumatocentric) approach to identity and calling should be an adequate foundation for a woman to function in all or any gifts, including pastoring, leading, and teaching. Jesus commands his disciples to make disciples of all nations. Thankfully, this command stands over the entire church and not just over the men, who make up less than half of the entire body. Thankfully, women are fully participating in this as much as they are able and always have done. Making disciples is predicated on the conferred authority of Christ, which again rests on all men and women and not just on the men. It will also entail women occupying every role in the church as they go about this task. Sadly, however, as simple as that appears (as it does to me), there are still battles going on over what “roles” women may occupy in modern concrete expressions of church, and there are still those who exclude women from authoritative and leadership roles on the basis that this stance is biblical. By this they mean that the warrant for this is easily discernible in the Bible. How do we answer this claim?
Jesus clearly both trusted and entrusted women with the spread of the gospel. He discipled women and treated them as equals in an unequal society. However, he did not formally or officially instate any women to positions of authority. Having said that, he did not really instate anyone, as far as we know. The only reference that is sometimes interpreted as an official appointment is the words to Peter in Matthew 16:18, but even the claim that this is a dominical instatement is controversial. Was Jesus stating that he was going to build his church upon Peter or upon the confession of Peter and the rock that is himself? Peter’s role in the foundation of the church is interpreted differently by different exegetes and even by whole denominations. Apart from this then, Jesus instates all his disciples (men and women) to go and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to obey the commands of Jesus, and baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, it is often assumed that as the church took shape in the first hundred or so years, patriarchal and hierarchical patterns were put in place under the guidance of the apostles, and that the right order of things is that men hold positions of authority and leadership, and women serve under them. Where does this view come from?
FROM THEN UNTIL NOW
The process of gleaning evidence from the Bible in order to establish permission for women to occupy positions of authority and leadership in the contemporary church is complex. To what are we appealing and why? What point are we trying to make? How are we linking what we know of the past (which is limited) to what we do in the present? How much of the church now has to reflect the church of the past, and how do we make those decisions? This is what I mentioned earlier about the series of interpretative decisions we make that leads us to contemporary practice. We cannot, for instance, find evidence for women’s ordination in the Bible because there is no direct equivalence of ordination in the early church as it is understood by most denominations today.
So we first need to be aware of the logic and coherence of a person’s argument if they are saying, “The Bible says this, therefore we must . . .” This is sometimes a straightforward process, and sometimes it really is not. Take the following two examples. We might say, “The Bible says we must love one another as Christ loved us, therefore we must love one another.” This seems to have a simple (if challenging!) application, but even then we sometimes disagree what loving the other might look like. A more complicated example is: “The Bible says we must not be unequally yoked or bound up with unbelievers, therefore . . .” How we complete this sentence will require some thought, prayer, and discernment as to how that might be applied in dating, marriage, church, and work relationships respectively. We know that Christians have and do interpret this differently depending on context and circumstance. So one question is what we believe the Bible says. Another question is, how are we using that either to include or exclude women from leadership? And a final crucial question is, where do we start?
BIBLICAL DATA
My preference as a starting point is to take a broad view of Jesus’ ministry and to use that as a foundation for models of ministry for women, men, and even children to some extent. (I recently spoke to a woman who had started preaching in her Pentecostal church at the age of nine.) However, as much as I might be happy with this as a hermeneutical method, this does not really answer questions about how we deal with certain texts that seem to prohibit women from certain roles. And because these texts are perceived to hold sway over the entire church, we should attempt to answer those questions too. So where do we start? Not with the prohibitions. The reason for this is that the data we have on what the church looked like in the early years conflicts quite severely with the prohibitions, and so once we have gathered that data, we can then go back to the prohibitions and read them afresh, attempting to understand what they might have meant at the time.
PAUL AND OUR IMAGINATIONS
I am always fascinated by the different responses that Paul evokes. What was he really like? Can we piece together a picture of this dynamic and charismatic man at the heart of the early church? Reading literature on him throws up wildly different views: he was a revolutionary who overturned accepted social mores; he was torn between eschatological ideals and missionary pragmatism; he was a champion of women; he was a misogynist; he was deeply influenced by a prevailing philosophical worldview; he thought in new and groundbreaking categories; he was all of the above!
We saw in our study of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 what a crucial part our preconceptions play in our exegesis. We all bring ideas that we have decided upon beforehand to the text. We all also, perhaps more than we would like to admit, employ our imaginations to reconstruct what a Bible writer might have meant, and our imaginations have already been primed to imagine certain realities and not others. We have to use our imaginations to some extent because there are some things we know about ancient culture and much we do not. The problem with our imaginations, however, is that they can only imagine reality based on what we already know or what we might wish were the case. And most of us are not really that well informed. We have picked up snippets of information and half-truths here and there. Our imaginations are subjective and frail and should be listened to with caution!
Studying the possible interpretations of Paul’s texts on women involves reconstructed scenarios that mainly paint negative portraits of women because we have read the texts negatively in the first place: a bunch of women all chattering at once through a service, a wife dominating her husband, women in an uncontrolled ecstatic frenzy, female heretics, and false teachers. An oft-cited scenario is that Paul gave them an inch and they took a mile. The women in Paul’s churches used their newfound freedom to abuse the system and get above their station. Paul liberated them, and they became overbearing and troublesome.
