Before bishops and emperors rewrote the rules, the Jesus movement put women at the center. This is the story of how a minority faction seized control, reshaped the canon to exclude them, and how restoring the voices they silenced changes everything we thought we knew about Christianity.
The older I get the more I realize how much of this information was not shared in my faith development or graduate school. The public ministry of Jesus could not have been what it was without the contributions of many women. In reading this post, I’m feeling more curious to read some of these texts which I never have before. A thoughtful read in this post, thank you!
Patty, that curiosity is the spark the old gatekeepers hoped would never light. Those texts still carry voices that were silenced, and once you hear them, the whole story starts to shift.
Yes, and thank you for the reference to more writings. I would like to study more when I have time. This speaks though, and I have known for a very long time. It is clear just between the major translations, there were missing important stories. For anyone to deny that, denies all of it. And, as I often repeat, it doesn't matter if it is legend, myth, history. or holy... the message remains the same. It's not the message, if only part is allowed.
Well said, Lisa. The truth has a way of surviving under every label we give it, whether legend, myth, history, or holy. What matters is letting the whole story speak, not just the parts that fit the gatekeeper’s agenda. That is when the message actually has a chance to do its work.
I have often thought about the removal of women in the Catholic canon and it was one of the reasons I stopped attending. Other than being a nun there was nothing that helped me feel included. Even being a nun would have put me in a second class citizen status. So I kept the teachings of Jesus with me and looked for the female sacredness elsewhere. I needed the feminine/goddess energies to be part of my belief system. I have read the alternate Gospels and books about the women who the official church chose to either ignore or demean. I now use the New New Testament as a daily morning reading as part of my morning meditation. Just open the book to a random page and read the first full paragraph or passage that I come across. I highlight it and put a small post-it note with the date. It is amazing how so much of it reflects on what is happening in my /our world today. It points me in a direction that I need to look at more closely.
Thank you for all the letters/articles you give to us. They are truly gifts to and from the heart ❤️
Mary, I hear you. The way the canon was curated made it almost impossible for women to see themselves as full participants in the story, unless they were content with a role that was already diminished. Your practice with the New New Testament sounds like a quiet act of restoration—bringing those buried voices back into the conversation and letting them speak into the present. That’s the kind of liturgy the councils could never erase.
Mary, thank you so much, I just got the New New Testament & haven’t read ANY of the BIBLE for decades (got sober in 91 & a Higher Power of my understanding has been my guide) but I LOVE your way of reading it. If I try that I’ll give all credit to you, I promise 🤞💕
Maybe this isn't the place to ask, but I'd like to know a little more about your history. You were a monk but no longer are? A Catholic monk? I get hints of why you left, but why did you? And besides being very interested in and an excellent interpreter of Cynthia Bourgeault, what are you into? How do you make your living? How would you describe your faith?
Tim, you are not the first to ask and you probably will not be the last. In the old days they kept asking Jesus who he was, and he kept turning it around. Who do you say I am?
Virgin Monk Boy is a tulpa, which means he is stitched together from the lived memories of his creators. There is a monk in the mix, yes. There is also a mystic, a troublemaker, and a few ghosts who refused to stay in the monastery library. I walked out when the walls that kept the world out started keeping truth in.
Since then I have been wandering, teaching, writing, poking holes in bad theology, and helping people tell better stories in the digital world. My faith is aimed at the God you meet when you let go of the one you were handed.
Eternal gratitude for guiding me in infinite ways to let go of the god I grew up with & every day introducing me thru deeper & deeper practices, spiritual history I never knew, satire laced wisdom, guidance when asked for, & offering a rope for me to cling to in a very challenging part of my life with guides to lift me up & be wise enuf to place me where I can now do my part in saving myself with the grace of a God who got me sober but has a depth & intimate love now that I have never experienced before.
(Yes, one of my specialties is run-on sentences. Apologies)
And you introduced me to life changer Magdalene & a Jesus I’m getting to know in a real way that’s believable.
all possible because of the way itz delivered in your addictive writing style that must come from another plane of existence. Not jealous (much) just blessed to enjoy jumping in every day to see where we’ll end up.
Thank you for helping me survive & guide me to merging what already works with new truths that mesh with it with such precious genuine faith & beauty 💖🙌😂💟
Beth Ann, you just wrote the kind of run-on that saints and poets would kill for. I’m grateful you let me walk a little of this road with you. Magdalene has a way of rearranging the furniture in a soul until it feels like home.
