Luke and the Outsider

Listen in as I talk with the hosts of the “Honestly, Though ” podcast about my summer spent immersed in Luke’s Gospel and saw Jesus’s focus on the outsider.

Black Friday Special

My new Bible study, Latte with Luke, weighing in at 328 pages, is the first study in the Coffee Cup series on the life of Christ. Number twelve comes with an all-new cover design. For Black Friday, I'm offering the book at more than 50 percent off the retail price ($7 each!) for orders of five+ books, while supplies last. Maybe you want to lead a group in a study of the life of Christ in the new year? Or perhaps you'd like to give copies for Christmas? Orders of 5+ books are $7.00 each; individual books cost $10.50—still a significant savings. Venmo me your address at the handle below. Or use the store on this site, and I'll send a refund check with your books. Subscribers to my site can order anytime between now and midnight on Cyber Monday. (S-h-h-h!)

Announcing the 2023 San Miguel de Allende Writers Workshop

Join hostess Debora Annino and me, along with other writers, in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a Spanish Colonial town that has served as a gathering place for artists and writers since the 1930s. The enchantment of San Miguel delights with its charming colonial architecture, iconic Parroquia, award-winning restaurants, Latin music, and lively literary and arts community. The fourth annual five-day, four-night retreat includes the following:

• Writing Workshops led by yours truly

• One-on-One Writing Consultation

• Transportation to/from airport

• Shared room accommodations in private home and local B&B

• Breakfasts, lunches and dinners

• Walking tour of San Miguel de Allende

• Mexican Art Tour

• Shopping in Mercado de Artesanias

• Latin-music dinner

• Volunteer opportunity with Little Things Matter Foundation to serve local community

* private room $350 additional fee

Airfare not included

The Bent-Over Woman Whom Jesus Healed

Recently, I dug deeply into a story about one of the lesser-known women of the Bible—the woman Luke describes as “bent over.” And I loved learning more about Jesus’s interaction with her.

But first, the backstory: Jesus and his disciples are walking somewhere on a Sabbath, and they feed themselves by taking some heads of grain in a field. And what do the religious leaders do? They object, because Jesus and his team have done “work.”  

When this happens, Jesus reminds his listeners of a story in the Scriptures about how a priest gave David and his hungry men leftover consecrated bread on the Sabbath. And Jesus concludes by declaring that the Son of man is “lord of the Sabbath” (Luke 6:5).  

Soon after that on another Sabbath, Jesus does something more public and equally unexpected: he heals a man with a withered hand. But again the Sabbath-police object, because their traditions have turned God’s designated weekly vacation day into a time when they prohibit others from showing mercy. 

In both scenarios, Jesus establishes himself as lord of the Sabbath. He is not actually breaking Sabbath law; he is showing how his accusers' interpretation of Sabbath law has led to practices that actually contradict the intent of the day. 

And now yet another Saturday has rolled around in the ancient Near East. And Jesus is where we expect to find him—in a synagogue. Teaching. And this rabbi sees a woman who has endured being bent over for eighteen years. (What were you doing eighteen years ago—the year of the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster? That’s a long time.) Sometimes Luke, the Gospel writer, attributes physical problems to disease, and sometimes he attributes ailments to spiritual bondage. In this case he attributes the suffering to a disabling spirit (13:11). 

The woman in question is not standing in line for a healing. Instead, Jesus initiates the interaction. He sees her. And he calls her over. “Woman, you are freed from your infirmity,” he says. And he touches her.

Imagine her shock when she can stand straight. “Praise God!” she exclaims. She’s vertical for the first time in nearly two decades! Instead of seeing people’s shoes, she sees their faces. She stands slack-jawed. And the crowd marvels. 

But the most prominent religious insider in the room, the synagogue president, scowls. Why? You guessed it—Jesus has healed, once again, on the Sabbath. But rather than address Jesus—the one who committed this so-called crime—the man turns to the least powerful person in the room, the woman who came expecting nothing but a worship service. And he bullies her: “There are six days on which work should be done,” he insists. “So come and be healed on those days. But not on the Sabbath.” 

She came to worship, not looking for healing! But the healer intervenes. He has zero tolerance for grace-killing. Instead, he publicly answers the man with words intended for the entire group of joy-smashers: “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath loose his ox or his donkey from its stall and lead it to water? (Yes. Duh.) Then shouldn’t this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be loosed from this imprisonment on the Sabbath day?” Talk about freeing the captives!

The Anointed One indeed releases people from prison (Isa. 61:1; Luke 4:18)—just not the kind of prison in which John the Baptist was locked up. And isn’t the Sabbath the best time to release a daughter of Abraham from such a prison? In suggesting as much, Jesus clarifies the true meaning of “Sabbath”—as a day for replacing bondage with freedom, a day to bring shalom. What better day to celebrate the rest of God and provide a reason for God’s people to rejoice—a day for joy?

Jesus’s response humiliates his adversaries, but the crowd loves it. Jesus has loosed a woman from prison, yet another evidence of the kingdom.  

Everyone looking forward to the kingdom has expected a new ruler to ride into Jerusalem on a trusty steed and overtake their occupiers, the Romans. But in Jesus’s first coming, he brings a different kind of deliverance, freeing captives from a different kind of prison.

Seeing the opportunity to help his listeners understand how the kingdom differs from what they expect, Jesus borrows examples from the farm and from domestic space. First, he compares the kingdom to a mustard seed. Sure, such seeds are smaller than a pinhead, but they grow large enough to support birds’ nests. The kingdom is like that. And the kingdom is also like yeast—“that a woman takes and mixes with three measures of flour until all the dough rises.” Yeast infiltrates invisibly, changing everything. 

That’s what the King’s kingdom is like. Shalom-rest. Freedom for captives. Defense of the bullied. JOY! 

King Jesus changes everything.

Excerpted from Latte with Luke.

Revisiting the Topic of Women in Public Ministry: My Recommended Resources (2022)

For more than two decades, I’ve taught a course on gender and its ramifications in the church and for women in public ministry. Since #MeToo and #ChurchToo combined with Christian leaders saying women have to endure abuse to be biblical and also that women shouldn’t teach in seminaries, I’ve seen a shift in attitudes. Add to that the one-two punches of Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez with Beth Allison Barr’s book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: People are revisiting what and why they believe on the topic. 

Some have sat up and said, basically, “Evangelicals have barred the front door against radical feminism while leaving the back door wide open to misogyny.” Some have heard Beth Moore told to “Go Home!” and responded with, “Stop already. That misrepresents us.” I’m hearing pastors get up and say, “I was wrong” to slut-shame Bathsheba. I’ve been told by radio hosts, “If I had talked with you a year ago about this, I would have heard you uncharitably, but now. . . .” Something has changed. 

Consequently, churches and parachurch organizations are asking for guidance about how to revisit the Bible’s words about topics like women’s silence and being “saved through childbearing.” 

Churches are seeing how inconsistent it is to have formulated policy about women without consistently applying their commitment to “God made men and women different by design, so that means we need to partner with them in having dominion.”   

Additionally, many are realizing that most debates are taking place within the complementarian camp. Indeed, within this camp, a lot of folks want to distance themselves from traditionalist views of women (e.g., “women are ontologically inferior to men”) and views of women’s public ministry that have women’s lives revolving only around those of men. There is a growing willingness to state outright that woman was made in God’s image; that violence in a marriage is what severs the marriage bond, not the departure of the person seeking safety; that if a sign of the Spirit in Acts 2 includes old and young women prophesying, it cannot somehow violate a grounded-in-creation mandate for a man to learn biblical truth from a woman. Here’s a chart I made with the help of my friend Catherine Arnsperger that shows a spectrum of beliefs within the inerrancy camp, and mostly within the complementarian camp.

I’ve done some consulting on the subject. But my first love is my students. So….  

Are you and/or your team wanting to revisit questions about gender in the church? Here are my recommended resources:

While there is no one book I recommend, here are some sources that will help you explore the issue for yourself. I highly recommend doing so in community. Through the years I have noticed that those who do so alone tend to end up in a different place (and not always a good place) from those who do so in community. Books with an asterisk are required reading in the course I teach (some in entirety, some only chapters). 

Recommended Books on Women in Public Ministry

HOT OFF THE PRESS: I wrote the foreword for 40 Questions about Women in Ministry (Kregel Academic) by Sue Edwards and Kelley Mathews. 

*Winston, George and Dora. Recovering Biblical Ministry by Women. Longwood, Florida: Xulon Press, 2003. 551 pages. Textual considerations. I require the first half of this book, and it’s a game changer for my students in helping them see how to frame the study. George graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary and was president of Belgium Bible Institute years before his retirement. His late wife, Dora, was a missionary in Europe for years and also taught at the institute. Significantly, the Winstons are more global in their thinking about masculinity and femininity/manhood and womanhood than many of the popular sources. 

