Josh Harris’s Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship was pretty formative for me back in 2000 when I read it. His 1995 short story “The Room” was also a favorite of mine (and a fascinating early example of a viral e-mail gone wrong). I did read I Kissed Dating Goodbye (1997), but it didn’t have as much of an impact on me as BMG. I didn’t think my own short courtship (engaged after 3-4 months of dating in 2003) was unwise in part because of Harris’s work. Indeed, it turns out that my own courtship was actually 2-6 weeks longer than Josh’s (!).

I was absolutely shook back in 2019 when the Harrises announced their pending divorce, and even more shook when Josh announced his departure from Christianity altogether. Shannon initially held on, but eventually made her own exit from Christianity. (And if you’re familiar with my story, you know that my own short-courtship marriage was—like the Harris marriage—doomed.)

In actuality, BMG’s message was in bad shape within a few years of its publication as several of Josh’s “successful courtship example” couples were already divorcing. At least one of his example couples had an extremely messy and ugly divorce. [1] But this was not widely known, and I don’t believe Harris ever revised the book to use different couples. This has now been completely eclipsed by the news of the author’s divorce, but these marriages that made a speed-run to failure should have been the canary in the coal mine that “courtship” doesn’t work.

Josh has said little publicly since 2019, but Shannon published a book last year on her side of things, which I’ve now caught up with. Here is my review of The Woman They Wanted by Shannon Harris (Hendrickson / Bonne), which I give ★★★☆☆ stars.

I graduated from high school in 2000, and I have been reflecting a lot lately on how much national evangelical youth leaders of the late 90s lied to my generation. Elisabeth Elliot had a terrible marriage [2], Josh Harris had no idea what he was talking about, and it’s not clear anyone was shot at Columbine for saying they believed in God [3]. Sifting the good I was taught in that era from the bad feels like cutting mold off of artisan bread.

We know now that Harris’s “courtship” proposal was a catastrophically bad idea. But what does healthier Christian dating look like? Can we teach abstinence before marriage without teaching guilt and shame? Can we teach young Christians how to spot red flags so they don’t wind up in awful marriages that they feel like they can’t get out of due to passages like Matt 19:9? And should a talented young Christian ever be rushed into the pastorate of a large church without formal theological training like Josh Harris was?

I don’t know the answers to all of these questions, but they are worth pondering.

For my own part, the second time around, I dated my future husband for about a year and a half before getting engaged, and we both understood that what we were doing was dating.

[1] I remember reading about these divorce cases years ago, but unfortunately, search engine results are now saturated with the news of Josh Harris’s own divorce, so I have been unable to find them to link to. If you are able to locate them, feel free to provide me with the links and I will update this article.

[2] See “Elisabeth Elliot, Flawed Queen of Purity Culture, and Her Disturbing Third Marriage,” by Liz Charlotte Grant, 6 February 2024. Incidentally, Elliot’s first marriage to slain missionary Jim Elliot didn’t sound that great either, and her second marriage to Addison Leitch seems to have started as a quasi-affair while Leitch’s wife was dying of cancer. Yet Elliot was the woman that purity culture evangelicals held up as proof that if you followed their counsel, God would write you a beautiful love story.

[3] Back in 1999, in the wake of Columbine, claims were made that slain students Cassie Bernall and/or Rachel Joy Scott had been asked by Dylan Klebold and/or Eric Harris whether each believed in God, and upon answering in the affirmative, the girl in question was fatally shot. A book was even released about Bernall called She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall, with evangelical leaders running an accompanying “She Said ‘Yes’!” campaign, asking students to pledge that they would take a bullet for Jesus. I personally attended an event at Creation West ’99 where a speaker was selling “She Said ‘Yes’!” t-shirts (he told us we could have the shirts for free if we did not have any money to purchase them; that promise was quickly rescinded as a mass of students showed up asking for free shirts). Columbine investigators have since shown that Bernall was fatally shot by Harris without being asked any questions at all. Rachel Joy Scott’s death is more difficult to reconstruct as, of the four parties present (Harris, Klebold, Scott, and Richard Castaldo), only a grievously wounded and paralyzed Castaldo survived. Castaldo was in a coma on the day of the shooting, and he later said he had no memory of telling anyone about an exchange on God between Scott and Harris or Klebold. In contrast, survivor Valeen Schnurr was asked about her belief in God, which she did affirm, but she was shot before being asked, and not after. You can read her story in her own words here. I heard Scott’s father Darrell Scott speak in early 2002 or 2003 and, to his credit, he was up-front about Castaldo being unsure whether Scott made a profession of faith before her death.

The post Purity Culture Doesn’t Work. Now What? appeared first on Weighted Glory.

But what even is Bluesky, and why are custom handles one of its best features?

If you haven’t heard, there’s something of a social media migration underway at the moment as many of us are abandoning eXtwitter for Bluesky. I won’t spend any time on the pros or cons of this, or why I think Bluesky may legit end up as a serious competitor to eXtwitter. Others have already posted better analyses than I ever could:

• Why I’m sick of X — and optimistic about Bluesky by Zeeshan Aleem [MSNBC]
• Bluesky is Twitter 2.0 by Alex Carter [Medium]
• A Second Academic Exodus from X? by Josh Moody [Inside Higher Ed]

Suffice to say that I’ve made the switch and deleted the X app from my phone.

In my view, one of the best features of Bluesky is that users are not bound to handles from the standard domain ([NAME].bsky.social) as they are with eXtwitter, Instagram, Threads, etc. On these other platforms, if you want a handle that’s taken—even if the account has been inactive for years—you’re stuck adding a number, underscore, or figuring out some other variation that’s available. So I’ve had to be BridgetJJ_ on a number of these platforms, because BridgetJJ is taken.

I first registered for Bluesky in February of this year, wherein I snapped up bridgetjj.bsky.social. But if you look at my account, that’s not my handle now. My handle is now bridgetjj.hist.church, which highlights my status as a budding church historian.

How did I get that as my handle?

