Luke 8:1-3, Women who paid the bills

Women sometimes acted as patrons of religious teachers, though Keener says men outnumbered them more than ten to one because men held most of the money. For women to travel with the group would have looked scandalous, and men and women learning side by side as adults was unheard of (Keener). Bailey writes that even in the traditional Middle East of today he knows of nowhere such an arrangement would be possible, since women traveling with men must spend their nights with relatives, and he notes that the women were paying for the movement out of resources they controlled. The ESV Study Bible observes that a woman from Herod's household shows that some of the wealthy and powerful supported Jesus. Magdala lay on the western shore a few miles north of Tiberias, and the word for Chuza's post can mean a business manager, a guardian or even a governor, here probably the manager of Herod's estate (Strauss). Strauss agrees that wealthy patrons often supported traveling teachers in the Greco-Roman world; what was unusual was women traveling with a rabbi as his disciples.