Out of The Shadows | Part II: What the New Testament says about Women
Out of the Shadows
Last time, we worked through the Hebrew Bible’s treatment of women, and what we found was an undercurrent of dignity — small but pointed authorial choices, women showing up at the hinge of stories where their cultures said they shouldn't. We ended at the very first chapter of the New Testament, where Matthew opens his Gospel by weaving five women into the genealogy of Jesus, and signals from his first paragraph that the story we're about to read will be a story about God grafting in outsiders, especially women, who hold onto His covenant even when many of the men around them are letting it slip.
That was the undercurrent. It's about to become a rushing river.
Jesus and His first followers consistently bring women right into the center. In the Gospels, women fund the ministry, sit at Jesus' feet as disciples, and become the first witnesses to the resurrection. In Acts and the New Testament Letters, women are routinely marked as leaders and co-workers in the growing way of Jesus. When the question of women in the church is raised, we often focus on the so-called restrictive passages — passages that seem to prohibit women from leading and teaching. We’ll be covering every single one of them in upcoming articles, and I’ll be showing how we’ve likely been misreading them. But first we really have to set the backdrop of how women show up in the Bible and the early church. Because, even more profoundly than what we saw in the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament takes women’s roles even higher.
Let me show you what I mean.
Jesus’ inner circle — the Gospels
Let's start with the question I get asked most often when this conversation begins. If Jesus was so open to women, why did He choose twelve men as His disciples?
It's a fair question, and the answer is significant. The twelve disciples were not the template for the future Church's ecclesial offices. They were a deliberate symbolic act. Jesus regathering the twelve tribes of Israel; a prophetic declaration that the exile which scattered the tribes across the world was coming to an end. And here is an easy-to-miss observation: Jesus is not one of the twelve. When Jews in the ancient world looked for a Messiah, they thought of a human king who would lead the nation back to a golden age — like David, or Judah Maccabee, or many other would-be-messiahs in Jesus’ day. So, we might expect someone claiming to be the king of Israel to assume the royal line of the tribe of Judah, and symbolically gather the other eleven tribes around himself. But Jesus chooses twelve. He's not acting like the leader of one tribe, He’s acting like the One who calls the twelve into being. When the tribes escaped Egypt in the book of Exodus, the Tabernacle lived in the center of the camp with the twelve tribes circling the tent North, South, East, and West. Jesus is acting as if He is the tabernacle. Yahweh in the flesh. Israel’s Messiah, yes, but much more than anyone was expecting.
Jesus’ twelve disciples are an incredible symbol for the wider story Jesus is fulfilling, but not the group that will inform our current quest. We need to ask, were there others called to lead? Who was actually in Jesus' wider circle? Did women have a role? And the answer is an emphatic, yes! — in numbers and at depth that would have been very unusual in the ancient world.
Luke 8:1–3 is the line I'd point you to first. Luke tells us that as Jesus traveled through the towns and villages of Galilee teaching, He was accompanied not just by the twelve, but by a group of women — Mary called Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Chuza (one of Herod's household stewards), Susanna, and “many others, who provided for them out of their means.” These women were funding the ministry. Richard Bauckham and others, based on the conventions of ancient letter writing and biographies, point out that the way these women are named in particular, suggests they were almost certainly some of Luke's eyewitness sources for his Gospel. When Luke tells us, in the opening verses of his Gospel — “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” — he's pointing to women like these.
Move from Luke 8 to Luke 10. Martha and Mary are hosting Jesus in their home. Martha is doing the work of hospitality; Mary is sitting at Jesus' feet listening to Him teach. Martha asks Jesus to send Mary back to help her — and Jesus does the opposite. “Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her.”
You have to know the cultural context to feel the impact this must have had on everyone in that room. Sitting at a rabbi's feet was the disciple's posture. It was how a male student studied under a teacher. Paul tells us in Acts 22 that he was “brought up at the feet of Gamaliel”; it was a position reserved for men who wished to follow a Rabbi. Jesus, in commending Mary, is saying that a woman occupying the disciple's posture is exactly right. He's not making an exception for Mary; He's making a bold statement about who gets to be His disciple. All are invited to sit.