*Bartlett, Andrew. Men and Women in Christ: Fresh Light from the Biblical Texts. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 2019. 464 pp.  Many books approach the subject from a firmly partisan point of view, whether complementarian or egalitarian. Andrew Bartlett makes use of his experience as a judge and arbitrator in assessing the debate with impartiality rather than advocacy (like a barrister). In a thorough but accessible analysis, he engages with exemplars of each view and with all the key biblical texts. He partly agrees and partly disagrees with both sides, and he offers fresh insights into interpretation of the texts.  

*Dzubinski, Leanne M. and Anneke H. Stasson. Women in the Mission of the Church: Their Opportunities and Obstacles throughout Christian History. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021. 238 pp. Many have been taught that women served only behind the scenes in the church for 1,950 years till US feminism came along and wrecked everything. Such a version of history ignores the long history of women in public ministry. Also, this article for many is full of historical surprises.

*Hübner, Jamin. A Case for Female Deacons. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015. 90 pp. Exactly what it says it is. Short, concise.

*McKnight, Scot. The Blue Parakeet, 2nd ed: Rethinking How You Read the Bible. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2018. 336 pages. McKnight helps readers consider the hermeneutics of culture. How do we know when something is cultural (e.g., slavery) and when it’s timeless? He applies hermeneutics of culture to the debate on women in vocational ministry.

*Piper, John, and Wayne Grudem, eds. Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1991 (re-published with only a new preface in 2006; contents in both editions are identical to the 1991 edition). Many church leaders read this book in seminary and have read nothing since. How these authors frame the debate will raise some eyebrows after reading Winstons.

*Pierce, Ronald W., Cynthia Long Westfall and Christa McKirland. Discovering Biblical Equality. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021. 3rd ed, 698 pp. Egalitarian scholars provide alternative interpretations than those presented in Piper/Grudem’s Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. This is a big, fat book that presents egalitarianism from the perspective of contributors who hold to inerrancy. 

*Sayers, Dorothy L. Are Women Human? Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005. From a speech given in 1938. 69 pp. Sayers’s observations about sexism predate the Women’s Movement. 

*Witt, William G. Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2020. 447 pp. Witt makes a biblical and theological case for the ordination of women to the ministerial office of Word and Sacrament. He argues that both sides of the debate about women’s ordination embrace new theological positions in response to cultural changes of the modern era. Witt touches on issues such as theological hermeneutics, relationships between men and women, Christology and discipleship, and the role of ordained clergy in leading the church in worship.

*Cohick, Lynn. Women in the World of the Earliest Christians. If you think the women with shaved heads referenced in 1 Cor. 11 were prostitutes, or that the Samaritan woman at the well was immoral, you’re overdue an update. Lynn Cohick knows her stuff.

*Chapter on “head” in Sumner, Sarah. Men and Women in the Church: Building Consensus on Christian Leadership. Seriously, Sumner’s chapter on what “head” means in Ephesians 5 is outstanding. It’s a metaphor. Efforts to substitute the metaphor have given us either “authority” or “source” as literal equivalents. And in doing so, we’ve destroyed the metaphor and missed the point. 

For 1 Timothy 2, I give my students my two academic articles on Artemis. I did my dissertation on that one. See links below to summary posts of the content. My forthcoming book, Nobody’s Mother with IVP Academic explores the goddess’s identity and the ramifications for Paul’s writings.

I require the *chapter on eschatology in Paul and Gender by Cynthia Westfall.She and I disagree about what is happening with head coverings in 1 Corinthians 11. But her chapter on women and the kingdom (eschatology) is worth the price of the book.

Meanwhile, for the past fifteen+ years, I’ve been writing on these issues right here on bible.org. I’m including below an index with links to all the relevant blog posts I could find. Some churches have preferred to use these because, well, shorter than that book list I just dropped above. 

Godspeed!

My Blog Posts on Women in Public Ministry

Church History: What Do We Learn from Women in Public Ministry? (Hint: Women have been more present than most of us thought.)

Do males image God more than females?

Is God more male than female?

Male and Female in God’s Design

Video: Sexuality and Faith: Male and Female in God’s Good Design

Foundations: What is biblical womanhood?

Biblical womanhood: Part 2

What Does It Mean that Woman is “Helper” (Ezer)?

Does Genesis Command a Man (not a Woman) to Leave Parents?

Women rule (have dominion)

Are women worth less than men?

What Does Genesis 6 Have to Do with Healthy Male/Female Relationships?

Is it unfeminine to be strong?

Nine steps to biblical manhood/womanhood

God as Male and Female: Metaphor and Simile

What’s a man card got to do with it?

Was Abigail right to go behind Nabal’s back?

Did Jesus Have Women Disciples?  and Other Questions

Mary Magdalene: Mary from Magdala or Mary Tower?

Gender and Jesus: Scripture Over Stereotype

“Act like men”: What does Paul mean?

Manhood vs. grandma

Seven views on the role of women w/in the inerrancy camp

Complementarians on women in ministry: diverse images

What’s the main difference between complementarian and egalitarian?

Comple-galitarian

Interview w/ Eugene Peterson women in church

On the ESV’s “contrary wives”

The Bible: Women Are More Present Than You Might Think

What the presence of women prophets in the Bible tells us

Can Women Speak for God in Mixed-Sex Groups?

“She was a pretty good prophet…for a woman”

Proverbs 31: The Most Hated Woman in the Bible 

Can a woman be a pastor?

Can a woman be a seminary professor?

Women and Theological Education: Capitulating to Culture or Historically Rooted?

Women and submission in the workplace

Staying home with kids vs. marketplace work

Shepherd Like a Girl

Jesus vs. sexism

1 Cor. 11 – Who were the women with shaved heads?

Heads and coverings: Part 1

Heads and coverings: Part 2

1 Cor 11 and “veils” 

1 Corinthians 14: Are Women Really Supposed to be Silent in Church?

Does Paul really think women are gossips and busybodies?

Ephesians 5: Paul and His Subversive Passage on the Family

1 Peter 3: Weak and weaker vessels

Why Peter today would not want a wife to call her husband “lord”

More on 1 Peter 3 and wives

Is Peter insulting women? Part 1

Is Peter insulting women? Part 2

Is my husband my priest?

“Not with braided hair or pearls”

Gender: Lose the boxes

What does “workers at home” really mean?

Are the Women in 1 Timothy Leaders, Needers, or Both?

1 Timothy 2: Who Was Artemis & Why Does It Matter, Part 1

 1 Timothy 2: Who Was Artemis & Why Does it Matter Part 2

1 Timothy 2: Do Women Have to Be Quiet?

Bible Backgrounds: Read Some NT Books with the Artemis Cult in View

Paul, Artemis, Ephesus, and 1 Timothy

 Can Men and Women Be Friends?

Evangelicals and Sexism

History: Reintroducing Five Women

Meet Some Female Martyrs of the Early Church

 Lost in (Bible) Translation: Are Women Really Missing?

Gender in Bible translation

Why Don’t We See More Women in the Biblical Text?

The Bible: Women Are More Present than We Might Think

Four Books to Put on Your Reading List re. Gender and Ministry

Bible Backgrounds: When Is It Legit to Appeal to Them?

Women: Time for An Update

Remember Lot’s Wife

The Bent-Over Woman Jesus Healed

Acsah: A Lesser-Known Woman of the Bible

Vindicating Vixens: What about Michel, Wife of David?

The Most Woman-Friendly Book in the Hebrew Bible

Fight Toxic Masculinity (Vs. Thinking All Masculinity is Toxic)

Church History: What Do We Learn about Women in Public Ministry

Beverley Ann Grafe: Eulogy

B. Ann Grafe, 92, died in Vancouver, Washington on September 14, 2022. She was born Beverley Ann Bacon in Portland, Oregon, on April 8, 1930, the only child of Velma Ella Henson Bacon and Theodore Roosevelt Bacon. By the time Ann was eight years old, her mother was a single parent whose mother and father owned restaurants in several small towns in the coastal range of Oregon and provided extra hands in raising their granddaughter.

Adopted by her stepfather, Beverley Ann Scharf graduated in the class of 1947 from Thomas Jefferson High School in Portland and went to work at Shell Oil Company. She attended college at Oregon State University, where she met Willis Raymond Grafe. They married on April 26, 1952, at Piedmont United Methodist Church in Portland. 