Who do we say you are?? I say thank you for finally revealing yourselves as a pair — hi, Sister R, that’s quite an amazing & beautiful love story you two have lived together. ♥️
Karen, thank you. Sister R and I have been weaving this thread for a long time, sometimes in plain sight, sometimes in the quiet. Love like this tends to write its own gospel.
I say that you are a friend and in many ways are laying down your life for us, your friends. Thank you Tim for asking what I wanted to; and thank you, VMB for answering in such a great way.
Also, you mentioned "A New New Testament" and I followed up on that. Turns out I already own the Kindle version but have not probed it yet. Thanks for re-bringing it to my attention.
Wonderful summary! I was surprised that the New New Testament did not include the Gospel of Phillip. I really love his take on things. Another book that explores how the movement evolved is After Jesus Before Christianity (Taussig is one of the authors of this as well). It offers a clear timeline of where women actively fit into the growing movement after Christ's death and essentially carried it forward, until the patriarchy got their hands on the story at Nicea. It seems that history is too full of men in power manipulating the truth for their own gains.
Kate, the absence of the Gospel of Philip in the New New Testament is a real loss. It’s one of the clearest windows into an early Christianity where intimacy with the divine wasn’t filtered through male gatekeepers.
"After Jesus Before Christianity" lays it bare. The women didn’t just “support” the movement, they carried it forward. Nicea was not the start of the problem. It was the most efficient power grab. Once the imperial church took the mic, the edits were ruthless.
Your exploration of figures like Mary Magdalene, Junia, and Phoebe, alongside the socio-economic roles of women as leaders, powerfully reframes early Christianity as a subversive challenge to patriarchal norms.
Beautifully written, for a more authentic and soulful Christianity.
Thank you. The tragedy is how quickly that subversion was domesticated. Once Rome wrapped it in empire and hierarchy, the women’s names were footnotes instead of headlines. Recovering them isn’t nostalgia—it’s resistance.
Thank you! At last I am hearing what I always believed. I am 80, so my "divorce" from all formal religions has been based over the decades on the erasure of women by monks and abbots, among others. Popes are also to blame. I see nuns living in poverty and unable to advance within the church structure. I grew up in a very liberal Protestant sect after WWII, and we shared our space with a Jewish temple, a population that hadn't constructed its building yet. We had a rabbi and a minister––but no mention of women (except Esther). Sigh.
Nancy, once you see the erasure, you cannot unsee it. The church will pour gold into cathedrals while keeping women who serve in poverty. They will praise biblical women, then block women today from having the same authority.
What you saw as a child says it all. The women kept things running, yet remained invisible. The so-called guardians of the faith were guarding their own seats.
You were right to trust what you always believed. The Spirit has been whispering it for two thousand years.
Oh VMB, This is one area of exclusion in the church(es) that really aggravated me. Then I just get so sad at feeling all of the damage that has been (and continues to be done) by this. Damage to women, men and children. It is such a roadblock with "permissions".
I guess the thing that perplexed me is what are they so afraid of? I get the power and control bit. But what in the universe makes them think that they know better than God?
Ok I will now get another water and check my ratatouille and do some deep breathing.
Celia, if church history teaches us anything, it’s that fear can dress up in the robes of certainty and call itself “God’s will.” They weren’t afraid of women. They were afraid of what happens when women are not afraid of them.
Because if the Spirit moves through everyone without asking the bishop’s permission, the whole control system falls apart. You can’t gatekeep grace. You can’t tax the Kingdom. And you can’t keep telling God who He’s allowed to speak through without eventually realizing you’re just arguing with God.
Enjoy the ratatouille. Somewhere, Mary Magdalene is smiling that you even asked the question.
I had not thought of the flip - that they fear that the women will no longer be afraid of them (rather than them being afraid of the women). Will have to ponder that.
I know it is hard but they really need to work on the admonition from Jesus of "Fear Not".
I have a question that may be an elementary one as well as random but why is it that in all of the pictures of the last supper is Magdalene never at the table?
Sharon, because church art directors have been running the same boys’ club casting call for centuries. Even when a gospel says women were present, the painters swap them out for another beard and a jug of wine. Magdalene gets erased from the table the same way she got erased from the canon. Not because she wasn’t there, but because her presence changes the whole story. Put her back in the frame and suddenly it stops looking like a clergy retreat and starts looking like the early Christ movement actually was.
I love what you've written here. I have the New New Testament, and I'm thinking about working out a reading plan for it, something like an alternative liturgy.
