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G'day, it's Director Mark. If you've been listening to our last two singles, you'll know that friend of the podcast and one of John Dixon's best friends, Ben Shaw, passed away three weeks ago after a valiant fight with cancer. John is taking a bit of a break to grieve his friend, totally understandable. So in the meantime, producer Kaylee and I have decided to choose our favourite Undeceptions episodes to drop into your podcast feed. Now,

Now, Undeceptions is now in its fourth season and it's just passed our 400,000th download. Huge! We've published over 70 episodes now, which explains why Kelly and I feel so exhausted, but also why we've had such a great time over the last two years. All that to say that there's plenty of episodes to choose from, so here's the one I picked, which left a profound impression on me.

I chose Remembering Women when John visited Dr. Lynn Coic to chat about how early Christians valued and celebrated women in the first centuries of the church. I especially liked it because it gets us outdoors in the middle of an Australian lockdown, and it also has such light and shade in it, some great contributions and brilliant music from producer Kayleigh. Hope you enjoyed as much as we did making it. Sit back. Here's a story.

At the foot of Mount Taurus, 120 miles from the Mediterranean, a first century noble woman named Thecla lived in Iconium, in a region of what we know today as Turkey. The Apostle Paul spent quite a bit of time in Iconium. Standing by her window one day, Thecla overheard Paul preaching. She was so engrossed by Paul's words that she didn't eat or drink for three days.

She became a Christian and her life changed forever. One of the messages she heard from Paul was on chastity. Blessed are they that keep the flesh chaste, for they shall become the temple of God. Thekla vowed to remain celibate, a commitment that didn't go down well with her fiancé. Nor did it please her family, who expected her to marry and have children, as all noble women were meant to do.

Seen as a rebel, Thecla was persecuted for her newfound faith. After visiting Paul in prison, she too was thrown into prison and condemned to be burnt at the stake. But miraculously, the flames did not touch her and she was released. Thecla followed Paul to Antioch. There, one of the city's leaders fell in love with her. After she rejected him, he appealed to the governor who sentenced her to be thrown to wild beasts.

But in the arena, she remained unharmed and was once again free to go in search of Paul. When they met again, Paul urged Thecla to spread the good news of Jesus Christ. She travelled to Seleucia in southeast Turkey, lived in a cave, taught the gospel and conducted healings in the name of the Lord. Thecla conducted so many healings that there wasn't anything for the doctors to do.

They grew angry and sent a mob to the cave to attack her. When Thecla prayed to God for protection, an opening in the rock appeared. Thecla went through the opening and it closed behind her. She was never seen again. If you were a 2nd or 3rd century Christian, you would have been very familiar with the story of Thecla.

Nowadays, not so much, unless you're part of the Eastern Church tradition, where she's remembered as a minor saint with her own feast day, 24th of September. Her story is in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, one of the writings of the so-called New Testament apocrypha.

Writings of ancient Christians that weren't accepted into the New Testament, partly because they had some dodgy ideas and partly because they were written too long after the apostolic period to have the apostles' authority. This document comes from the mid to late 2nd century.

And yet scholars like Alistair McGrath, who we spoke to in episode 19, consider this story of Thecla, quote, one of the most remarkable witnesses to the aspirations of women in the early church. She defied the expectations of a woman of her time. She was a rebel. Her decision to follow Jesus was considered dangerous to society.

Now, much of her story is legendary, no doubt. But the traditions about her, the core of which is probably historical, certainly tell us something about how early Christians in the second century could imagine a woman having an impact for Christ in the Roman world. There's nothing like it, now you've seen before. We're the center of it all, we are the eye of the storm.

This week, we'll be zooming in on some other early Christian women, for whom we have good evidence, who had a profound impact on the church and its teaching in their time. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new video streaming service, Master Lectures, featuring some of the world's leading Christian scholars. Every week at Undeceptions, we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture, or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.

Ever tried walking on snow? It can be pretty difficult. The traction you have on other surfaces just isn't there. You find yourself using more energy than you would on a firm surface as you try to keep yourself stable.

