Jesus and Women: What Had Changed by His Day (4 of 4)

The standing of women in Israel was not fixed across the biblical period, and knowing which direction it had moved is what makes the Gospel scenes legible.

The older literature has heroines. By the first century something had shifted, and the shift is documented rather than inferred.

Who Were the Women of the Older Literature?

Ruth, Esther, Deborah and Judith, and none of them is a supporting character.

Deborah judges Israel and a general refuses to go into battle without her. Esther is the reason her people survive. Ruth’s declaration to Naomi is a covenant statement and she ends up in the genealogy of David. Judith, in the deuterocanonical book, walks into an enemy camp and comes out with a head.

These are not stories about women being permitted to help. They are stories in which the woman is the agent.

What Had Changed?

The position had clearly declined, and Ben Sirach is the usual exhibit.

That book, written a couple of centuries before Jesus and widely read, contains material about daughters and wives that is difficult to read and impossible to mistake. It reflects a world in which women were regarded as inferior and in which a daughter is discussed primarily as a liability to be managed.

Bailey’s summary of the trajectory is blunt. In the classical past women like Ruth, Esther, Deborah and Judith were heroines. By the time of Jesus they were clearly inferior.

That is the setting. Not a timeless background of ancient patriarchy, but a specific culture that had moved in a specific direction within its own tradition, and had literature to prove it.

What Do the Gospels Show Instead?

Women inside the movement, and named.

Luke 8:1-3 says the Twelve were with him and also some women who had been cured, and names Mary Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and says there were many others. It then says they were supporting the group out of their own means.

They travelled with him. Some of them funded it. That is stated plainly in a single passage and it is rarely preached.

Joanna’s position is the striking one. A woman connected to Herod’s household financing an itinerant preacher whom Herod’s family had reason to watch.

Did He Teach With Women in Mind?

Bailey argues he shaped the material deliberately, and the pattern is checkable.

Again and again a story about a man is set beside a story about a woman. A shepherd with a lost sheep and a woman with a lost coin. A man sowing a mustard seed and a woman working yeast into dough. Simeon and Anna. Zechariah and Mary, each receiving an annunciation and each answering differently.

Luke runs that pattern the length of his Gospel, more than two dozen times, and never states a principle about it. The arrangement does the work.

Bailey reads it as Jesus shaping his teaching to communicate as powerfully to women as to men, and the Gospel writers then selecting and presenting material that continued the elevation.

What About Mary?

Unknowable in detail and impossible to discount.

We cannot reconstruct her influence on how her son thought about women. What Bailey says about it is measured and probably right: whatever it was, it was positive and beyond measure.

She is present at the start, present at the wedding at Cana, present during the ministry, and present at the cross when almost nobody else is.

What Does the Series Cover?

Four scenes where the attitude is on display rather than stated.

The woman at the well, who receives the most direct self-disclosure in John up to that point. The Syrophoenician woman, who wins the hardest argument in the Gospels. The woman brought for stoning, who is used as a device by men who left the other guilty party at home. And the woman in Simon’s house, who supplies every courtesy the host withheld.

None of these is a passage about the status of women. Each is a story in which something is done, and the doing is the argument.

Introduction to the series on Jesus and women. See the woman at the well, the Syrophoenician woman, the woman caught in adultery, and the woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee.

Footnotes2

1. Luke 8:1-3 is the passage to know if only one is remembered. It names three women, indicates there were many more, and states that the ministry was funded by them. Very little ancient literature records the financing of a movement that plainly, and almost nothing records it as coming from women.
2. That the paired stories are never explained is what makes the pattern persuasive. An author making a point about women would say so once. An author who has simply built his material that way leaves it to accumulate across twenty-four chapters, and it does.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 14. Supports the account of the decline in the position of women between the older literature and the first century, the reference to Ben Sirach, the assessment of Mary's influence, the presence and funding of women in the movement, and the argument that Jesus shaped his teaching to reach women as powerfully as men. Supplied in full.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 8:1-3, Luke 15:3-10, Luke 13:18-21, Luke 1:5-38, and Luke 2:25-38.

Where the sourcing stops: the trajectory described here is a general assessment rather than a measured one, and the position of women in Second Temple Judaism varied by region, class and period in ways a single line cannot capture. Ben Sirach is one voice, widely read but not a legal code.