Once we have moved away from that view, however, new possibilities in reading the whole of the New Testament, and indeed the Bible, are opened to us. If we no longer begin with the fundamental idea that Paul was out to control women in some way, we are then able to imagine positive portrayals of women in the first churches that are not now in circulation. Paul, following Jesus, elevated women in the congregation and recognized their gifts. We have evidence for this. It is hard, therefore, to imagine Paul excluding women from full participation in worship.
NEW TESTAMENT WOMEN
The following is a list of the women referred to in the book of Acts and the Epistles, and so we know that Paul would have known or been friends, even good friends, with all these women:
Tabitha (Acts 9:36-42)
Lydia (Acts 16:14-15, 40)
Phoebe, Priscilla, Mary, Junia, Tryphaena and Tryphosa, Persis, Rufus’s mother, Julia, the sister of Nereus (Romans 16)
Chloe (1 Corinthians 1:11)
Euodia and Syntyche (Philippians 4:2-3)
Nympha (Colossians 4:15)
Lois and Eunice (2 Timothy 1:5)
Claudia (2 Timothy 4:21)
Apphia (Philemon 1:2)
Priscilla (Acts 18:2, 18, 26; Romans 16:3; 1 Corinthians 16:19; 2 Timothy 4:19)
the mother of John Mark (Acts 12:12)
the “elect lady” (2 John 1:1)
Philip’s four prophet daughters (Acts 21:9)
the women who are encouraged to prophesy in Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:2-16)
There are two things to note. The first is that they are named at all (when they are named), indicating to us that those women were important figures. Second, Carolyn Osiek and her coauthors point out that the women mentioned here, as well as the women named in Ignatius’s letters and other Christian documents from the first and second centuries, are named but with no reference to their relationships to men. “In the light of that culture’s obsession with classifying women by sexual status, it is striking that so many women are named in the Pauline and Ignatian letters and elsewhere without such designation.”4 They go on to cite Phoebe, Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, Julia, and the unnamed sister of Nereus (Romans 16:1, 6, 12, 15), and Euodia and Syntyche (Philippians 4:2) among others named in the early church writings.
In addition to this, they note that it would have been highly unlikely that all of the women mentioned were ascetics (and therefore celibate). “Rather, women in ministerial roles in the first centuries were more likely married or widowed than celibate ascetic, in spite of some evidence of a growing custom of consecrated celibacy.”5 So, Christian writers were deviating from the norm and according the women a status of their own when recording their involvement in the church. Thus, we know that there were important and influential female figures in the early church. However, I would like to take it further than that and demonstrate that when Paul refers to apostles, prophets, and teachers in 1 Corinthians 12:28, he also has women in view.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 12:28, “God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers.” A mixture of the history of translations with a male bias, assumptions regarding the roles of women, and the silencing of women’s histories, has caused certain sections of the church, perhaps particularly in the modern era, to assume that at least two of these offices were the preserve of men. However, the evidence of what Paul’s female friends and coworkers were doing in the church flies in the face of this. For reasons I will elaborate later, my opinion is that Paul would not have intended to exclude women from any of these roles and that it would not have been heard in that way. Moreover, if he had women in mind as well as men for these roles, then it is difficult to defend the exclusion of women from them or from the contemporary equivalent of these roles on the basis of a Pauline foundation.6
WOMEN AS APOSTLES
It is now accepted, but has not always been, that Junia of Romans 16:7 was notable or outstanding among the apostles and that she was a woman! I believe it is also now reasonably well known that Bible translators in the past adapted Junia (a woman’s name) to Junias (a man’s name) on the grounds that a woman would not have had such status. The discovery and correction of this in recent years is a modern-day parable. It is worth rehearsing the events of Junia’s history because it gives us an insight into how Bible translations mislead us on the question of women and their roles. For more detail, I recommend reading Scot McKnight’s book Junia Is Not Alone as well as other recent material on this subject.7 McKnight spells out both the role of Junia in the early church and how she came to be left out of our Bibles.
What do we understand by the term apostle? It has been argued that the term could signify a messenger of some kind—one who is sent. Most are agreed, however, that to be named as an apostle meant a certain level of gifting, anointing, authority, and, I would add, willingness to suffer within the church. McKnight writes this about Junia: “She was in essence a Christ-experiencing, Christ-representing, church-establishing, probably miracle-working, missionizing woman who preached the gospel and taught the church.”8 Undoubtedly she had an authoritative, teaching role, and as an apostle this would have been exercised within mixed groups of women and men.
Chrysostom, who was not that favorable to women in general, although better than some, writes in his commentary on 1 Corinthians,
To be an apostle is something great. But to be outstanding among the apostles—just think what a wonderful song of praise that is! They were outstanding on the basis of their works and virtuous actions. Indeed, how great the wisdom of this woman must have been that she was even deemed worthy of the title of apostle! But even here he does not stop, but adds another song of praise besides, and says “Who were also in Christ before me.”9
Credit where credit is due!