The topic of women and their place in the church can feel a bit like walking through snow. It takes up a lot of energy within the church and outside of it. Constant arguments, persistent accusations. Well, Professor Lynn Koik came across these accusations that Christianity is unfriendly, even hostile to women, quite early on in her studies at university.

So since then, she's written quite a lot on this topic, including Christian Women in the Patristic World, Their Influence, Authority and Legacy in the Second through the Fifth Centuries, co-authored with Amy Brown-Hughes, and Lynn's Women in the World of the Earliest Christians.

I caught up with Lynn in Denver, Colorado in the US, where she's provost and dean, as well as professor of New Testament at Denver Seminary. It was freezing there. And yes, we did actually have to walk through snow together. I asked Lynn to paint me a picture of what life in ancient Rome might have been like for the first women who heard the gospel.

A Greek woman or a Roman woman, they would be part of the Roman Empire. And it varied depending on how much money you had. So you might want to think that most people had enough money that

They could last two or three days without getting more money to, you know, tell them. So they weren't subsisting day to day, like on handouts. They were either out in the fields or tending flocks if they were more rural, or they were shopkeepers or they were artisans. We know women who made jewelry, certainly were part of the clothing industry. So everyone that was working. So I think that's one image you want to have. You did have some...

some, maybe 7 to 10%, who were quite wealthy. They had a lot of leisure time, but everybody else, they were working hard. And then of course you did have those who were terribly impoverished, and they might make up 20% or something like that. Some women were slaves. - Can we say generally that women in this period, whether Greek, Roman, Jewish, were oppressed?

Women, you could say women were oppressed at this time if you use modern standards. If we assume that women should have the right to vote, then yes, they were oppressed. Of course, so were men. They were really, it was a very different governance system back then. So I think from having legal rights

If that's the standard, then again, I would say, yes, probably you could say that women were oppressed in as much as women could not by themselves go into court and represent themselves. They needed a male guardian. They would need a male guardian to sign off on if they bought or sold a piece of land. So they could buy and sell. They could own property. They could have their control of their own wealth.

but they couldn't distribute it in legal ways without having a man sign for it. Lynn is hinting at something a lot of scholars note today. Women were sidelined by men in a range of ways in the ancient world, but we're probably wrong to imagine a kind of handmaid's tale of subjugation and reproduction.

They could speak up for themselves. They could buy and sell. They could sometimes even divorce their husbands at will.

But they weren't at the center of political life, that's for sure. They lacked access to the wheels of power. So it's mixed. And we have to be cautious, make sure we don't read modern agendas back into ancient evidence. And the same is true when we come to the topic of Jesus and women. Our modern pro-women intuitions can't be allowed to run amok with the historical evidence.

nor should we let modern church debates about women's ordination muddy the waters of a discussion about what was really going on in the first century. Let's get back to Lynn, who is the consummate, careful scholar on this kind of stuff. I think that Jesus, in inviting women to follow after him,

was not unique. We have a community that left scrolls called the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's a deposit of scrolls left near the Dead Sea at a place called Qumran. And the community that is described there seems to have allowed for women to be full members, maybe not with the same level of authority,

but nevertheless full members. We know of women who would self-identify as Pharisees. There are ways that Jewish women could

participate in the life of first century Judaism, even in these smaller groups like Jesus followers or Pharisees or something like that. And so in that sense, Jesus wasn't unique in inviting women into

his circle of disciples. Just a quick explainer here. A Pharisee was a member of a Jewish sect that kept strict observance of religious ceremonies and practices and adherence to oral laws and traditions. Pharisee is not a job like priest or scribe. It's just a faction. It's like saying Protestant.

Anyway, Pharisees thought of themselves as the most pure of all the Jewish factions. In fact, the word Pharisee probably comes from the Hebrew word for purity.

