Women of the Gospels

Luke's Gospel begins with two women. one young, one advancing in years.  Elizabeth is first. She is barren and had no children. But her husband is told by an angel that she will bear a son, who will be John the Baptist, the precursor of Christ. Elizabeth is a significant character, as she has a role in God's scheme of things, but she and Zechariah fade out of the story when Mary arrives to see her. Elizabeth is a minor character in the story, a woman who reflects the Old Testament, whose ending is presaged in the ministry of John. Elizabeth meets the pregnant Mary and the child in her womb leaps for joy. If we are looking for significant female characters we will have to look beyond Elizabeth.

But we need not look far. As Chapter 2 of Luke's Gospel recounts the story of the annunciation of Jesus, which is found in chapter 2 of Luke's Gospel. When you read it let your imagination get to work. Mary is a young virgin visited by an archangel.Gabriel This is an awesome experience. The puzzled young woman asks how she, a virgin, is to become mother of the messiah. Imagine a girl about fourteen or fifteen years old, the normal age for a girl to wed in that period. She is confronted by not merely an angel, but an archangel bearing a message that she, yet a virgin  was to bear a child. The child will be holy and will be the  Son of God, the messiah.. We do not know what the experience was like. Did Gabriel's awesome presence fill the room? But what filled Mary was the Holy Spirit.Mar'y had become the receptacle for God's presence,. She had become the ark of the covenant. She had been given an awesome vocation.Thenceforward.  Mary remains a presence in Jesus" life: finding the young Jesus in the temple, getting Jesus to work as miracle at Cana and being present at the crucifixion. She was possibly one of the women who visited the tomb and found it empty.

Elizabeth  is a figure less significant than Mary. She was of the priestly  family of Aaron and a kinswoman of Mary, which suggests that Mary was of priestly family too. This casts doubt on the long trumpeted claim that Mary was of the family of David. But we,have insufficient  information to resolve this claim. We do know that Mary visited Elizabeth's family. But Jewish women would not leave their villages unaccompanied, so Mary would have needed an escort. But if Mary's father was a priest he would have spent an annual tour of duty in Jerusalem.he could have taken Mary with him. That solves the transport problems. It also  explains where Mary stayed during . She would have stayed with her kinswoman. 

Certain other women turn up in the Jesus' story. They seem to have been part of the. early church, which was a community centred on Jesus.  We do not know how many of the early church were women, but it has been suggested that when Jesus sent out the 72 disciples to spread the message the disciples would have been in male female pairs. Although in Jewish society women were not permitted to preach, the females in these pairs would have communicated with women when possible.

Mary Magdalene was an important figure in  early community, but we know little about her. A long-enduring error in the church is to confuse four separate women: Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha [herself one of the early community,]【 but like her sister, not a travelling one] was one such woman, and the other two included the woman taken in adultery and the sinful woman of Luke's Gospel. The latter  two women  have minor roles and then fade out of the story.. Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward, possibly a widow was among the women who visited Jesus' tomb, as was Mary wife of Cleopas. We know from the writings of Eusebius, a historian who recorded some historical information about Jesus' family, that St Joseph had a brother called Cleophas. This makes his wife Jesus' aunt. Cleophas turns up in the final chapter of Luke's Gospel, when he is named as one of the two travelers who encounter Jesus on the road to Emmaus. along with his son, probably Simeon, later to become bishop of Jerusalem

Not a lot is recorded of these women. The woman who anointed Jesus with a jar of Nard, an expensive perfume, ,is likely to have been Mary of Bethany,who seems to come from a family with plenty of money, as they seem to have been from a family who had property.  Some Christian thinkers are of the opinion that Martha and Mary of Bethany, along with their brother Lazarus . were the children of Joseph of Arimathea, who was a scholarly member of the Sanhedrin, council, who in John 3 came to visit Jesus secretly at night to inquire about his identity and mission. But this claim is neither verified nor at this stage of scholarship verifiable. It might be correct, but we do not know. 

Mary Magdalen is a mystery. She was not a woman of ill-repute, as I have said. Nor did she come from the town of Magdala, which only acquired the name some years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Gnostic sources makea great deal of the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalen. Some Gnostics claimed that .jesus had married Mary but thereis no Gospel support for this belief. Certainly, Jesus included her among the women whom he taught. Mary seems to have been an emotional person who was very attached to Jesus. On resurrection day she was one of the women who visited the tomb to anointed and mourn Jesus, and this made her the first witness to the resurrection and the apostle to the apostles. 

Women from outside the 120 strong group are present in brief roles. One is in John's Gospel, the woman at the well. She was collecting water on her own, a sign that she was at odds with the other women of the town, an outsider. The town was populated by Samaritans, a community that Jews called outcasts. She would not have expected to speak to a Jewish male, but Jesus speaks to her and addresses her and stays in the Samaritan townsfolk, a sign that he wanted to break down barriers of religion. 

Breaking barriers was central to Jesus' mission, but not all the breaking barriers was easy. The case of jesus not immediately responding to an importunate Canaanite woman who had a sick daughter, Jesus initially refused to heal the girl, but the  woman, who may have thought Jesus a magician, persisted. Jesus says something that seems strange, that the children's food should not be given to the dogs, he was alluding to the Jewish tradition of calling gentiles dogs, but he modifies the terim by replacing the word dogs for housedogs, pets. The woman picks up on the  shift of meaning implicit in the dialogue and replies that  even the dogs eat the scraps. Jesus picks up on the woman's implicit admission that the healing can only be performed within the faith of Israel. She has made the faith admission that enables healing. Tough love.

The final woman of the three was the woman with a haemorrhage. This was a blood flow that probably arose from childbirth when a piece of the placenta had been left behind. She had been ritually untouchable and had been so for years, this would have meant that her confidence was shattered to such a degree that she thought that a great rabbi like Jesus would have scorned her for her uncleaned, so she sneaked up behind Jesus and touched his robe, thinking that jesus would not notice. But Jesus knew that power had gone out from him.she confessed what she had done, expecting to be told off, only for Jesus to say that her faith had saved her and to go in peace. 

Jesus showed her that he had come to save the broken and excluded, whether they were male or female. This was a sign that the messianic age had begun.