During the couple’s first years together, Willis worked year-round for Oregon’s Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), spending construction seasons in the field, their first being at Glacier National Park in a dry cabin while Willis worked as an engineer on Going-to-the-Sun Road. Their sons David Raymond and Steven LeRoy were born in Lebanon while the couple were stationed in Steamboat and Alma. While Willis and Ann were living on a job site in Veneta, Carolyn Marie was born in Eugene. When Willis was relocated to the Salem office of the Bureau of Public Roads in 1958, the couple bought five acres on the Willamette River, where they resided when Sandra Louise and Mary Elizabeth were born. 

The couple tended a one-acre garden, a pear orchard, and a Christmas tree farm. Ann was a homemaker whose life was filled with providing loving care for five children, canning, camping and hiking as a member of the Chemeketans, sewing, leading a 4H entomology club (where she gained the nickname, “The Bug Lady”), and occasionally finding time to do watercolor painting and sketching.

In 1969, Willis and Ann moved to the Washington DC office with the Federal Highway Administration. When Ann was not transporting kids to band or orchestra or Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, the family spent weekends in museums, on historical sites, and at monuments all along the eastern seaboard as well as hosting family and friends from Oregon. Ann took up quilting, and she and Willis served as youth group advisors. 

Willis chose early retirement in 1976 so the family could return to Oregon, and they moved to Albany. Once all the kids were launched, Willis retired a second time and the empty nesters relocated to Woodburn in 1994. Ann was an active member of a Portland-based celiac support group. She also converted to the Eastern Orthodox faith and was active in the Greek Orthodox parish in Salem. Upon losing Willis in 2016, Ann immediately moved to Cascade Park Retirement Center in Woodburn for independent living. In 2020, she went to live with daughter Carolyn in Vancouver, Washington. Following hospitalization with pneumonia in October of 2021, Ann was moved to Cedars View Adult family Home in Brush Prairie, Washington. She passed away peacefully on September 14, 2022, at the age of 92 years.  

Ann was preceded in death by her husband of 64 years, Willis; son-in-law Gordon Patterson and grandson, Jonathan Patterson. She is survived by her children David Grafe, Steven Grafe (Christina), Carolyn Patterson, Sandra Glahn (Gary), Mary McLaughlin (Mark); brothers Roger Bacon (Gail) and Scott Bacon (Jackie); grandchildren Heather Heck (Chris), Roy Grafe, Caleb Patterson, Julia Loring (Josh), Alexandra Glahn, Devin Bybel (Peter), and Erin McLaughlin; great grandchildren Beck and Leni Bybel; and beloved niece and nephews: Nancy Barker (George); Marc Grafe (Alicia), Rod Grafe (Pam), and Bruce Taylor.

Ann’s favorite verse was from Joshua 1: “Be strong and of good courage. Be not afraid. For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”

Simply be faithful in your corner of the world

School with students starts for me on Tuesday, but the faculty already had our two-day workshop. And our department had its all-morning meeting. At the latter, our department chair told us how wolves—reintroduced after decades of absence in Yellowstone National Park—transformed both the Park's ecosystem and its geography (see video below). He reminded us that we don't have to set out to change the world. Showing up and doing what God designed us to do, aiming at faithfulness rather than world-changing, can have enormous ramifications.

My CT book review: The Sexual Reformation

This review first appeared in the April 20, 2022 web edition of Christianity Today.

The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman

Standing outside a Coptic church in Cairo, I saw a mosaic that sent me back to a college hermeneutics class. In the image’s foreground, a man lay slumbering as an angel hovered over him, pointing. I followed the finger to a horizon dotted with pyramids. And I recognized the Bible’s second “Joseph and Egypt” story, which recounts the holy family’s flight from Herod’s persecution.

The image reminded me of how I’d wrestled with a passage from Matthew’s Gospel: “Out of Egypt I called my son” (2:15). The passage was suggesting that when the toddler Jesus returned from the land of pyramids, he had “fulfilled,” in Matthew’s words, a vision from the prophet Hosea: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (11:1). Yet Hosea, for his part, wasn’t issuing a prediction about the coming Messiah. He was thinking back to an event he knew from Israel’s history: God’s deliverance of his people from Pharoah’s yoke.

For years I struggled to see how the holy family’s return from Egypt truly fulfilled Hosea’s prophesy. But then my hermeneutics professor explained that Matthew was using “fulfilled” to mean something closer to “epitomized,” or “filled to the full in meaning.” In modern parlance, we might imagine Matthew saying, “Talk about calling your Son out of Egypt!”

When we try shoehorning a prediction into our reading of Hosea’s vision, my professor said, we end up distorting it. Instead, he argued, we should treat Matthew’s choice of language as an exercise in literary layering. In other words, he was drawing on earlier biblical motifs to amplify his point.

I thought of that lecture often as I read Aimee Byrd’s new book The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman. Byrd is probably best known for a previous book, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which raised many questions about how evangelicals speak of manhood and womanhood within the church. In this latest release, she diagnoses the church’s broken handling of human sexuality and points to a solution in Scripture. But her interpretive framework is open to question.

Word and meanings

To summarize Byrd’s argument: We’ve allowed views of gender to emerge from teachings of some church fathers who were more rooted in Aristotle than Genesis. We have held up June Cleaver as the ideal woman rather than the one in Proverbs 31, who’s out making real estate deals (v. 16) amid other “vigorous” tasks (v. 17). When we’ve stood strong on truth, we’ve often sacrificed grace. Or vice versa. And we’ve barred the front door against feminism while leaving the back door wide open to the kind of misogyny that resulted in the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements.

Byrd’s proposed solution is looking at Song of Songs through a specific interpretive lens. She sees the Song as revealing a “typology in God’s design of man and woman, one that unfolds throughout the canon of scripture.” She describes this approach as reading the Song “Christianly,” which means looking for its “divine authorial intent” rather than the intent of its human author.

Throughout her book, Byrd shows how she prefers this method to a variety of alternative approaches. For centuries, rabbis have seen it as an allegory of love between God and Israel. The early church read it as an allegory of the relationship between Christ and the church. More recently, many scholars have taken it at face value as poetry that extols human love as a gift from God.

Responding to this later interpretation, Byrd warns, “We cannot flat-foot the Song as a horizontal love-and-sex manual” and “We cannot flat-foot our sexuality under the weight of cultural conventions.” And she’s right that the Song is far more than a guide to great marital sex. Indeed, while some have seen the Song as a chronological guide through courtship, love, and marriage, such an understanding has problems beyond flawed methods of Bible interpretation. Courtship, for one thing, was virtually nonexistent at the time the Song was written (or its poetry collected). And a chronological reading misses some of the distinctive elements of Hebraic literary structure, which wasn’t bound by the sort of beginning-middle-end conventions that wouldn’t exist until hundreds of years later.

Many will agree with Byrd’s assessment that the church needs to reform its understanding of God’s design for men and women. But the path she takes from problem to solution is another story. Sadly, Byrd’s typological method of interpreting Song of Songs leads her to some conclusions that run contrary to basic rules of word usage.

Describing the bride in the Song, Byrd points out that she has “dove’s eyes” (1:15), an image the woman applies to her husband later in the book (5:12). Noting that the bride “finds peace” in her lover’s eyes (8:10), she argues, “The dove is clearly a symbol of the Holy Spirit.” Clearly?

Then, reflecting on the prominence of lilies in the book (2:1–2, 16; 4:5; 5:13), Byrd says they “remind us of God’s people, the church.” About the bride’s references to myrrh (5:1, 5, 13) she writes, “Myrrh is the perfume of the temple. It’s as if she is saying that we, the collective church, are on [the lover’s] lips!”

Yet none of these interpretations is anywhere near as straightforward as Byrd suggests. On what basis of authority does she make them? Readers never get a clear answer. “The question of authorial intent,” Byrd argues, “is not given to us. It’s a Song. … So why would we spend our energies probing into that when the typo-symbolic reading is the plainer reading?” Which only raises the question: Plainer to whom?

At one point, Byrd notes a parallel between the king in the Song being bound by the beloved’s hair (7:5) and Jesus being bound when he is arrested, as recorded by John (18:24). Now, in this example, the author of the fourth Gospel does use literary layering as he borrows words and images from the Song. But seeing the bound Savior in the original reference to the bride’s hair? It reminds me of the oft-quoted scene in one of the Alice in Wonderland books, in which Humpty Dumpty tells Alice that when he uses a word, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” In response, Alice wonders aloud “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Byrd warns of misguided interpreters who “read with modern metaphysical and critical methods, believing they are being faithful to the plain sense of the text.” She suggests that their “good intentions have not taken into account the providence of God in divine authorship.” But allowing words to have so many meanings—isn’t that relying too much on human imagination?