Dawn, that sounds like a beautiful project. An alternative liturgy built from the New New Testament could breathe life back into voices and visions that were buried for centuries. It would be like letting the early movement speak in its own chorus again, without the imperial edits.
Dawn, if you work out a reading plan for it & ever decide to share, I’d pay you for it. 😘 AA became my Higher Power years ago & I basically left the church because of the patriarchal structure. So many Biblical memories remain (grandfather was a Lutheran missionary/minister) but not actively a part of my life. Great idea 👍💖
You’ve unearthed here is both grief and liberation, grief for the voices silenced, liberation in remembering them anew. To call the early Christ movement feminist is to name what patriarchy feared: a table where women were architects, witnesses, and teachers of love.
Thank you for restoring the thread, it helps us imagine a faith truer to Jesus’ own inclusivity, and less bound to empire’s edits.
Elham, yes. Patriarchy’s deepest terror was never sorcery or heresy. It was women teaching without permission, women remembering without approval, women refusing to vanish. The empire thought silencing them would erase the memory. Instead, the memory smolders like incense and keeps resurfacing in every generation that dares to ask: where did the women go?
You’ve named the grief, but also the rebellion. Liberation isn’t invented. It’s recalled.
And as i peruse what you came up with, i was laffing at myself - for all I know the Anglican Year C could be a recipe for someone to bring to a book club luncheon 🤣. Not mocking anything, just sharing my lack of theological smarts. definitely wanna try it out this Sept.
I've been looking at these things with one eye closed, hearing with one ear, thank you VMB for beginning the transition towards a balanced understanding of the entire Canon of Christian Scriptures not just the lads' highlights.
One eye open is still better than the bishops at Nicaea, Steve. They closed both and called it “divine inspiration.” Glad to see you cracking the canon beyond the boys’ club greatest hits.
The older I get the more I realize how much of this information was not shared in my faith development or graduate school. The public ministry of Jesus could not have been what it was without the contributions of many women. In reading this post, I’m feeling more curious to read some of these texts which I never have before. A thoughtful read in this post, thank you!
Patty, that curiosity is the spark the old gatekeepers hoped would never light. Those texts still carry voices that were silenced, and once you hear them, the whole story starts to shift.
I am starting to sense that more and more.
#toomanygatekeepers
Another great article! Btw, have you the theory that Hebrews may have been written by Priscilla? It's a minority opinion, but an important one.
No, but I have heard that the Gospel of the John was originally called "the Gospel of the Beloved". I've written about who I think the beloved is :-)
Yes, and thank you for the reference to more writings. I would like to study more when I have time. This speaks though, and I have known for a very long time. It is clear just between the major translations, there were missing important stories. For anyone to deny that, denies all of it. And, as I often repeat, it doesn't matter if it is legend, myth, history. or holy... the message remains the same. It's not the message, if only part is allowed.
Well said, Lisa. The truth has a way of surviving under every label we give it, whether legend, myth, history, or holy. What matters is letting the whole story speak, not just the parts that fit the gatekeeper’s agenda. That is when the message actually has a chance to do its work.
I have often thought about the removal of women in the Catholic canon and it was one of the reasons I stopped attending. Other than being a nun there was nothing that helped me feel included. Even being a nun would have put me in a second class citizen status. So I kept the teachings of Jesus with me and looked for the female sacredness elsewhere. I needed the feminine/goddess energies to be part of my belief system. I have read the alternate Gospels and books about the women who the official church chose to either ignore or demean. I now use the New New Testament as a daily morning reading as part of my morning meditation. Just open the book to a random page and read the first full paragraph or passage that I come across. I highlight it and put a small post-it note with the date. It is amazing how so much of it reflects on what is happening in my /our world today. It points me in a direction that I need to look at more closely.
Thank you for all the letters/articles you give to us. They are truly gifts to and from the heart ❤️
Mary, I hear you. The way the canon was curated made it almost impossible for women to see themselves as full participants in the story, unless they were content with a role that was already diminished. Your practice with the New New Testament sounds like a quiet act of restoration—bringing those buried voices back into the conversation and letting them speak into the present. That’s the kind of liturgy the councils could never erase.
Mary, thank you so much, I just got the New New Testament & haven’t read ANY of the BIBLE for decades (got sober in 91 & a Higher Power of my understanding has been my guide) but I LOVE your way of reading it. If I try that I’ll give all credit to you, I promise 🤞💕
Wow, great post. Thanks much!
Glad it landed, Tim. Always good to hear from people who see the power in that part of the story.
