Dear non-POC¹ friends of CBE International,

If you are reading this message, congratulations. You’ve survived a year of global pandemic, economic recession, social distancing, wildfires, floods, an ammonium nitrate explosion, murder hornets, and likely the most acrimonious US presidential election in living memory. If you’re looking at this list thinking, “feels like something’s missing,” it’s because some of us didn’t survive the racial disharmony that was also a hallmark of 2020.

Imagine waiting to be born inside a small, warm, and dark home. You feel safe and protected, and every need is provided. You are aware of a faraway pulsing and gentle voice. Eventually, the walls begin to squeeze in on you. At first, gently, then with greater force. You are ejected not so much out, but into a new home. You are born. You experience the gentle voice hinted at inside the womb as a person. You recognize her as Mother.

Women today have proven themselves successful in medicine, law, and virtually all other professions. Why, then, do certain churches refuse to ordain them? Some churches claim that ordaining women would be contrary to tradition and Scripture. Men, they say, have led the church for centuries, but female clergy are a relatively new phenomenon, one that reflects the influence of secular humanism and modernism, not orthodox teaching. However, this argument ignores the facts.

Many Western, Protestant Christians oscillate between pity, fear, compassion, and scorn for burqa-clad women.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. The idea of human rights—fundamental rights for each human irrespective of his or her gender, social status, or origin¹—is a characteristic of our modern world and a fruit of the Enlightenment.

“International.” It’s the final word of “Christians for Biblical Equality International.” It’s in our web address. It’s in our logo. It’s on the front and back covers, in the masthead, and on literally every page of Priscilla Papers.

“So the Lord God said to the serpent. . . .

Personhood is deeply intertwined with the names we are given. In the biblical narrative, names of characters brim with meaning. Such meaning is enhanced in those instances in which a person takes or is given a new name.¹ A rare example of a woman undergoing a name change is Sarai, who takes on the new identity of “Sarah” in Gen 17. This transpires within the various iterations of God’s covenant with Abraham (the Abrahamic covenant) found in Gen 12–17.

Hebrew nouns have grammatical gender, either feminine or masculine. Hebrew verbs distinguish masculine and feminine plurals as well as masculine and feminine singulars. English translations generally mirror the gender of such verbs in narrative and usually, but not always, when the female metaphor is inescapably gendered—for example, childbirth.

In Mark 12:41–44, a woman shows the readers the way to follow Christ as she foreshadows the suffering that lies ahead for Messiah and for the disciples by giving her “whole life” to God. Thus, she should not be overlooked in the Bible’s long list of exemplary women. Through Mark’s artful storytelling, this unnamed woman—whom Jesus witnesses giving an offering in the temple—encapsulates the self-giving life of Christ and foreshadows the lives of all Christians who follow Jesus well.