And then there's Mary of Nazareth — His own mother. I want to spend a moment on her because she's doing more in the Gospels than we often realize.
When the angel Gabriel comes to Mary in Luke 1, the language Luke uses is worth noticing. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” That word overshadow is Temple language. It's reminiscent of the vocabulary the Hebrew Bible uses for the cloud of God's presence resting on the tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant. Many readers, going back to the early church, have heard Temple language here. Luke very well may be signaling, in the very first chapter of his Gospel, that Mary is becoming something like the Ark of the New Covenant — the vessel through which the presence of God enters the world again.
That's a high view of Mary. Protestants have historically been wary of elevating Mary, partly in reaction to perceived Catholic devotional excesses. But the New Testament should make us take her more seriously. We don't worship the Ark; we don't worship the tabernacle. We worship the God who chose to dwell within them. In the same way, we don't worship Mary. But she is the one God chose to carry His presence into the world — and her response, “I am the Lord's servant. Let it be with me just as you have said,” is one of the great confessions of faith in the entire New Testament.
A few verses later, when Mary travels to see her cousin Elizabeth, both women break into prophecy. Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit and proclaims, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Mary responds with the Magnificat — one of the most theologically dense pieces of poetry in the New Testament, a song about God pulling the powerful down from their thrones and lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry and sending the rich away empty. The two women who carry the coming of John the Baptist and Jesus into the world begin their stories with prophetic speech. Before either of their sons draw their first breath, the mothers are already declaring the good news.
These prophetic women at the beginning of the story point us straight to the end of the Gospels, where we find something similar. After Jesus has died and risen from the dead, who does He send first to proclaim the resurrection? Women. Mary Magdalene, in John 20, encounters the risen Jesus in the garden and is told “Go to my brothers and say to them…” Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record women going to the tomb, finding it empty, and being commissioned by angels to tell the disciples. The Church has called them, since at least the time of Hippolytus in the third century, the apostolae apostolorum — the apostles to the apostles. The most important message in human history was entrusted first to women, in a culture where women's testimony wasn't even admissible in court.
If that single fact were the only thing the New Testament told us about women, it would already be enough to call most of the assumptions about who can speak God's word into question. Whatever else the Bible says about men and women, it says this: the first preachers of the resurrection were women.
Acts — the early church takes off
The Gospels set the pattern. Acts shows it spreading.
One of my favorite, easily missed details about early women leading is Acts 8:3. Describing Saul's persecution of the early Church, Luke writes, “Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.”
Craig Keener’s massive commentary on Acts points out that to stop a movement from spreading, you wouldn’t go after random followers; you would grab the leaders and watch the followers scatter. From the earliest days, even though it would fly in the face of Greco-Roman and Jewish convention, both men and women were so central to the Jesus way that it seems even its enemies knew it. What’s remarkable is how this fact seems so unremarkable to Luke — as if it were completely obvious in the first century that this was the case.
Move forward to Acts 16, and we meet Lydia. Paul has just crossed over into Macedonia for the first time. Philippi is the first European city to hear the gospel. And the first convert in the city is Lydia — a businesswoman who deals in purple cloth, a luxury trade item that tells us she's well-off. She hears Paul speak, the Lord opens her heart, she's baptized along with her household, and she insists Paul and his team stay at her house. The Philippian church starts in her home. I’m convinced that the reason we don't immediately think of her as the leader of that house church is because her name is female. If a man named Lyon had hosted Paul and started the Philippian church, we'd be calling him the first pastor of Philippi without hesitation.
To that same Philippian church, a decade or so later, Paul will write to two more women, Euodia and Syntyche, who appear as the leaders of the church and are named as Paul’s co-laborers in the gospel. Philippi seems to have a deep bench of female leadership. We'll come back to these women in just a moment.
