The Jesus Revolution for Women

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Collin Hansen
It’s a book all about women and Jesus, but not just for women. It’s a book for all of us about Jesus as we see him from the perspective of his female followers. And Jesus through the eyes of women how the first female disciples help us know and love the Lord. Published by the gospel coalition, Rebecca McLaughlin explores the life changing accounts of women who met the Lord. By entering the stories of the named and unnamed women in the Gospels. This book gives readers a unique lens to see Jesus as these women did, and marvel at how he loved them in return. Now, if you’re like me, you might be surprised by just how much we can learn. I mean, I, I knew all of these stories, of course, by reading them over the years, but I’d never seen them together this way. And I didn’t sufficiently appreciate either the diversity of the stories or their first century oddities. The only reason I think they don’t stand out more to us today is because we already live in a world that’s been revolutionized by Jesus’s treatment of women, we could still travel to many places, especially in the Middle East that more closely resemble the pre Christ world, and how women are treated and valued compared to men. Many of you will be familiar with Rebecca’s work through such books as the secular creed confronting Christianity, and another new book confronting Jesus nine encounters with the hero of the Gospels, which is published by crossway and TGC. And Rebecca joins me now on gospel bound to discuss the Gnostic Gospels, feminism, and more, Rebecca, thanks for joining me.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Hey, Colin, I thought we were gonna talk about the real gospels, though, not on the Gnostic ones.

Collin Hansen
Well, we’re gonna talk about the Gnostic Gospels, in light of why we prefer the real God. Okay. All right. So let’s just start big question here. What was the single most striking thing you learned about Jesus through the eyes of women?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Oh, my goodness. It fit I feel really dumb confessing this. But early in the process of writing this book, I found myself writing the sentence, a sentence claiming that Jesus had female disciples in the fullest sense. And I felt almost edgy, saying, I always knew that the 12 apostles weren’t the only disciples Jesus had. But actually, saying that Jesus had female disciples in the absolute fuller sense, albeit not within the 12, we were playing, you know, a very specific role. As you text my best friend, I was like, Am I on the edge saying this? And am I on the edge saying that there are also female prophets that we see in the Gospels? I’m not, it’s just what the text says. And so I think it was fun for me, because I spent quite a bit of time in various books, and just in my own sort of life, looking at the encounters of Jesus with multiple women, I think it was piecing together those encounters just like you were describing Colin, and in particular, looking at Luke’s Gospel, which fascinates me to the extent that I call my son Luke, who Luke, Luke names, women as Jesus’s disciples on purpose to name women, among Jesus’s disciples. So it couldn’t be clearer from Luke’s gospel that Jesus had female disciples in the fullest sense.

Collin Hansen
I was going to ask that question. And I think I had some of the same reaction that that you did, it seems so obvious. And yet, I don’t know why hadn’t more commonly heard it, put that way. And then as the book has circulated, and as we’ve published excerpts, we’ve been accused of the logical downgrade for saying that, but what exactly is the alternative? Either it seems like either to redefine the definition of disciple, or to deny the explicit testimony of Scripture. I don’t really know what the alternative is.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah, I think we all know that Jesus had female followers in the loosest sense, and that he encountered a lot of women who received him, you know, absolutely. With faith. I think one of the markers of disciples in in the most fallen technical sense is that they actually traveled around with Jesus. And we see in the, in the gospels, we see very close followers of Jesus who do not travel around with him. So for example, Mary and Martha and Lazarus, who seem to have stayed in Bethany, rather than following Jesus around but clearly among his closest followers, and each of them described as somebody who Jesus loves. But seeing especially in Luke’s gospel, Luke naming women among those who traveled around with Jesus as he went on his preaching tours through the villages through the cities, and seeing that they are named witnesses of Jesus’s life, death, burial and resurrection. Again, it’s a piecing together of things that we might have known before. We’re probably all familiar with the Are many of us with the fact that women named women were the first witnesses of Jesus’s resurrection. But sort of pulling that back and saying, oh, no, they’re actually also times when it’s named women, who are the witnesses of Jesus’s life and teachings and miracles, even before we get to his crucifixion, burial, and resurrection, where they come to the fore. We see this this pattern throughout the Gospels,

