It cannot have been easy for women of Jesus’s locale and time. The Maccabean struggles had led to only a brief period of independence, and then once more Jews were thrust under the onerous system of corrupt client kings or, as was the case in Judea, the even greater indignity of direct rule by Rome. Furthermore, the rulers were both literally and figuratively taxing the people. Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, of Idumean or Edomite descent, was not really a Jew. He was an Idumean—that is, a descendent of the Edomites, Israel’s bitter rivals for many centuries. He modeled himself on Hellenistic rulers. Due to that background and to his sly and predatory character, Jesus called him “that fox” (Luke 13:31–32). A ruler so insensitive to Jewish religious ardor that he would build a capital city, Tiberias, on a Jewish graveyard and then try to cajole people into living in that unclean spot cannot have been well thought of by Torah-true Jews.8
Furthermore, people growing up in the region of Galilee, by the shores of its large lake, would have encountered commerce and traffic from various directions and various neighboring cultures, most of it not very (or not at all) Jewish. The fishing trade, the economic foundation of the region, took the men away for days at a time, leaving the women behind to hold things together, keep the family going, cultivate the garden, and keep so busy that they could not cultivate their minds or spirits to their full potential.
So far as we can tell, women were not disciples of early Jewish teachers before Jesus’s time. Prophetesses such as Miriam were distant memories, even though our Mary Magdalene was likely named after her. It is not a surprise that deeply spiritual and bright women might have leaped at the chance to dabble in foreign religions from nearby Gentile territory or jump on the bandwagon of a radical rabbi from Nazareth when he offered them a chance to fish for followers. This must have seemed like a big step up from gutting fish and sweeping dirt floors, though these women continued to serve the traveling band of disciples either by patronage or by actually provisioning and cooking for them (“helping to support them out of their own means,” Luke 8:3). What then can we say about these remarkable women who seem to have dropped everything to follow Jesus? We will examine the stories of two of the more prominent female disciples, Joanna and Mary Magdalene, and see what their tales reveal.
JOANNA/JUNIA: FOLLOWER OF JESUS, APOSTLE OF CHRIST
Jesus, it can be said, had an entourage, and that entourage, according to the Gospel of Luke, included several women of substance. Luke tells us that as Jesus traveled through the cities and villages of Galilee, “proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God,” he was accompanied by the Twelve as well as by “some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna and many others, who provided for them out of their resources” (Luke 8:1–3). We will focus first on the second-named woman: the wife of Herod Antipas’s steward.
Herod Antipas, a son of King Herod the Great, ruled over Galilee and Perea (the desert region south of Galilee and east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea). As the wife of his steward, Joanna was no peasant. Rather, she would have been a middle-or even high-status woman apparently able to travel on her own or with friends without fear of reprisal. Her traveling, then, is no surprise. What is surprising is who she traveled with. Women in early Jewish culture were not supposed to fraternize with men they weren’t related to, never mind travel around Galilee with them.
And yet Joanna not only followed a controversial man named Jesus around Galilee; she supported him financially. Joanna apparently had access to her husband’s material wealth and used it, as the earlier quote tells us, to become one of Jesus’s patronesses.9 Her funds helped Jesus, the Twelve, and the women disciples travel, eat, and minister together.
Joanna’s support of Jesus is especially surprising because of her husband’s employment. After all, Herod Antipas was the infamous beheader of John the Baptist. He cannot have been pleased that his steward’s wife was running after Jesus, a radical sage and a relative of John the Baptist. It surely didn’t help Chuza’s situation that Jesus, as noted earlier, had called Herod “that fox.”
That Joanna would nevertheless leave her home and put her husband’s career at risk to follow Jesus shows how very attractive the ministry of Jesus must have been to women and how brave (or foolhardy) Joanna was. But there were good reasons to follow Jesus. He did not treat women as if they were made unclean periodically by menstruation; he saw God’s grace as having overruled such conditions and the rules they entailed. This open attitude allowed women to become his close and constant disciples without fear of contaminating others in the circle. Second, Jesus apparently dismissed contemporary taboos against men talking with women who were not their relatives (cf., e.g., John 4:27).10 This was a radical step in a highly patriarchal culture like that of Galilee. Indeed, it would be a radical step in most Middle Eastern cultures today.
