09/13/2026
If you were there the Sunday Rev'd Mark preached about the Gospel According to Mary being deleted and other instances where women in the bible were demoted or erased, this post will interest you. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1FQ1Qy3T1x/
"For most of two thousand years, one message echoed through the Western church: women, be silent. This was not presented as tradition. It was presented as the will of God, older than argument, beyond question.
One woman decided to check the original words for herself.
Her name was Rosemary Radford Ruether. She came of age in mid-20th century America, in a home that was more free-thinking than strict, but she entered a field — academic theology — that was almost entirely male. When she looked around the seminaries and the lecture halls in the 1960s, she noticed something odd. Half the human race seemed to be missing from its own religious history.
So she went back. Not to commentaries. Not to sermons passed down through the centuries. She went to the oldest manuscripts, the original Greek, the layer beneath a thousand years of translation choices made mostly by men.
And there, sitting quietly in plain sight, were the women.
Paul's letter to the Romans names a woman called Phoebe, using the Greek word diakonos — deacon. When that same word describes a man elsewhere in scripture, it stays ""deacon."" When it describes Phoebe, generations of translators quietly softened it to ""servant.""
The same letter names Junia as outstanding among the apostles. Centuries later, a copyist decided a woman could not have held that title, and her name was rewritten as ""Junias"" — a man who, as far as anyone can tell, never existed.
Priscilla is shown teaching a respected preacher named Apollos, correcting his understanding of the faith. Her name is listed first, ahead of her husband's — a small detail, but in the writing conventions of the time, small details like that signaled who held more standing.
And Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the empty tomb and the first to carry the news to the others. Early Christian writers had a title for her: apostola apostolorum. The apostle to the apostles.
None of this was hidden in obscure fragments. It was sitting in the main text, in plain Greek, waiting.
Ruether held it up and asked the question no one in power wanted asked out loud: if silence is God's law for women, why does the earliest record of the faith show women teaching, leading, and announcing the most important news in the entire story?
The reaction was not gentle. She was called a pagan wearing a Catholic mask. She lost a teaching post after publishing a critical essay. Decades later, a university that had offered her a professorship quietly withdrew it. She was accused, again and again, of trying to tear the whole tradition down.
She wasn't tearing it down. She was trying to hand back something she believed had been taken — the memory of a community, in its first and rawest form, where a woman's voice was not an exception to be explained away.
Over the next six decades, she kept going. She wrote more than three dozen books, tying the same thread through everything — the same logic used to silence women, she argued, was the logic used to justify dominating the earth, colonizing distant peoples, and dismissing anyone standing outside the circle of power. One idea, dressed up in a hundred different justifications: those on top always claim heaven put them there.
She trained the next generation of scholars, pastors, and researchers, and they carried her questions into their own pulpits and classrooms, long after the people who dismissed her had moved on to dismissing someone else.
Rosemary Radford Ruether died in 2022, at 85 years old, having spent her whole working life on one long argument.
Today there are women preaching from pulpits and leading congregations in denominations that once would have called it impossible. That space did not open on its own. Scholars like Ruether spent decades prying it open, one footnote at a time.
Phoebe was called a deacon. It was right there in the letter the whole time. It just took someone stubborn enough, for long enough, to insist that the church actually read its own words.
If you were ever told that your silence was God's will, and some part of you never fully believed it — the record suggests you were allowed to doubt it all along.
The words were never erased. They were only ever mistranslated.
Someone just had to go back and read them again."
