ArticleBlog | Remembering the women disciples of Jesus
Remembering the women disciples of Jesus
Author: Andy PeckPost Date: 23.06.22
In the gospel, the women disciples of Jesus play a major role in witnessing to his death, burial, the empty tomb and his resurrection. But the accounts we have are not exactly the same. Reading them carefully, it is striking that only in one gospel is there mention of the women experiencing ‘joy’ (Greek: chara). This is in the Gospel of Matthew.
Part One RESURRECTION ACCOUNT
The feminist historian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza devised a reading strategy that asks us to think about why a story is told in the way it is, before we try to uncover the real women.
In the resurrection story [Matthew 28:1 20], two women came to the tomb of Jesus early on Easter Sunday. They were Mary Magdalene and the ‘other Mary’ (the mother of James and Joseph). An angel had rolled the stone away and was now sitting on it. Guards there to keep watch fainted, as dead men, out of fear. But the women did not faint. The angel said to them, ‘Don’t be afraid. I know you’re looking for Jesus who’s been crucified, but he’s not here. He has risen, just as he said he would. Come over here and see the place where he was lying, and then quickly tell his disciples that he’s risen from the dead and, look, he’s going ahead of you to Galilee. There you’ll see him. There you are, I’ve told you!’
So the women ‘left the tomb quickly’ with ‘fear and great joy’ and ran to report all this to his disciples. On the way, incredibly, they met Jesus, physically resurrected. As before, they did not faint, but rather ‘they took hold of his feet and lay down before him’. He too said, ‘Don’t be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to leave for Galilee, and there they’ll see me’; and they went on to do this. We are not told what happened next, because Matthew skips over the scene of them communicating the news. But the upshot was that ‘the eleven disciples’ went off to Galilee, in fact to a particular mountain that Jesus had designated, so clearly they trusted the women’s witness. When the men saw Jesus there they also lay down before him, but – oddly, and unlike the women – ‘some were doubtful’. Despite this, Jesus told them to ‘make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all I commanded you’.
As with many parts of the New Testament, the story is more complex than it seems on first sight. The first thing we have to remember is that such stories were told in communities that had strong ideas about gender – the way women and men should behave. The wider world of the first Christians was a very gendered one, in that there were acceptable things for men to do, and acceptable things for women, and transgressing gender norms was generally not considered a very good thing. Men were supposed to be more publicly active and brave than women, for example. In this wider world also, among the opponents of Jesus’ followers, it was considered that the Christian witness relied too much on women. It was believed by stupid ‘women, slaves and small children’, as the anti-Christian philosopher Celsus scoffed, and relied on the testimony of a ‘delirious woman’. So Christians had to be wary of how they presented things. Women were not allowed as witnesses in Roman courts, after all. They could not testify. They needed a man to represent them in legal cases.