Well, I registered the custom domain http://www.hist.church for $12/yr, created the subdomain bridgetjj.hist.church, then made that my handle. (Note: http://www.history.church was taken, and http://www.historian.church was a little long for my liking, so I went with http://www.hist.church, as the hist.church handle is the same length as the standard bsky.social handle.) There’s a process in the domain control panel wherein you add the relevant code to your domain DNS, which allows you to set any domain you own as your handle.

What’s great about this is that if there’s a handle you want that’s taken in the main bsky.social domain, you can absolutely still have that handle; you just have to pair it with a custom domain. So I don’t even have to be bridgetjj.hist.church, I could be bridget.hist.church, doc.hist.church, jenny.hist.church, bob.hist.church, etc. These handles are no doubt taken in the main bsky.social domain, but they are still open in my custom domain.

This also can function as a secondary form of identity verification without blue checkmarks. For example, the chicago.suntimes.com user on Bluesky is definitely the official Chicago Sun-Times account, because they’re using the actual Web site as their handle. But is chicagotribune.bsky.social the official Chicago Tribune, or is it a mirror / unofficial account that someone else set up? There’s no way to be sure just by glancing at the Bluesky account. The Trib would have to use some form of chicagotribune.com as their handle to be sure.

I’m posting my exact process below. For now, please know that I’m happy to share the hist.church handle with any other church historian who would like this for their Bluesky handle. You just need to send me an e-mail or direct message with the following information:

1. The handle / subdomain you would like. Examples: Calvin (calvin.hist.church), Luther (luther.hist.church), McPherson (mcpherson.hist.church), and so forth. So long as it isn’t bridgetjj or taken by someone else already, I can do it.
2. Go to https://bsky.app/settings => Change Handle => I have my own domain, then send me the string of code that I’ve highlighted here:

With that information, I can make your custom [NAME].hist.church handle, free of charge.

My process:

• I registered the http://www.hist.church domain at NameCheap. I took the private WHOIS registration but stuck with the cheap / basic DNS.
• I signed into the NameCheap dash board and clicked “Domain List” on the left side of the screen.
• I clicked the “Manage” button for “hist.church.”
• I clicked the “Advanced DNS” tab.
• I clicked “Add New Record” and selected “URL Redirect Record.” For host I put “bridgetjj” and for the redirect URL, I put http://www.weighted-glory.com. I left the type as “Unmasked.” Then I clicked save. This created the subdomain http://bridgetjj.hist.church, but when people go to that subdomain, it redirects to my personal site. (I also could have redirected it to my Bluesky profile page. Any site works, I just needed the subdomain to exist.)
• I opened https://bsky.app/settings => Change Handle => I have my own domain, which displays a page with a line of code on it that you will need. For my handle, I entered bridgetjj.hist.church.
• Back at the NameCheap DNS panel, I clicked “Add New Record” again and this time selected “TXT Record.” For host I put “_atproto” and for value I copied-and-pasted the string of text from the “Change handle => I have my own domain” section of my Bluesky profile. Then I saved it.
• I clicked “Add New Record” one more time, selected “TXT Record” one more time, but this time, for host, I put “_atproto.bridgetjj”. I then once again copied-and-pasted that string of code from Bluesky for the value, then saved.
• After this, I tabbed over to the “Change Handle => I have my own domain” page on Bluesky and clicked “Verify DNS.” Once it had verified that my custom domain with subdomain was ready, I clicked the change handle button.
• I then made another account on BlueSky and saved bridgetjj.bsky.social, in case I ever decide to go back to the basic handle. I updated that profile to tell people to go find me at
  bridgetjj.hist.church.

Note that this process does not require Web hosting. Domain registration alone is fine.

Also, you can probably adapt this process to work with most other Web registrars. You just have to figure out where the DNS panel is.

Anyhow, I really think Bluesky custom handles are underused right now and will eventually take off. Feel free to use my process if you’re technology-impaired like I am.

The post Bluesky Church Historian Handle appeared first on Weighted Glory.

I have a new article in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society: “Hebrews, She Wrote?: An Analysis of the Harnack-Hoppin Thesis of Priscillan Authorship of Hebrews.” In it, I argue that Prisca / Priscilla is not a serious contender for primary authorship of the anonymous composition that became known as Πρὸς Ἑβραίους.

You may be asking, “Well, which scholars say she is?” The answer is, not many. Priscilla was first proposed as the author of Hebrews in 1900 by German theologian and church historian Adolf von Harnack. There was a small flurry of early adopters of the theory (most notably, J. Rendel Harris) until a blistering 1911 critique by Charles Cutler Torrey. Most significantly, Torrey pointed out that the author uses a masculine self-referential participle at 11:32, which Harnack had not specifically addressed in his original article. This feature is difficult to square with a female author.

The theory was eventually taken up by Ruth Hoppin, who published a scholarly essay on the matter in 2004. She appears to have first begun advocating for Priscilla’s candidacy in 1969, authoring several iterations of a book on the matter, most recently in 2009. Apart from Hoppin, Mimi Haddad (1993) and Gilbert Bilezikian (2006 / 2017) have both advocated for the thesis, and F. F. Bruce (1990) seemed neutral on it if not receptive to it. A more mixed reception is found in a 1994 feminist essay on Hebrews by Cynthia Briggs Kittredge.

Aside from these authors, most commentators on Hebrews dismiss Priscilla’s candidacy in a footnote or a sentence or two, if they mention it at all. The most common vehicle of dismissal is the Torrey route of pointing to the masculine participle at 11:32. So, why bother to address the theory at all?

The suggestion that Priscilla wrote Hebrews is actually one that I rather like. For years I was something of a passive advocate for it (I could point you to master’s-level seminary papers wherein I called the author “he or she” in deference to the theory!). That all changed when I actually picked up a copy of Priscilla’s Letter by Hoppin (2009) and read through it. I was disappointed. There were significant problems with her methodology, documentation, and use of evidence, and I would have expected better from a book endorsed by Gilbert Bilezikian [1]. I realized that I could not recommend this theory, no matter how much I personally would like it to be true.