It’s true that by exalting sexual love, the Song points to God’s good gift of physicality. We know from Paul in Ephesians 5 that marriage is a picture of Christ and the church, and from Revelation 19 that a great wedding awaits the church, which is Christ’s bride. So, in human love and consummation we see the future of redeemed humanity foreshadowed.

But we can make this connection confidently only because the future event remains rooted in the meaning of the earlier, which has its own meaning in its original context. After all, what meaning has a “fuller” truth without an original meaning of its own on which to build an analogy?

A different path

In The Sexual Reformation, Byrd has diagnosed well. Indeed, the church has a problem, and a lot of wrong pathways have led us to where we are. Byrd’s prescription is to look to the Bible for help. And on this we can agree. She notes, “As weighty as these issues are, we are addressing symptoms without getting to the root: what our longings are created for, where our desires should be oriented, what the meaningfulness of our sex is, and what we are living for.” Yes, and amen.

Byrd is on firmer ground, too, when she makes observations from the text of Song of Songs itself without seeking to interpret it. For example, she notes, “The woman’s voice is so free in the Song. Astonishingly, in its patriarchal context, the female voice is dominant. … It immodestly begins the Song and closes us out. Female voices make up more than 60 percent of the Song. And yet I’m less interested in the sheer quantity, but in the freedom, boldness, playfulness, intensity, and truth of what the bride speaks. She initiates over and over, starting in the beginning, declaring her desire for the kisses of her Groom’s mouth.” Observations like these can aid the church in reforming as they help readers see new possibilities for talking about men and women, love, marriage, and sex.

Most of Byrd’s readers will endorse her call for a small-r sexual reformation and acknowledge that the Bible is the place to look for help. But when it comes to how we understand Scripture’s counsel, I suspect most readers will find themselves on a different path. Because before one can do something like make an analogy based on Egypt, such a place with sand and pyramids must actually exist.

5 Trends in the Self-Publishing Book Market

I just finished teaching a week-long course in self-publishing for ministry. As I teach it every year, I watch for trends, and here’s what stuck out this year: 

• The continuing rise of audio. As demand continues for audiobooks, it also gets ever easier to produce audio versions. Writer’s Digest says “Audiobooks are the fastest growing format in publishing.” By 2027, projected income is in the billions. Creating an audio version of your book means more listeners, from commuters back on the road to parents scrubbing floors needing free hands to the visually impaired. Podcasts are up; so are audio books.

• More iterations. We used to think of self-publishing in terms of either print-heavy e-books or stacks in the garage of print-heavy print books. Now we have gift books. Workbooks. Print-on-demand books. Books with black-and-white photos. Books with color photos. Audio books. And so many more.... And let’s not forget comic books and graphic novels. In fact, let’s talk about the latter. 

A graphic novel is a narrative or collection of comic stories, often hand-drawn and separated into panels. Maus (Pulitzer and American Book award honors) and American-Born Chinese (National Book Award and Printz Award honors, plus a Disney+ series) are both excellent works that have helped take the graphic-novel genre mainstream—along with some help from Manga, once a niche genre. Newsy.com says the sub-genre of graphic novels saw a growth of 171 percent in 2021 compared to 2020, and that amounts to a little more than 24 million books sold last year. The self-publishing market has continued to expand to accommodate writers and visual artists who, in the past, had a tougher time publishing. Demand has driven invention.

• More data journalism. One of our speakers, Brandon Giella of Giella Media is an expert on data journalism. He showed us this holy-moly graphic on five megatrends in data journalism. Visual storytelling is hot. And it’ll reach boiling as we continue to shift away from words toward visuals. The graphs in this blog post tell stories at a glance. People love sidebars and graphs, narratives in visual form. Even a Bible study can include a graph—like the number of times the apostle Paul uses gunh to mean "wife" instead of “woman” (more often). I’d love to see a Bible study that includes a word cloud showing how often the word “love” shows up in Ephesians 5.    

• Continually growing global reach. Here are the number of internet users in a sampling of five countries with large English-speaking populations: 

1. Australia, 21 million

2. Canada, 33 million 

3. Kenya,  46 million 

4. USA, 288 million

5. India, 749 million 

Internet use means demand for downloadable information. E-books can go where it would take months to deliver a physical book, even if people could afford to order them. So e-book publishing companies increasingly pitch their international reach as a reason to publish with them. 

• More library distribution. In a New Yorker article last September, “The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books,” author Daniel Gross said, “Increasingly, books are something that libraries do not own but borrow from the corporations that do.” Instead of selling e-books and audio books to libraries, publishers sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders like OverDrive, which sells lending rights to libraries. Often expiration dates accompany those rights, making e-books more expensive than print books for libraries. But that development is great for writers, because it gives our publishers more power over prices. That higher price tag has actually not discouraged libraries from buying, as they see such demand for e-books. According to Gross’s research, in 2020, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from 20 percent the previous year. Libraries now join an elite group when their "borrows" reach the benchmark of more than a million e-book downloads. What that means for my students: When considering which self-publishing companies to select, writers are more apt to look for distributors such as Overdrive on a list of publisher’s partners before committing. And often they find it.  

At one time, people said e-books were dead. They also said that about print books. Want to self-publish a book? What are you waiting for? 

Annunciation

Virgin hears crash.

Lightning flashes

She bolts up, jaw agape, 

 Book falling.

The winged envoy kneels

  announcing 

  “Hail, favored one!

   The Lord is with you!”

Favored, how? 

And why?

Only a teen

Eating bread and pigeons.

Living in hut—no Herodian palace.

Yet

The Almighty sees her.

Knows her.

Calls her

Blessed.

But this task!

She clenches fist.

He is with her.

Resolve rises.

Who is like the Lord?

Has anyone precedent for this?

Still, she determines to trust

  the impossible.

Because all His ways are just.

Because the spoken word comes with blaze

  And sound of waves.

She inhales scent of honeysuckle 

  and nods.

A child this winter.

“May this thing you have said

 Come true in me.”

She thinks

Not my will,

But God’s.

Ruach overshadows,

Hovering as when the spoken word brought matter. 

Someday she will know 

that the one bringing travail

himself birthed the universe.

Home Again

I just spent three weeks teaching in Italy on a trip that had (despite some challenges) many glorious moments. One highlight was getting invited to the home—Villa Aurora—of Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi. Her 16th-century estate, smack in the center of Rome, is loaded with masterpiece paintings from, I kid you not, Michelangelo, Caravaggio (his only ceiling painting ever), Picasso, Dali....

The 72-year-old blonde Texan told of how her late husband, the prince, descended from popes. Wait. I forgot to mention her first-century bust of Julius Caesar, on whose ancient gardens (which inspired those at Versailles) she said the villa is built.

Anyway, this all came about because her sister in Fort Worth attends Bible study with one of my students, who posted about going on the trip as a photographer/artist thanks in part to the grant that's allowing me to explore women in the visual record of the church. And voila—here came the invitation for our group of artists to have a private tour.

Four years ago, Princess Rita lost her husband, who left her with the right to remain on the property till she dies. But his kids contested her right to stay. And because she said she does not want to spend the rest of her life in court, she's selling. The initial price was set at half a b-b-billion dollars. But (since Elon Musk was busy buying Twitter?), no takers the first time around. So they lowered the price to a third of a billion, and will take another go. You can Google it. It's apparently the highest pricetag ever set on a residential property. I swear I'm not making this up.

She was warm and hospitable and, at the moment, is hosting her Ukrainian housekeeper's family, who have taken refuge with her—having had to leave behind their son-in-law/husband/father.

Italy post-COVID has some infrastructure challenges to overcome. We went places I'd double-verified only to find them closed. But just as often we'd stumble on an unexpected museum opening, where we had the place to ourselves. I rolled my ankle one week in, and it's still swollen and keeping me from standing for long. But the views of Umbrian and Tuscan landscapes took our breath away. The art dazzled. The worship in spaces built for music to reverberate have left me longing for those sounds. People from Doha to Northern California forged friendships. Nuns blew us away with their hospitality rooted in a theology that says "you might just be Jesus in the body of a hungry person so I'm going to serve you as if you're Him." We read 2 Timothy in the prison where Paul might have written it. We read Romans 16 in the space Phoebe probably delivered it. And we saw a lot of art (including a once-in-a-lifetime collection/show of Donatello's works that happened to be in Florence while we were there).

We noticed a lot of ancient churches named for women, especially around the eighth and ninth centuries. I wrote about that here.

In other news, Missio Nexus ran the last in a series of my articles on men and women pursuing ministry partnership. Now you can find them all in one place.

