Christians like to point to the martyrdom of the first apostles as evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. They base their hypothesis on the premise that people don’t die for a lie they know to be false. People might die for a lie that they believe to be true, but not one they know to be false.

Until just a few years ago when my husband mentioned it, I didn’t even know there was a question about the ending of Mark 16. When comparing the shorter ending with the longer ending, it is clear that the longer version is a happier ending. Did Bible editors include the longer version just to give us a happy ending?

Did you ever wonder why we say, “until death do us part?” It’s because there will be no marriage in the life after death. How do we know this? Because the apostle Luke tells us that Jesus said so.

As you may or may not know, before I became a dedicated follower of Jesus, I identified as a liberal feminist. I believed in the right of women to be strong, independent, equal, and even the right to make hard "choices." My identity changed as I discovered who I really was as a special child of God.

When I set out to write this series, one of my main motivations was to gain clarity in my own mind about the truth of the matter. I had procrastinated on analyzing the biblical data and stating my official position concerning the role of women in the church. I owed it to both to myself and to the Christian community to do so.

Women were most certainly viewed by Jewish men as second-class citizens, a sort of property. Female testimony in a court of law didn’t even hold as much weight as the testimony of a man. Women were seen as less intelligent and less trustworthy.

But then… Jesus! 

In this series on gender roles in the church, we’ve finally come to what has been called “the 1 Timothy 2 proof-text bomb.” There is so much to be said about these few verses! 

The argument I’m attempting to develop in this series is that taking Paul’s statements about restrictions on women in isolation from other Scripture and then applying them to all people, in all churches, in all times, and in all places is a misunderstanding of Paul’s intention.

We certainly shouldn’t minimize the fact that The Twelve—the dozen men Jesus hand-picked to be his principal learners and leaders—were all men; that is significant. But, we also cannot ignore the fact that there were others, including women, who learned and ministered under the direction of Jesus.