In episode 132 of the Enter the Bible podcast, co-hosts Kathryn Schifferdecker and Katie Langston discuss the audience-submitted question, "Were there female leaders in the early church?" with guest Dr. Matt Skinner.

Matthew L. Skinner is Professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary. His books include Acts: Catching up with the Spirit (Abingdon Press, 2020), A Companion to the New Testament (3 volumes; Baylor University Press, 2017-18), Intrusive God, Disruptive Gospel: Encountering the Divine in the Book of Acts (Brazos Press, 2015) and The Trial Narratives: Conflict, Power, and Identity in the New Testament (WJK Press, 2010).

Motivated by an interest in helping people explore the Bible’s connections to faith and life, he has contributed to several commentaries, encyclopedias, and other resources to assist pastors, teachers, and students in their study of Christian scripture. Every week, he co-hosts the Sermon Brainwave podcast on Working Preacher.

Ordained as a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA), he serves as the Scholar for Adult Education at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. His work can be found online at www.matthewskinner.org.

Do you have Bible questions you would like answered? Go to our website at https://enterthebible.org/about to get started.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/sc-W7mCI_uk

Mentioned in this episode:

Stepping Up to Supervision

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Hello and welcome to the Enter the Bible podcast, where you can get answers or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible but were afraid to ask. I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker,

Katie Langston: and I'm Katie Langston, and today on the podcast, we are delighted to welcome our special guest, Matt Skinner. Uh, Matt is the is a professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, uh, and author of the new book, Matthew The Gospel of Promised Blessings, published by Abingdon Press. Welcome, Matt. Thanks for.

Matt Skinner: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah, thanks for joining us, Matt.

Katie Langston: So today we are answering a question, uh, and wonderful listeners, if you would like to submit your own question, you may do so at enter the Bible.org. There's a little button at the top that says "ask a question". And uh, um, we try to get to as many of these as we can. Uh, and uh, this question today has to do with, female leadership, particularly in the early church, and particularly in the, um, in the Bible. So were there female leaders in the early church? Did they exist? If so, who were they?

Matt Skinner: Short answer is yes. There were.

Katie Langston: Boom.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Oh, good.

Katie Langston: Thank you all for listening.

Matt Skinner: So there's that. I would say there always have been, even if they haven't been formally recognized according to certain institutional structures. But that's a different podcast probably. But there is evidence in the New Testament as literally as far back as we can look of women providing leadership. And I like to say as well, in what we might call a publicly recognized leadership position, I don't want to talk about necessarily an office like pastor or bishop, because those those terms appear, but they don't become very defined until I think a little ways after the New Testament was written. But you've got women exercising roles alongside of men who also are recognized. And one of the things that's remarkable about that is there's no embarrassment expressed about it. Like when we do see places where a male author mentions women coworkers, there's never like a "and it's okay because she's really cool, or it's okay because she's kind of like a guy or she," you know what I mean?

Matt Skinner: Know what I mean? There's no.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: No qualifications. Yeah.

Matt Skinner: There's no anticipation that the audience is going to be scandalized by it or say, "we've never heard of that before," right. So that's significant to that fact that there's no embarrassment.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah.

Katie Langston: Is that let me? Is that culturally weird, like, for that time?

Matt Skinner: Not necessarily. Um. One of the public places where women could exercise quite a bit of power in the Greco-Roman world was in religion.

Katie Langston: Yeah,

Matt Skinner: Like in Greco-Roman religion, there were certain movements.

Katie Langston: Were priestesses or.

Matt Skinner: There were cults. Yeah, yeah. Where priestesses were recognized and and female prophets and things. So there were ways, you know, what a sociologist would talk about, kind of amassing power like authority in the public sphere. But we also know we know of at least one Jewish synagogue where we have an inscription about a woman who was the president or the presider of that synagogue as well. So it depends. A lot of it has to do with class. In other words, a high class woman could get away with a lot more than a lower class man could.

Katie Langston: Sure.

Matt Skinner: So it's not just about gender. It's it has to do with class and background and purchasing power and all that stuff.

Katie Langston: Sure,

Matt Skinner: in some settings as well, you know, there's you might remember the slave girl in Rome in acts chapter 16, who's in Philippi. Who's enslaved but has a lot of power in that she's possessed by this soothsaying spirit until the spirit's driven out. And she doesn't mean anything to anybody anymore. So there's, you know, it kind of depends how you want to define power, but.