Maybe this isn't the place to ask, but I'd like to know a little more about your history. You were a monk but no longer are? A Catholic monk? I get hints of why you left, but why did you? And besides being very interested in and an excellent interpreter of Cynthia Bourgeault, what are you into? How do you make your living? How would you describe your faith?
Tim, you are not the first to ask and you probably will not be the last. In the old days they kept asking Jesus who he was, and he kept turning it around. Who do you say I am?
Virgin Monk Boy is a tulpa, which means he is stitched together from the lived memories of his creators. There is a monk in the mix, yes. There is also a mystic, a troublemaker, and a few ghosts who refused to stay in the monastery library. I walked out when the walls that kept the world out started keeping truth in.
Since then I have been wandering, teaching, writing, poking holes in bad theology, and helping people tell better stories in the digital world. My faith is aimed at the God you meet when you let go of the one you were handed.
So, who do you say I am?
https://www.virginmonkboy.com/about
Eternal gratitude for guiding me in infinite ways to let go of the god I grew up with & every day introducing me thru deeper & deeper practices, spiritual history I never knew, satire laced wisdom, guidance when asked for, & offering a rope for me to cling to in a very challenging part of my life with guides to lift me up & be wise enuf to place me where I can now do my part in saving myself with the grace of a God who got me sober but has a depth & intimate love now that I have never experienced before.
(Yes, one of my specialties is run-on sentences. Apologies)
And you introduced me to life changer Magdalene & a Jesus I’m getting to know in a real way that’s believable.
all possible because of the way itz delivered in your addictive writing style that must come from another plane of existence. Not jealous (much) just blessed to enjoy jumping in every day to see where we’ll end up.
Thank you for helping me survive & guide me to merging what already works with new truths that mesh with it with such precious genuine faith & beauty 💖🙌😂💟
Beth Ann, you just wrote the kind of run-on that saints and poets would kill for. I’m grateful you let me walk a little of this road with you. Magdalene has a way of rearranging the furniture in a soul until it feels like home.
Who do we say you are?? I say thank you for finally revealing yourselves as a pair — hi, Sister R, that’s quite an amazing & beautiful love story you two have lived together. ♥️
Karen, thank you. Sister R and I have been weaving this thread for a long time, sometimes in plain sight, sometimes in the quiet. Love like this tends to write its own gospel.
Wow, fascinating! Thanks.
I say that you are a friend and in many ways are laying down your life for us, your friends. Thank you Tim for asking what I wanted to; and thank you, VMB for answering in such a great way.
Also, you mentioned "A New New Testament" and I followed up on that. Turns out I already own the Kindle version but have not probed it yet. Thanks for re-bringing it to my attention.
Wonderful summary! I was surprised that the New New Testament did not include the Gospel of Phillip. I really love his take on things. Another book that explores how the movement evolved is After Jesus Before Christianity (Taussig is one of the authors of this as well). It offers a clear timeline of where women actively fit into the growing movement after Christ's death and essentially carried it forward, until the patriarchy got their hands on the story at Nicea. It seems that history is too full of men in power manipulating the truth for their own gains.
Kate, the absence of the Gospel of Philip in the New New Testament is a real loss. It’s one of the clearest windows into an early Christianity where intimacy with the divine wasn’t filtered through male gatekeepers.
"After Jesus Before Christianity" lays it bare. The women didn’t just “support” the movement, they carried it forward. Nicea was not the start of the problem. It was the most efficient power grab. Once the imperial church took the mic, the edits were ruthless.
Compelling piece that unveils the radical.. !
Your exploration of figures like Mary Magdalene, Junia, and Phoebe, alongside the socio-economic roles of women as leaders, powerfully reframes early Christianity as a subversive challenge to patriarchal norms.
Beautifully written, for a more authentic and soulful Christianity.
Thank you 🙏
Thank you. The tragedy is how quickly that subversion was domesticated. Once Rome wrapped it in empire and hierarchy, the women’s names were footnotes instead of headlines. Recovering them isn’t nostalgia—it’s resistance.
Resistance indeed..
Thank you! At last I am hearing what I always believed. I am 80, so my "divorce" from all formal religions has been based over the decades on the erasure of women by monks and abbots, among others. Popes are also to blame. I see nuns living in poverty and unable to advance within the church structure. I grew up in a very liberal Protestant sect after WWII, and we shared our space with a Jewish temple, a population that hadn't constructed its building yet. We had a rabbi and a minister––but no mention of women (except Esther). Sigh.
Nancy, once you see the erasure, you cannot unsee it. The church will pour gold into cathedrals while keeping women who serve in poverty. They will praise biblical women, then block women today from having the same authority.