I have a couple weeks blocked off (after I catch up on email) to work on my book, Nobody's Mother, about Artemis of the Ephesians at the time of the earliest Christians. And I'm teaching a doctoral-level course in self-publishing for ministry in July.

Hope you don't overheat and get a chance to see something beautiful this summer. Preferably a place with some water.

Paul and His Subversive Passage on the Family

In the first half of the Book of Ephesians, the apostle Paul lays out the Christian’s new identity in Christ. In the second half, he provides the “so what,” or the ramifications. As he outlines what Spirit-filled living looks like (Eph. 5:18ff), he envisions a community in which people show Christ’s love by serving one another. And one of the places where such service happens is in the household—where he, in his era, would have found spouses, kids, and slaves under one roof. 

People living in the first century under Roman rule would have been familiar with instructions for respectable families known as “household codes.” These codes outlined the ideal for life in the household, and such instructions were always addressed only to the husband. Consider this sample of household-code instruction from Aristotle (384–322 B.C.):

Of household management we have seen that there are three parts—one is the rule of a master over slaves . . . another of a father, and the third of a husband. A husband and father, we saw, rules over wife and children, both free, but the rule differs, the rule over his children being a royal, over his wife a constitutional rule. . . . The rule of a father over his children is royal, for he rules by virtue both of love and of the respect due to age, exercising a kind of royal power (Aristotle, Politics, Book 1, XII).

 The codes’ influence was so great that emperors passed laws establishing them as the rule of the land. People who followed them were perceived as upholding civic values. Before Paul’s time, Hellenistic synagogues even borrowed the codes’ outline as a testimony to the outside world. And the apostle Peter, Paul’s contemporary, did so as well. In their view, the Christians’ familial life was to match if not exceed the best of Greco-Roman ideals. (For examples of household codes showing up in the NT, see Paul's usage in Eph. 5:22—6:9; Col. 3:18—4:1; 1 Tim. 2:9–15; Titus 2: 2–10; and Peter's 1 Pet. 2: 13–3: 7).

The adaptations require careful observation, however. In the common understanding, a free man reigned unilaterally as king in his home, served by his wife, children, and slaves. But in Paul’s subtly subversive remix, the male householder served to the point of laying down his life. Paul’s genius is in providing countercultural advice in a way that upholds cultural ideals, making it difficult for critics to accuse Christians of being a threat to society—while still urging Christians to model the life of their Lord.

Looking closely, we see that one of Paul’s innovations is to elevate the vulnerable by speaking directly to the less powerful family members. He addresses instruction specifically to wives, children, and even to slaves—none of whom were ever addressed in secular household codes. He even addresses them first in each pairing (wife/husband; children/father; slave/master).  

Whereas people like Aristotle expected husbands to rule, Paul tells husbands to serve to the point of sacrifice, even to the point of a violent death. A man was considered manly in Paul’s day if he did not have to experience anyone touching his body without consent. Slaves, gladiators, soldiers, and non-citizens had no such rights. So imagine the surprise to readers when Paul suggested that husbands should offer up their bodies—citing Jesus as the ultimate example. Paul was basically telling these men to sacrifice their man-card if necessary in order to love well. He even threw in some women's-work laundry terms about husbands washing spots and wrinkles. 

In borrowing the structure, Paul is not saying slavery is okay. Or that Aristotle got it right. He is simply following the expected literary structure while radically, subversively modifying it to stress the God-pleasing ideals of humility and service as evidence of Spirit-filled living. In borrowing but repurposing, Paul creates a Christian innovation. He appears to be upholding society’s structures, yet his major adaptations infuse the codes with absolutely upside-down gospel values that actually contradict the codes. 

When we try to inject power back into the structure, we exchange Paul's emphasis for that of Aristotle's. Why would we want to do that?

When we accuse Paul of being against women, we totally miss what he has done with the codes.

Do you need to push back against cultural expectations, including cultural gender norms for the sake of the gospel? We serve a King who girded himself with a towel and laid down his life—who learned obedience unto death, even death on a cross.

Who needs your humble service, your willing sacrifice, today?

Checking In

It occurred to me this week that I'd left you, my loyal readers, in the dark on some of the stuff I've written and said of late. So in case any of this interests you, here goes—a few links here:

Every year I teach third graders at The Covenant School in Dallas “How to Read an Icon." I did so again in February. So fun! If you see a guy holding keys, he's probably Peter. If you see a tall skinny cross held by a solemn-looking person, he or she is probably a martyr. If he's wearing green, good chance he's John the Baptist.

A friend created a PDF from one of my blog posts as a visual for my content on seven views on women in ministry leadership within the inerrancy camp (five of them within the Complementarian camp), a topic I presented for Reformed Theological Seminary via Zoom. The post was also referenced in Christianity Today. You can find the free PDF here.

I presented on “Artemis of the Ephesians at the time of the earliest Christians” for a class at Northern Seminary. Lynn Cohick, Northern's provost and my friend, asked me to lead their DMin students on a trip to Italy similar to the one I do for DTS, only this one focused specifically on women in the visual record of the church (oh, and I got a grant to do some photography on the subject!). Slated for early January 2023.

I presented a lecture titled “Cultural backgrounds in interpreting verses about women in public ministry” for Missio Nexus missionaries last month. I did a related blog post on that for bible.org, where I post twice a month on the Engage site.

I invite you to listen in as I talk with Christine Prater on the Holy Shift Podcast: "What's Up with the Upside Down Kingdom?" We talk in a follow-up episode about “The Sermon on the Mount.”

You can also listen as I talk with Jodie Niznik about “The Betrayal of Jesus” on her So Much More podcast. That ran during Holy Week. "Kiss the Son" (Psa 2) in worship or kiss him in betrayal. What a contrast!

I taped an episode on "Feminism and Womanism" for DTS's The Table Podcast. I'll let you now when I have an air date.

Christianity Today's book editor asked me to review Aimee Byrd's latest book, and I really wanted to love it. But I had some concerns about her hermeneutics. You can read my thoughts here: “When Song of Songs Uses a Word, It Doesn’t Always Mean What We Think It Means.”

Do you use the YouVersion Bible app plans for Bible reading? If so, check out the work of two of my students, who published plans they wrote doing independent studies I supervised. One is "Known By Love: A Six-Day Devotional in 1, 2, and 3 John"; the other is an intersection of Negro Spirituals and Lamentations with music included (she rented a studio!) titled "Learning to Lament with the Spirituals: A Six-Day Devotional."

I wrote a blog post about some things that trouble me regarding how we talk about adoption. That was for The Holy Shift: Adoption

And I wrote another for them about comforting those who mourn: Quiet Presence

The Write Now Editing site ran a short post I wrote titled “Read to be a better writer” Why do you read?

April 10-12, I took/met up with some students from across the USA—from Manhattan to LA—and we attended the national conference of the Evangelical Press Association (I'm prez-elect) in Colorado. We also met up with former writing students from Dallas, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, and Colorado Springs. My former intern Seana Scott won an award for her excellent writing with Peer Magazine; and my student Radha Vyas won EPA's $2,000 Jerry Jenkins scholarship, presented by Mr. Jenkins himself. YAY! So fun to see them thriving and expanding their influence.

My Latte with Luke Bible study is late in launching. But for good reason: AMG is doing (much needed) all new covers for my Coffee Cup Bible Study series. So look for the Luke study in June.

Speaking of that series, if you have read Mocha on the Mount and never posted an Amazon review, I need only two more to make fifty, which would move it up in the search engines. Consider helping me out?

Now that I've entered grades and have graduation behind me, I'm gearing up to take twelve people to Italy with DTS in June, teaching Medieval Art and Spirituality. Please pray that the Spirit would do a great work. I have students coming from all over—from Doha, Qatar, from the Smoky Mountains, from working at Google in LA....I love the diversity of our distance students!

Debora Annino and I have a tentative date for the next writer's workshop in San Miguel de Allende Mexico. We're looking at February 8–12. Maybe you should join us? One of our 2022 attendees just landed her first book contract. YAY!

Thanks for reading. I'd love your prayer support.

Was Abigail Right to Go Behind Nabal's Back?

One morning after I taught a women’s Bible study on the life of Abigail—wife of Nabal, a woman hustled over to me, elbows swinging. Seeing her body language, I braced myself.

Her argument about my teaching went something like this: “You're wrong! Abigail was most definitely not righteous. By taking matters into her own hands, she shows what happens when a wife steps out from under her husband’s ‘umbrella of authority.’ If Abigail had submitted to Nabal rather than intervening, David would have felt guilty for killing Nabal, and that guilt would have kept him from killing later."

I’d heard this interpretation already—from Bill Gothard, among others.

So how do we figure out how to interpret this story? Was Abigail good or evil? The text itself provides the needed clues.