Katie Langston: interesting.

Matt Skinner: So it wasn't necessarily scandalous, as best we can tell. But there do appear to be places or times where Paul is trying to make sure. Like something's going on in 1 Corinthians 11 around hairstyles where Paul might be trying to say, it's great that women are offering this leadership in our public worship, but let's make sure they don't look too much like the the people from the cult of Sybil down the block or something like that. You know, there might be some of that going on. Um.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Is that the place where he says, don't, don't braid the hair or something like that?

Matt Skinner: Yeah, it's either about head coverings or it's about having your hair done up and neatly coughed quaffed or. Yeah, the origins of the updo were in, 4th century Corinth. It's wedding season after all.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: So, yeah. Right. Right, right. So be leaders but don't maybe draw attention to yourself or I don't know or do it properly.

Katie Langston: It sounds like don't look like you're a pagan priestess, maybe.

Matt Skinner: It could be that because, you know, there were Greco-Roman cults where, like, mantic prophecy was a big deal, where you basically, people would prophets would get themselves into a I have no the right word to use kind of this mantic.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Frenzy.

Matt Skinner: Frenzy. There's that's a great word. Right. And so it's hard to keep your hair, you know, uh.

Katie Langston: Looking respectable when you're in a mantic prophetic frenzy.

Matt Skinner: Right.

Matt Skinner: It could have been that I don't want to dig too deep into first Corinthians 11, because it's really confusing and I don't.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: That's alright, that's alright. Let's go back to the the female leaders of the church.

Matt Skinner: Yeah . Well, you know, we don't know much about Mary Magdalene, but she was certainly important to Jesus and certainly trustworthy and certainly prominent among that group, even if she wasn't named as one of the 12, we get enough mention of her to know that she was significant, as were other women Joanna, Susanna, others who were part of Jesus' own company. So let's let's remember them as well. When it comes to the church of later decades, Paul is actually our best source for this, which is interesting because some people think Paul was awful toward women. And that's a bigger question.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Actually, we'll just, I'll break in with a plug here. So, uh, t wrote an article and did a podcast lo these many years ago, back in 2012, that, we'll have a note about it in the, these episode notes. But, the essay is titled "Paul Hated Women or Did He?" And then there was a podcast episode from season one, episode eight. So you can refer back to that, to see if if Matt still agrees with what he said, what, 12 years ago. But I'm sure. Yeah.

Katie Langston: Timeless. I'm sure it was timeless.

Matt Skinner: I'm sure the easier question is, does Matt remember what he said 12 years ago? And the answer to that is certainly no. But I'm sure it was good.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: I'm sure it was.

Katie Langston: No doubt, no doubt.

Matt Skinner: What's fascinating about Paul's letters when it comes to his ministry, he's always working with people. He has this reputation of being this kind of lone wolf who's out there with no authority, and kind of this renegade apostle. Uh, all the letters, almost all of the letters that we are very confident that he himself wrote name coauthors. Timothy's most frequent somebody named Sosthenes. Silas Weir, also known as Silvanus. But Paul will occasionally greet people in churches, and part of this is to kind of develop his bona fides. Part of this is to like say, hey, there are people there who know me. You know them, they can vouch for me. This is you know how things work. And the place where he is the most verbose about that is the end of his letter to the Romans. It's a church he did not found. He had never visited Rome, it appears until. Well, then he wrote this letter. And so part of what he's doing is saying, I know people there, they know me. We're all one big happy family. You can talk to them. So and this is, you know, it's boring as can be to read because it's just a list of names you don't want to have to pronounce. But it starts off in 16:1. He says, I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cancoret, which is a small city near Corinth. And this is all we know about Phoebe. But it appears she probably was the person who delivered the letter. There was no mail service, and so Paul has to get the letter to Rome. And so Phoebe, uh, probably then is a well-to-do enough to travel where she can travel. She can afford travel. She knows how to do it safely. Um, she probably has an entourage of some kind but she also would be the one who delivers the letter. Not to one big congregation, but to multiple house churches. And so some Roman, some interpreters of Romans have said she's probably the letter's first interpreter. She's, um, the one who would either read it out loud or be present when it's read so people can say, what in the world did Paul mean here about offering your bodies as a living sacrifice in chapter 12? And she would say, well, Paul and I talked about it. And so she's more than just a carrier. She's probably a representative of Paul. He names her as a deacon. We're not exactly sure what that meant in terms of responsibilities, but Paul names it as a kind of office again without apology.