Some women identified with that version of Judaism rather than, say, the traditions of the Sadducees or Essenes or any of the other factions of ancient Judaism. So there was nothing different about Jesus? Well, what he was saying in the midst of these disciples was different. There was some content distinction, which then probably led to

the way in which the men and women who followed him interacted themselves. So what I mean by that is it appears that women and men, if they had gifting and capabilities, led together. It would not be surprising to have women who held positions of responsibility in the community because of how Jesus was

organizing their communities. I've often heard it said, in fact, I think I might have said it myself a few times, that it's really striking that Jesus chooses to place women at the center of some of his parables, the stories he used to illustrate his moral or spiritual lessons. Lynn says, sure, Jesus uses women, but not just women. He

He also would put front and center the Samaritan. And the Samaritan was seen as someone you wouldn't want to emulate. I don't know if I would say he was an archenemy of the Jew, but those two didn't get along, even though they were neighbors, they didn't get along. And so I think given the fact that women wouldn't have the same level of opportunities, daughters wouldn't have the same level of opportunities as sons,

stood out as in certain ways they could be marginal, right? And Jesus' message was inclusive, even of those on the margins. So those who were not Jews, but were Gentiles interested in the Jewish way or in the Jewish God who called out to Jesus, the woman whose daughter needed healing. And Jesus, as

after a somewhat odd conversation, this is in the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew, says to the woman, your faith has made your daughter well. And so he's, that's not, it's not just he was talking to a woman. This was also a non-Jewish woman. And that fit his overall message. And so that's where I would say we can talk about how Jesus' message was so affirming to women when

when we think about it in the overall context, that it's affirming for everyone. And that was the specialness, I think, that drew many people to him. Yeah, so you're sort of saying it's not that we're casting Jesus as the feminist. He was the inclusivist. Yes. I don't know how to laugh, what to do, how to move. Yes, the last few days when I need myself.

He's a man. He's just a man. And I've had some men before. He's just a man.

That's the song I Don't Know How To Love Him from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar. It's from a 2012 Arena production where Mel C, yeah, Sporty Spice, played Mary Magdalene.

and sings to Jesus, admitting that she's fallen in love with him. It's one of the more controversial takes on the figure of Mary Magdalene, though certainly Andrew Lloyd Webber is not the first or the last to suggest a physical relationship between Jesus and this Mary.

It's a theory that's often rolled out, and in popular culture, no one has rolled it out with more fanfare than Dan Brown in his bestselling book, The Da Vinci Code, where Mary Magdalene is depicted as Jesus' wife.

In a documentary I was part of a while back called The Christ Files, I visited Cairo and got to see the original text of the Gospel of Philip, which is where the whole idea that Jesus had a girlfriend came from. Here's a little bit of what the young John Dixon found.

The Gospel of Philip is one of numerous leather-bound books discovered in 1945 near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. No one actually thinks Jesus' disciple Philip wrote the thing. This name appears to have been added to the text to lend weight to its ideas. This is the text, the only one, from which people have extracted the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children with her. It all comes down to a couple of lines.

The Saviour loved Mary Magdalene more than all the disciples and kissed her on her mouth often. The other disciples said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Saviour answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her?" Because the manuscript is a little damaged, as you can see here, we're not exactly sure what was in the original. For instance, where it says Jesus kissed Mary on the mouth,

This is a bit of guesswork, since just where the word mouth might have been, there's a lot of damage. Jesus may have kissed Mary on the...

cheek or the hand or the big toe for all we know. Mary Magdalene has been labelled many things. Sex worker, saint, sinner, witness, wife. So much has been written about her it might seem impossible to get the real answer to the question. Who was she really? You might say she's the Bible's most mysterious woman.

Mary comes from a town that had decent trade at the time, and I think she's a businesswoman, and she has some resources. She also falls ill with some sort of disease that Jesus heals. And that really is kind of the baseline for who she is. And after she is healed, like others whom Jesus heals,

she becomes a devout follower and she stays at his side up through the end. Mary Magdalene is introduced in the Gospel of Luke at the beginning of chapter 8. Just a little bit of information we get about her. But then

The early church tries to fill out that information, begins to conflate her story with some other stories. And that's where you get the notion that, well, her sickness had to do with her being a sinner. Then she had so much to repent of. And there's beautiful artwork that's created that shows a very penitent person.