We find the "Abigail and David" story in 1 Samuel 25:2–43. The narrator begins with his assessment: “[Abigail] was both wise and beautiful.” In contrast, of Nabal the storyteller says, “But the man was harsh and his deeds were evil” (v. 3). The first clues about how to view this story appear at the beginning.

Now, Nabal was filthy rich, and David’s men had treated Nabal's servants well. But when the time came for Nabal to reciprocate, he screamed at the king’s servants: “WHO IS DAVID, AND WHO IS THIS SON OF JESSE? This is a time when many servants are breaking away from their masters! Should I take my bread and my water and my meat that I have slaughtered for my shearers and give them to these men? I don’t even know where they came from!”

Whoa. As they say in Texas, “Them’s fightin’ words!”

The reader knows David is God's anointed, but Nabal has no respect. And when David heard how Nabal had dissed him, he rounded up four hundred men. His plan: wipe out Nabal and every one of his children and slaves. Nabal was totally outnumbered.

Fortunately, one of Abigail’s servants told her what Nabal had done. This slave provided her with the backstory about how David’s men had treated Nabal’s servants with utter kindness and deserved better from Nabal. This servant needed Abigail to intervene or he would die along with the rest of the innocents.

Abigail chose to act. But it wasn’t just her own neck she sought to save. It was hers, and her kids', and her servants'—and even her evil husband's.

Abigail was no rebel. She was a peacemaker—in the best sense. And as such, she put together enough food for the army and sent her servants ahead of her. But she temporarily withheld her plan from Nabal, who would have tried to stop her, and a lot of innocent people would have died.

Riding on her donkey, the equivalent to a Mercedes in her day, Abigail went down to meet David and his men. By the time she arrived, David was good and worked up over Nabal's insults. The future king planned to kill all the men in any way associated with Nabal’s household

When Abigail met David, she showed the humility her husband should have exhibited. She “got down off her high horse”—or donkey, threw herself to the ground, fell at David's feet, and pleaded with him. Notice how much she talked about the Lord: “Please forgive the sin of your servant, for the Lord will certainly establish the house of my lord, because my lord fights the battles of the Lord. May no evil be found in you all your days! When someone sets out to chase you and to take your life, the life of my lord will be wrapped securely in the bag of the living by the Lord your God. But he will sling away the lives of your enemies from the sling’s pocket! The Lord will do for my lord everything that he promised you, and he will make you a leader over Israel. Your conscience will not be overwhelmed with guilt for having poured out innocent blood and for having taken matters into your own hands. When the Lord has granted my lord success, please remember your servant.”

Did you catch that? Abigail was focused on God. And she considered it evil to “take matters into your own hands”—the very action for which she is accused by contemporary critics. So…either this story is full of extreme irony or Abigail is a model of righteousness. Textual clues suggest the latter.

Now, notice the future king's "God talk." He says, “Praised be the Lord, the God of Israel, who has sent you this day to meet me! Praised be your good judgment! May you yourself be rewarded for having prevented me this day from shedding blood and taking matters into my own hands! Otherwise, as surely as the Lord, the God of Israel, lives—he who has prevented me from harming you—if you had not come so quickly to meet me, by morning’s light not even one male belonging to Nabal would have remained alive!”

David saw Abigail’s actions as preventing him from sin, as wise, and as guided by the Lord himself.

A less honest wife would have hidden her actions from her man. But once Nabal sobered up and the danger had passed, Abigail summoned the courage to tell her husband what she'd done. And he flipped out so intensely that he had a stroke. Literally. Utter rage exploded in his head, leading to his death.

And again David saw the circumstances as being from God. When he heard about Nabal’s death, the future king exclaimed, “Praised be the Lord who has vindicated me and avenged the insult that I suffered from Nabal! The Lord has kept his servant from doing evil, and he has repaid Nabal for his evil deeds.” David was so impressed with Abigail and how God used her that he sent for her to marry her.

So how do we know how to interpret this story? The text itself gives us the clues we need to see the point-of-view of the narrator: Abigail was beautiful inside and out, and the hand of the Lord was on her and on David. As is often true of Bible stories, the text interprets itself.

Aside from learning hermeneutics in Abigail's story, we can also learn from Abigail's life. Although suffering in an abusive marriage, Abigail protected others—and herself—from harm rather than thinking only of herself. She refused to cover for Nabal's sin, and she retained her voice in the situation. Sounds like a timely message, huh?

Photo:  "David und Abigail," Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie

Permission granted for non-commercial use. Permalink:  www.khm.at/de/object/ac796a52db/

https://blogs.bible.org/was-abigail-right-to-go-behind-nabals-back/

Book review in CT

FYI: I just published a book review of Aimee Byrd's latest, The Sexual Reformation: Restoring the Dignity and Personhood of Man and Woman (Zondervan Reflective) over on the CT Mag site. In ninety days I can run it here, but before then, please give it a read and let me know your thoughts and questions.

Women’s History Month: Meet Some Female Martyrs from the Early Church

When I spoke to a class of seminary students recently about women in public ministry in the early church, someone asked me to share some names and narratives about our foremothers. It seemed fitting to provide a sampling here during Women's History Month. (Some day I hope we will simply learn "history"; but until women are included in the telling of history, we'll continue to need a special annual focus.) You can find all the women listed below in the mosaics of Ravenna's "new" (6th c) Basilica of Sant'Apollinare. I've included a summary of the stories that usually accompany them, as well. You will notice a theme of women exercising agency over their own bodies to the glory of God.

Agatha. Virgin martyr. Agatha died in 251. Born in Sicily into a noble family, she steadfastly vowed to remain a virgin. She was taken to a house of prostitution, tortured by rods, hooks, the rack, and fire. She died after being rolled over coals and sharp broken pieces of pottery.  

Agnes. Virgin martyr. As a child, Agnes committed herself to God. At age thirteen she was killed by the swift stroke of the executioner’s sword.

Anastasia. Virgin martyr. The Roman daughter of a nobleman, Anastasia was forced to marry an unbeliever. She often disguised herself as a man to minister to Christians in jail. When her husband found out, he imprisoned her—along with three maids—and threatened to starve her. But he died, and she was released.Anastasia was later burned alive. She has been described as “one of the most highly venerated” of the church of Constantinople.

Anatolia and Victoria. Virgin martyrs. Sisters. During the reign of Decius, they refused to recant and died from sword wounds.  

Cecilia. Virgin martyr. Cecilia took a vow of chastity as a girl. Her parents betrothed her to a man who, upon learning of her vow, was baptized on what was to be their wedding day. Cecilia proclaimed the good news and is said to have summoned 400 people to her home, where they were baptized. It took three attempts on her life to kill her.

Crispina. Martyr. Raised a Christian by her noble family, Crispina was accused of disregarding edicts. The proconsul tried to get her to recant her faith by threatening her with death. “Crispina replied that she cared not for this life,” and was beheaded in 304. Augustine held her up as a model for Christians, as she gave up luxury and ease for eternal glory. 

Cristina. Virgin martyr.Cristina’s father, a Roman patrician, had her beat and imprisoned at age 12 for refusing to sacrifice to a god. His successor ordered her tongue cut out and had her put in a dungeon with snakes. Bound to a tree, she was impaled with arrows. 

Daria. Virgin martyr.An educated young woman from Athens, she had a fiancé who converted to Christianity and was baptized. They were arrested, put in separate prisons, tortured, and sentenced to die. Both were tossed in a pit and covered with dirt and stones—buried alive.  

Emerentian. Virgin martyr. Known as the foster-sister of Agnes, she was stoned to death while confronting pagans at Agnes’s burial place. 

Eugenia. Virgin martyr. She left alife of privilege to enter a monastery and, upon the abbot’s death, was elected as his replacement. She was later beheaded for her faith.  

Eulalia. Virgin martyr. At age twelve, she refused offers of marriage, choosing to remain a consecrated virgin. Her parents hid her at their country home, but she escaped and publicly delivered a courageous message. She was burned to death by flaming torches. 

Euphemia. Virgin martyr. During Diocletian’s persecutions, Euphemia wore black and renounced worldly goods and pleasures. A judge tried to get her to recant at age 15, but she refused, so she was tortured on a wheel, but the wheel broke. She was thrown to wild beasts, but they ignored her. She is said finally to have been struck on the mouth with a hammer.

Felicity. Martyr. Enslaved and pregnant, she gave birth two days after her arrest. Her labor and delivery of a preterm baby girl was celebrated, as fellow believers had prayed for such an outcome. Per her wish, Felicity died in the arena together with St. Perpetua and other believers. A Christian woman adopted and raised her daughter in the faith.