So despite the fact that without exception Junia was considered to be a woman by all the early church writers, it still came to pass that Junia was glossed out of the Bible. It is strange and somewhat disturbing that this was a later, not an early, development. The idea that women should be excluded from certain roles crept in after about the 1200s and was taken up in subsequent years. In other words, more recent translations strip women of their position, not earlier ones. Hence, there was a series of events that led to writing out Junia from Romans and the substitution of her with a male name. In the 1500s, Luther, following a translator named Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, changed the name from Junia to Juniam (the accusative case) and added a masculine article to the name, which is not there in Greek, hence indicating that Junia was a man. Luther’s German translation of the Bible was, of course, disseminated widely and was highly influential.
In addition to Luther, there were a string of men who endorsed the idea that Junia was a man in their own translations of the Bible. Before him, there was Giles of Rome (c. 1243–1316), who referred to Andronicus and Junia as “honorable men” and influenced the Roman Catholic Church. In 1858, Henry Alford changed the name of Junia to a male name in his edition of the Greek New Testament. This was endorsed in 1927, when we know that “in the thirteenth edition of his composite Greek New Testament, Eberhard Nestle silenced Junia and gave birth to a new Christian man named Junias.” McKnight describes how “Junia was but a footnote for Nestle. . . . In changing her name and creating a new male name, Nestle buried Junia alive.”10 In 1979, when Kurt Aland became the editor of the famous Greek New Testament, she was erased from the footnote. And so, McKnight declares, “she ceased to exist.”11 “Let me be clear once more: The editors of Greek New Testaments killed Junia. They killed her by silencing her into non-existence.”12
Thanks be to God, this was challenged, and Junia was resurrected! The scholarship of women and men has brought this to the fore, and Junia, for the most part, has been restored to her proper place. A further frustration, however, is that now it is harder for people to argue that Junia was a “man who was outstanding among the apostles,” some claim that we should read it to mean that Junia and Andronicus were simply highly esteemed among the apostles, but not apostles themselves. It should be noted that while translators believed Junia to be a man, there was no such ambiguity. Junias the man was an outstanding apostle. I think we should accord the same accolade to Junia the woman for whom it was meant in the first place.
WOMEN AS PROPHETS
It is incontrovertible that there were women prophets and that women prophesied with Paul’s approval in the early church. As well as Philip’s four unmarried daughters (Acts 21:9), we have the clear indication from 1 Corinthians 11:5 that women prophesied in the assembly.13 It is difficult for us to fathom what exactly Paul meant by prophecy, and we should exercise caution against reading back from contemporary uses of the term, say, for example, in Pentecostal or charismatic traditions. Whatever Luke and Paul meant by designating some as prophets and the act of prophesying, it is clear that it is some kind of communication to the gathered assembly of a revelatory nature concerning the nature and intentions of God (1 Corinthians 14:30). The prophet edifies the church and brings instruction (1 Corinthians 14:4, 31), hence the need for these messages to be weighed and tested. Prophecy is not just testimony or revelation about a person, as it might be used today. It has a teaching element to it. Witherington writes, “Prophecy is addressed to the whole congregation—including the men. Since prophecy involved authoritative exhortation or a new word of God, then it had a didactic purpose. Prophecy is not merely a personal testimony.” He adds, “There is nothing in 1 Corinthians 12–14 to suggest that prophecy (or preaching or teaching) were gender-specific gifts.”14
Witherington is right to bring out the didactic or teaching purpose of prophecy, as Paul uses the same verb in 1 Corinthians 14:31, “that all may learn” (manthanō—to learn), that he uses a few verses later in verse 35. John Owen, writing in the seventeenth century, and probably himself a cessationist when it came to spiritual gifts, writes the following regarding prophecy: “So prophets are the ‘interpreters,’ the declarers of the word, will, mind, or oracles of God unto others. . . . Hence, those who expounded the Scripture unto the church under the New Testament were called ‘prophets,’ and their work ‘prophecy.’”15
Cessationists still in the modern church often also seem to resist women teaching in church or at least prohibit women teaching men. They might well appeal to Owen’s understanding of prophecy, without realizing that this places them in an impossible dilemma. Paul’s endorsement of female prophets appears to have put them in a position where they would have both expounded Scripture and brought revelation among the mixed gathered assembly. Furthermore, the weighing and testing of prophecy seems to have been done by the gathered assembly and not just by a privileged or authorized few (1 Corinthians 14:29-31). Thus, in addition, there is no evidence to tell us that those women prophets/teachers were specifically under the authority of a man, but we will explore this more later on. Finally, Paul places prophecy before teaching in his list of gifts: first apostles, second prophets, and third teachers. Prophecy is a crucial foundational gift in the establishment and building up of the church, it has a teaching element to it, and it was exercised by women in Paul’s churches.