Christian, it's very powerful artwork, but I don't think it actually represents who she is. When you do that, when you make her something that she's not, you lose who she really was. And she can be a wonderful role model for today. A person, a woman who is, you know, kind of just your average working woman who has a business, who travels, you know, from town to town, perhaps with her business there around the Sea of Galilee.

and contracts a horrible illness. And like many people today, when you get ill, you begin asking all kinds of questions that if things are all going well, you don't necessarily focus on. And when her questions about what happens next were answered by Jesus with His healing and His whole message that He gave her, she became a disciple and an ardent one, one who stayed with Him even at His time in the cross.

How much do you make of her being a witness to the resurrection and being sent to tell the other disciples? Do you think that's just an accidental element of history, or do you think that the writers of the Gospels are actually trying to highlight her role as an important disciple and witness? I think it's the latter. They are trying to emphasize her voice.

At that time, you wouldn't necessarily put your foundational beliefs in the mouth of a woman. It wouldn't carry the same sort of weight as if it was in the mouth of a man, although maybe not a slave man, right? I mean, class would also come into play here. But it's not so much that women weren't trusted in and of themselves.

necessarily individually, right? Like I think, you know, people trust, sons trusted their moms and, you know, I mean, there was a respect there for your elders. And so in that, I don't want to create a picture like everyone thought all women were stupid. It's not the case. But as a group, they were seen as more gullible or less reliable, more, you know,

taken to imagination. And so when she comes back saying, I've seen the risen Lord, I mean, that's a pretty amazing statement. And a lot of the disciples say, I got to see this for myself, right? And I think they don't completely dismiss it out of hand because they know her, but they also think, I'm not going to take it just at face value. I got to see it myself. So I think the

If the church could have said Peter saw the empty tomb and he was raised, they would have done it. I don't think they would have tried to create this story of women seeing the tomb as a way to reinforce belief in this story. They would have made up a different story. So that suggests to me that, in fact, Mary Magdalene

really was the person who came back to the group and spoke the words. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.

One of the little known facts about Jesus' life is that it was women who bankrolled his entire mission. You've probably never stopped to wonder just how much it might have cost to travel throughout Galilee and Judea as a party of 13 over a two to three year period.

Jesus and his disciples no doubt enjoyed generous hospitality in many of the towns and villages they visited, but this can't have provided all of the food, all of the lodging, and the taxes that they would have needed at various points along the way. I mean, a modest meal in a traveler's inn was about a quarter of a denarius.

A denarius was a day's wages for an average day laborer in the fields or the mines or whatever. So a quarter of your daily income could be spent just on your main meal of the day. To put it in average terms, if a day laborer today gets about 200 bucks,

That means $50 would be spent on your evening meal. All this got you in the first century was a sizable piece of bread, a bowl of lentils, two pieces of meat and two glasses of wine. Seriously, people have actually studied this stuff. A loaf of bread on its own was about one twelfth of a denarius. That's $16.50. A cluster of grapes or 10 figs set you back an eighth of a denarius.

$25. Simple clothing, uncoloured, set you back about four denarii. That's $800. Then there were the various Jewish and Roman taxes due each year to the authorities. Even assuming Jesus and his disciples lived modestly, which is a fair bet, the bill for this two to three year preaching tour would have been massive. Where did the money come from?

Tucked away in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 8, is the answer.

After this, Jesus travelled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases. Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had come out, Joanna, the wife of Cusa, the manager of Herod's household, Susanna, and many others.

These women were helping to support them out of their own means. Now, these words at the very end, helping to, in the last line, are not actually there in the original Greek. The passage literally says, these women were providing for them out of their own means. The point is pretty significant. As Professor John Meyer of the University of Notre Dame writes,

This passage preserves a valuable historical memory. Certain devoted women followers accompanied Jesus on his journeys around Galilee and finally up to Jerusalem, and actually supported him and his entourage with their own money, food or property. Such a passing and uncontrived detail, one that was also potentially off-putting to ancient male readers,

has a strong claim to historicity. Most scholars accept this as a real part of Jesus' life. James Dunn of Durham University, one of the leading scholars of the last 30 years, writes, such uncontrived detail indicates good tradition. Luke evidently had access here to firsthand recollections.

