Monday, May 11, 2026: I'm not adding women to the Bible. I'm uncovering the women male bias erased.
He went out of his way to bring the "bent over" woman into the circle of men in order to cure her. That was a big No-No. Women and men never mixed in the synangog.
He touched the woman -- something strictly forbidden by law
He performed the cure on a Sunday -- also strictly forbidden. And he also called out the authorities for being hypocrites. Wow. Jesus shamed the leaders:
"14 Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”
15 Jesus answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? 16 Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”
17 When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing."
In one very telling remark, Victoria noted that this story of Jesus' cure of the "bent over" woman is never shared in Catholic churches on Sunday -- but only on weekdays with fewer people in attendance. Notice too the woman is not named. Why not? Has her name been erased by the men who wrote and edited the scripture story? That's a quewstion asked many times by Theologian Elisabeth Fiorenza.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has done pioneering work in biblical interpretation and feminist theology. Her teaching and research focus on questions of biblical and theological epistemology (the theory of knowledge), hermeneutics (how to interpret the Bible or other wisdom books), rhetoric (the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing), and the politics of interpretation, as well as on issues of theological education, radical equality, and democracy.
She understands that Re-imagining the Jesus movement in a feminist key opposes the boundaries set by a history of male domination, gender, and doctrine. By assessing various Jesus traditions and interpretations as to whether they can engender liberating visions for today, Fiorenza seeks to challenge and transform masculine Christian identity toward a vision of justice and well-being for all.
During her classes at Harvard where she was a professor in the Theology department, She would stand before her Harvard divinity students and ask: "Where are the women in the Bible?" Not where should they be. Where did they go? Her answer: the men erased them. Through her deep scholarship and research she brought the women back.
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza asked her students to do something most had never considered: read the Bible looking for what wasn't there. Not what the text said. What it deliberately left out.
This was Harvard Divinity School in the 1980s. Students came to learn how to interpret sacred texts, to understand ancient languages, to trace theological arguments through centuries of scholarship. They didn't come to be told that everything they'd learned might be built on systematic erasure.
But that's exactly what Elisabeth was saying. For two thousand years, biblical scholars—exclusively male for most of that time—had read scripture and concluded: women played minor roles in early Christianity. Supporting characters. Wives and mothers. Occasionally mentioned, rarely important. This seemed like historical fact. Ancient societies were patriarchal. The Bible reflected that reality.
Elisabeth had a different theory: What if early Christianity actually had women leaders, and later male writers systematically wrote them out? She called it reading the Bible with a "hermeneutic (interpretation) of suspicion." She had her students Assume the text has biases. Assume its authors had motives for what they included and excluded. Assume silence doesn't mean absence. Then look again.
Take the unnamed woman in Mark's Gospel who anoints Jesus with expensive oil. Jesus himself says her action will be remembered wherever his story is told. But the Gospels never give her name. Centuries of interpretation barely mention her. She becomes a footnote. Why would Jesus promise she'd be remembered, then male writers ensure she was forgotten? Elisabeth's answer: because she was doing something prophetic, something powerful—and that threatened the emerging male hierarchy of the early church.
So they kept the story but removed her name. Made her forgettable. Made sure Jesus's promise wasn't kept.
Or consider Mary Magdalene. The Gospels show her at the crucifixion when male disciples fled. Show her as first witness to the resurrection. Show Jesus sending her to announce the news to others. She's functioning as an apostle—the literal meaning is "one who is sent."
But by medieval times, Western Christianity had transformed her into a prostitute. A label nowhere in the Bible but invented by male interpreters who couldn't accept a woman as primary resurrection witness. They needed Mary Magdalene small. Sinful. Needing male guidance. So they rewrote her despite what the text actually said.
Elisabeth's 1983 book "In Memory of Her" laid out this argument with exhaustive scholarship. She analyzed Greek grammar. Compared manuscript variants. Examined archaeological evidence from early Christian communities. She wasn't speculating. She was doing the painstaking work of recovering what had been deliberately obscured.
The backlash was immediate.
Conservative theologians accused her of forcing feminist ideology onto scripture. Of seeing women where there were none. Of rewriting the Bible to fit modern politics. Some male scholars dismissed her entire methodology. Of course the Bible was written by men about men—that's just history, not bias.
But Elisabeth kept pushing the fundamental question: How do we know what's "just history" versus what's been shaped by who got to write it? When every biblical author is male, when every interpreter for centuries is male, when every translator is male—are we getting history, or are we getting history as men chose to record it?
Her Harvard students wrestled with this. Some found it electrifying—suddenly seeing possibilities in texts they'd thought they knew. Others found it destabilizing. If women were actually leaders in early Christianity, what did that mean for churches that still excluded women from leadership? If Mary Magdalene was an apostle equal to Peter, why couldn't women be priests? These weren't abstract academic questions. They had immediate implications for religious institutions built on male authority.
Elisabeth wasn't gentle about the implications. She remained Catholic but became one of the church's fiercest internal critics. She argued that Jesus's movement was egalitarian—shared meals, women disciples, rejection of hierarchy. The patriarchal church structure came later, imposed by men consolidating power.
This made her dangerous. Not an outsider attacking Christianity, but an insider with credentials saying: we've been wrong about this for two millennia. She became the first woman to hold an endowed professorship at Harvard Divinity. Trained generations of scholars who carried her methods forward. Built an entire academic field around feminist biblical interpretation. But she also remained controversial. Even now, decades later, mention her name in certain theological circles and watch the reaction split.
Some see a brilliant scholar who revolutionized biblical studies by asking questions no one else dared. Others see an ideologue distorting scripture to fit contemporary politics.
Elisabeth's response has always been consistent: I'm not adding women to the Bible. I'm uncovering the women male bias erased. The distinction matters enormously.
One approach says: let's make room for women in religious leadership despite biblical precedent. Elisabeth's approach says: women were already leaders. Later men erased them. We're not innovating—we're recovering. It's the difference between asking for inclusion and demanding recognition of what was stolen.
At eighty-six, Elisabeth still writes, still teaches, still makes people profoundly uncomfortable by asking simple questions with complicated answers. Where are the women in this text? Not "should there be women?" but "where did the women who were here go?" That shift—from "should" to "were"—changes everything. It transforms absence from natural to suspicious. Makes silence evidence of erasure rather than proof of non-existence.
And it applies far beyond biblical studies. Whose stories get preserved in any historical record? Whose contributions get credited? When we accept received wisdom about who mattered in the past, whose biases are we accepting?
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza didn't set out to rewrite the Bible. She set out to read it honestly—acknowledging that texts written by men, copied by men, interpreted by men, and taught by men for two thousand years might reflect male perspectives rather than complete truth. Then she did the meticulous scholarly work of recovering what those male perspectives had obscured. She found women disciples. Women prophets. Women who funded early churches and hosted communities and proclaimed resurrection.
They'd been there all along. Reduced to single sentences. Names removed. Roles minimized. Importance diminished. Because male writers couldn't imagine—or couldn't allow—women holding the authority these women actually held. Elisabeth asked a Harvard classroom full of future religious leaders to see that erasure. To stop accepting silence as evidence. To read suspiciously. Questioningly. With awareness that every text has an author with biases.
Some students left that classroom angry. Threatened by implications they couldn't ignore.
Others left transformed. Seeing sacred texts completely differently. Understanding that interpretation isn't neutral—it's always shaped by who's doing the interpreting.
The question Elisabeth asked in the 1980s echoes today:
Where are the women?
Not where we wish they were.
Where they actually were before someone decided they shouldn't be remembered.
Answer that question honestly, and you have to confront who did the forgetting.
And why.
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