I began trying to explain to others that the theory has significant problems and has not been well-received by most scholars of the New Testament and early church history. The problem is, some have taken the lack of scholarly response to Hoppin’s work as evidence that the theory is robust and unassailable. [2] For example, Hoppin does address the participle at 11:32, so merely pointing to the masculine participle at 11:32 has not been an adequate response. Others seem to have not paid careful attention to her work; e. g., one scholar dismissed Hoppin by talking about expectations for Jewish women in antiquity when Hoppin spends considerable time arguing that Priscilla was a Gentile.

In sum, I concur with Kittredge that the Harnack-Hoppin thesis “deserves to be taken seriously,” and that is what I have done. [3] You may download the article on my Academia page. If there are any errors in my article or any significant primary or secondary sources that I missed, please let me know and I will document them here.

I would like to thank Bob Yarbrough at Covenant Theological Seminary, whom I knew from his previous tenure at TEDS. I composed “Hebrews, She Wrote?” with the aim of allowing Bob to publish it in the Presbyterion after turning him down for one of my other papers. You can imagine my surprise when he then turned me down—but only because he thought I could get it into a more competitive journal. Bob, I appreciate your encouragement and support, and I still owe the Presbyterion another paper. I’ll make good on my word!

I would also like to thank Dana Harris, Richard Fellows, the editors at JETS (Dorian Coover-Cox and Chuck Bumgardner), and the three anonymous reviewers at JETS, all of whom gave me some mixture of editing and/or valuable (sometimes critical) feedback that made the paper better.

Finally, my thanks to Ruth Hoppin for working so hard on expanding Harnack’s thesis. Despite my disagreement with her conclusions, Priscilla’s Hebrews candidacy is something that absolutely deserved to be explored. My fondness for the suggestion of Priscilla as the author of Hebrews will never dissipate, so if anyone thinks they can defend the thesis or improve on Hoppin’s work, I will read their arguments with great interest.

— Bridget Jack Jeffries, PhD Student (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School), June 2024

Notes, Additions & Corrections on the Article:

Addendum to Footnote 47 (p. 56): On the unlikelihood of M. Acilius Glabrio being a convert to Christianity, see Silvia Cappelletti, “The Jewish Community of Rome: From the Second Century B.C. to the Third Century C.E.” (PhD diss.), Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 113, edited by John J. Collins (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 130-32.

[1] Bilezikian endorsed and wrote the foreword to the latest iteration of Hoppin’s work. See Ruth Hoppin, Priscilla’s Letter: Finding the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Fort Bragg, CA: Lost Coast Press, 2009), ix. This was prior to the allegations of impropriety against Bilezikian, which I find credible but he denies. However, those allegations have nothing to do with his scholarship.

[2] I do not mention this in my article as it is irrelevant to my critique of her work, but Hoppin herself has repeatedly claimed that her work was suppressed in 1997 under “suspicious circumstances.” Her 2004 scholarly essay claims that she sued her former publisher and successfully obtained a $70,000 settlement over the matter. I cannot speak to the nature of her dispute with her former publisher—if her publisher breached contract, then I am happy she was made whole in court—but it is unclear to me why anyone would suppress her work instead of simply critiquing it as I have done. See Hoppin, Priscilla’s Letter (2009), x, and “The Epistle to the Hebrews Is Priscilla’s Letter,” in A Feminist Companion to the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Maria Mayo Robbins, Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings 8 (London: T & T Clark International, 2004), 147.

[3] Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, “Hebrews,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 432.

The post Hebrews, She Wrote? appeared first on Weighted Glory.

While my original post talked about a certain complementarian ex-boyfriend (a man I had been dating in 2015), what it did not mention was that I was already dating a complementarian. In March 2016, a complementarian man living in Minneapolis decided to perform a search on OKCupid for any high match for him regardless of distance. The top result was me, an egalitarian woman living in Chicago. We were a 99% match, each of us having answered hundreds of questions on the site, questions about race, religion, politics, gender, marriage, and children. We were even both raised in Alaska and had spent part of our lives in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. The only problem was—as I said in my original article—I had recently changed my OKC profile to make it very clear that I was egalitarian and that wasn’t going to change, so any complementarian gentlemen callers needed to be willing to compromise or move along.

The man looked at my profile for several days and went back and forth about contacting me. Finally, he thought, “She isn’t going to write me back anyways,” and he shot his shot.

He was incorrect. I wrote him back within the hour. The date was March 16th, 2016—the same day I turned in the defense copy of my master’s thesis and fixed my nose. I had just gotten back from the hospital when I came home to his message.

We were married on June 16th, 2018. We’ve been married over five years now.

Our courtship did involve some tough conversations on what we thought of gender and the church. I made it clear that, at a minimum, I expected us to attend a church with female deacons, and I expected us to attend a church that would nourish my gifts for teaching. I also made it clear that if I ever preached or served as an elder, pastor, deacon, or chaplain, I expected him to be supportive. Finally, I made sure he understood his only authority over me was persuasion, that I was not going to look to him as the sole leader of our home, and that we needed to work through disagreements with conversation and reason. He was welcome to believe whatever he wanted about men and women and gender roles, so long as he was willing to make some compromises about how we ran our family and where we went to church.

It’s been seven years since we first said “yes” to dating across the comp-egal divide and we are both deliriously happy. My husband no longer identifies as a complementarian, but I believe we would be making this marriage work even if he did. I’m glad I took my own advice and was open to dating a complementarian.

Original Post — 09/16/2016

Complementarian pastor and theologian John Piper tackled this issue earlier this year, and for once, I largely agree with him. It is a bad idea for an egalitarian and a complementarian who are firmly wedded to their ideals to date.

This is just good advice for religious dating in general—don’t date someone who disagrees with you on things that mean a lot to you (and that’s going to be a different list for every person)—but it especially applies to views on gender roles.

How is there not supposed to be resentment in a relationship when he thinks she should submit to his leadership and she thinks Ephesians five wives should only exist in dark corners of the modern world along with Ephesian six slaves? (I am, for the time being, assuming a male complementarian and a female egalitarian; I’ll get to the opposite at the end of this post.)

