The Third Preaching Tour

150:1.1Of all the dar­ing things which Je­sus did in con­nec­tion with his earth ca­reer, the most amaz­ing was his sud­den an­nounce­ment on the evening of Jan­uary 16: “On the mor­row we will set apart ten women for the min­is­ter­ing work of the king­dom.” At the be­gin­ning of the two weeks’ pe­riod dur­ing which the apos­tles and the evan­ge­lists were to be ab­sent from Beth­saida on their fur­lough, Je­sus re­quested David to sum­mon his par­ents back to their home and to dis­patch mes­sen­gers call­ing to Beth­saida ten de­vout women who had served in the ad­min­is­tra­tion of the for­mer en­camp­ment and the tented in­fir­mary. These women had all lis­tened to the in­struc­tion given the young evan­ge­lists, but it had never oc­curred to ei­ther them­selves or their teach­ers that Je­sus would dare to com­mis­sion women to teach the gospel of the king­dom and min­is­ter to the sick. These ten women se­lected and com­mis­sioned by Je­sus were: Su­sanna, the daugh­ter of the for­mer chazan of the Naz­a­reth syn­a­gogue; Joanna, the wife of Chuza, the stew­ard of Herod An­tipas; Eliz­a­beth, the daugh­ter of a wealthy Jew of Tiberias and Sep­pho­ris; Martha, the el­der sis­ter of An­drew and Pe­ter; Rachel, the sis­ter-in-law of Jude, the Mas­ter’s brother in the flesh; Nas­anta, the daugh­ter of El­man, the Syr­ian physi­cian; Milcha, a cousin of the Apos­tle Thomas; Ruth, the el­dest daugh­ter of Mat­thew Levi; Celta, the daugh­ter of a Ro­man cen­tu­rion; and Aga­man, a widow of Da­mas­cus. Sub­se­quently, Je­sus added two other women to this group—Mary Mag­da­lene and Re­becca, the daugh­ter of Joseph of Ari­mathea.

150:1.2Je­sus au­tho­rized these women to ef­fect their own or­ga­ni­za­tion and di­rected Ju­das to pro­vide funds for their equip­ment and for pack an­i­mals. The ten elected Su­sanna as their chief and Joanna as their trea­surer. From this time on they fur­nished their own funds; never again did they draw upon Ju­das for sup­port.

150:1.3It was most as­tound­ing in that day, when women were not even al­lowed on the main floor of the syn­a­gogue (be­ing con­fined to the women’s gallery), to be­hold them be­ing rec­og­nized as au­tho­rized teach­ers of the new gospel of the king­dom. The charge which Je­sus gave these ten women as he set them apart for gospel teach­ing and min­istry was the eman­ci­pa­tion procla­ma­tion which set free all women and for all time; no more was man to look upon woman as his spir­i­tual in­fe­rior. This was a de­cided shock to even the twelve apos­tles. Not­with­stand­ing they had many times heard the Mas­ter say that “in the king­dom of heaven there is nei­ther rich nor poor, free nor bond, male nor fe­male, all are equally the sons and daugh­ters of God,” they were lit­er­ally stunned when he pro­posed for­mally to com­mis­sion these ten women as re­li­gious teach­ers and even to per­mit their trav­el­ing about with them. The whole coun­try was stirred up by this pro­ceed­ing, the en­e­mies of Je­sus mak­ing great cap­i­tal out of this move, but ev­ery­where the women be­liev­ers in the good news stood stanchly be­hind their cho­sen sis­ters and voiced no un­cer­tain ap­proval of this tardy ac­knowl­edg­ment of woman’s place in re­li­gious work. And this lib­er­a­tion of women, giv­ing them due rec­og­ni­tion, was prac­ticed by the apos­tles im­me­di­ately af­ter the Mas­ter’s de­par­ture, al­beit they fell back to the olden cus­toms in sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions. Through­out the early days of the Chris­tian church women teach­ers and min­is­ters were called dea­conesses and were ac­corded gen­eral rec­og­ni­tion. But Paul, de­spite the fact that he con­ceded all this in the­ory, never re­ally in­cor­po­rated it into his own at­ti­tude and per­son­ally found it dif­fi­cult to carry out in prac­tice.