Justina. Virgin martyr.  Born in Padua, Italy, Justina was raised in a Christian family. Her father, a king, was said to have been baptized by a disciple of Peter. After her father's death, the emperor pressured Justina to renounce her faith. When she refused, she was put to death by sword.

Lucy. Virgin martyr. Lucy died in 304 under Diocletian. She sold her belongings and gave the money to the poor. She was arrested and brought before a judge, who commanded her to sacrifice to idols. She died from a sword through the neck.

Paulina. Virgin martyr. Paulina’s family witnessed her mother’s miraculous healing and converted with three hundred others. Father, mother, and daughter were martyred for their faith. 

Perpetua. Martyr. Perpetua was educated. She converted to Christianity despite her father’s objections. Her father was beaten due to her confession of faith, but she still refused to recant.Perpetua was married and still nursing a baby when arrested. She died a martyr in the arena of Carthage, alongside her servant, Felicitas. Perpetua’s account of her experience has earned her the designation as the first known Christian female writer.

Savina. Third-century martyr and widow of Milan. Upon her husband’s death, Savina helped victims of persecution under Diocletian, even burying their bodies in her own home. Found praying at their tombs, she was martyred.  

St. Pelagia. Virgin martyr. To defend her virginity, at age 15, Pelagia—born in Antioch—took her own life in 311. When soldiers arrived to arrest the girl at her father’s home, she said a prayer and jumped into the sea.  

Valerie. Widow and martyr.In first-century Ravenna, Valerie married Vitalis, who was tortured and buried alive. (Justinian built a church in Ravenna to honor him—the Basilica of San Vitale.) When Valerie refused to participate in a pagan festival, villagers beat her to death.  

These are women of whom the world was not worthy. May we follow them as they followed Christ.

Special thanks for Cynthia Hester for her help with research.

I shot the image below in 2017 in Ravenna, Italy. It's a mosaic in the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuevo that depicts Jesus with the woman at the well/Samaritan woman. According to tradition, her name was Fotina, and she was martyred.

Bible Backgrounds: Read Some NT Books with the Artemis Cult in View

Ever seen drawings of the ancient goddess Artemis? If so, she was probably carrying a bow and arrow. More recent iterations of her as Wonder Woman still depict her the same way—with shields, bows, and arrows.

Ancient literature includes many references to Artemis as a master of archery. We see a similar connection in the epigraphic (inscription) evidence. In what is known as “the Oracle Inscription” found in the ruins of Ephesus, the goddess is described as “Artemis of the golden quiver,” a “shooter of arrows” and a “straight-shooting one.” In the ancient Ephesians’ manifestation of her, as with the more generic Artemis, the arrow was her primary weapon.

What does Artemis have to do with Bible? Maybe a lot…

Talking about spiritual warfare in his epistle to the Ephesians (Eph. 6:10–18), Paul was writing to people in this city that served as guardian of Artemis’s temple and Ground Zero for her cult (see Acts 19). And he gives a reason Christ-followers need to armor-up with the breastplate of faith: to extinguish “flaming arrows of the evil one” (6:16). Might he have had the cult of the queen of archery in mind?  

Ephesus was a port city with access to great roads and harbors. So the metropolis was strategic geographically and politically. As such, it became an important site of early Christianity. Priscilla and Aquila, Paul’s partners in tent-making and ministry, eventually moved with Paul to Ephesus (Acts 18:19).  The city served as home base for Paul for three years (c. AD 50–53). And to or from Ephesus he probably wrote 1 Corinthians (see 1 Cor. 16:8), the Book of Ephesians, and 1 and 2 Timothy. The addressee of the latter, Paul’s protégé, continued to minister in Ephesus even after his mentor left (1 Tim. 1:3). Tradition places Jesus’s mother in Ephesus along with the elder John after his exile on Patmos in the 90s. And John reportedly wrote his Gospel while in Ephesus and surrounding towns, along with 1, 2, and 3 John. That is a lot of “Ephesus” influencing the New Testament (NT)! 

In Acts we find a good summary of some key events that happened in this city at the time of the earliest Christians. Sorcerers burned magic books (Acts 19:18–20), Paul taught daily, and an uprising made Paul decide to end his three-year stint in the city earlier than planned (19:23–20:1). The problem? Serious opposition from followers of, you guessed it, Artemis. 

Scholar Michael Immendörfer in Ephesians and Artemis notes that in the Book of Ephesians, Paul “adopts local Artemis terminology and infuses it with new meaning or defines it in relation to Christ, so that cultic terms are used to criticize the cult.” The author concludes, “As readers were familiar with the [cult] language, it is very likely that they recognized the author’s allusions and could comprehend the intended associations. They consist of direct attacks on the cult and of indirect polemic.”[1]

Comparing words in the NT written from or to an Ephesian context with ancient words about Artemis one does indeed find surprising overlap. In some cases, terms that appear only once in the NT show up in the papyri or inscriptions and provide some context. For example, Paul is in the great city (1 Cor 16:8) when he describes his time there saying, “I fought with beasts (ἐθηριομάχησα) at Ephesus” (15:32). By “beasts” does he mean animals or people? We get a clue when we notice that Homer described Artemis as “Potnia theron” (Πότνια Θηρῶν), mistress (counterpart to master) of wild beasts. In his choice of the term for “beast” Paul has chosen to use the form of a word found in one of Artemis’s titles. The NT describes how Paul faced great difficulty because of Artemis’s followers (Acts 19:23–41; 1 Cor 16.9). So perhaps we have found a plausible explanation for what he meant by fighting beasts?

While Immendörfer has focused on the Book of Ephesians and the overlap of words relating to Artemis and her cult, I’ve been looking at a similar phenomenon in 1 Timothy. And I haven’t had to look far. Three of seven key titles ascribed to Artemis Ephesia in ancient literature and inscriptions (lord, savior, god) appear multiple times in the letter Paul sent Timothy with instructions for how to complete the work in Ephesus (1 Tim. 1:3). In fact, all three appear in his salutation. Now, usually Paul greets recipients of his missives with something like “grace and peace to you”—but not this time. To his protégé in Ephesus he writes this: “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, To Timothy my true son in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord” (1 Tim. 1:1, 2). In Second Timothy we find another of Artemis’s seven key titles, this one relating to epiphany/appearance. And Paul has combined that title with that of Savior to describe the plan of God that “…has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10).

The creators of our Koine-English lexica (dictionaries) took into account literary sources from the ancient world when they wrote their works, but they drew on very few inscriptions. Meanwhile, more than half a million inscriptions from the time of the earliest Christians are available to us today. (One source even puts that number at a million!) Now that inscriptions are available online and many have even been translated into English, it’s time to revisit how these background sources can shed further light on the settings and meanings in our NT texts.  

[1] Immendörfer, Michael. Ephesians and Artemis: The Cult of the Great Goddess of Ephesus as the Epistle’s Context. Tübingen : Mohr Siebeck, 2017, pp. 313.  

Why Churches Should NOT Drop Online Services

So, Tish Harrison Warren has a regular column now in the New York Times. And I subscribed, because I generally like her work. Plus, I love that the Times has a regular columnist who shamelessly adheres to the Apostle’s Creed. But this week, I had serious issues with her words. The title says it all: Why Churches Should Drop Their Online Services. 

That felt super ableist to me. And the article itself didn't get any better.

Before I go further, let me back up and remind my readers that an entire section of my web site is devoted to life in the body. I'm all about embodied living. The five senses. In-person gatherings and long conversations over food. True face time over FaceBook FaceTime. So given the choice, I usually opt for real embodied presence vs. Zoom. And yet, I still had serious issues with the piece—so much so that after reading, I wondered, “Am I over-reacting?”

I shot a link to the article with a message to my friend Lacie, who describes herself in this post as an amputee. And I asked her, “Does this feel ableist to you?” 

Here’s her reply: 

"Of the most egregious kind. It hurt my stomach to read. It’s wrapped in language that exalts the importance of embodiment…but only the needs of the healthy body matter. 

"I can see where she’s coming from. Getting people back into pews after they’ve felt the comfort of learning/connecting from home must feel daunting for pastors. But disconnecting disabled people to motivate the able-bodied is not the way to do it. 

"She outright says it’s fine to cut us out, then adds that someone should be visiting us. Come on. Looking back to how things were done before the internet and not seeing the beauty of how the internet has connected those of us who were previously disenfranchised feels like a stone-age thought process. 

"The church has adapted and changed how we connect with one another in a myriad of ways throughout historical events and varying cultures. COVID has given us the impetus to broaden the way we do church. It’s given us the gift of worshipping across cities and states and global lines. My kids attended their grandparents' Sunday school lessons for the past year. What a gift! 