Somebody then wrote in to ask, what should you do if you’re a complementarian who is already married to an egalitarian?

On this account, Piper’s response is far less useful. He advises for a prickly situation wherein the husband continues to exercise leadership in the home by calling Bible studies and prayer meetings with the children, leaving the wife in the uncomfortable position of having to either submit to his leadership or stew by herself somewhere else.

This bizarre scenario doesn’t answer a host of important questions in navigating a complementarian-egalitarian relationship, such as:

• What church will the family attend?
• Will it have female deacons, elders, or pastors?
• How will decisions be made?
• How will disagreements be settled?
• Is the complementarian husband going to support his egalitarian wife if she is called to serve as a deacon or elder at her local church, or if she chooses to become a pastor or chaplain?
• What happens if the egalitarian wife beats her husband to initiating and leading family Bible studies? Does he engage with her in co-leading the family meetings, or is he the one stewing with resentment elsewhere?

Egalitarians and complementarians who marry each other only have three options:

(1) compromise on their principles
(2) live and let live
(3) part ways

Either one or both of you agrees to sacrifice some of your egalitarian/complementarian principles for the sake of the marriage, or you live separately and apart in what is effectively an interfaith marriage, or it doesn’t work out.

For me, the question of whether I would date a complementarian comes down to what kind of complementarian he is.

Marriage at the Crossroads was a 2009 book by William & Aida Spencer (an egalitarian couple) and Steve & Celestia Tracy (a soft complementarian couple). There was not a lot of practical difference between how the couples ran their marriages.

As one reviewer said, “In many respects the differences between the Spencers and the Tracys appear to be more semantical than actual, as there are several shared sentiments. ‘If we didn’t know better, we would say we had read each other’s chapters because they have each similar and overlapping content’ (p. 182).”

So I could see a marriage between an egalitarian and a Craig Blomberg [1] complementarian working out with little issue—so long as the couple could come to agreement on a church home—while a marriage between an egalitarian and a Paige Patterson complementarian would be doomed.

Last year [in 2015], I wound up dating someone who eventually proved to be the equivalent of a hard complementarian.

I reached a point where I asked him, if things ever worked out, would we be able to compromise on a church to attend together given our different feelings on gender and ministry? I suggested the example of an Anglican church I knew of that had female deacons and female “pastors,” but not female elders or priests.

His response? “I am NOT going to compromise on God’s standards!” I realized there was no way I was going to be with someone who wouldn’t attend church with me or be fully supportive of me if I ever became an elder, a deacon, or a chaplain, and this became one of several reasons that I ended the relationship. (This man had also been sexually active with every girlfriend he had ever had prior to me, while I had always insisted on saving sex for marriage. It grieved me that his interpretation of 1 Tim 2:12 somehow meant more to him than what’s plainly written in 1 Cor 6:18-20.)

My advice to egalitarians who are debating whether to date a complementarian is to know and be up-front about their deal-breakers. I wound up changing my profile on the dating site to be very specific about my feelings on gender and how I wouldn’t date Christians who were strong believers in traditional gender roles.

I have only been addressing the scenario of a female egalitarian dating a male complementarian. What about the opposite, a male egalitarian dating a female complementarian?

I think this is potentially less of an issue because they have a loophole: so long as they mutually agree that the husband is going to lead, and the husband is willing to take the lead, neither one is compromising his/her principles.

There may still be some disagreement about where the couple goes to church and whether the church will have female deacons, elders and pastors, but if the female partner is a good complementarian, shouldn’t she be submitting to her husband’s desire to attend an egalitarian church? Problem solved.

[1] With apologies to Craig Blomberg, who probably never expected to be made into a dating-adjacent term!

The post Dating a Complementarian?: A Repost and Retrospective appeared first on Weighted Glory.

As part of my doctoral studies, I took an interdisciplinary class in Spring 2022 wherein the main task for us students was to write a paper on one of the Royal Psalms (2, 20-21, 45, 47, 72, 93, 97, 99, 101, 110, 132), but within our respective disciplines. The class had eleven PhD/THS students (3 Old Testament, 4 New Testament, 2 Systematic Theology, 2 Church History) and four professors from the four disciplines (Eric J. Tully — Old Testament, Dana M. Harris — New Testament, David J. Luy — Systematic Theology, Scott M. Manetsch — Church History). I wound up writing a paper on the reception history of Ps 45 (Ps 44 in the LXX).

A version of the paper was presented at the Midwestern Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society on March 19th, 2022 as “The Pastor-Theologian and the Princess Bride: A History of Ps 45.” After feedback I narrowed the paper down to just discussion of Ambrose, Jerome, and John Chrysostom, with a bit of Ps.-Ambrose thrown in for good measure, then re-titled the paper. Note that David G. Hunter had already written an excellent essay on Ps 45 in the work of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, and this paper builds on that, but in new directions. After the class, Dr. Harris (who edits the Trinity Journal) invited me to submit the paper to the journal, where it was accepted.

Ps 45 is pretty much the only psalm that mentions women, yet it has been virtually ignored by feminists. It has also been virtually ignored in the life and worship of the church. [1] I hope my article suggests some remedies to both of these problems, if small ones.

Since writing the article, I came across this interesting comment in the work of Protestant Reformer Katharina Schütz Zell:

“From my mother’s womb He has chosen me and said to me through His Spirit, ‘Hear, daughter, look on this; forget your father’s people and house, so the king will desire your beauty, for He is your Lord and you should adore Him’ [cf. Ps 45:10-11]. Oh, these words! I have thought about them so much, and because of that I have forgotten the whole world and adored Jesus Christ my Lord and God [cf. Jn 20:28]. By His grace I hope to do that to the end.” (loc 3017-3021)

Zell was an eloquent woman who preached publicly, refuted errors boldly, and clearly considered herself a pastor, albeit an unordained one. I wonder now how many other women in church history thought of Ps 45:10-11 as part of their calling to ministry.

You can access my article for free at Academia. Feel free to use the comments here for thoughts on or corrections to my article.

