Bible Study series: Luke 8:1-3. Women were important for the earliest Jesus Movement before his resurrection, and afterwards.
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In the next link to the original chapter, I comment more and offer the Greek text. At the bottom you will find a “Summary and Conclusion” section geared toward discipleship. Check it out!
In this post, links are provided for further study.
Let’s begin.
Scripture: Luke 8:1-3
1 And so it happened afterwards that he was traveling around towns and villages, preaching and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God, and the twelve were with him 2 and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and diseases: Mary called Magdalene, from whom seven demons went out, 3 and Joanna, wife of Chuza, estate manager of Herod, and Susanna. And many other women were supporting them from their resources. (Luke 8:1-3)
Comments:
1:
Jesus was an itinerant. He had a home base in Capernaum (Mark 2:1). But he had to travel because that is why he was sent (Mark 1:38-39). Everywhere he went, he proclaimed and “preached the good news.”
Here the object of both verbs is “the kingdom of God.” Jesus did not just preach empty platitudes and interesting stories of the past, but he was ushering in the new kingdom. Some elements of the past were to be taken from the old order (universal moral laws, truths about God’s character, wisdom literature and devotional literature, prophecies, and so on), but more things are left behind (e.g. sacrifices, festivals, Sabbath keeping, harsh punishments and so on).
What Does the New Covenant Retain from the Old?
But this is a brief digression. Let’s get back to this passage.
“kingdom of God”: What is it? As noted in other verses that mention the kingdom in this commentary, the kingdom is God’s power, authority, rule, reign and sovereignty. He exerts all those things over all the universe but more specifically over the lives of people. It is his invisible realm, and throughout the Gospels Jesus is explaining and demonstrating what it looks like before their very eyes and ears. It is gradually being manifested from the realm of faith to the visible realm, but it is not political in the human sense. It is a secret kingdom because it does not enter humanity with trumpets blaring and full power and glory. This grand display will happen when Jesus comes back. In his first coming, it woos people to surrender to it. We can enter God’s kingdom by being born again (John 3:3, 5), by repenting (Matt. 4:17; Mark 1:5), by having the faith of children (Matt. 18:4; Mark 10:14-15), by being transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son whom God loves (Col. 1:13), and by seeing their own poverty and need for the kingdom (Matt. 5:3; Luke 6:20; Jas. 2:5).
It also includes the Great Reversal in Luke 1:51-53, where Mary said that Jesus and his kingdom were bringing to the world. The powerful and people of high status are to be brought low, while the humble and those of low status are to be raised up. It also fulfills the reversal in 2:34, where Simeon prophesied that Jesus was appointed for the rising and falling of many. It is the right-side-up kingdom, but upside-down from a worldly perspective. Jesus would cause the fall of the mighty and the rise of the needy, and the rich would be lowered, and the poor raised up. It is the down elevator and up elevator. Those at the top will take the down elevator, and those at the bottom will take the up elevator.
Here it is the already and not-yet. The kingdom has already come in part at his First Coming, but not yet with full manifestation and glory and power until his Second Coming.
Bible Basics about the Kingdom of God
Questions and Answers about Kingdom of God
Basic Definition of Kingdom of God
1 Introducing the Kingdom of God (begin a ten-part series)
If you want to know what he was preaching, just look at the teachings that Luke wrote down, as we just saw in Luke 6, and we are about to see here in this chapter and in future chapters. So preaching and “good-news-izing” the “kingdom of God” in this verse is a summary of what is to come in his teachings (foreshadowing), and a backwards look at what he has already taught. For me, there is no need to debate what was the content of his preaching and proclaiming the kingdom. The Gospel of Luke is clear but omits much (John 21:25).
“proclaiming the good news”: see the previous verses in Luke.
2:
This is a wonderful image of women traveling with Jesus and the twelve. They probably kept apart from the men, unless Peter’s wife and other wives of the twelve and male disciples were with them close by. No, they did not keep apart from the men because of Jesus’s kingdom, but the customs of Judaism and the larger culture. They listened to Jesus intently and kept an eye on the men. It is easy to imagine they observed needs that men just didn’t spot. Twelve men wandering around the countryside from village to town and bumping into each other needed help from women!
One Rabbi advised, “Talk not much with womankind. They said this of a man’s own wife: how much more of his fellow’s wife! Hence the sages have said: He that talks much with womankind brings evil upon himself and neglects the study of the Law and at the last will inherit Gehenna (m. ‘Abot 1:15)” (Garland, p. 347).
The fact that Jesus associated with women, in these circumstances, is remarkable. He was breaking down the barriers.
“healed”: the verb means to “make whole, restore, heal, cure, care for.” It is surprising that the verb is used for deliverance from demonic oppression, but so be it. We have to learn something from it. Maybe it is deliverance is part of healing too.