When Jesus traveled to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, his unusual entourage of women and men accompanied him. This, too, is extraordinary. Normally women went to such festivals with their own families, but Joanna and several other Galilean women broke the cultural norm to be with Jesus. These women were likewise present at the crucifixion. Luke tells us, “All his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee, stood at a distance, watching these things” (23:49). According to Luke, Joanna and other women not only witnessed the death, but followed Joseph of Arimathea to the tomb. When they saw where Jesus had been laid, they went to someone’s house and prepared burial spices and ointment, returning to the tomb once the Sabbath was over to anoint and cleanse Jesus’s body and to wrap spices in the burial shroud to retard the odor.11
But when the women—Luke later identifies them as “Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women” (Luke 24:10)—arrived at the tomb on Easter morning, “they found the stone rolled away from the tomb…. When they went in, they did not find the body” (Luke 24:3). Two angels—“men in dazzling clothes”—approached the women and asked them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again?” The text continues: “Then they remembered his [Jesus’s] words, and returning from the tomb they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.”
Notice the repetition of the word “remember.” With that literary device the author is telling us that the women had, when Jesus was still alive, received teaching from him about his coming death and resurrection. It was not just the Twelve who had been taught these things at Caesarea Philippi, as we might have assumed based on that story in Luke 9:18–27. To the contrary, the women had also been instructed in the crucial coming events in Jesus’s life. They too were intended to play a role in these matters.
The men apparently thought that the women’s tale of a risen Jesus was nonsense, “an idle tale,” and “they did not believe them” (Luke 24:11). This is not surprising: women in that culture were generally considered too emotional or too illiterate to be valid witnesses. For this reason, it is all the more striking that women were the key witnesses to the heart of the later Christian creed, for they were last at the cross, first at the tomb, first to hear the Easter message, first to see the risen Lord, and first to proclaim the Easter message. We may assume that Joanna, like Mary Magdalene, is alluded to in Acts 1:14, where we learn that “certain women” prayed with the disciples, but it would appear that Joanna’s story ends in that scene in the upper room. Or does it?
In Romans 16 Paul mentions several church leaders and workers who are in Rome or will be traveling to Rome, and he asks the locals to treat them well. The list includes a handful of women, including one Junia and her husband, Andronicus, mentioned at Romans 16:7. The Latin name Junia is in fact equivalent to the Hebrew Joanna. In Paul’s day, Galilee and Judea were territories within the Roman Empire. In order to survive, many Jews, especially the elite, adopted Roman customs, conventions, and even names. It is no accident that Herod Antipas, a client king of Rome, named his capital Tiberias after the Roman emperor. Even the Sea of Galilee came to be known as Lake Tiberias in this period.
As a steward or estate agent responsible for managing and buying the king’s land, Chuza undoubtedly moved in circles where he would have had close contact with Romans and the Jewish royal family. It is quite possible that he and his wife adopted Latin names. Might Paul’s Junia be the woman Luke calls Joanna? On first glance this seems unlikely, since Junia is said to be married to a man named Andronicus, which is not equivalent to the Hebrew Chuza. Yet the name Andronicus could be a nickname, meaning no more than “conqueror of men.”
There are several clues in Romans 16:7 that suggest another verdict. Paul writes: “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen who were in prison with me; they are notable among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was.” First Paul tells us, by calling Junia his “kin,” that she is Jewish, not Roman. Second, Paul reveals that he knows this couple intimately: they had done time together, apparently imprisoned because of their work as ministers and missionaries. This is actually quite unusual. Criminal women were generally not jailed but were put under house arrest, unless they had done something notorious to offend a city’s officials. Paul appears to be suggesting that Junia and her husband were, as he was, ringleaders of the “notorious” Christian sect that was causing so much trouble throughout the empire.
Third, Paul notes that Junia and Andronicus were in Christ before him. Paul was converted only two or three years after Jesus died, which would mean that Junia and Andronicus numbered among Jesus’s earliest followers. But where might they have been, that they were “in Christ” before Paul? Surely they would have had to be part of the Jerusalem church that Paul himself persecuted when he was Saul the Pharisee!
Finally, and most importantly, the couple are said to be “notable [or, depending on the translation, prominent or outstanding] among the apostles.” The Greek word episemoi can mean any of these things but in all cases is a superlative of some sort. Whether we call them prominent or notable or outstanding apostles, Paul clearly thinks highly of them.