Then there's Priscilla. Acts 18 introduces her along with her husband Aquila. They're a tent-making couple who befriend Paul in Corinth and travel with him to Ephesus. While they're in Ephesus, a brilliant Jewish preacher named Apollos arrives, eloquent and well-versed in the Scriptures — but he's only heard about Jesus as far as John's baptism. Priscilla and Aquila, the text says, “took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately.” They teach Apollos.
Notice the order. Luke names Priscilla first, ahead of her husband. That's a deliberate choice — the more prominent name typically comes first in the ancient world, and Luke does this with Priscilla three out of four times he names the couple. Priscilla is the lead teacher in this scene. She is teaching a man, and a learned man at that, and the New Testament records the act with approval. Whatever the much-discussed 1 Timothy 2 passage means, it cannot mean that women are simply forbidden to teach men. Acts 18 already settles that question.
Romans 16 — the chapter we skip
Most people skim past Romans 16 because it's just a list of greetings, and more names we can’t pronounce. Paul is writing to the many house churches scattered around the great city of Rome — he hasn’t been there, and he sends his greeting to many leaders and house churches who will receive this letter. And about a third of the people Paul names are women.
Phoebe is the first one he mentions, and she gets two whole verses. “I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae… for she has been a patron of many and of myself as well.”
Two things in those two verses. First, Phoebe is called a deacon (Greek diakonos). The ESV historically translated this as “servant,” which is a soft rendering of a technical Greek term that the same English Bible translates as “deacon” everywhere else when it's applied to men. Most modern translations now use “deacon” or “minister” here, which is closer to what Paul actually wrote.
Second, and just as important: Paul is sending the letter to Rome with Phoebe. She's the carrier. By the conventions of the time, the person carrying a letter was typically the person who read it aloud and answered the community’s questions — which means Phoebe was very likely the first interpreter of Romans. There was no united Roman postal service, so someone like Paul would send an important document like this with a trusted friend. Before she left, Paul would have walked her through the letter, making sure she would be able to answer and clarify any questions that would arise. The letter of Romans, the most theologically intricate document of the New Testament, was first delivered, first read aloud, and first explained by Phoebe, the deacon of Cenchreae.
A few verses later, Paul greets Andronicus and Junia. “They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before me.”
For the first thousand years of Church history, Christians read Junia as a woman — because her name was a common Roman female name — and understood that Paul was calling her an apostle. Some have suggested masculinizing her name into Junias. This reading emerged among medieval commentators, gained ground through the Reformation, and hardened in the 20th century when some printed Greek editions accented the name as male. As far as we can tell, the name Junias did not actually exist in the ancient world.
Separately, some modern translations kept her female but rendered the grammar as "well known to the apostles" rather than "outstanding among them" — making her someone the apostles esteemed rather than one of their number. But that reading sits awkwardly with the verse itself. The same little preposition, en (έν — in, among, with), governs both phrases in this verse: these two were en the apostles, and they were en Christ. No translator renders the second phrase "well known to Christ" — it plainly means they belonged to Christ, were part of his family. A translation that takes en as "known to" in one breath and "among" in the next owes us a reason for the switch. The natural reading, and the one every early Greek-speaking interpreter assumed, is the straightforward one: Andronicus and Junia were outstanding apostles, in Christ before Paul.
And these aren't the only two. Paul greets Prisca (Priscilla again), Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis (“the beloved”), Rufus' mother, Julia, Nereus' sister. He calls several of them “fellow workers,” the same word he uses for Timothy, Titus, and his closest ministry partners. The list is full of women, and Paul commends them by name and by role.
A few years ago I went through the New Testament and listed every named figure who belonged to the founding generation of the Church — co-workers, hosts, ministers, prophets, apostles. The list runs to roughly 125 people. Women account for about a quarter of them — and if you narrow it to those the text credits with a specific ministry role, women rise to 30%. Set that against the world it emerged from: first-century Judaism, inside a Greco-Roman culture where the public sphere was firmly male, and it is remarkable. The roles these women played are not vague. Phoebe is named a diakonos of her church. Priscilla teaches Apollos. Junia is called outstanding among the apostles. Euodia and Syntyche are said to have contended at Paul's side in the gospel. Lydia and Nympha host churches in their homes. A whole cluster of women in Romans 16 are singled out for having "worked hard in the Lord." When the Church was at its most vital and least institutional, women were not at the margins of the work — they were named in the middle of it.