The fact that these women took on the role of benefactors almost certainly indicates they were wealthy. And Joanna, who's described here as the wife of a senior royal official, will have been especially wealthy. She belonged to the upper echelons of ancient Galilean society. In a period when the gap between rich and poor was very pronounced, a woman like this would have seemed positively aristocratic to many of Jesus' disciples.

Jesus was known to have oriented his ministry to the poor, or at least what we would call the working class. But he didn't do so to the exclusion of the rich. Anyway, my simple point is this. Humanly speaking, we have a group of financially savvy and well-resourced women to thank for the entire three-year mission of Jesus and the apostles recorded in the Gospels. You can press play now.

Jesus might not have been the feminist some want him to be, but in his inclusivity and emphasis on those on the margins, women were brought into his fold in pivotal ways. So it's after Jesus that things go pear-shaped for women in Christianity, right?

We're about to talk about the Apostle Paul, one of the leaders of the first generation of Christians and considered the most important Christian figure after Jesus himself. But he gets a bad rap, according to Lynn. The writings of Paul have been used to prevent women attaining positions of leadership within the church even today. You remember the snow? It'll be getting chilly in here after the break.

This episode is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, Tactics, by Greg Kuchel. It's the 10th anniversary updated edition.

It's a kind of primer on how to talk about Christianity in public. It's the kind of thing that Undeceptions is all about. There are so many difficult questions our culture raises about the Christian faith. Is the Bible reliable? How could there only be one way to God? Isn't faith the opposite of knowledge? And on and on it goes. And what Kuchel does in this book is he clearly lays out the complaint

And then he proposes ways to discuss these things in a sensible manner. One of the keys, he says, is finding the question behind the question, the worldview or faith commitment that drives the complaint in the first place. Kuchel has been running seminars on this stuff for decades, so the book is full of know-how, not just theory, but practical know-how.

The book is clearly pitched to people who are Christians, wanting to have healthy conversations with those who don't believe. But actually, I think doubters would find benefit from this book. It might give you better tactics to counter Christians, actually. But it might also challenge the basis of some of your doubts about the Christian faith. Anyway, head to zondervanacademic.com or any of the online booksellers and check out Greg Kuchel's Tactics, a game plan for discussing Christian convictions.

Have you thought of studying online? Ridley College offers a range of online courses from certificate level to master's degrees. Old Testament, New Testament, theology, apologetics, church history, and so on. Soon I'll be teaching historical Jesus online for them. Ridley brings the best in theological education right to your fingertips. Head to ridley.edu.au forward slash undeceptions.

That's ridley.edu.au forward slash Undeceptions. Check them out. I love them. What did women experience when they came into contact with Paul and his churches that he's starting in the decades after Jesus? I mean, the story is, the perception is, that's when they started to be oppressed.

And I think Paul would be very surprised and saddened to know that that's a legacy that is imputed to him. I think what he would say is, "Ah, I enjoyed working with the women that he mentions, for example, at the end of the book of Romans or in

Philippians or in Colossians. I can name so many of his letters where he talks about women who he worked with, and he calls them co-workers. He describes them in the same way that he does his male co-workers. So I think he would be surprised that people would think he wasn't seeing women disciples as having the same

level of possible level of understanding of the gospel and ability to preach it, to live it, to do it. So I think that Paul's misunderstood in some ways.

Having said all of that, I think it's also really important that we don't bring our 21st century mindset back into the first century. The first century was a patriarchal world and everybody operated on that. That was just kind of what people thought and so if that's what you're up against,

how do you preach the gospel that certainly cuts away at patriarchy, but yet also makes sense of their lives? So I think that was the challenge that Paul had. He had to explain the gospel to them in their moment, in a moment when women couldn't go to court on their own. If a woman wanted to separate from her husband, what we might call divorce,

She could do so only if she had a male guardian, maybe a family member or a friend, represent her also in the court. That's the reality that Paul had to deal with as he then tried to shape his churches.

So when you pick up Paul's letters, as an expert in this area, you don't feel any sense that you as an accomplished woman are being shut down? No, I don't feel that I'm being shut down. And thank you for saying that I'm accomplished. I appreciate that. I think that Paul was intense. You certainly get that from his letters, or I get that from his letters. He's a man driven by a mission.