Katie Langston: Yeah.

Matt Skinner: She sometimes is translated as a deaconess in older translations, but this is the there is no separate word for deaconess and deacon in the Greek. It's just she's no less. Because when people hear deaconess, they sometimes hear deaconette, you know what I mean? Like kind of a deacon or just an honorary deacon. But no, she's a deacon as much as any other person would be a deacon. No offense to people who call themselves deaconesses. I know there are still movements out there that do that, but. Anyway. He names others people who he names, some as coworkers. Maybe the one who's most famous is Prisca, because she is named also in the book of Acts. She's named also in First Corinthians and somewhere else that escapes me right now. But she and her husband, Aquila are seemed to be a husband and wife ministry team. She's often named before him, which is curious because typically a man, the male of a household would be named first. So maybe she occupies higher social status. Or maybe she's just the better minister, maybe the more prominent teacher or better preacher. You know, it happens, and they are described as people who host a church in their home, which would suggest, again, some wealth, but they're there and they're not. She's not subservient to him, to her husband in any way. And so she's a full fledged coworker.

Katie Langston: Do we know anything more about her from the other, uh, where she appears.

Matt Skinner: When she's in Acts we're told that she and her husband were Jews who were expelled from Rome during because of a decree. And we do know of a decree from an emperor that not all Jews, but probably a significant portion of like influential Jews, were expelled from Rome.

Katie Langston: Wow.

Matt Skinner: This is under Claudius and the we have a source that says it was on account of chrestus. And this could be a person named Chrestus who was causing trouble. Or it could be a mishearing or a misspelling of Christos, of Christ. So? So they are. They're refugees in Acts. They meet up with Paul, and spend time with him in Corinth and then Ephesus. We're told they're also, the traditional translation is tent work, tent makers, but leather worker might be a better translation. So they have the same trade as Paul, and they set up shop together and they support themselves so they can do ministry in a foreign land. So they're just really, you know, if you want to call Paul courageous for traveling and for starting churches from scratch, they're just as courageous or just as called as he is.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: That's really fascinating, right? And especially what you said about Prisca being named first, that they they are co-equal ministers of the gospel that they and co-workers with Paul. Yeah. She's. Yeah. Yeah, I love pastors wives but she she does she's she's also a minister. She's not just the spouse of the pastor, right? She's also a minister herself. Yeah.

Matt Skinner: I was talking to one of our graduates about a week or two ago, and she said that, she's really worried because her husband is way too into being the pastor's husband and.

Matt Skinner: Is and is doing is just way too into all the social events and all the planning and stuff like that. So, yeah. Those roles, those roles can cut a variety of ways. But I think he was making more work for her because he was so eager to embrace as well.

Matt Skinner: Which I love. Uh, but then we need to talk about a woman named Junia.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah.

Matt Skinner: Who is here in Romans 16, verse seven, where Paul says, quite simply, Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives or my kinfolk. So we would assume that that means Jews. It could mean they're related to Paul, but if so, they would also be Jewish. But that might just mean they are Jews who have embraced Christ. Um, who were in prison with me. So that's interesting. They've they've been prominent enough to attract negative attention and and suffer alongside of Paul. They are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was. This is all we know about these two, but he names them as prominent among the apostles. Now we've got the 12 apostles who Jesus chose. Paul calls himself an apostle multiple times because he was commissioned by the crucified and risen Jesus. But Paul also talks in first Corinthians 15 about other people who saw the risen Christ and were commissioned by him. And so here it appears that Paul is referring to some other folks from some other people who consider themselves part of this first generation of apostolic Christians, and they are prominent. They were believers before Paul was. And Junia is a female name. We don't know who Andronicus was. Could be a husband, could be a brother, could be a son. Could just be a friend. Partner who knows, right? They don't necessarily have to be husband and wife, but they could be, but Junia is a woman's name. And she's named as prominent among the apostles. There's a funny, not funny story. There's really actually a really sad story about the history of interpretation of this.

Katie Langston: I'm about to ask about that because because they they for a long time they were like, well, that couldn't be a woman. So they turned it into Junius, right? Is that right? Am I remembering that correctly?

Kathryn Schifferdecker: So who who that?

Katie Langston: Yeah. Who's they? Just to be.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Just to be clear

Matt Skinner: I want to know who this person is. I want them held accountable.

Katie Langston: I'm going to write them a sternly worded letter. Some medieval monk.