Euodia and Syntyche — Philippians 4
I want to spend a little more time on a passage that's often misread, in part because I've spent more time on it than on any other passage in this article. Back in 2019 I published a peer-reviewed article on Philippians 4:2–3 in Priscilla Papers, the academic journal of Christians for Biblical Equality. I'll walk through the argument here in summary form; if you want the full footnoted version, it's still available on the CBE website. Link at the end of the section.
The passage is short. Paul, near the close of his letter to the Philippian church, writes:
“I entreat Euodia and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord. Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women, who have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life.” (Philippians 4:2–3)
The standard read of this passage, in commentary after commentary, goes like this: Euodia and Syntyche were two women in the Philippian church who were locked in some kind of personal dispute. Paul, near the end of his letter, pauses to call them out by name and tell them to settle their disagreement. Their quarrel is so disruptive that he has to address it directly.
That reading has problems.
First, Philippians is one of the warmest letters in the New Testament. Paul calls the Philippians his “joy and crown,” thanks them effusively for their financial partnership in the gospel, and uses the language of friendship and affection throughout. He's not in fight-mode with this community. The tone of the letter doesn't fit the image of Paul reaching out to slap down two squabbling members of his church.
Second, look at how Paul actually talks about Euodia and Syntyche. He calls them fellow-laborers — the same Greek word (synergoi) he uses elsewhere for Timothy, Titus, Aquila, Priscilla, and his other closest ministry partners. He says they “labored side by side with me in the gospel.” That is not language Paul uses for ordinary church members. That is language he uses for co-workers in the mission. In fact, when John Chrysostom commented on this passage in the late fourth century, he called Euodia and Syntyche the chief of the Philippian church, using a Greek word (kephalaion) that he understood to mean something like head.
Third, when Paul really is settling a dispute in his letters — and many of his letters take on this tone — his vocabulary is different. He commands. He rebukes. He uses words like epitassō (“I order”), or he asks rhetorical questions designed to embarrass the disputants into line. Look at how he writes to the Corinthians when they really are fighting. He names the factions and shames them: “'I am of Paul,' or 'I am of Apollos.'… Is Christ divided?” Look at how he writes to the Galatians: “O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you?” That's settling-a-dispute Paul.
The verb Paul uses for Euodia and Syntyche is parakalō — “I encourage,” “I urge alongside.” It's a warm, exhortative word. Combine that with the way he describes them — fellow-laborers, named alongside Clement and “the rest of my fellow workers whose names are in the book of life” — and the picture shifts.
What I think is actually going on in Philippians 4:2–3 is this. Euodia and Syntyche were two of the leaders of the Philippian church, very likely two of the episkopoi (overseers) Paul addresses in the letter's opening greeting. Paul is writing in a moment when the Philippians are facing external pressure from outside the community — Roman culture, Jewish-Christian agitators, persecution — and he wants the church to remain united around the gospel he's been preaching to them. A major theme of the entire letter is this call to “have the same mind” and “agree in the Lord.” Its prime occurrence is found in Philippians 2 with the great Christ Hymn at the heart of the letter. “To have the same mind” is not the language of settling a personal quarrel; it’s the language of unity in the mind of Christ, and of partnership in mission in the face of external pressure.
I’m convinced that when Paul gets to chapter 4, he turns directly to the two leaders he's been writing to and tells them: keep pursuing the same mindset I’ve been telling you about in this letter. Stay united in the gospel I've been pointing you toward. And he asks a “true companion” — an unnamed but evidently trusted member of the community — and the rest of the church to come alongside and help these leaders in this goal.
This isn't Paul refereeing a fight. This is Paul commissioning. He's writing to the two pastors of the Philippian church and saying: keep going, stay unified, and let the rest of the community come alongside you.