[1] You all know that I love Mormon studies, but as far as I can tell, Ps 45 has also been ignored by Mormons, this despite it arguably having both polygamy and deification in it!

Bowen, Nancy R. “A Fairytale Wedding?: A Feminist Intertextual Reading of Psalm 45.” Pages 53–71 in A God So Near: Essays on Old Testament Theology in Honor of Patrick D. Miller. Edited by Brent A. Strawn and Nancy R. Bowen. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003.

Charry, Ellen T. Psalms 1-50: Sighs and Songs of Israel. Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2015.

Hunter, David G. “The Virgin, the Bride and the Church: Reading Psalm 45 in Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine.” Pages 149–74 in The Harp of Prophecy: Early Christian Interpretation of the Psalms. Edited by Brian E. Daley, S. J. and Paul Kolbet R. Vol. 20. Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015.

Jeffries, Bridget Jack. “The Consecrated Virgin and the Princess Bride: Historical Applications of Ps 45 to Women in Education and Ministry.” Trinity Journal 44 no. 1 (2023): 21-36.

Schütz Zell, Katharina. “To Sir Caspar Schwenckfeld, My Gracious Dear Sir and Old Friend: to His Own Hands.” In Church Mother: The Writings of a Protestant Reformer in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Edited and Translated by Elsie McKee. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Kindle ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

The post The Consecrated Virgin and the Princess Bride appeared first on Weighted Glory.

One of the requirements for the class was that we select a woman in church history not in the class readings and do a presentation on her, to introduce the class to more women whom we haven’t had time to read. The presentation is open-ended; we’re welcome to do a painting, a poem, a song, etc. Students have given some very interesting presentations on Mary of Egypt (c. 344–c. 421), Héloïse (c. 1100–c. 1164), Christiana Tsai (1890–1984), Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957), and Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964), among others.

I chose to do my presentation on Walatta-Petros (1592–1642), an Ethiopian Orthodox saint and resistance leader who founded and served as abbess over seven monasteries and fought the attempted colonization and conversion of Ethiopia by Portuguese and Spanish Jesuits. A hagiography of her was written just thirty years after her death by one of her male disciples, “sinner and transgressor” Galawdewos. It has only been made available in English in 2015 by Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner. A pared-down student edition with just Galawdewos’s text and an introduction by Belcher was made available in 2018.

The Life of Walatta-Petros is a fascinating text that presents its subject as a powerful, prophetic, apostolic, even quasi-messianic woman. Her birth is foretold to her father by a monk:

“I have seen a great vision with a bright sun dwelling in the womb of your wife . . . A beautiful daughter who will shine like the sun to the ends of the world will be born to you. She will be a guide for the blind of heart, and the kings of the earth and the bishops will bow to her. From the four corners of the world, many people will assemble around her and become one community—people pleasing God.” (6-7)

Her father is so pleased at her birth that he insists on holding her immediately despite the “unclean” nature of childbirth:

“Therefore, [her father] went happily and exultantly into the house of childbed, even though he was a great lord and it was not appropriate for him to enter into such a house. . . . The midwife said to him, ‘How can you hold and kiss a newborn who is all covered in blood?’ He responded, ‘Give her to me! Truly, there is no unclean blood or filth on this daughter of mine.’ . . . On account of all this, we consider blessed Walatta-Petros’s father and mother who brought forth for us this blessed and holy mother through whom we have found salvation.” (7–8)

The text repeatedly connects Walatta-Petros (whose name means “Daughter of Peter”) to male authority figures in the Bible such as Moses, Elijah, Peter, or Paul, thus suggesting that she is a prophet or apostle of sorts. For example:

“As Paul says, ‘You all are the house of the Lord.’ Just as the Lord gave Peter the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, so he likewise gave to Walatta-Petros that those who follow her will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. And as the Lord said three times to Peter, ‘Tend my sheep,’ so to her likewise he conferred the tending of his sheep in the pasture of meritorious spiritual struggle.” (8–9)

“She truly was worthy of this name of Walatta-Petros since the son of a king becomes a king and the son of a priest becomes a priest; and just as Peter became the head of the apostles, she likewise became the head of all religious teachers. Just as Peter could kill and resurrect through his authority, she likewise could kill and resurrect. She became a god by grace, as scripture says, ‘You are gods, all of you are children of the Most High.’ O glory, glory of such dimensions! O sublimity, sublimity of such greatness! While she was a human being like us, to her it was given to be a god.” (9)

Obviously, there is some Eastern Orthodox theosis / deification at play here.

The text touches on a number of issues women typically struggle with. One of these is the struggle for beauty:

“But the outer beauty of her appearance was surpassed by the inner beauty of her mind. Listen, my loved ones: What should make us boastful of the beauty of our appearance, which changes and decays? Is a human being justified before God by his beautiful appearance, or damned by his ugly aspect? . . . God, by contrast, favored Leah—who was despised because she was ugly in appearance and had bleary eyes—by opening her womb, and so she gave birth to Judah from whose seed Christ was born . . . Because of this, we should not boast about the beauty of our looks, nor need we be ashamed of the ugliness of our appearance, since that which is perishable should clothe itself with that which is imperishable.” (9–10)

Walatta-Petros was married off young to the king’s right-hand man, Malkiya-Kristos. She had three children with him, but none survived. She soon fell into conflict with her husband when he converted to “the filthy faith of the Europeans” alongside King Susinyos. Belcher explains that a number of Ethiopian court members and officials converted for political reasons, but their wives and daughters would not submit to them and refused to follow them, so that the Ethiopian resistance to European colonization was female-led. (eBook loc 70)

At age 24, while her husband was away on a military campaign, Walatta-Petros ran away from him to become a nun. He pursued her. When it became clear she would fall into his hands again, she used scriptural texts to liken her situation to marital rape: “God’s will be done! He can save me; to him nothing is impossible. He who saved Sarah from the hands of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, and from the hands of Abimelech, king of Gerara, he will also save me. He who saved Susanna from the hands of the old men, he will also save me.” (17) Just for comparison, marital rape was not a crime in all 50 United States until July 5, 1993, yet Walatta-Petros knew all the way back in the 17^th century that it was wrong.