Matt Skinner: I know, well.

Matt Skinner: For a long time, Bibles were reproduced from the best known or most circulated manuscripts, and for a long time people were working off of a Greek manuscript that referred to this person as Junius, with an s at the end, which is a male's name. And early 20th century more manuscripts were found, various manuscripts that we know to be more reliable. In some cases, that means older than other manuscripts, but in other cases it means more, kind of aligned best with older fragments. In other words, they appear to be kind of less spoiled by corrections or changes or marginal notes. And this one reads her as Junia. So what appears is some ancient scribe, probably very early second century, third century, certainly by the fourth century, probably saw this and said there needs to be a sigma, there needs to be an S on the end of this, because no way could a woman be an apostle, because by the time we hit around the year 200, and certainly by the time we're in the year 300, for sure, there really are no women in recognized kind of credentialed church leadership positions The church church's leadership has become exclusively male. Women who feel a calling are sent off to monastic movements for the most part. How that happened is another another podcast, but probably somebody who just simply couldn't imagine because of how they were raised and the church in which they were around thought, there's no way this could be right. This must be the genius. And so, you know, and the translations have in some ways followed that route. So I think, I think it's the RSV from the 1940s refers to them instead of prominent among the apostles. It calls them men of note.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Oh, wow. Geez.

Matt Skinner: And there are still translations being produced by, I'd say, more kind of conservative fundamentalist, you know, publishing houses that still read this as Junius, but amongst critical biblical scholars, New Testament scholars, it is a near consensus that this should be Junia, and that near consensus is are very hard to come by in, in, in our line of work. Right, Kathryn, so?

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Right, right.

Matt Skinner: So newer translations are reading this, I think correctly as Junia and have now recovered this evidence, whatever it meant for her to be an apostle, it certainly has a kind of public proclamation, but also an authoritative bent to it. Like you want to know about Jesus, talk to somebody who knew him. So that's remarkable, right? I mean, yeah, most starting to change, but most people were not raised in churches where they thought that there could have been a woman among the apostles.

Katie Langston: Right.

Katie Langston: Yeah. My, um, I have a good friend who's, uh, I think she's doing her dissertation on Junia. I could be wrong, but one of the things, um, she's mentioned is, is just that Junius isn't a isn't a name anywhere in, like, Junia is a very common female name, but there's not a male equivalent anywhere in, like, contemporaneous sources. You know, like, it's pretty clear that someone just made that up.

Matt Skinner: So people who named their son Junius were essentially copying the corruption of Romans 16 and.

Katie Langston: Right. Yeah. Right.

Katie Langston: Yeah, yeah. So it's yeah, it's that's interesting.

Matt Skinner: I should say there's other places where. Oh go ahead Kathryn.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: No, no. Go ahead, go ahead, Matt.

Matt Skinner: I just would say there's other places. It's not just Romans 16 where Paul will greet, women who are who are leaders. Philippians four verses 2 to 3 is is lpful here where he says: I urge Euodia, and I urge Syntyche, two female names, to be of the same mind in the Lord. And I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers. So again, two women who Paul names as co-workers, fellow co-laborers in the gospel. Something appears to be wrong. There appears to be some kind of a clash between the two of them. Which could be they could lead to what we might call factions, or maybe groups. Imagine that. A congregation having factions. Can you believe it? And and so and so. Paul is appealing to some third party to help reconcile them. We don't know who that is, but I think it's remarkable. He doesn't say anything like, tell them to shut up. He doesn't say who told them they could be leaders. He doesn't say remove them from leadership. He's not dismissive of them. I don't think it might be nice if he had written to them directly. Who knows? But, um, and again, he's not apologizing for them and their leadership. So he recognizes something about their position as leaders risks becoming negative if they aren't able to reconcile whatever is going on. So that's. Part of being a leadership is to be engaged in conflict. Part of that's just part of the job.

Katie Langston: Yep.

Matt Skinner: And so here are women who are not just leading politely and kindly and passively, but maybe with some rough edges. And so I like that as well. He doesn't make cracks either, about women being, you know, sniping each other. It's just none of the stuff you might expect. If Paul really thought that women didn't have what it took somehow to be leaders. I wish we had more evidence.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's all, it's really fascinating. And yeah, I agree. I wish we had, more information about who these women were and what they what their role was in the church. So I realize this is the topic for another podcast. But we probably should at least mention in this podcast that there are other passages in the New Testament that, that seem to, say that women should not have leadership roles in the church. So this is an impossible ask. I realize that, but can you give like a two minute, like what would you say? Right.