An earlier, fully-footnoted version of this argument was published as Tyler Allred, “Philippians 4:2–3: An Alternative View of the Euodia-Syntyche Debate,” in Priscilla Papers (Autumn 2019). This article first appeared in the Autumn 2019 issue of Priscilla Papers (www.cbeinternational.org). The full version is available at https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/philippians-42-3-alternative-view-euodia/.
After the Apostles — widows, virgins, and the offices we forgot
A reasonable next question to ask is: what happened after Paul? If women were so central to the early church in the first generation, did that continue? Or did the church quietly close those doors as it moved past the apostolic period?
The historical record is clearer than most modern Protestants realize. For at least three more centuries, women continued to hold recognized ecclesial roles in the church — not in the margins, but as vetted offices with formal qualifications and, in some cases, actual ordination prayers.
Start with what the New Testament itself was already setting up. In 1 Timothy 5, Paul gives Timothy a list of qualifications for "widows" — and the list reads very much like an office. A widow must be at least sixty years old, the wife of one husband, known for good works, raising children well, showing hospitality. She is to be enrolled — the technical term for being formally entered into an official register.
Scot McKnight, in a recent piece on the order of widows, points out something most modern Protestants miss when they read this passage. These qualifications look almost identical in structure to the qualifications for overseer in 1 Timothy 3 — vetted, enrolled, with specific moral and family requirements, carrying the weight of a recognized role. How has this been so often missed? McKnight offers the following punch line: “maybe that's because historians saw the word ‘widow’ and read it only as ‘a woman who lost her husband.’”
The order of widows had real institutional authority in the centuries that followed. Polycarp of Smyrna, writing around AD 110, calls widows “the altar of God” — a striking image that links them directly to the most sacred space of the temple. By the fourth century there's a document called the Testamentum Domini that includes an actual ordination prayer for installing a widow into office, complete with a bishop's blessing and a congregational “Amen.” Whatever else widows were doing in the early church, they weren't doing nothing. They were one of the formal ways the church recognized and deployed the leadership of older women.
The other significant institutional form was the order of virgins. I spent some time on this in graduate school, and the short version is worth bringing forward here. By the fourth century, virgins were a recognized order in many churches — listed alongside presbyters, deacons, and deaconesses in church-organizational documents like the Constitutions of the Holy Apostles. Cyril of Jerusalem speaks of “the order of solitaries and of virgins.” Jerome describes a formal ceremony where the virgin is veiled by the bishop and declared “a chaste virgin to Christ.” Ambrose and Gregory of Nyssa develop a full theology of the virgin's role.
That order didn't emerge from nowhere. The seeds go back to the New Testament — Paul's reflections on celibacy in 1 Corinthians 7, the metaphor of the church as a virgin betrothed to Christ in 2 Corinthians 11, and Revelation 14 — and they get developed through the second and third centuries by Ignatius, Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian. By the fourth century the development has matured into a recognized order with formal liturgy.
I’m not advocating for a resurgence of monasteries, only pointing out that for many centuries, virginity was seen as a path through which a woman could exercise spiritual authority and lead. The historian Carl Volz puts it well: virgins served as “a sign of the coming of God's kingdom, living testimony that God's grace was active in their lives.” It was one of the ways women continued to find a place of leadership and influence in a community that was, on other fronts, slowly narrowing. This is why, for so many centuries the role of nun was so prominent. By the time of the Protestant Reformation there was already a cultural drift away from these offices. When we look at the modern Protestant church and see nothing that resembles a recognized women's office, we sometimes assume that's the biblical pattern. The biblical and early-church pattern actually included them. We're the ones who lost the thread.