Her husband was abusive to her upon catching up to her (18) and she was forced to reconcile, but the reconciliation was short-lived. The king had the Ethiopian Orthodox patriarch murdered and sent his vestment to Malkiya-Kristos as a reward. Walatta-Petros was furious. She began withholding sex from her husband until he relented and let her go, this time for good.

She developed a close friendship with a woman named Eheta-Kristos who also left a husband and daughter to become a nun: “As soon as our holy Mother Walatta-Petros and Eheta-Kristos saw each other from afar, love was infused into both their hearts, love for each other, and, approaching, they exchanged the kiss of greeting. Then they sat down and told each other stories about the workings of God. There was no fear or mistrust between them. They were like people who had known each other beforehand because the Holy Spirit united them.” (26)

In 1622, Emperor Susinyos I declared Roman Catholicism the official religion of the Ethiopian empire. Walatta-Petros objected to the “filthy faith of the Europeans” and especially the hypostatic union:

“After this, King Susinyos began to make changes and established the filthy faith of the Europeans, Catholicism, which says: Christ has two natures, even after he, in his divine and human natures, became one and he became the perfect human being. Thereby, Susinyos repudiated the holy faith of Alexandria, which says as follows: Christ became the perfect human being; he is not split or divided in anything he does; he is one Son. In him there is only one aspect, one essence, and one divine nature, namely, that of God the Logos.” (29)

Because of Walatta-Petros’s work in leading the resistance, the king wanted to kill her “or at least [cut off] her breasts” (34). Her husband, who still loved her, intervened and proposed exile instead, to which the king agreed. On her way out to exile, her boat was attacked by a hippo, but Walatta-Petros remained calm and calmed her disciples. The hippo eventually fled. (36)

She later received a visit from Jesus Christ, who told her of the imprisonment she was about to suffer, the people she would convert, and the great things she would do. She told him, “How will I be able to save others, I who cannot save myself? Am I not mud, and a pit of filthy sludge?” Jesus responded, “Even mud, when it is mixed with straw, becomes strong and enduring and can hold grain. You, too, I will make likewise strong.” (45)

She continued to make trouble for the king from exile, so he captured her and planned to kill her again. And again, her husband intervened and suggested she be forced to listen to Roman Catholic preaching and teaching instead, in hopes that she would convert.

“Then they began to try to persuade her with many clever tricks to abandon the true faith of the Orthodox pope Dioscoros and adopt the filthy faith of the Catholic pope. . . . Three renowned European false teachers came to her and debated with her about their filthy faith, which says, ‘Christ still has two natures after the ineffable union of his humanity and divinity.’ She argued with them, defeated them, and embarrassed them. . . . Rather, she laughed and made fun of them.” (52–53)

Walatta-Petros was sent to be imprisoned and tortured for three years by the very unfortunately-named “Black man.” He tortured her, tried to seduce her, then tried to rape her. “Then Satan entered into the heart of the Black man so that he laid his eyes on Walatta-Petros: he began to make advances toward her, as men do with women. When she rejected him, he used a cord to tie her back to the house post and secured her in that position.” He tried to burn her but was unable to start the fire. Later, when he had it in mind to sexually assault her, an angel with a drawn sword protected her (57–58). For her own part, Walatta-Petros was kind to the Black man and eventually converted him with her kindness (61–62).

After being released, she traveled around, founding seven monasteries and performing miracles. Eventually her resistance was successful and the king converted back to Orthodoxy, while Roman Catholicism was mostly vanquished from the land.

With the patriarch still not replaced, Walatta-Petros attempted to appoint a man deacon in order to administer the Eucharist, but he questioned her authority.

“Furthermore, he disdained her and held her in contempt, saying in his heart, but not with his mouth, ‘What is it with this woman who gives me orders, acting as if she were a spiritual leader or a monastic superior? Does not scripture say to her, {We do not allow a woman to teach, nor may she exercise authority over a man?}’” (80–81)

Walatta-Petros responded by killing him (with prayer) and resurrecting him to teach him a lesson, whereupon he was a changed man. Galawdewos explains:

“So it is not acceptable for people to speak ill of and abuse those whom God has set up as leaders and appointed, in keeping with what scripture says: ‘Do not speak ill of your people’s leader.’ In the past, when Miriam and Aaron had secretly spoken ill of and abused Moses, leprosy sores had appeared on Miriam and she had been expelled from the camp of the Israelites for seven days until they had confessed with their mouths and openly declared their sins, with Aaron saying to Moses, ‘We have sinned because we have spoken ill of God. Please, pray for her so that this leprosy disappears from her.’ So Moses prayed for Miriam, and she was healed. This story of [this man] is similar.” (83)

Another example of men challenging her authority:

“Some resentful theologians arose, however, giving vent to their resentment against our holy Mother Walatta-Petros with satanic zeal when they saw that all the world followed her, that she was greater than and superior to them, and that they ranked below her. . . . Therefore, they said to her, ‘Is there a verse in the scriptures that states that a woman, even though she is a woman, can be a religious leader and teacher? This is something that scripture forbids to a woman when it says to her, {Regarding a woman, we do not allow her to teach. She may not exercise authority over a man.}’ With this argument, they wanted to make Walatta-Petros quit—but they did not succeed. . . . At that point, Father Fatla-Sillasé, the teacher of the entire world, said to them, ‘Did God not raise her up for our chastisement because we have become corrupt, so that God appointed her and gave our leadership role to her, while dismissing us? For this reason, you will not be able to make her quit. It is just as Gamaliel said in Acts, {Leave these men alone and do not harm them. If what they put forward is of man, it will pass and come to naught. But if instead it is from God, you will not be able to make them quit. Do not be like people who quarrel with God.}’ . . . In the same way also, the resentful theologians were unable to make our holy Mother Walatta-Petros quit because God had authorized her. If her teaching had not been from God, her community would not have held up until now, but would quickly have disappeared. Through its continued existence, it is evident that her community is from God.” (109–10)

I find it interesting that Father Fatla-Sillasé’s defense of Walatta-Petros was virtually identical to the explanation many complementarians offer for Deborah (Jdg 4), that she was only called to leadership and authority because “no worthy men” could be found. In this case, the men were unworthy because of their capitulation to Roman Catholicism, so Walatta-Petros was called. The text does not challenge the idea that 1 Tim 2:12 forbids women from teaching, preaching, or exercising authority; it simply insists that special exceptions can exist.