Katie Langston: Two-minute women in in church leadership.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Summary of how you would respond to those kinds of criticisms, because I'm sure that some of our listeners are thinking, well, what about right? What about those other.

Matt Skinner: Oh, sure. Yeah. And you should be. And I just want to name the elephant in the room. I feel a little weird as the man on a podcast with two women leaders in the church. I'm not here to give you permission. I'm just here to say this is what I see in the New Testament.

Katie Langston: All good.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: You know what? You're the New Testament scholar. So that's. Yes.

Matt Skinner: I just want to.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: I appreciate I appreciate that I appreciate that acknowledgement.

Matt Skinner: There's something wrong about this. Uh, so the most notorious text is first Timothy, chapter two. First Timothy in general and Titus in general have a lot to say about church leadership. They imagine certain positions as being filled by men and not just any kind of men, but like heads of household men who, appear to be wealthy and well established in their communities. So that's a problem, too, in that there's a very small segment of the population that appears to be qualified for leadership, according to those books. I think those and this is not a minority view at all. This is actually, I think, a pretty prominent view. I think those books are probably written in the second century, around the year, maybe 115. I think they're not written by Paul, who's long dead by, he dies in the early 60s. I think they're written in Paul's name by somebody else to address a church in a very different time and place and cultural reality. We could unpack all of that. So in Paul's own writings in First Corinthians 14, he says something that sounds really similar to 1 Timothy 2, where it's not just women shouldn't lead, but women shouldn't even talk when the congregation is gathered. In 1 Timothy 2, it says they should just go home and ask their husbands after the service if they have any questions. I mean, it's very, very condescending. Paul in 1 Corinthians 14, verses 33 and following he says, women should be silent in the churches. They are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate. Then again, if there's anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is shameful for women to speak in church. This sounds a lot like 1 Timothy 2. You see, it's in parentheses in a lot of modern translations because it's a real break in the chain of thought. If you read verse 33 A and then jump to verse 37, it actually flows a lot nicer. There are, there's at least one, I think maybe two, if I remember correctly, ancient Greek manuscripts that include little marginal notes that almost like a parentheses type of thing around this that suggest a scribe might have thought there was something dubious about this, or maybe thought it was an addition. Like, maybe I'm just copying this like it's my job to copy it. And this was in the margins. We don't know. But there's anytime there's a mark like that, it usually points to a confusion on the part of a scribe. So it might have meant that a copyist recognized that this was an addition. Why would it be added? Maybe somebody was trying to copy out of the sentiment, out of 1 Timothy 2 and plug it in to Romans, to 1 Corinthians 14. It's not. How about this? It's not an outlandish hypothesis for that to have happened.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah. That's helpful.

Matt Skinner: That doesn't excuse the damage that's been done by it. I know people have been literally terrorized by these texts. But Paul himself never pauses and says, "I'll bet you're wondering what I think about women."

Matt Skinner: Like Paul never treats like being a woman as a theological category, right? Just like he never does that with enslaved people. What we get from Paul is a theological theologizing mind trying to solve problems, trying to provide direction to churches, and at times he talks about big issues like can you eat meat that's been sacrificed to another deity? He never stops and asks the question, "should women be in church leadership or not?" But when he does have time to kind of open the door a bit and show us what life looks like inside of ancient churches, we see women ministering alongside of men. In some cases with authority over men. And you know what I mean? So we can't.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah.

Matt Skinner: If our answer is, what did Paul think about women? We will never get that answer. But if our answer our question is what does Paul show us about what leadership looked like in those first generations? We can learn a little bit and what we learn, I think. Should speak louder than that little parenthetical aside in first Corinthians 14. And, you know, maybe we'll do another podcast one day on 1 Timothy 2 and talk a bit about how in the world did that get in our Bible? Because I think there's reasons why we can understand how it might have. There's even better reasons to understand why it's not normative for all times and all places and all churches. I think that was more than two minutes, Kathryn .

Kathryn Schifferdecker: No, no, no. That that was really that was really helpful, Matt. And I know that was an impossible ask to to address those issues in two minutes.