So why did things narrow? It’s widely recognized that it did: the institutional church of the fourth and fifth centuries had markedly fewer women in recognized leadership than the church Paul knew. As for why, one widely held account, argued by Karen Jo Torjesen and others, ties it to Christianity's change in status. As the movement went from a network of house churches to a publicly recognized imperial religion under Constantine, it absorbed the surrounding Greco-Roman world's institutional forms. Authority consolidated around the bishop — a male figure modeled on Roman magistrates and priests — and the gift-based, decentralized leadership of the first generation was slowly replaced by hierarchical clerical office that borrowed heavily from the patriarchal patterns of the surrounding culture. Women's offices — widows, virgins, deaconesses — held on for centuries, but were squeezed by the consolidation, absorbed into one another, and eventually channeled into monastic communities. Historians weigh these factors differently, but the direction of travel is not in dispute: as the church institutionalized, it grew more male-only — and the first-generation pattern we've traced in this essay was something the later church moved away from, not toward.
I've said elsewhere in this series that I'm willing to critique both sides of this conversation where positions are shaped more by culture than by Scripture. Some egalitarian arguments really are taking their cues from modern cultural assumptions about sex and power, and they deserve to be called out as such. But here's the part I think often gets missed: the male-only-leadership tradition we inherited is itself downstream of a particular set of cultural pressures — not the New Testament pattern, but the post-apostolic church's accommodation to Greco-Roman patriarchal values. If we're going to be honest about culture shaping the church, we have to be honest in both directions. The case I'm making in this series isn't novel innovation. It's recovery.
The cumulative case
So what do we have when we put all of this together?
In the Gospels: women fund Jesus' ministry, provide eyewitness testimony, and sit in the discipleship role at Jesus’ feet. In Acts: women are arrested as leaders alongside men, found house churches in cities like Philippi, and teach Apollos in Ephesus. In the letters: a woman deacon carries and reads Romans to the churches, we meet a female apostle named Junia, and two women are leading the Philippian church. When we count the named leaders of the first generation, we find 30% of them are women.
As bookends to the story of Jesus, women show up at the beginning to break into prophetic song and announce the coming of the Lord before Jesus is even born. And they show up at the end in the garden tomb, where they become the first to receive the news of Jesus’ resurrection — the news that has changed the world in countless ways ever since. The Church takes off, and continues in its first generation, with women at the center of its public witness.
This isn't a story about exceptions. It isn't about a few token women being permitted into leadership against the broader pattern. It is the broader pattern. The early Church, in its first decades, looked very much like a movement of men and women leading together. Remember the equal partnership we saw in Genesis 2? For at least three more generations the church kept women in vetted offices, even as the broader institutional shape was narrowing in other ways.
I want to acknowledge that the complementarian movement would push back on any one of these examples. Priscilla taught alongside her husband. Paul might be calling Phoebe a "servant" rather than an official deacon (in fact, the institutional titles probably weren’t solidified until later). Euodia and Syntyche could be read as zealous co-workers rather than overseers. I take that pushback seriously, and I would love to hear from you if you have those questions. What I think is harder to dismiss is the cumulative weight. The more examples you have to qualify or explain away — across the Gospels, Acts, the letters, and three more centuries of patristic practice — the more strained the male-only-leadership reading becomes. The broader pattern of Scripture, read against itself rather than against a modern tradition we inherited, presses in a different direction.
Where this leaves us
And that broader pattern is the context in which the often-cited "restriction" passages have to be read. There are a handful of texts — 1 Corinthians 11, 1 Corinthians 14, 1 Timothy 2 and 3, Titus 1, Ephesians 5, 1 Peter 3 — that have been taken to mean that women cannot teach, cannot lead, cannot hold office in the Church. Some of those passages are genuinely hard, and we'll work through each of them carefully in the articles to come. But in the years I’ve spent studying this topic, I find that we often begin in the wrong place. Setting the full narrative of Scripture in view, as we have now done, allows me to take seriously the claims of these hard passages.
Four papers in, and the picture is starting to come into focus. The Hebrew Bible, under the surface, was already doing this work — naming the dignity of women in a male-dominated culture, and refusing to let the brokenness have the last word. The New Testament brings that undercurrent into the open. I hope you can already see the trajectory throughout the whole narrative of Scripture of women stepping out of the shadows and into the light.
Next time: haircuts, head-coverings, and the confusion of 1 Corinthians.