“evil spirits”: See my posts about Satan in the area of systematic theology:
Bible Basics about Satan and Demons and Victory Over Them
Bible Basics about Deliverance
Magic, Witchcraft, Sorcery, and Fortunetelling
“diseases”:
Some intellectual feminist interpreters claim that Luke insults the women when he brings up their former needs. But their claim is not true. Anyone who associates with the Renewal Movements knows how wonderful it is to be healed and delivered. (I myself had to chase away a few demonic attacks in my own life, and I still need healing in two areas of my body.) The Gospel of Luke is Charismatic. Luke 5:41 says demons came out of many, men and women, included, and cried out, “You are the Son of God!” Recall that in Luke 7:36-50, the last story just before this one, an unnamed “sinful” woman was invited into God’s house, though she had to push in uninvited into Simon the Pharisee’s house. Luke’s report about the women in vv. 2-3 is designed to encourage women of his day (and ours) that nothing disqualifies them from the kingdom.
Mary Magdalene: her name here is Maria in Greek, so Luke did not feel the requirement to keep the Hebrew name Miriam (in other places he does write “Mariam”). He intended his Gospel to go out to the provinces in a language the people could understand. That’s the way it should be when the Bible is translated into various languages around the globe today. Use names and words that people understand. There is nothing “extra-pure” about Hebrew roots, as if Gentile believers around the world are unfulfilled if they do not have these Hebrew names and fulfilled if they do in their translations. She was from Magdala, a fishing village on the western shore of the Lake of Galilee.
Short digression: why the big push towards Hebrew roots? Americans are very trendy because, probably, they have extra-leisure time. Also, many Jews live here (all right by me), and a certain percentage of them convert to the Messiah Jesus (as all of them should). When they read the Gospels, they see that Jesus was a Jew and spoke Hebrew and Aramaic (all true). But let’s not exaggerate any of this, but instead focus on bringing the gospel to the entire world, beyond the Hebrew roots. That’s the whole thrust of the New Covenant Scriptures, written as it is in a language that most people of the first century could understand—Greek—and trimming away ancient customs in the Old Testament and the massive traditions of Judaism. Slow down, Hebrew Roots Movement!
Once again see my post
What Does the New Covenant Retain from the Old?
Seven is the number of completion, so you can interpret the seven demons as a deep need for deliverance or there really were seven demons. In v. 30, below, Jesus will cast out an entire legion of demons. I take the number literally.
In any case, Luke is not interested in insulting women, but in promoting them; he did not have to mention them here, as the other synoptic Gospels do not. Most importantly, he is interested in promoting the kingdom of God as Jesus preached it, which is also for women.
3:
Luke included their names probably because he interviewed the ones who were still alive. In Acts 21:17 Paul and his team, including Luke, since he used the pronoun “we,” arrived in Jerusalem. Luke with his writing kit followed Paul around, but he must have gone off on his own to investigate and interview the Messianic Jews in the capital and those living in Judea, who could supply him with information about Jesus’s ministry. Why not interview Susanna and Joanna and Mary Magdalene and the many others? He named them because he probably met them. In contrast, Mark did not include their names (15:41). He may have known of them through his mother Mary (Acts 12:12), but never interviewed them about their following Jesus from Galilee. (Most scholars say Mark got his Gospel from Peter’s preaching.) However, to repeat, Mary herself told Luke about her deliverance and Joanna and Susanna and the others told them that they were the ones who there at his death.
Specifically, the women from Galilee will reappear in Luke 23:49, and they stood at a distance while he was on the cross and died. Then in 23:55 they followed the soldiers to find out where he was buried. In Luke 24:1-11, where Joanna was again named, they are the ones who brought the spices to put on his body, but when they got to the tomb, they found the stone rolled away and no body, the tomb empty. Two men in dazzling apparel frightened them, so they bowed with their faces to the ground. The men proclaimed the resurrection and sent them on a mission to tell the men, who didn’t believe them. So it is easy to imagine that as they stayed together at a distance from the men at his death, burial and resurrection, so in Luke 8:2-3 they traveled and stayed together at a distance in Galilee—but not at a spiritual distance from Jesus. They were grateful he healed and delivered them.
“estate manager”: it is used in contemporary Greek writings and inscriptions for a household and estate manager. Older translations have “steward.” Chuza managed the estates of Herod, who was tetrarch of Galilee and who was also Herod the Great’s son and was co-named Antipas. He ruled over Galilee and Perea from 4 B.C. to A.D. 30 (see Luke 3:1 for others in the ruling class, and you can google his name). So Chuza’s job was a big deal. Was he a slave? Maybe, but if he were, then he had a lot of freedom. He had access to a lot of power and money. Often slaves were more powerful and richer than free farm laborers or other free servants.