Matt Skinner: But incredibly important, though.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah, it is, it is. And I think uh, and I would point back to, to Galatians as well. Right? I mean, we have problems like this in the old, you know, interpreting the Old Testament, obviously to like what? And we've had podcasts on that. What do we do with texts that talk about enslaved people? What do we do with texts that talk about capital punishment? Right? And and at least one thing we do is letting Scripture interpret Scripture. And I think that's what you've been doing by talking about. Right? Like when there's these passages. Yes, that talk about women being silent and there's these passages that show women and leadership in the church. And I think one of those other. And so you have to put those texts in dialogue with each other and another text to put in dialogue with it. Uh, in on this issue is, is Galatians 3:28. "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there's no longer slave or free. There is no longer male and female. For all of you are one in Christ Jesus." Right? Like, uh, and "if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise." There's no subordinate status there for enslaved people, for Greeks, for for Jews or for women. So yeah. So we let Scripture interpret scripture, on issues like this.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: But we let it also disagree with itself sometimes. Right. Like that. Sometimes it's a, it's a conversation among it's like among itself. And, and the different writers are arguing with each other or they're responding to, different cultural contexts, different ministry contexts. Different. You know, literally centuries and cultures and places and times and, so when there are these tensions, you don't always have to try to resolve them. Right? You don't always have to try to harmonize them. Right? It's okay to sometimes just let that let that tension exist because it's in the kind of wrestling with the tension that sometimes you find, more meaning, you find breakthroughs, you find ways of thinking and interpreting that hopefully are life giving as opposed to, you know, oppressive and sad.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Well, and as you acknowledge, Matt, both Katie and I are, are actually ordained pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I grew up, as did Katie, in a tradition, two different traditions that don't ordain women. So this this was, and continues to be but to a lesser extent, this this is an important topic for me, and I'm sure for Katie as well, that you know, how do you answer a call that you feel to leadership, to preaching, to being a pastor? If people are interpreting the text in such a way to say, no, you can't do that, right? Like, do you follow what you know to be or what you feel to be the Spirit's leading, or do you listen to those other voices? So the I know there may be listeners out there who are experiencing that same thing. And I think it's a matter of discernment, obviously, but hopefully this has been helpful in your discernment in that in wrestling with those texts. I remember just a little anecdote that's, I think, related, when I was, telling my family that I wanted to be ordained, that I wanted to be a pastor, one of the people, one of the two of the people I had to tell were my great Uncle Herbert and Aunt Viola, his wife. And Uncle Herbert had been a pastor in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, where I grew up, that did not ordain women. He had been a pastor for decades, and Aunt Viola was the pastor's wife, and I thought she would have a problem with it, actually. And what? And Aunt Viola was kind of this grumpy old lady like, I mean, and she was a wonderful woman. And she did not suffer fools. She was a little grumpy. She did not suffer fools gladly, put it that way. And she was very positive. And she's like, well, of course you can be ordained. The church wouldn't survive without women anyway, right? Like women. Women make sure the church survives. So of course women should be pastors. So I was gratified that Aunt Viola, gave me her blessing, as did Uncle Herbert. Uh, but. So it's important as you're as you're discerning calls, that you find those people, those voices that are able to affirm the Spirit's calling in your life.

Matt Skinner: And there are great resources about these texts, too, if people are.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Absolutely. Yeah. We could put. Yeah, there lots of people have um, yeah. Have, have asked these questions and, have wrestled with them in, in faithful in faithful ways. Right. It's not a question of just saying, well, you know, we've talked about this on the podcast a lot. It's not a question of saying, well, I don't like this thing, so I'm going to throw it out. Right? Because it's in the Bible, you do need to interpret it and you need you need to do something with it. Um, and there are very faithful, robust, thoughtful ways of, um, kind of interpreting and thinking through those passages that that don't amount to like a, you know what I mean? So. Right, right, right.

Katie Langston: And I think what we've heard today from you, Matt, has been, a par with that, right? Like, you interpret it. Robustly. You don't just throw out these texts. So thank you for that.

Matt Skinner: Thanks for having me.

Kathryn Schifferdecker: Yeah. Well, and thank you wonderful listeners or viewers for being with us today on the Enter the Bible podcast. Remember, you can get more great resources, I think, including some commentary on these passages, on Enter he Bible.org. Um, and uh, of course there are um, videos, podcasts, articles, maps, all kinds of cool stuff over there. So go check it out. Uh, and, um, if you have enjoyed this podcast today, if you're watching us on YouTube, we invite you to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you're listening on your favorite podcast app, head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. It really helps. And of course, the greatest compliment you can give is to share this podcast with a friend. Until next time.