WOMEN AS TEACHERS AND PASTORS
This brings me to whether Paul appointed women as teachers and pastors. As well as the teaching and pastoring/leading role that Junia would have occupied, Paul also mentions and commends Phoebe in Romans 16:1-2. Here we find she is called both a diakonos and a prostatis by Paul, but as with Junia, the history of translation has certainly misled us on the nature of Phoebe’s central role in the early church. There has been no question that Phoebe was a woman. However, what it meant for her to be a diakonos and a prostatis is questioned. A study of various translations will show that these words have been and are still sometimes translated as “servant” and “helper” respectively. This, though, has turned out to be hopelessly inadequate at conveying Phoebe’s position and role. Sometimes the word servant is used as a translation of diakonos in relation to men, although it is more commonly translated as “minister” when referring to a man. I would submit that choosing to describe Phoebe as a servant in conjunction with the word helper is a deliberate choice to depict her in a subordinate role. As McCabe points out, diakonos is the word “Paul uses to describe his own ministry (1 Cor 3:5; 2 Cor 3:6; 6:4; 11:23; Eph 3:7; Col 1:23, 25), but it is unlikely that this parallel could ever be gleaned from English translations alone.”16 With reference to Phoebe, despite footnotes sometimes indicating that the word could be translated “deacon” or even “deaconess,” and the fact that this is the better translation, Phoebe is still often referred to as a “servant” even now. The choice of this word certainly does not give the impression that she was a deacon in the church at Cenchreae, which is what is implied by the language Paul uses. In other words, she occupied a position of leadership. McCabe makes the point that Paul describes Phoebe as “being” (the participle ousan) “of the church in Cenchreae” (the genitive ekklēsias), implying a recognized position or ministry in a specific congregation.17 She was a deacon of the church, not just a servant from the church.
Diakonos can also be used of a courier or intermediary, which should not surprise us when applied to Phoebe, as it is now established that she was the one who carried the letter of Romans to the churches in Rome. This is another indication of her central role in the church and in her partnership with Paul. The task of taking a letter to a church would have entailed not simply delivering the letter but in all likelihood performing the letter for the hearers, with the correct tone and emphases as if from Paul himself. In other words, she would have read the letter knowledgeably.18 In addition to this, she would have had the task of explaining it to the gathered churches. She was an emissary tasked with the job of delivering, performing, and explaining Romans. For anyone who has read Romans, it must be clear that this would have required a considerable level of knowledge of what was in Paul’s mind when he wrote it and what he meant by it. That is no mean feat!
It tells us a number of important factors about the role of women close to Paul. First, we know that she would have been close to Paul as he was writing the letter. Second, it tells us that she was theologically knowledgeable and wise enough to have understood it first and then to take a role in explaining it to her hearers. On the question of Phoebe delivering and reading/interpreting the letter, Beverly Roberts Gaventa writes, “Let’s tease out this point a bit further. If Phoebe is the carrier of the letter, and most scholars agree on that point, then she was almost certainly engaged in discussing its content in advance.”19 She understood the letter and knew what Paul wanted to achieve by it. Gaventa adds, “Almost inevitably, Phoebe shaped the hearing of the letter by the way she read it,” also speculating that “Phoebe may even have had a hand in shaping the content of the letter.”20 This is an indication to us that Phoebe’s theological understanding and wisdom were not only invaluable to Paul but that she was entrusted by him to communicate this to a strategic church. I find it impossible to see how this role can be properly divorced from a public teaching role.
In addition to being a diakonos and letter carrier of Romans, Phoebe was a prostatis. Again, in the past this has been translated as “helper,” but this is now deemed to be a ridiculously thin translation for what would have originally been communicated. As prostatis is a hapax legomenon (it occurs only once in the Bible), we can only glean its meaning from cognate (related) terms. This leads us to prostateis (the masculine form of the noun) and proistēmi (the verb form). In the masculine form, prostatis always connotes authority and the exercise of authority over others. In the verb form it is translated to “preside,” “rule over,” “direct,” “maintain,” and the like. She was one who ruled and led.
Here it is spelled out by McCabe:
In surveying the semantic domain of prostatis in regard to church leadership positions, one can see that the semantic range of meanings for proistēmi differs from the rendering of prostatis in English translations in Rom 16:2. According to the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, in surveying the eight occurrences of proistēmi (as noted above), the majority of these instances have the sense of “to lead.” However, English translations do not take this factor into account in their rendering of Rom 16:2 or the fact that prostatis in its proper sense means “a woman set over others.” Instead of seeing Phoebe in a leadership capacity, English translations account for Phoebe as a “helper” (ASV, NAS, NKJV), a “succourer” (KJV), a “great help” (NIV), or as “helpful” (NLT). The YLT, however, adhering to the most literal rendering of prostatis, renders this term as “leader.” Douglas Moo argues that if the cognate verb proistēmi is considered in determining the meaning for prostatis, Paul might be characterizing “Phoebe as a ‘leader’ of the church.”21
Prostatis also tells us that she was a patron or benefactor with considerable means and influence. She funded Paul’s mission and clearly had a relationship with him constituted by mutual trust and respect. With Paul’s formal commendation of Phoebe to the Romans, the picture we are getting is of a woman patron of Paul’s, a great friend and coworker, and one who is entrusted with the safeguarding and delivering of sound teaching and doctrine to a strategic church in a key city.