The Greek phrase has sometimes been taken to mean “notable to the apostles” or even “noted by the apostles,” but the Greek preposition en here surely has its normal meaning of “in” or “among,” as Origen and John Chrysostom, the earliest Greek commentators on this verse, admit. Some scholars have tried to minimize the importance of this statement, suggesting that Paul is using the term “apostle” to refer to an emissary of a local church, as he seems to do in 2 Corinthians 8:23 and perhaps Philippians 2:25. But in both of those texts the word “apostle” is qualified in such a way that it is clear he is talking about a local church emissary. There is no such qualification in our text; rather, the context suggests that by “apostle” Paul means the same thing here that he means when he applies the term to himself, since he is describing itinerant missionaries who did time with him courtesy of the Roman system of jurisprudence.12
Paul’s letter to the Romans, written around A.D. 57–58, predates the earliest gospel (Mark) by at least ten to twelve years, which means that Romans 16:7 is the first New Testament reference to a woman as an apostle. This is impressive, especially when we remember that when Paul uses the term “apostle” this way (without any qualification), he means an Apostle with a capital A—that is, someone who has seen the risen Lord, has been commissioned by Jesus, and now serves as a missionary.13 In sum, Paul is writing about a Jewish woman called Junia (but presumably named Joanna in Hebrew) who was an early, close, and prominent follower of Jesus, who witnessed Jesus’s resurrection, and who then boldly spread the gospel. Might she be the Joanna of Luke’s gospel?
I believe she is. One could ask, “But what happened to Chuza?” I suspect that he divorced Joanna and she then remarried a Christian named Andronicus, with whom she undertook missionary work that took her to the heart of the empire (and, at least once, to jail). It’s easy to see why Chuza would have divorced a woman who was using his money to chase after a radical prophet who had insulted his boss. In the honor-and-shame culture in which they lived, Herod Antipas would hardly have retained Chuza as an estate agent if Chuza had retained Joanna as a wife! The divorce might also explain why Joanna was free to follow Jesus to Jerusalem for Passover in the year 30.
As historians continue to learn about the social context in which women operated in the first-century world, and as small points of language and linguistics become clear, fresh insights into scripture are made possible.14 I admit it takes a certain amount of detective work to connect Joanna with Junia. Nevertheless, the links are plausible. They are strengthened by the fact that Junia must have been part of the original circle of followers of Jesus in Jerusalem if indeed she was “in Christ” before Paul’s conversion in A.D. 34–35. This was before there was a mission outside of Israel, never mind a mission to Gentiles. Furthermore, Luke presents Joanna as a bold and prominent disciple, and Paul’s Junia is similarly characterized.
Whether they are two women or, as I believe, one, the two depictions provide an unusual glimpse into the life of an unusual woman in the early church.15 Here indeed we have a profile in courage and great faith. The question this raises is, What manner of man could inspire this sort of loyalty, courage, and devotion? The biblical facts of Joanna’s life offer a remarkable though indirect witness to the towering figure Joanna believed Jesus to be. We will say more about this after considering one of Joanna’s more famous female cohorts in ministry, Mary Magdalene.
THE TALE OF MIRIAM OF MIGDAL: A RECOVERING SPIRITUALIST
We do not know nearly as much as we would like to about the women who followed Jesus. Our clues are partial and piecemeal at best, and we must rely on our general knowledge of the social and religious milieu to help us fill in the gaps. One of the things we do know about socially and spiritually oppressive situations (such as that of Jewish women in Jesus’s time and place) is that the marginalized often frantically look for help in strange places—dabbling in darkness, necromancy, shadowy spirits. We may remember the tale of the medium of Endor whom King Saul consulted in his desperation, seeking to call up the shade of Samuel the prophet and get some answers and direction (1 Sam. 28). Desperate times often lead to desperate measures, whether they call for them or not.
We need to clear up a few facts first. No, Magdalene was not Mary’s last name; rather, it identified her as coming from the tiny village of Migdal, along the northwestern Galilean shore. Her first name was probably actually Miriam, after the sister of Moses.
Miriam of Migdal was possessed by demons before she met Jesus, according to Luke 8:2. In fact, she endured a particularly malignant form of possession: seven demons had a death grip on her. (Seven, in the Jewish way of thinking, was a complete set, perhaps not as severe as the “Legion” in the Gadarene demoniac story of Mark 5, but nonetheless a very severe case.) For whatever reason, Miriam had dabbled one time too many with the dark powers and perhaps also the spirits of the dead, and instead of being able to manipulate them, they came to control, indeed to possess, her. Tales of demonic possession and exorcism are well known throughout the last two thousand years and from many different cultures, of course, and such stories continue to be told even today. Sometimes modern and even postmodern people have assumed that such references are simply about people who suffer fits due to a mental illness or epilepsy. While that is perhaps true in some cases, there is considerable and credible cross-cultural testimony to the reality of evil spirits and the practice of exorcism over many centuries, including our own. The reality is that occult and astrological practices existed in Jesus’s day and have continued in every century since then, and it is precisely these sorts of practices that have often led to spiritual problems in the life of the practitioners. Miriam may well have been such a practitioner. Thus it will not do to simply dismiss the possibility that Jesus addressed some spiritual malady in the life of the woman from Migdal.
