Thread by @pj_schreiner

Brief thread on women Acts.👇🏼

One thing that has surprised me in working on Acts: the Western editors of Acts don't like women!

I have read this before, but to see it in action is something else. The editor/s consistently delete or change wording that exalts women in Luke's narrative.

For example, today I was working on Acts 17. In verse 34 it says, “However, some people joined Paul and believed, including Dionysius the Areopagite, a woman named Damaris, and others with them.”

One Western editor (Codex D) deleted “a woman named Damaris” from the record completely!

Luke’s point seems to be that two prominent intellectual figures accepted his teaching for Damaris’s close association with Dionysius may indicate Damaris is also a distinguished Areopagite.

While many groups in this time showed prejudice against women, some communities were more open to female scholars/philosophers and Epicureans and Stoics were of the latter.

This little note thus indicates Luke shows Christianity is a social group who welcomes women philosophers/scholars.

But Codex D is deletes it!

While I am complementarian, I sometimes find it frustrating that complementarians won’t make much of these things because they are afraid of the slippery slope. But we need to speak where the Bible does.

I am not signing up for a complementarianism that purposively shushes where the Scriptures shouts.

Lesson: some are still functionally deleting these type of things from the Bible.

Even when I post these things very few of my complementarian friends “amen” “like” or “retweet” these type of things because they don't want to cause confusion.

But let’s be biblical and speak confidently where the Scriptures speak clearly.

Fini.

One final thing.

This is the reason I am working on getting scholarships for women for our ThM program @WesternSeminary. I want to encourage rather than discourage future study.

westernseminary.edu/academics/degr…