However, he probably was not a slave.
Richard Bauckham in his Gospel Women: Studies in the Named Women in the Gospels (Eerdmans, 2002), offers this summary of his extensive research on Chuza:
This rather extensive treatment of Joanna’s husband may seem to have distracted us from Joanna herself, but it has been important for establishing and confirming Joanna’s social status and affiliations against the claim that as ‘a steward or manager of an estate [Chuza] would still be a slave or freedman … Such a person would still be deprived of real status’ [quoting Corley, Private Woman, p. 11 n. 13]. On the contrary Chuza and Joanna were members of the Herodian aristocracy of Tiberias [a city in Galilee], and the sheer rarity of the name Chuza, together with the plausibility of its bearer as a Nabatean at the court of Herod, assures us that Luke’s information about Joanna is reliable. (p. 161)
Now on pp. 165-88 Prof. Bauckham provides an excellent discussion on Junia. He argues that Junia is a sound-alike name for Joanna (Luke 8:2-3; 24:10). She added a Latin name to her Hebrew one, to relate to the Romans, where she was living (Rom. 16:7). Many Jews had biblical names but also adopted Greek or Latin names to relate to the large Greek and Roman cultures. Chuza had probably already died, and she remarried to Andronicus, likely also an early follower of Jesus who had (unknown) Jewish name and this Greek name. Bauckham’s idea is ingenious. Plausible. If his evidence and argument is true, then Joanna-Junia followed Christ from the beginning or close to the beginning (Luke 8:2-3), watched him die on the cross (Luke 23:49), and then proclaimed the resurrection to the eleven (24:10). So she deserved the praise “prominent among the apostles.”
So what does this mean if Junia and Joanna were the same person and she remarried to Andronicus? They were apostles of Christ (Rom. 16:7), because the Greek says they were “noteworthy” or “prominent” among the apostles. This is confirmed by the Greek-speaking church fathers who had no problem in saying Andronicus and Junia (a female name frequently attested) and not Junias (a male name never attested), were “prominent among the apostles,” and not merely “well known to the apostles.” (Rom. 16:7). I accept the opinion of these Greek fathers and their natural reading of Rom. 16:7 as decisive, for the fathers were educated native Greek speakers, and that is how they read the dative case with the Greek preposition en in Rom. 16:7 Andronicus and Junia were probably husband and wife.
Yes, Junia Really Was a Female Apostle: A Close Look at Romans 16:7
“many other women”: the Greek does not mention “women,” but the pronouns are feminine, and in English we can miss the feminine gender (compare plural ils, elles in French and just they in English). So I supplied the word “women,” to drive home the point that Jesus’s followers were not just men, and not just the named women, but many other women. I wonder how many there were. Dozens? Hundreds? We know that in Matt. 14:21 five thousand men were miraculously fed, besides women and children. But Luke singles out these women in vv. 2-3, so we should not see them numbering in the thousands in those two verses. (I wonder how their husbands felt about all this “journeying” business.) I say they numbered in the dozens, but sometimes, maybe, up to the hundreds, though that’s just a guess. They were not casual followers, since they ended up in Jerusalem at his death and the aftermath.
“Susanna”: she was probably of the same class as that of Joanna, since men and women associated with those of their own class at this time and culture. Why did they associate with Mary Magdalene, who may have been poorer (or not)? The kingdom of God was breaking down class hierarchy. Following Jesus demanded it, gradually and over time.
“were supporting”: He (or she) helps in the practical needs of the church. (Phoebe was a deacon, in Rom. 16:1.) But here it is not an official position, which comes later in early Christianity. Some translations have “provided” (NKJV, NET, MSG); “ministered” (KJV); “contributing” (NAS, NLT); “helping to support” (NIV); “used” (CEV, NCV). It could also be translated as “serving.”
“their resources”: this is material resources, not just prayer and well-wishing from a distance. The pronoun their, incidentally, is feminine. It was their resources. No doubt they used the money to buy food for their Lord and the twelve and themselves, when they went into a town or village. They may have bought or gathered combustible material to cook some food in a campout, so to speak. We don’t know, but those guesses come from the logic of first-century, Israelite culture. They make sense.
GrowApp for Luke 8:1-3
1. The women sacrificed a domestic life to follow Jesus. What have you sacrificed to follow him in your own situation?
2. How have you contributed to the work of the kingdom? Volunteering your time? Giving money? Mission trips? What else?
RELATED
11. Eyewitness Testimony in Luke’s Gospel
3. Church Fathers and Luke’s Gospel
2. Archaeology and the Synoptic Gospels
1. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels: Introduction to Series
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