NYMPHA, CHLOE, AND LYDIA: LEADERS OF HOUSE CHURCHES
There are three women named in the New Testament who had churches in their homes. I wonder how many people hearing that assume that this meant they were fluffing up the cushions beforehand, baking something for the group, and serving the coffee! Apart from the fact that they would have had servants to do the domestic tasks for them, it appears that hosting a church in your home carried with it a leadership responsibility in that church.22 We have a similar example to that of Junia with Nympha, mentioned in Colossians, who is sometime referred to as a man. With Junia, there is no known male equivalent of the name. With Nympha there is, and with a different accent Nympha could have been a man—Nymphas. We have no accents to tell us which it might be, so we have to look at other clues in the text. The reason editors believe Nympha to be a woman is that Paul refers to the church in “her” (autēs) house. Thus, the majority of scholars now acknowledge that Nympha was almost certainly a woman and not a man. However, this view has not necessarily filtered down to a popular level yet. A quick glance at some Bible websites informs us that it is still sometimes assumed that Nympha is a man. Take, for example, what is written on the popular Bible Hub website. Although the editors acknowledge that Nympha might be a woman, they opt for her identity as a man, while also describing his standing, wealth, and influence in Colossae and beyond to Laodicea.23 As we know, this was her standing, wealth, influence, and so on. I wonder if it will be suggested she has less standing and influence when known to be a woman.
Despite the fact that the first-century Greco-Roman world was uncompromisingly patriarchal and was certainly a place where poor and slave women had no rights, we do know that wealthy women had spheres of considerable influence, and one of those spheres was the home or household. Osiek, MacDonald, and Tulloch make the point that wealthy women were well educated and had considerable authority and control in their own households. “This constant theme tells us that, in spite of a veneer of male supervision in the household, it was really a system run by women. The household was women’s space.”24 A woman with wealth and property was a valuable asset to the spread of the gospel. It enabled her to host and to act as a benefactor/patron to the early itinerant apostles. The patron could give “material and cash gifts, food and dinner invitations, lodging, favorable recommendations and appointments, help in matchmaking, and bequests and inheritances.”25 It was common to find women “in diverse roles as patrons, heads of households, mothers, teachers, and various kinds of ambassadors of the new faith.”26 It is perfectly plausible to assume that in a similar way Chloe’s people and Lydia’s household were under their influence and governance because of the fact that the household is referred to as pertaining to them. It is no stretch then to say that as leaders of their households that constituted the church, they were church leaders!
SUMMARY OF WOMEN AS APOSTLES, PROPHETS, AND TEACHERS
It is clear then that the New Testament refers to specific women whose names and roles are recorded forever for us to see. In addition to this we find Priscilla, who is mentioned with her husband, Aquila, in Acts 18:2, 18, 26; Romans 16:3; 1 Corinthians 16:19; and 2 Timothy 4:19. Four of the six times she is mentioned, she is mentioned first, giving us a clear indication that she is deemed to be the most prominent of the pair. In addition to this we know that she had a crucial role in instructing Apollos in the faith (Acts 18:26). Prisca, Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis all “worked” with Paul. Gaventa writes, “That bland verb does not convey a great deal in English, but this is the language he uses elsewhere when he is speaking about apostolic labor (as in 1 Cor 3:9; 4:12; 15:10; Gal 4:11; 1 Thess. 5:12).”27 The term coworker is also the term used of Euodia and Syntyche in Philippians 4:2-3. I have memories of a sermon I heard many years ago about these two women. Instead of being portrayed as influential leaders in the church, they were portrayed as quarrelsome and troublesome women who needed to have their heads banged together! That image lodged in my head until recently, when I read that they were apostolic women who labored alongside Paul. Now I imagine they were disagreeing over doctrinal and pastoral issues, as was the case with the church leaders in Corinth. No wonder Paul needed them to be reconciled for the sake of the church. Oh, how much is communicated to us by the assumptions of those who teach us the Bible.
WOMEN OF COURAGE AND VALOR
I want to give one final example of a straightforward translation bias that shows us how translation and editing affect how women are portrayed. It is not from the New Testament, but it is a good and clear illustration of what we are discussing. I first read of the following example in Katherine Bushnell’s book where she highlights how the word hayil is translated in relation to men and in relation to women. This word occurs 242 times in the Old Testament and is translated variously as “army,” “war,” “host,” “forces,” “might,” “power,” “goods,” “riches,” “substance,” “wealth,” “valor,” “strength,” as well as various military allusions. Bushnell gives a complete list. To the reader she says, “Please review the list, and get the usage of the word clearly in mind before proceeding further.” She then asks the reader to consider how this word is used in relation to a woman. She cites Ruth 3:11, Proverbs 31:29, and Proverbs 12:4. Here we find that the word is devoid of any connotations of strength, valor, or military might, and in her day was rendered as “virtue.”28 Now it is more likely to be translated “nobility” or “noble character,” but still not the power, strength, and valor that the word also conveys. Here is a clear example of this from Gordon McConville’s book Being Human, published in 2016:
The mutuality of male and female is expressed in the counterpoint of the virtues of these two [Ruth and Boaz]: she is, Boaz’s words, a “woman of worth” (eset hayil, 3:11), echoing the narrator’s introduction of Boaz himself as “a powerful man of worth” (is gibbor hayil, 2:1). The term hayil has a range of possible connotations, including wealth, standing, courage, and virtue. Applied to Boaz it denotes the high regard in which he is held in the community; in Ruth’s case it evokes her active, self-effacing loyalty to Naomi. Each has shown great stature according to their respective circumstances and opportunities.29
I understand, as Boaz is gibbor hayil, that McConville brings out the power and might of Boaz in particular. But Ruth is eshet hayil, denoting her worth and nobility and also conveying her strength. Read in one way in the light of our reading of Genesis, these references could connote that Ruth was Boaz’s equal in every way and that even though she was disadvantaged socially, she was his match. In English, however, as received by McConville, it becomes this: the man is courageous, influential, and virtuous; the woman is self-effacing and loyal. Men are consistently cast as leaders while women are consistently cast as followers.
