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Beloved Disciple

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

With Jesus in Galilee
Mary of Magdala

Jesus went on through cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God, Jesus and the Twelve with him, and some women who had been healed from evil spirits and sicknesses: Mary who was called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had gone out; and Joanna, wife of Chusa, Herod's steward; and Susanna; and many others—who used to provide for them out of their means.
Luke 8.1-3

Imagine any painting you may have seen of Jesus and his entourage. There is Jesus in the middle, dark-haired and bearded. Around him are twelve men, some of them distinctive: probably Peter, with gray beard, on one side of Jesus; John, young and still beardless, on the other side; Judas Iscariot, swarthy and sinister, on the edge of the group. And not a woman in sight. We might well ask what has become of the women who, according to the Bible itself, traveled with him around Galilee and to Jerusalem—among them Mary Magdalene.

Magdala (its name derived from the Hebrew migdãl, "tower") was a village on the western shore of the Lake of Galilee, so Mary was at home in Galilee, as Jesus was. She and Susanna are mentioned without reference to a husband or son; it is likely that they were unmarried. (Or Susanna may simply have been well enough known in the churches that she needed no other designation. Mary was an immensely common name, so that any Mary needed to be further specified; Susanna was not.)

And Joanna? We might well wonder if she was a widow. It is hard to imagine her having her husband's permission—or defying him—to travel with Jesus and his strange band of misfits. Her retainers were presumably looking after her property and bringing funds and supplies to Jesus's group as necessary. Chuza may have been the manager of a royal estate (and so a powerful and wealthy man) or the finance minister (far more powerful and wealthy) of Herod Antipas's whole Galilean kingdom. Joanna, then, was a member of the Galilean elite in her husband's right and probably, to have gotten such a husband, in her own. Chuza is known as a Nabatean name. Nabatea bordered Herod Antipas's kingdom to the east, and Herod married the daughter of the Nabatean king. Herod may well have taken on a Nabatean dignitary as his steward, who would—in a similar spirit of political solidarity—have married a woman from the Galilean aristocracy, Joanna. Joanna appears again in Luke's story as one of the women who come to Jesus's tomb on Easter morning; she may be, as well, the woman Junia who is described by Paul in his Letter to the Romans as an apostle.

Luke tells of other women who could afford to be benefactors of the early churches: Martha and Mary of Bethany offered Jesus hospitality; Tabitha was generous to those in need in Jaffa; a group of believers met in the house of Mary, the mother of John Mark; Lydia, who traded in (high-value) purple dye, provided hospitality for Paul in Philippi; and Priscilla, with her husband Aquila, was among Paul's most stalwart allies and put him up in Corinth. Joanna and Susanna and the other patrons of Luke 8.3, however, were startlingly different from these: they traveled around with Jesus.

We are used to thinking of Mary Magdalene as one of the women who supported Jesus, but it is at least worth wondering if, on the contrary, Luke is naming among the women in Jesus's entourage just a few from widely differing social and economic backgrounds. Here, on the one hand, is Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward, and there, on the other, is Mary Magdalene, a woman who had been beset by seven devils. Mary would likely have been an outcast before her healing and dependent on Jesus's protection after it; we cannot be sure, then, that she was herself one of those who helped pay for Jesus and his disciples.

With the three names—Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna—we are still in danger of imagining just a handful of women in a large group of men. But Luke mentions many other women traveling round Galilee. They will be important later. From elsewhere in the gospels we hear some of their names: Mary, the mother of James the Small and of Joses; Salome; the wife of Zebedee and mother of James and John, two disciples called in Galilee; the sister of Jesus's mother; and Mary, the wife(?) of Clopas. There may well be overlap here, with the different gospels describing the same woman in different ways.

Imagine the scene. Jesus and his male disciples are walking from village to village around Galilee. Galilee was an area about fifty miles from north to south, thirty from east to west. Upper Galilee, its northern area, was thinly populated. Jesus and his followers, traveling the towns and villages of Lower Galilee, would never have been more than two days' walk from home. Along the lakeside the fishermen (Peter and Andrew, James and John) and in a good many villages Jesus the son of the builder would have been recognized and in principle welcome. Simon Peter, we know, was married, and we have no reason to assume that the rest of the disciples were too young or too poor to have found wives yet. So where were their wives? At home? Who was managing—and paying for—any children's upkeep?

Jesus warns his followers how much they must renounce. Here is the warning in Luke's version, the most extreme of all. His Jesus says, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." But the disciples did not, in the long run, leave their families. In the mission around the eastern Mediterranean after Jesus's death, Peter traveled with his wife like the other apostles, Paul tells us, and the brothers of the Lord. Perhaps the wives traveled in the group during Jesus's lifetime too or just brought provisions to Jesus and the disciples when the group was within easy distance of their homes at Capernaum or Nazareth. In the absence of more evidence, we can only envisage some plausible scenarios.

Excerpted from Beloved Discipleby Robin Griffith-Jones Copyright © 2008 by Robin Griffith-Jones. Excerpted by permission.
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