One of the miracles Jesus granted Walatta-Petros was early menopause (74–75). Like I said, this text deals with a surprising number of issues that impact women: childbirth, beauty, sexual assault, divorce, and friendships between women. There is also an entire chapter wherein Walatta-Petros condemned other nuns for lesbian relationships (Chapter 86, “Our Mother Sees Nuns Lusting After Each Other”).

After founding and leading seven monastic communities of both men and women with no male authority figure directly over her, Walatta-Petros prepared to die at the age of 50. She appointed Eheta-Kristos as her successor, with the text likening this to Elijah appointing Elisha (133–34). She died on November 23^rd, 1642, and the text claims there were 27 miracles following her death through the end of the year. Ethiopia stands as one of the few non-European countries that was never colonized by Europe, in part thanks to Walatta-Petros’s resistance.

Belcher states The Life of Walatta-Petros is the earliest book-length biography of an African woman, and the only one written from an African perspective. For my own part, I found the text remarkable. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything like it in church history in terms of its thorough presentation of a woman as an apostle, prophet, and authority figure over both women and men. Acts of Thecla is somewhat similar, but only a few chapters long, and Thecla primarily ministers to women.

Many figures in church history are painted with their right hand raised in a teaching gesture, but this can also symbolize the hypostatic union, which Walatta-Petros rejected. She did not disagree that Christ is both fully divine and fully human, but the Ethiopian Orthodox church has a different take on how that works. In one of the paintings of her, she has the two fingers on her left hand raised in rebuke of the Roman Catholic priests trying to convert her, so I have painted her with the left hand raised.

(Also, I am NOT a painter. This is only the fourth painting I have ever done, and the first time I have tried to paint a real, specific human. She deserves to be painted by a far more skilled hand than mine.)

Anyhow, I hope you’ll give this fascinating account a read!

UPDATE: As of March 2024, I have published a short article on Walatta-Petros with Mutuality. You can download that from my Academia page here.

—————-

Galawdewos. The Life of Walatta-Petros: A Seventeenth Century Biography of an African Woman, Concise Edition. Translated and edited by Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner. Kindle edition. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

The post Walatta-Petros: An Apostolic Ethiopian Saint appeared first on Weighted Glory.

Christians have been explaining away the uncomfortable truth of female leadership in the Scriptures for centuries.

Deborah (Judges 4:4) was only leading Israel because “there were no worthy men available.”

Phoebe (Romans 16:1-2) was just a “helper” and “servant,” not a “patron” and “deacon.”

The female pastor whom John writes to in 2 John (v. 1) and the other female pastor who was with him (v. 13) are “just metaphors for local churches,” not actual women.

And if all else fails, say that the female leader was actually a man. Even if the text repeatedly calls her “woman” or she has an incredibly common, feminine name.

These five New Testament women were all said to be men at some point in church history, and their involuntary gender reassignment probably has everything to do with their status as leaders and teachers in the early church.

Euodia and Syntyche (Philippians 4:2-3)

Early in the fourth chapter of Philippians, Paul makes an appeal to two women named Euodia (Εὐοδία) and Syntyche (Συντύχη) to resolve their apparent differences. We know that these were both women specifically because, not only are their names feminine, but Paul refers to them in v. 3 as αὐταῖς (autais) and αἵτινες (hautines), which are feminine plural pronouns. If Paul had implored either two men or a man and a woman together, he would have used the masculine plural pronouns, αὐτοῖς (autois) and οἵτινες (hoitines).

Numerous commentators have noted that the entire letter to the Philippians—with its emphasis on spiritual maturity, humility, and unity–seems to build intentionally towards this plea for the women to be reconciled to one another. This is strange if the women are simply members of the congregation (even influential ones), for if they were under the authority of a local pastor or team of elders, why didn’t Paul simply appeal to the elders to settle their dispute for them? He does ask one man, a “true companion” (more on him at the end of this article), to help the women, but the plea is for collaboration, not for the exercise of authority.

The oddness of Paul’s appeal to these women has lead some to give the women the 2 John treatment and insist that they were not individuals but abstractions of factions within the church at Philippi, with Euodia representing Jews and Syntyche representing Gentiles. But the peculiarity of the passage evaporates when one considers that Euodia and Syntyche were the leaders of the congregation(s). Hence the fifth century church father John Chrysostom noted, “It seems to me that these women were the head (κεφάλαιον) of the church which was at Philippi.” [1]

It is probably no coincidence, then, that both women have had their genders switched to “male” repeatedly. J. H. Michael summarizes:

In the [King James Version] [Euodia] appears as the name of a man—“Euodias.” Theodore of Mopsuestia (circa 350 – 428) tells of some who took the second of the two to be a man’s name—Syntyches. He also mentions the fact that some held that Syntyches was the husband of Euodia and that he was none other than the jailer who figures in the story of Acts 16. [2] The versions of [William] Tyndale and [Thomas] Cranmer also make the second a man’s name. [Hugo] Grotius took both persons to be men. Neither Euodias nor Syntyches has been found as the name of a man, whereas Euodia and Syntyche, as names of women, are common in inscriptions . . . [3]

While the understanding of Euodia and Syntyche as women is now well-known, the understanding of their prominence as leaders of the Philippian church is not. And that needs to change.

Nympha (Colossians 4:15)

Nympha (Νύμφα / Νύμφαν) was a house church leader greeted by Paul in his epistle to the Colossians. Those who had churches meeting in their homes most likely assumed a pastoral role of some kind, and Nympha is one of several women in the New Testament who is given this designation. Paul specifically mentions that the church meets in her (αὐτῆς) house.