WOMEN IN OFFICE: DEACONS, PRIESTS, ELDERS, AND BISHOPS
Across the denominations and vast range of churches in the world, there are a variety of offices reserved for those who lead, teach, preach, govern, or celebrate the sacraments. Historically, and by and large, these roles have been given to men, and there are multiple reasons for this. What a woman might participate in and be called to in relation to ministry and office will very much depend on what is normative in her own denomination or community. However, it does not follow that a woman who belongs to a denomination that prohibits her taking up certain roles will necessarily exclude herself from the possibility of inhabiting them. I have heard countless stories of women who feel called to pastor, teach, preach, take part in the governance of a church, lead a church, celebrate the Eucharist/Communion, or all of the above even when there is no expectation from the community that she might be able to do this. Sometimes she finds a way forward, sometimes not. This can be the cause of great pain, dislocation, and alienation.
For many women, the question of joining the pastorate, priesthood, or episcopacy is the central question. They feel called to the pastorate, priesthood, or bishopric within a certain denomination but find that the denomination excludes women from this office on account of the fact that the ordination is for males. This used to be the case in the Anglican Church until recently and is still resisted by some within the Anglican Communion. For others it relates to the role of pastoring a church, joining a board of elders, teaching, or preaching. Here I will mainly be addressing the question of women in leadership, pastoring, and teaching roles in general because specific denominational issues are beyond the scope of this book.30
EXAMPLES IN THE BIBLE CONTINUED
Whenever prejudice operates, people tend to discount an individual example of a particular status or achievement as the exception to the rule. The example of one person often does not shift people’s mindsets about all people like that person. So whereas we might cite Junia, Phoebe, Nympha, Lydia, and Chloe as examples of leadership, this may not persuade everyone that all women should be able to occupy a position of leadership in the church. In addition to this, we all know that people gravitate first to the prohibitions. Before we come to the explicit prohibitions, we will look at one of the main New Testament references to offices of responsibility and leadership (apart from what we have already seen).
The first thing to note is that the language of office and leadership is elusive, making appeals to models or patterns in the past highly problematic. The New Testament does not use the term priest and only once refers to priesthood with a reference to the priesthood of all believers (1 Peter 2:5), referring to all Christians. This at once problematizes claims about the priesthood. If, however, the issue is primarily over the teaching and authoritative roles of the elder, overseer, and deacon, then we can examine the specific references to positions of leadership in the New Testament and ask whether these might also refer to women, taking an exegetical approach. We have already done that for the offices of apostle, prophet, and teacher and found evidence for that. One of the sticking points, though, related to women in leadership in general is the question of the authority to govern and practice oversight, so that when we do find references to “elders” or “bishops,” for example, it is argued that these offices are a male preserve.
The reality though is that we have a paucity of information to draw on. The New Testament does not name any specific female bishops or presbyters, but neither does it name any male ones.31 Elders (presbyters) are mentioned in Acts 14:23 and 20:17. They are also referenced with “the apostles” in Acts 15:4, 6, 22, 23. Witt notes, “In Phil. 1:1, Paul greets the ‘saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi,’ along with the ‘overseers and deacons.’ . . . This is the only letter in which Paul specifically addresses these office holders by title.” He adds though, “There is nothing in these passages to indicate the sex of these office holders, and the only person specifically identified as a deacon by Paul is the female deacon, Phoebe (Rom. 16:1).”32 This was my case in point. Only in the pastoral epistles do we find any description of what is required of an overseer/bishop, elder/presbyter, and deacon, and here we have two references in 1 Timothy 3:1-13 and Titus 1:5-9. The references in 1 Timothy are most commonly cited to establish the notion that leadership in the church should be male, so we will turn now to this.