Among the types of miracles that Jesus performed, exorcism is one of the most (if not the most) frequently reported in our earliest-written gospel (Mark), though not many scholars have wanted to highlight this fact in the modern era. Exorcism made Jesus a very controversial figure in his day, as the debate in Mark 3 over Jesus being in league with Beelzebul or Satan shows.16 In fact, it made Jesus too controversial for some: the Gospel of John, for example, reports no exorcisms performed by Jesus.
From a Jewish viewpoint, demons not only degraded a person, they defiled a person, and so they were called “unclean spirits.” A person who was unclean was not to participate in group gatherings, such as worship in the synagogue, for fear of contamination of others. This in turn suggests that Miriam of Migdal, by dabbling with the darker forces, had managed to cut herself off from spiritual nurture and training in her own village or in the nearby fishing villages. Unlike physical uncleanness, spiritual uncleanness was harder to shed.
Then a controversial healer and preacher from Nazareth somehow crossed paths with Miriam, perhaps when he was preaching along the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, and he exorcised the demons from her.17 This is the very first thing we learn about this woman in Luke 8:2, in an almost parenthetical comment by Luke. She too must have been rather notorious, something of a cause célèbre because of this remarkable event in her life; otherwise, Luke would hardly have introduced her this way.
We need to be clear here that “spiritual pollution” was not seen as the same thing as immorality in early Judaism, though sometimes it could be caused by or lead to immoral behavior. Later readers have sometimes assumed immorality on the part of Miriam, confusing her with other biblical characters, but that is the result of misreading scripture. The anonymous sinner mentioned in Luke 7:36–50 as having anointed Jesus’s feet in the house of Simon the Pharisee, for example, has often been assumed to be Miriam of Migdal. This serious mistake became possible only once manuscripts of the New Testament began to have the separation of words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and verses, which first happened in the early Middle Ages.
Let me explain. The culture into which Luke wrote his gospel was overwhelmingly an oral culture, and documents were just aids and tools of oral communication. Luke’s gospel was not likely part of a culture of texts or published and public literature; rather, it was intended to educate a high-status new Christian named Theophilus (see Luke 1 and Acts 1). Without the separation of the gospel into stories, there was no real way to skip ahead in the narrative and learn more about a character who was mentioned but not named. Put another way, Luke was a careful historian and narrator: if he had wanted Theophilus—who would be hearing this document read in all likelihood, rather than reading it himself—to think that Miriam of Migdal was the sinner woman of Luke 7, he would have had to name her in that first mention of the woman in the narrative. Otherwise, no one would ever have guessed this was the case, since she is not mentioned in Luke 1–6, even obliquely. Had Miriam of Migdal been the same woman as the anonymous person mentioned in Luke 7:36–50 as a “sinner,” Luke would simply have introduced Miriam’s name at Luke 7:36, not at Luke 8:2.
Even less plausible is the attempt to identify Miriam of Migdal with the anonymous woman caught in adultery in John 7:53–8:11. Miriam does not show up in John’s gospel until the cross in John 19, and once again the woman caught in adultery is not named.18
But there is much more to say about Miriam. Almost always named first when a list of women disciples is given in the gospels, she seems to have been as much of a risk taker as her Master. As noted earlier, Jesus seems to have been the first early Jewish teacher to have women disciples. Furthermore, these were women not related to him or to the Twelve, and they were traveling with him in Galilee. This would surely have been surprising if not shocking to many in traditional Galilee. Luke takes the trouble to mention three women by name, though he adds that there were “many others” as well (8:3), so presumably we are meant to see these women as representative of the entire group of women disciples. If so they must have been a diverse lot.
It is out of the ordinary that any women were named. Usually in such a patriarchal culture, women, even honorable ones, were “anonymous” in the stories of the day (see, for example, Luke 7:36–50; Luke 8:43–56; John 7:53–8:11; Mark 14:3–9), especially women with some sort of social liability—for example, a disease, demon possession, or connections with a despised or immoral ruler or leader. What is most interesting, then, about the three named women is that the first two who are mentioned had significant social liabilities.19 Mary Magdalene was plagued by demons until Jesus exorcised them, and Joanna was the wife of Herod Antipas’s estate manager. Despite their liabilities, these women and others were patronesses and provisioners of Jesus’s traveling entourage, practicing the sort of hospitality Jesus had told the disciples to rely on when they traveled from town to town.