"Disabled people know the feeling of being cut off from society. We face it with the phone calls we make to venues before going out to eat to see if the Google recommendation that says it’s ADA friendly is actually true or if there is a four-inch ledge at the front door. We face it when we’re unseen entirely in a store needing assistance or told by someone with a big cart to simply get out of the way. We face it when the sign outside our church says “Have children? Park in the west lot. Need handicapped entrance?  Park in the east lot.” [Lacie has two kids.] My car was broken into two weeks ago, and the only thing stolen was my “handicapped” placard. All these things have happened to me. 

"Warren’s proposal to remedy poor church attendance by cutting off virtual attendance says we don’t matter. Again. And to use embodiment as the reason is so tone deaf. The number of people already disabled or traumatized or homebound added to the increasing number of people dealing with the effects of long-COVID should tell us that now is definitely not the time to disconnect them from the body of Christ."

The influence of Artemis on the issues of 1 Tim 2:8–15

Wendy Wilson, the Mission Advisor for Development of Women and the Women’s Development Track Exec Director over at Missio Nexus asked me to write the following for the Missio Nexus audience, and it provides a sneak preview of what you can expect when my book comes out.*

Many have undertaken to explain how understanding the identity of Artemis, the goddess of midwifery in first-century Ephesus, can shed light on the apostle Paul’s instructions about being saved through childbearing (or childbirth, or the childbearing) (2:15), but fewer have explained how understanding first-century Artemis and her cult helps provide a context for the entire pericope or section of 1 Timothy 2 when the apostle talks to his protégé Timothy about women (or wives) in the church. Paul is addressing a problem, but his doing so is often universalized. The problem was specific with broad ramifications, as is always true of Scripture. But this passage is often understood in the opposite way—as speaking to a broad universal problem with specific application. 

In his instructions to these wives or women (Koine has only one word that encompasses both, so we must do some interpretation to determine which he means), the author of 1 Timothy begins, “I do not allow a gune (γυνή) (2:12). In saying, “I do not allow,” he uses the present tense, which in Koine Greek has more of a sense of progressive action than in English. So the first-century Koine-speaking person would probably have heard this phrase as, “I am not allowing.” Such a progressive statement carries the idea that “disallowing” is the author’s practice, perhaps always, but perhaps only for a limited audience and/or duration. This in itself is not necessarily significant. 

What makes the present tense stand out a bit more than it might otherwise is Paul’s use of the first person combined with the present tense. It’s not that one must not allow, or that women should never be allowed. But rather, he says, “I am not allowing….” In a personal letter, not an epistle addressed to an assembly, the apostle states what he himself is not doing so as he gives his protégé directions in his task of charging certain people in Ephesus to stop teaching false doctrine (1:3). Rather than asserting “Thus saith the Lord” to a group, Paul describes his own practice to his mentee. 

Again, rather than saying, “A woman (or wife) must not teach,” he says, “I am not allowing a woman (or wife) to teach.” The apostle uses similar limited-context first-person language elsewhere when he refers to the marital status of virgins and widows in Corinth. In that context he counsels Corinthian women to stay single (1 Cor. 7:25–40), which is quite different from the counsel he offers about Ephesian widows (i.e., to marry, 1 Tim. 5:14). In his instructions to the Corinthians, he states outright that he is not giving a universal directive: “Now concerning virgins I have no command of the Lord, but I give an opinion as one who by the mercy of the Lord is trustworthy” (1 Cor. 7:25).

Regardless of whether the author’s practice transcended time and culture or was temporary, both husbands and wives in the assembly at Ephesus needed to stop doing something disruptive. Husbands were angry during prayer, and apparently wives were acting in a way that communicated a sense of superiority or perhaps violated civil law. 

One might also see an Artemis influence in Paul’s reference to limiting women or wives teaching. He gives this reason for the restriction that he says is his practice: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve” (v. 13). To Jewish people, the Adam-and-Eve narrative was the old, familiar creation story. But for Gentiles—the focus of Paul’s ministry—the Genesis narrative was new. The non-Jewish members of Timothy’s spiritual community were well versed in a far different creation story. They had a special pride of place about this story, because they believed its events—known throughout the empire—took place near their city. In the Artemis cult’s origin narrative, the woman came first, and her twin, Apollo, followed. In Timothy’s context the creation story from Genesis contradicts the local story and would have served as a logical corrective. To the Ephesians, woman came first and was preeminent; to Jews, the woman was not only second, but she was even deceived. This is not to suggest Eve was a prototype of females’ sin. Rather, the facts about Eve knock women back to a place of equality with men. 

Seeing the author’s use of Genesis as a corrective to the local story’s implications rather than as an inviolate principle of firstborn preeminence allows for reading Genesis in a straightforward way. Rather than trying to find hierarchy in the creation story, readers can see in the Genesis text a stress on how “alike” the man and woman are. Adam exclaims that the woman “finally” is a creature who corresponds to him (Gen. 2:23). This is not to diminish the beautiful difference between man and woman; it is merely to say that the Genesis text emphasizes oneness and unity and likeness, not difference. 

If Paul’s exhortation is addressing a local issue, how might the phenomenon of a woman teaching square with what God has called women to do since the beginning? It actually corresponds beautifully. Throughout redemption history, the Holy Spirit has moved women such that in every era in which God has raised up male prophets (e.g., Law, kings, post-exilic, pre-Pentecost, Pentecost, church age), he has also raised up women prophets. And women will prophesy again in the future, not due to a failure of male leadership, but as a sign of the Spirit (Joel 2:28–29; Acts 2:17–21). 

Seeing the reference to Eve’s creation order in 1 Timothy 2:13 as an all-time prohibition against females imparting spiritual content to males creates far more textual difficulties, both in this text and throughout the canon of Scripture, than it resolves. But seeing Paul’s instructions to Timothy as an apologetic against false teaching in Ephesus both fits the context and allows interpreters to better synthesize the whole counsel of God. 

Paul writes, “Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.” Again, in contrast with the Artemis myth, the facts of the Genesis creation story correct false thinking. If Timothy’s charges in Ephesus were unduly influenced by the Artemis cult and its over-exalting of woman, the Genesis story brought a course correction. The female is not superior; Genesis proves it. 

The author’s local corrective does have universal implications, but not the sorts of ramifications that have often been assumed. Paul’s statement about Eve is not to suggest that women are inferior teachers because of an inborn vulnerability to corruption. Rather, the truth that Eve was deceived restores equality in a context in which pride of creation order probably brought an imbalance. The application: If someone teaches false doctrine, make them stop, but let them learn. 

Seeing the text this way is consistent with Paul’s teaching about Eve elsewhere. Not only of women, but of the entire assembly at Corinth, he wrote, “I am afraid, lest as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your [plural] minds should be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3). Noting this, Sumner argues that the apostle did not view vulnerability to deception as a female-only weakness, but rather as a human one. Paul warned the entire assembly that they were vulnerable to being deceived in the same way Eve was.

Paul was writing to his protégé living in a culture in which Artemis of the Ephesians was esteemed as a midwife who was believed to bring mercy-killing or rescue to women in labor. Her temple was one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and people came from all corners of the empire to worship her. That there was a clear conflict between her followers and the followers of Jesus Christ is clear from the Book of Acts. A Christian whose loyalty had recently shifted from following Artemis to following Jesus as the Jewish Messiah would have faced an adjustment both in going from a female-dominated cult to a more male-dominated one, and in viewing childbirth differently. Refusing to make offerings to the goddess of midwifery as a statement of her faith likely would have caused a wife great anxiety, as the prospect of death would have terrified her. But because Christ is superior to Artemis, it’s entirely plausible that Paul was assuring his protégé that no such disaster will happen. She will be saved/delivered safely—assuming she lives for Christ. 

The city’s prominent goddess and her cult had a profound influence on first-century Ephesus. Ancient inscriptions dating to the time of the earliest Christians suggest that at that time, Artemis was associated with saving and midwifery, and also that women enjoyed great autonomy in that city. While some have said that Artemis was a goddess of sex and fertility and that a concern to oppose such an influence motivated Paul’s instruction about women in 1 Timothy 2, there is no evidence to support such a claim. But seeing the Book of 1 Timothy, and especially his instructions about women in its cultural context sheds light on how readers today are to take heed. The problem is not women; the problem is falsehood. So, let us learn. 

(* I have signed a contract with IVP Academic to publish my dissertation work on Artemis of the Ephesians at the time of the earliest Christians. My working title is: Nobody's Mother: Artemis in First-Century Ephesus and Why She Matters. I expect the book to release in the fall of 2023.)

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