FEMALE LEADERSHIP AND 1 TIMOTHY 3
In 1 Timothy 3:1-13 we find references to the moral character of an overseer/bishop and a deacon, and we see here the same pattern emerging with other texts we have been studying. Whereas it was just generally assumed that of course Paul is referring only to men (and probably their wives), there is now a growing number of scholars who argue that Paul is referring both to male and female deacons here and also could be referring to women as overseers or bishops as well. There seems to be a good reason for this, not least of all because scholars are noting a misleading bias in translations. As many note, the descriptors of potential leaders are moral qualifications, not job descriptions. In the face of domineering false teachers (male and female), Paul is describing the character and moral behavior that he expects of those who have responsibility for pastoring and oversight in the community. However, the assumption that Paul is addressing only men here has colored our translations in the same way that we have seen occurs time and time again. In describing the office of overseer/bishop, Paul begins by addressing “whoever” and “anyone” (tis), but as Witt points out, this is followed in our English translations by a plethora of male pronouns where there are none in the Greek. “The complementarian-leaning ESV translation introduces the male pronouns ‘he’ or ‘his’ ten times in 1 Timothy 3:1-7, while even the ‘inclusive language’ translations of the NRSV and the revised NIV have eight and ten masculine pronouns respectively. In actuality, the Greek texts of 1 Timothy 3:1-12 and Titus 1:5-9 do not contain a single male pronoun.” The only reference to sex in the passage is the phrase “one woman man,” which is a literal translation. So he writes, “With the single exception of the three-word expression ‘one woman man’ . . . nothing in the passage would indicate that the person being discussed for the office of overseer/bishop would be either a man or a woman.”33
As well as the male pronouns that have been inserted, we should note the pattern of the passage and what that tells us of the meaning. Paul describes the character of a bishop/elder, then a deacon, and then turns to women. There are those who argue that he begins with male bishops, and then male deacons, and then addresses wives or just women in general, differentiating them from the elders he addressed to begin with. However, there are indicators in the text that tell us he was probably addressing first male deacons, and then female deacons. As Witherington points out, the whole address hangs on the verb must in 1 Timothy 3:2. The overseer “must . . .” We go on to read in verse 8 that deacons, “likewise” are to exhibit the same character as overseers. Further on, in verse 11 we read that the women “likewise” must also exhibit these characteristics. As this use of likewise grammatically refers back to the verb must in verse 2, Witherington writes, “just as 1 Timothy 3:8 is dependent on [must], so we would expect a continued discussion about church functionaries” in relation to the women’s role.34 His view then is that Paul is naturally referring to female deacons.
Stark writes the following, simply working on the assumption that Paul was definitely referring to women deacons:
In 1 Timothy 3:11 Paul again mentions women in the role of deacons, noting that to qualify for such an appointment women must be “serious, no slanderers, but temperate and faithful in all things.” That women often served as deacons in the early church was long obscured because the translators of the King James Version chose to refer to Phoebe as merely a “servant” of the church, not as a deacon, and to transfer Paul’s words in 1 Timothy into a comment directed towards the wives of deacons.35
SUMMARY
We are now realizing that there is a weight of biblical and extrabiblical evidence for the existence of women leaders, ministers, deacons, and teachers in the early church. Epigraphical evidence from the first centuries of the church demonstrates to us that there were other women deacons, and there are now multiple resources available to those who are interested in the history of the early church that will prove that women were not at all excluded from all forms of ministry and service. I enjoy finding men from ages past who were certain that the Bible and the early church embraced the ministry and leadership of women. Bushnell cites Bishop Lightfoot in her work, an Anglican bishop from the nineteenth century. He was an impressive scholar of the apostolic fathers, Paul’s epistles, and philology (the study of language). He was also involved in translating the Bible. Here Bushnell cites him,
Bishop Lightfoot speaks of the mistranslations to do with Phoebe. He also gives strong reasons for believing that 1 Tim 3:11 refers also to women deacons, and adds: “If the testimony borne in these two passages to a ministry of women in the Apostolic times had not been thus blotted out of our English Bible, attention would probably have been directed to the subject at an earlier date, and our English church would not have remained so long maimed of one of her hands.”36
Having spent most of this chapter on exegetical material, before we come to a final word on the official roles of women in the church, I wish to turn two theological themes that apply to all men and women and in my view should serve as a backdrop to our understanding of the way that men and women can participate as coworkers in the church and the world.
ONE NEW HUMANITY IN GALATIANS 3:28
I have already mentioned in chapter two the importance of Paul’s baptismal theology and how we should understand Galatians 3:27-28. I also discuss this in some detail in Women and Worship at Corinth. Here is where Paul claims that there is now no longer Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus on the basis of one shared baptism. There are many ways to interpret this one phrase, but I find the prevalence of temple imagery drives us in a certain direction. There are good grounds for imagining that what Paul had in mind was related to his vision of one new humanity, where the walls of hostility had been erased and Jew and Gentile, slave and free, and male and female found that they were not only one in Christ but were one in worshiping Christ, no longer separated by the literal, physical boundaries that would have held them apart in the temple. The church had become a sacred space where different and socially unequal groups came together as one, and social expectations of inferiority and superiority no longer functioned or, more to the point, were turned on their heads. In other words, Paul is not making a point about difference per se, he is making a point about honor and shame, hierarchy, socioeconomic boundaries, and exclusion. Difference and diversity is part of the rich tapestry of human existence. Discrimination, exclusion, and the lording of authority over others in the Christian church is anathema.
I drew on John Barclay’s work on Galatians to endorse this point, although Barclay himself in this instance does not refer to any implications of Paul’s theology for men and women. In fact, many male scholars address the implications of Paul’s theology with reference to Jew-Gentile and slave-free relations but neglect to apply it to male-female relations. The implications are vast, however, if what they claim to be true of Paul’s attitude to Jew and Gentile or slave and free is applied to male and female.
Recall Barclay on the implications of what it means to become a “new creation” in Christ from Galatians 6:15.