Yet this reference to a female house church leader seems to have made some scribes uncomfortable; a number of manuscripts witness Νυμφᾶν (the circumflex accent making the name the masculine Nymphas) and his (αυτου) house. Others witness the masculine plural “their” (αυτων) house. The King James Version and other early English translations (Darby, Douay-Rheims, Geneva Bible, Young’s, etc.) favored Nymphas and spoke of the church meeting in his house. Thankfully, modern-day textual criticism has corrected this and made Nympha a woman again in most newer translations.

When commentators thought Nympha was a man, they readily described “him” as the leader of a household church. John Eadie (1884) described a masculine Nympha as “worthy of distinction” because the church met in “his” house. [4] Finding the idea of a female church leader ludicrous, John Davenant (1832) lamented that Ambrosiaster, in his commentary on Colossians, had “transformed this pious and renowned man into a woman” and insisted that it must be the error of “some ignorant and lazy Monk” who interpolated the feminine into Ambrosiaster’s text. He went on to describe Nympha as a “distinguished man” and postulated that “the congregation of the faithful was accustomed to assemble in [Nympha’s] house . . . because he instructed all his domestics piously and in a Christian-like manner, and trained them daily in religious exercises.” [5]

Let’s keep Davenant’s understanding of Nympha’s church leadership along with her restored gender. It’s the non-ludicrous thing to do.

For more on Nympha, see Marg Mowczko’s excellent article, “Nympha: A House Church Leader in the Lycus Valley (Colossians 4:15).”

Junia (Romans 16:7)

I’ve written a lot about Junia elsewhere. To make a long story short: Paul calls this woman an “apostle” in Romans 16:7. We know it’s a woman because there are no examples of men named “Junia” from the first century, nor are there any examples of men named “Junianus” being nicknamed “Junia,” nor are there any confirmed examples of Jewish men named “Yehunni” (itself a rare name) having their names transliterated into Greek as “Junia.” The only first century “Junia”-s that we know about are women, and we know of them in abundance.

All of the early church fathers who commented on the passage also said Junia was a woman, including Origen and John Chrysostom.

The first reference to a masculine Junia is from the Index Discipulorum, a document purporting to list the seventy disciples whom Christ commissioned (Luke 10:1ff) that began circulating around the fifth or sixth century (sometimes improperly attributed to Epiphanius of Salamis). Junia eventually came to be known almost exclusively as a man, even though the weight of ancient evidence overwhelmingly favored a feminine reading.

Christians who oppose the ordination of women really, really don’t want a female apostle in the Bible, so they’ve been trying hard to keep the myth of a male Junia alive and well. For example, the ESV translation still footnotes “Junias” as an option. It doesn’t footnote “Nymphas,” even though we have fourth century manuscript evidence of a masculine “Nymphas” and nowhere near such early manuscript evidence for “Junias.”

But Jesus promised that not one iota would be stricken from His word—and Junia’s identity as a woman is here to stay.

Priscilla (Acts 18:2, 18, 19, 26; Romans 16:3; 1 Cor. 16:19; 2 Tim. 4:19)

Yes, that’s right—even a woman who is specifically called a “woman” (γυναῖκα – gunaika, Acts 18:2) and mentioned by name in the New Testament more times than some of the Twelve isn’t safe from having her gender reassigned. The copy of the Index Discipulorum which makes Junia into a man also makes Priscilla into a man—and one who was a bishop of a church nowhere near her husband’s church.

The discomfort with Priscilla probably has something to do with her eminence in teaching and church planting. Though ancient convention dictated that a man’s name usually came before his wife’s, Priscilla is mentioned before her husband Aquila five out of seven times, suggesting that she was the more prominent of the missionary couple. She instructed Apollos in the gospel (Acts 18:26), was a house church leader in Ephesus, and some have speculated that she may have written the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Small wonder that Priscilla challenges those with a narrow view of women’s roles in the Church.

But were any men turned into women?

At least one. The aforementioned “true companion” of Philippians 4:3 is an esoteric figure. The Greek word for “yokefellow” or “companion” is a vocative substantive adjective that is, elsewhere, heavily associated with marriage. This led Clement of Alexandria to conclude that the “companion” was Paul’s wife, Paul having apparently married since his declaration of bachelorhood in 1 Corinthians 7:7. [6]

The trouble with this is that the modifier of σύζυγε (syzyge) is γνήσιε (gnēsie), and this adjective is undoubtedly masculine. Had Paul been addressing a woman, he’d have written γνήσια (gnēsia) σύζυγε. So unless Paul was their Peter Buttigieg, this σύζυγε does not mean “marital partner.”

Some have suggested that “Syzygus” is simply the man’s name, but “Syzygus” was not a known proper name for a man.

The identity of the σύζυγε is a mystery that will probably never be solved in this life. But the role of women in the church isn’t a mystery. The Word of God shows that women were called to varied and diverse leadership positions over both men and women.

And altering Scripture to make those women into men will not erase God’s truth.

—

[1] Homilies on Philippians 13, translation mine.

[2] Though I found many scholarly articles, commentaries, and entries which attribute this account to Theodore Mopsuestia, none of them cites the original reference, and I was unable to locate it. Mopsuestia’s commentary on Philippians correctly names both women as women (see Theodore of Mopsuestia: Commentary on the Minor Pauline Epistles, trans. by Rowan A. Greer [Atlanta, Ga.: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010], 351), but it is possible he related this theory elsewhere. If anyone knows the reference, please send it to me.

[3] J. Hugh Michael, The Epistle of Paul to the Philippians (Seattle, Wa.: Digital Publishing, 2018; originally published by Harper and Brothers in 1928), eBook Location 4186.

[4] John Eadie, A Commentary on the Greek Text of the Epistle of Paul to the Colossians (Edinburgh: T. T. Clark, 1884), 290.

[5] John Davenant, An Exposition of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Colossians, Vol. 2 (London: Hamilton & Adams, 1832), 298-299.

[6] Stromata 3.6.53.

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