And he doesn't, he has to though give this gospel at a time when there is extreme hierarchy in the Greco-Roman world. Everyone's trying to fit in their rung of the ladder. That's just the reality. Now the gospel comes breaking into that and says that all are equal, we might say, at the foot of the cross, right? All are one in Christ. All have the spirit. All have, I mean,

And you serve each other. That's an amazing statement to make in a culture that is so hierarchical and has a lot of rules, say, around meals. And then you come in and you say, let me tell you about the meal that Jesus started with his disciples and that we're to do on a regular basis. And we share the bread and the wine, so to speak. Okay, well, in Paul's culture, that

If you had someone who owned slaves, they would never dream of sitting or having the slave recline at the table and giving them something. Except for one or two days a year. Right. Right? In the festival. In the festival, that crazy festival time when you... The upside down festival, yeah. That's right. And it only works because the rest of the time it's quote unquote right side up. Exactly right.

The festival we're talking about here is called Saturnalia, the most popular of all the Roman festivals. It fell on the 17th of December, but it pretty much went for a week.

It was dedicated to the Roman god Saturn, of course, but frankly, no one knows its origins. And it's really weird. Basically, all work and business was suspended for the week of festivities. And the most striking thing about it is that slaves were given temporary freedom for that week to say and do what they liked. They could even sit at the table of their masters and talk back to them without getting into trouble. The world was turned upside down.

For a week and then everything went back to good Roman order. It's really weird So all of a sudden now you have on a regular basis this kind of upside downness and and Paul really Pushes that but he he and he has to keep reminding them that of this upside downness and

But he also wants them to know that the gospel can be lived out even in an imperfect culture. Look, there is so much more debate on the place of women in leadership in the church. But frankly, it's a little insider baseball to tackle on this podcast.

Some church authorities say yes, some say no, some say in between. I say let's just cut each other slack across the divide.

But regardless of the endless church debates, there still remains this truth: the early Christian church was not a hostile place for women. In fact, there were some seriously impressive women, particularly in the second and third centuries, who we should all really know about. There's two famous women, Perpetua and Felicitas. Perpetua

They lived about very early in the 200s. 203 is their martyr date. Their birthday is sometimes how it's called. Perpetua is from a fairly wealthy family. They live in North Africa and she becomes a Christian.

and keeps a diary while she's imprisoned. After she is put in this prison, she continues to have some conversations with her family, and those are talked about in this diary. She has some visions. Those are also described in the diary. And then

the final day when she's in the arena and she and the small group of Christians around her are condemned to the beasts and die horrible, dramatic deaths. Alongside her story, which takes up most of this, is another story about a female slave who's pregnant.

And she gives birth a bit early, so in her eighth month, and they pray that this will happen so that she could be part of this group as a Christian martyr also. So she has her baby. The baby is born early.

within 24 hours or so of when the rest of the group is going to go into the arena. And so she's able to join them. And it's a fascinating story of how she thinks about her own giving birth to this daughter and how she herself is a daughter of God and how Christ is living in her, even as her daughter lived in her. It's just a fascinating story.

way of thinking about childbirth, about, Perpetua talks about nursing her son. There's all kinds of female imagery, biological female imagery that is also put to theological use, theological reflection. And I point that out because I think we have a sense that women were completely silent as the church was doing theology.

That's not the case. Women were thinking theologically, and they were also thinking about their own experiences, the typical experiences of having a baby, nursing a baby. And what does that mean theologically? And the rest of the church picked that up. Perpetua and Felicitas were celebrated each year by the church.

as martyrs. So it's important, I think, as we reflect back on what was happening in the early church, we don't just imagine there were a bunch of male bishops sitting around coming up with these abstract creeds. There was a lot of action and women were a part of that. Another revered woman is Macrina.

She was the sister of Gregory of Nyssa. You've probably never heard of Gregory, but he was a huge deal in the fourth century because he made such a massive contribution to the doctrine of the Trinity. That's the idea that God is one, but he is one in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is one of the most celebrated theologians of the period. That's Gregory. But what of his sister, Macrina?

Right. Macrina is the sister of Gregory of Nyssa, who is a famous church father. The uber-Tunitarian theologian and so on. Yes, yes. And she lived, probably was born about 327, died around 379. She comes from a very wealthy family.