The enormous creativity made possible by this vision of reality is immediately obvious: “For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but new creation (καινὴ κτίσις)” (6:15). As in 5:6, Paul announces the irrelevance of taxonomic systems by which society had been divided in subtly hierarchical terms: old “antimonies” are here discounted in the wake of a new reality that has completely reordered the world. The connotations of the phrase “new creation” stretch well beyond individual conversion, gesturing to a cosmic refashioning awaited in the future (cf. 1:4). But in context the primary focus is the social novelty of communities that disregard former boundaries by discounting old systems of worth. The “new creation” is indifferent to traditional regulative norms and generates new patterns of social practice: it is instantiated among “those who walk by this κανών” (6:16). In this context, circumcision is neither valued nor denigrated: the circumcised are neither superior nor inferior by being so marked.37
He describes Paul’s view of these new communities. There is no more superiority or inferiority. They are siblings. They become “communities freed from hierarchical systems of distinction.”38 Barclay’s insights are crucial in relation to the point I made at the beginning, regarding the coherence and integrity of the soteriological and sociological status of men and women. What is true of the nature of a woman’s status as the one who is equally saved in Christ should have concrete ramifications in terms of how communities function.
YOU ARE THE BODY OF CHRIST
A second strand of Paul’s theology relevant to ministry is the church as the body of Christ. I find it fascinating that the early church so often describes the church in feminine terms when it is Christ’s body that we are representing. In 1 Corinthians 12 Paul uses the language of the body, and specifically the body of Christ, in order to teach a deeply divided church how to treat one another. This, followed by his magisterial passage on love in chapter 13 must be taken into account when we are talking about Paul’s view of church structure. In chapter 12, he paints a certain picture about how they should behave with one another. It serves as a window into Paul’s thought on the nature of the Christian church and how it should operate, but is also significant within the letter itself as he develops the theme of the body. Through the metaphor of the physical body, Paul exhorts the congregation to elevate respect, love, interdependence, and care for one another over charismatic gifts or “roles.” Not only this but the overriding message of chapter 12 is that those who see themselves as more important and more worthy of honor should instead honor the inferior, the lowest, and the least.
Paul’s teaching here is not simply that they should honor those who are perceived to be inferior, but that there is a God-ordained reversal of status in the body of Christ. “God has so adjusted the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member.” What is the purpose of God having done this? That “there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored [glorified], all rejoice together” (1 Corinthians 12:24-26).
This brings us back to the language of head that Paul situates within his picture of the body as well as in his theology of God/Christ. First, he warns those who perceive themselves to be in the position of the head that they may never say to any other part of the body, “I have no need of you.” But second, and far more radically, Paul claims that those who are more “important” must devote themselves to honoring the dishonorable parts in the knowledge that those members are given the highest honor by God himself. There is no doubt that women, especially slave women, would have been at the bottom of the pile. There is also no doubt that Paul aligns himself with these at the bottom of the pile. This is a radical and challenging view of the apostolic role as lived out by a first-century Jewish male.
MALE AND FEMALE MEDIATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES
In conclusion, a few theological themes around identity, mediation, and representation arise from my previous points, which I believe are pertinent to reflections on the role of the priesthood (however we understand this) as a mediating and representative role. First, we are all, male and female, baptized into Christ. This becomes our new identity, the basis on which we are a “new creation.” This positions men and women in relation to one another as absolute equals, but it especially positions men and women as equals in terms of representation and mediation. All Christians are represented before God as “in Christ,” giving us the identity of “sons” in the Son.
I know that women are daughters, but women are given the rights of a son, which is important. Equally, all Christians are chosen to represent Christ in turn to the world because not only are we in Christ but Christ is in us. In the world, we are ambassadors for Christ, and we become ministers of reconciliation, hence the priesthood of all believers. The priest stands simultaneously as a representative of Christ and a representative of the church. Those who argue for a male-only priesthood or pastorate put the emphasis on the equivalence of the maleness of Christ and the maleness of the representative. To my mind, this is akin to telling a half-truth. To prioritize the presence of a Y chromosome as the qualifying criteria for the priesthood is telling only half a truth about Christ and half a truth about humanity. God initially chose male and female to represent his image. He then chose Christ to represent male and female, and he now chooses male and female again to represent Christ. Mediators and representatives are also called to represent the church—to be in persona ecclesiae.
The church is classically defined in feminine terms, although we are not to fall into a naive trap on the other side of claiming that the church is female. It is, after all, Christ’s body! But this tells us that both male and female should represent Christ and both male and female should represent the church. There are so many pastoral reasons that women in leadership are needed for the health of the church, but there are also symbolic reasons because this speaks to us of who we think is qualified to represent God and why. Ali Green writes, “The female priest evokes a greater abundance of possibilities in our religious imagination as it acknowledges and incorporates the feminine and subtly changes the psychic dynamics of our relation to the divine.”39 This is such an important point and worth pondering. As Green explores in her book, the presence of a woman priest chosen to represent God challenges the idea of women as impure, unholy, ignored, and excluded, a tragically powerful narrative that has affected women through the ages. It should be a cause of great rejoicing where women have been admitted to the priesthood.
We have been exploring in this chapter what the relentless and dominant narrative of male bias has given rise to in terms of translation and messages to women. I have not even begun to touch on the implications of this for how women see themselves in the church and the effect that this has had on some, both on the excluded women and on the men who grow up in this environment. These conversations need to be had, and many need healing from distorted readings of Scripture and bad theology. I am sure that it is time now for redemption and time to recover Jesus’ first radical restoration, inclusion, and instatement of women.