The next place we hear of Miriam is in the story of Jesus’s final days in Jerusalem, as told by Matthew. We do not know what Miriam did during the time between when she was converted and first traveled with Jesus in Galilee and this last week of Jesus’s life in April of the year 30, other than that Mark 15:41 says she was one of the disciples traveling in Galilee. What Matthew 27:55 tells us is that several women, including our Miriam, traveled with Jesus and the Twelve up to Jerusalem from Galilee for the Passover celebration.
This is a helpful reminder of a couple of things. It shows us that Jesus continued to associate with and travel with women as well as men throughout his ministry, even if this scandalized the more conservative Galilean and Judean Jews when he went up to Jerusalem. It also shows just how devoted Miriam and others were to Jesus, and how devout she had become, making the long trek up to Jerusalem for the Passover celebration. Neither she nor the others could have realized that dramatic events were about to happen to Jesus, changing their world and worldview.
According to Mark 15:40–41 a group of women watched the crucifixion from afar. The first person mentioned in Mark’s list is Miriam of Migdal. We are reminded again in 15:41 that she and other women had followed Jesus while in Galilee and had provided for him. Here we have a somewhat more specific reference to attending to Jesus and his needs, but it likely means no more than the reference in Luke 8:3. While the male disciples had all denied, deserted, or betrayed Jesus, the same could not be said about the female disciples, or at least these three (Salome and Miriam the mother of James and Joses are also mentioned). They were allowed to remain at the cross, presumably because the Romans did not expect women to try to take Jesus down from the cross. (In fact, though, that sort of behavior did happen from time to time, when a watchman was not placed on the site where the execution took place.) In any case, these women were there until the bitter end and are mentioned only after the narrative concludes the discussion of Jesus’s death.
Again at Mark 15:47 we are told that the two Miriams saw where Jesus was buried in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. Immediately thereafter we have the brief reference at Mark 16:1 to their coming to the tomb on Easter morning, apparently fully expecting to anoint the body and change the linens during the period of mourning. What they found instead was the empty tomb. Mark recounts an encounter with an angel at the tomb, always a sign of divine activity, but he does not, in the present form of the ending of Mark, tell the story of the appearance of Jesus to these women. That story appears in truncated fashion in Matthew 28:8–10 and in much fuller form in the famous account in John 20, to which we must devote the rest of our time.
New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd once said that the story of Mary Magdalene in John 20 was the most self-authenticating of all the Easter narratives, because who would make up the notion that Jesus appeared first to a little-known woman from Migdal?20 It is still a pertinent question. The scene reads like a narrative of the progress of a soul going from grief to euphoria. But there is much more to the scene. The story, as John tells it, makes it apparent that Miriam, like the other disciples, was not really anticipating encountering a risen Jesus. His appearance came as a total shock. This was no dream or wish-projection of an overheated imagination. This was a profound encounter that changed a person’s mental outlook totally.
Part of the transformation that John stresses is that Miriam can no longer cling to the old Jesus, whom she tellingly calls rabbouni, “my teacher” or “my master” (not, for instance, “my beloved” or “my husband”!). There was a teacher-disciple relationship between these two persons.21 Miriam seems to assume that things will return to the way they were before. Jesus’s command to her is not “Touch me not,” as some have rendered it, but rather “Don’t cling to me.” She is being warned not to hold on to the Jesus of the past, the Jesus one could touch. Rather, she is to go forward into the future, proclaiming that Jesus had risen and had appeared to her. One church father called Miriam at this juncture in her life the apostle to the apostles (a matter we will address in the next chapter). It is Jesus who commissioned Miriam to tell the male disciples where he was going now that he had risen. It is not surprising that many in the Jesus movement thereafter saw this as a sufficient, though remarkable, precedent for women to proclaim the gospel. In fact, John’s gospel depicts Miriam as not only the first to see the risen Jesus but the first to proclaim the Easter message. But even this is not quite the end of the story. According to Luke’s second volume, “the women” disciples were present in the upper room praying when the new member of the Twelve was selected (Acts 1:14). We may assume then that they, including Miriam of Migdal, were present at Pentecost as well.
The New Testament tells us nothing more of the story of Miriam. She disappears into the sands of time. We will deal shortly with later conjectures about her that seem to have very little (or no) historical basis. But we have more than enough material in the New Testament to say that a strong case can be made that she was an important early disciple of and witness for Jesus, self-sacrificially serving him; and we can say with equal certainty that there is absolutely no early, particularly no first-century, historical evidence that Miriam’s relationship with Jesus was anything other than that of a disciple to her master-teacher. We can also conclude that it is crucial that the risen Jesus commissioned her to be the first person to proclaim the Easter message, even to proclaim it to the inner circle of male disciples. This provided a remarkable precedent for women to be involved in the Jesus movement from then on.