Her parents are Christian. And then through a series of events, they decide that they will live much more ascetically. And she invites the slaves that they had had or the workers that were on the estate to live in what we would

called today like a monastic kind of rhythm. And so that's what she set up. But there's a book that her brother writes called The Life of Macrina. It's probably written around 380, shortly after she died. And then he writes another volume called On the Soul and the Resurrection, which also is

has a lot of reflection on her death, very similar to his work, Life of Macrina. And he is drawn to his sister as one who teaches him. He saw her as, if you will, the smart one. She was the philosopher. He was led by her. And when he finds out that she's ill and

potentially going to die. And he travels to be at her side. At different points in this journey as he goes, he has this vision that he's trying to understand. So he's thinking about it, thinking about it. When he comes to her side and she passes on, he then realizes what this vision was telling him. It was telling him that his sister, who died in her bed, his sister should be understood as a martyr.

Now, there's no martyrs anymore at this time in 380. It's now Christianity is a licit religion. But Gregory sees her testimony and her life as so given to God. And I think one of the interesting things for Gregory here is he understands his

his sister as a martyr. Another piece of this is that when she was born, her mother received a vision that this daughter should have a secret name and that secret name was Thecla, who is the first martyr. So I want to trace through these centuries

the importance of the idea of martyrdom, the idea of living an ascetic life. And when I say ascetic, what I mean is people who are trying to have both their body and their mind in such order and under control to a purpose that they value. So it may mean that you abstain from sexual relations and both Thecla and Macrina were virgins.

But so were a lot of men at this time. Celibacy was a practice at this time that people felt would help you to order your life.

Not everyone was celibate, but some were, and it was for that purpose. Macrina demonstrates not just this ordering of body and mind for now, for today, but she was driven by this desire for the resurrection of the body and this eternal love that awaited her. And so that was important.

sort of in a nutshell what her philosophy and her way of life were that was so compelling to her brother. And when you think about it, here's a man who writes about theology, who's one of the great theologians of the church. And when he wants to think about the soul and the resurrection, he thinks about his sister and her life and her teachings.

One of my favourite little details in the early 2nd century is buried in a letter from Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan. Pliny was the governor of Bithynia, modern day Turkey, where he had a number of Christians presented to him in court. It's not clear what they were charged with, even Pliny wasn't sure, that's why he wrote to the Emperor.

But even though Pliny reckons they were harmless idiots, he came to the conclusion that they should be tortured and killed if they wouldn't recant their faith. I dismissed any who denied that they were Christians when they'd repeated after me a formula calling upon our gods and made offerings of wine and incense to your statue, and furthermore had reviled the name of Christ, none of which things I understand any genuine Christian can be induced to do.

if they persist i order them to be led away for execution for whatever the nature of their admission i am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished

Pliny goes on to talk about the things he's discovered about this sect, the Christians, about what they get up to. And basically he just says all he can find out is that they get up before dawn and sing a hymn to Christ as God. They share a meal. They make a vow not to do anyone wrong. And he's just not sure he's got to the bottom of it. So he has an idea to get more information. I tried to extract the truth by torture from two slave women whom they call deaconesses.

"'I found nothing but a degenerate sort of cult. "'I therefore postponed the investigation and hastened to consult you, "'for the matter seemed to me to warrant consulting you, "'especially because of the number involved. "'For many persons of every age, every rank, "'and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. "'For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities, "'but also to the villages and farms.'

Perhaps you missed my favourite bit. These deaconesses, he says. In trying to get to the bottom of what Christianity is all about, Pliny decides to torture two slaves, and these slaves are women, and they had the title, he says, deaconesses. It's odd. Why would Pliny go for women like this? Well, I think because these women, he felt, had...

information about how the church was run. And sadly, whether they were women or men, he would have tortured them to get answers because that just is how they felt the system needed to work. You weren't going to get the truth unless you tortured. The fact that they were slaves, I think, signals for us the reality that Christianity for a while, this is now early second century

I had more members that were of the lower levels of society rather than the upper crust. That just simply, a variety of evidence leads us to that.