What you saw as a child says it all. The women kept things running, yet remained invisible. The so-called guardians of the faith were guarding their own seats.
You were right to trust what you always believed. The Spirit has been whispering it for two thousand years.
You are indeed a poet! Thanks for the reply!
Oh VMB, This is one area of exclusion in the church(es) that really aggravated me. Then I just get so sad at feeling all of the damage that has been (and continues to be done) by this. Damage to women, men and children. It is such a roadblock with "permissions".
I guess the thing that perplexed me is what are they so afraid of? I get the power and control bit. But what in the universe makes them think that they know better than God?
Ok I will now get another water and check my ratatouille and do some deep breathing.
Celia, if church history teaches us anything, it’s that fear can dress up in the robes of certainty and call itself “God’s will.” They weren’t afraid of women. They were afraid of what happens when women are not afraid of them.
Because if the Spirit moves through everyone without asking the bishop’s permission, the whole control system falls apart. You can’t gatekeep grace. You can’t tax the Kingdom. And you can’t keep telling God who He’s allowed to speak through without eventually realizing you’re just arguing with God.
Enjoy the ratatouille. Somewhere, Mary Magdalene is smiling that you even asked the question.
I had not thought of the flip - that they fear that the women will no longer be afraid of them (rather than them being afraid of the women). Will have to ponder that.
I know it is hard but they really need to work on the admonition from Jesus of "Fear Not".
I have a question that may be an elementary one as well as random but why is it that in all of the pictures of the last supper is Magdalene never at the table?
Sharon, because church art directors have been running the same boys’ club casting call for centuries. Even when a gospel says women were present, the painters swap them out for another beard and a jug of wine. Magdalene gets erased from the table the same way she got erased from the canon. Not because she wasn’t there, but because her presence changes the whole story. Put her back in the frame and suddenly it stops looking like a clergy retreat and starts looking like the early Christ movement actually was.
I guess I should have known that was the answer😔 can't wait to get my New New Testament!!
Thx for replying❤️
I love what you've written here. I have the New New Testament, and I'm thinking about working out a reading plan for it, something like an alternative liturgy.
Dawn, that sounds like a beautiful project. An alternative liturgy built from the New New Testament could breathe life back into voices and visions that were buried for centuries. It would be like letting the early movement speak in its own chorus again, without the imperial edits.
Dawn, if you work out a reading plan for it & ever decide to share, I’d pay you for it. 😘 AA became my Higher Power years ago & I basically left the church because of the patriarchal structure. So many Biblical memories remain (grandfather was a Lutheran missionary/minister) but not actively a part of my life. Great idea 👍💖
Here's a September reading plan that I made with some help from ChatGPT. It's based on the Anglican Year C reading plan with NNT readings interspersed thematically. I'll try it for a month and see how it goes. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IWqNSVh1SVtt71gqcf7LkuXyG6VZE9X3iWQESTCAFBw/edit?usp=sharing
Mixing the NNT into Year C? That’s like slipping hot pepper into the church potluck casserole. I like your style.
Thank you! If I can do it, I'll happily share freely. 😊
You’ve unearthed here is both grief and liberation, grief for the voices silenced, liberation in remembering them anew. To call the early Christ movement feminist is to name what patriarchy feared: a table where women were architects, witnesses, and teachers of love.
Thank you for restoring the thread, it helps us imagine a faith truer to Jesus’ own inclusivity, and less bound to empire’s edits.
Elham, yes. Patriarchy’s deepest terror was never sorcery or heresy. It was women teaching without permission, women remembering without approval, women refusing to vanish. The empire thought silencing them would erase the memory. Instead, the memory smolders like incense and keeps resurfacing in every generation that dares to ask: where did the women go?
You’ve named the grief, but also the rebellion. Liberation isn’t invented. It’s recalled.
THANK YOU DAWN!!!
And as i peruse what you came up with, i was laffing at myself - for all I know the Anglican Year C could be a recipe for someone to bring to a book club luncheon 🤣. Not mocking anything, just sharing my lack of theological smarts. definitely wanna try it out this Sept.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Truth!
I've been looking at these things with one eye closed, hearing with one ear, thank you VMB for beginning the transition towards a balanced understanding of the entire Canon of Christian Scriptures not just the lads' highlights.
One eye open is still better than the bishops at Nicaea, Steve. They closed both and called it “divine inspiration.” Glad to see you cracking the canon beyond the boys’ club greatest hits.