So we shouldn't necessarily be surprised that you have women who are slaves who are also in some way representative of the church's leadership, that they can speak somehow for the church. That's what Pliny assumes, and I think that's probably correct. What's your hunch?

of what that title meant? I mean, obviously Pliny got that title from them or from the church whom they call deaconesses. He probably has no idea what that means, but he's just relaying it as a title. What do you think they were doing to get that title? Yeah, boy, that's a very interesting and hard to answer question because we don't really know enough about

to know exactly what they were doing. In some way, I would imagine that if they had leadership roles in the church, it would also involve serving in some way. And the language around leadership in the New Testament is connected with serving others. That's even a self-designation. Some of the apostles will talk about themselves as a slave of Christ.

while they are leaders, I also want to emphasize one of the amazing things that church doesn't get right all the time, but what they aspire to is leadership that thinks of the other first. That's not a power push. Once you recognize that that's at least the goal of leadership within the church, then it shouldn't be terribly surprising that you could have slaves

functioning in that role, just like you could have women and men of a higher class functioning as leaders because of the way leadership was understood, which, best I can tell, is a different way of understanding leadership than the Romans would have understood it.

On a topic like this, we can very easily find ourselves knee-deep in snow. So it's sometimes good to dust ourselves off and go back to the beginning, to hear from the women who knew Jesus and those who came soon after him. How were they attracted to the church? How were they treated by the church? What influence did they have? What legacy did they leave behind?

The church in the ancient world showed women a new way of being. The gospel message offered freedom that they'd never experienced before, and they flocked to Christianity because of it. Some were incredibly courageous in going against the grain, pushing against their culture. All this to follow Jesus, a man who positioned himself in the margins to speak to those who had no voice.

Remembering is important. I think it's very important that we know that there were women who used their money to support like a Jerome or Chrysostom or other church fathers. It's important to know that Gregory of Nyssa didn't think about his great theological thoughts on his own, but he was

greatly informed by his sister. We need to hear women's voices and their actions more. So that's the remembering part. But we don't want to either put them on some kind of pedestal that is unrealistic,

or fail to acknowledge that the church also acted at times in patriarchal ways, like it was part of its time, right? It was a creature of its age. So it had blind spots that maybe now we are more aware of. We, of course, in our culture today have our own blind spots. And hopefully future generations will be

generous towards our failings, even as they also tell the truth. So I think that responsible remembering is choosing to remember and doing so in a way that gives full voice to the women without creating a woman that is not real flesh and blood, because that separates them again from us.

Got questions about this or other episodes? I'd love to hear them and we'll answer them in our upcoming Q&A episode. You can tweet us @Underceptions, send us a regular old email at [email protected], or if you're brave, go over to Underceptions.com and record your question live so we can hear the audio on the show. And while you're there, check out everything else related to this and other episodes.

If you like this show, perhaps I can give you a gentle nudge to check out another one that's just now out. It's called Life in Wartime with David Robertson and Steve McAlpine, two great thinkers. It's another member of the Eternity Podcast Network.

The COVID-19 epidemic has brought upon us all the moral challenges associated with living in a state of constant conflict. We have to choose how we're going to respond to this global threat day by day. And David and Stephen from Third Space are here to help you think through the implications of the messages we're hearing and what constitutes real humanity in these challenging times. Go to eternitypodcasts.com.

Next episode, well, it's our Q&A episode for the season. And we've been collecting your questions over the last month or so. And now I'm going to have a go at answering some of them with sensible answers. Wish me luck. See ya. Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon. Directed and produced by...

We can fill that in later with Kaylee Payne. Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band, editing by Bryce McClellan. Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is part of the Eternity Podcast Network, an audio collection showcasing the seriously good news of faith today. Maybe just later you can drop in the words Mark Hadley. Will that be okay, Mark? Just drop them in where you like. Mark Hadley, Mark Hadley.

Head to underceptions.com. You'll find show notes and other stuff related to our episodes. Over the coming weeks, we're transforming underceptions.com into a whole library of audio, video, and printable stuff from lots of authors, actually, designed to underseed and let the truth out. You've been listening to the Eternity Podcast Network.