Collin Hansen
And while still acknowledging that they are not among the 12, and not the apostles, and not entrusted with that, that writing of the Gospels, and yet still valued among the closest people, I guess, helped me to understand what made Jesus different in how he treated women, because I think one of the challenges for us as Christian readers in the 2000s is that it doesn’t strike us as all that odd his interactions with women. But surely that would not have been the case. For those women who experienced this with Jesus directly. And of all of those first readers of these gospels,

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah, it two of my favorite encounters that Jesus had with women are one when he is having dinner at a Pharisees house, which is unusual for Jesus, usually, the Pharisees are complaining about who is having dinner Well, on the on this occasion, he’s actually having dinner with a Pharisee named Simon. And this, this woman of the city, who was a sinner walks in, and Luke describes her that way sort of sets her up to the sinful woman of the city. And she comes and starts weeping on Jesus’s feet and wiping them with her hair and pouring It’s like a It’s a totally embarrassing situation. Because not only is this a woman who is sort of approaching Jesus and touching his body, frankly, in our culture today, it’d be pretty weird if a woman came and like started you know, touching your feet and crying on you that people would ask questions you know, Colin, who is this woman who was pouring out I love upon your in this in this way. But so she’s She’s not only a woman, she’s also a sort of disreputable woman, for some reason, it’s not totally clear whether she was known for sexual sin, or if there was another kind of sinful, you know, well known simple practice in her life. But Simon, the Pharisee, is a port that Jesus is receiving her as he is. And he concludes, you know, if Jesus was really a prophet, He would know what kind of woman that says he’s touching him. And he would want nothing to do with her, of course. And Jesus then goes on to hold this woman up as an example of love to shame Simon, and points out all the things he has failed to do, that she is, is now doing. And I love the story, because it shows again, not only Jesus receiving a woman, and, you know, holding her up as an example, to a man who would have seen himself as, you know, impressive among men religiously, let alone when we extend it to women, but that this is a woman who is specifically on the edges and on the fringes and in their kind of disreputable camp. And yet Jesus holds her up as an example. To Yeah, to shame his his Pharisee host.

Rebecca McLaughlin
So we see there, a couple of kind of threads combining to show us Jesus’s love and welcome of this woman. Another story that’s extremely striking is his conversation with a Samaritan woman at a well in John’s gospel, and there again, we see three different threads actually pulled together one, she’s a woman and a respectable Rabbi shouldn’t really be having a private conversation with a woman other than her, you know, his mother or his you might, that would have been probably fine, but like, a random woman, not so much. Number two, She’s a Samaritan and Jews did not associate with Samaritans they were raised to hate Samaritans that was a you know, massive kind of segregation to where Jews would go to long lengths to circumvent Samaritan territory, Jesus walks right into it. And she’s a woman who has had five husbands and is now living with a man who’s not her husband. So it’s almost like Jesus delights in in cutting through not only the kind of male female barriers of his day, but sort of doubling down on that to say, not only about am I going to welcome and engage with women, but also sinful women, but also sinful foreign women who I meant to hate as a Jew. It’s the longest part of recorded conversation he has with anyone in the Gospels. And he delves into theology with her. So what we see in his treatment of women is, is an openness, or welcome to them, even if they’re outsiders in every possible sense, and the way that he treats them with theological seriousness. So as I said, we have this this long conversation with the Samaritan and we also have an possibly my favorite story in all of the Gospels, when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead and John Levin, but before that, how has this incredible conversation with Lazarus, his sister, Martha, where he says to her, I am the resurrection the life anyone who believes in me even though he dies will live and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s one of his famous I am statements. And whereas almost all the others have spoken to groups, this has spoken to one individual grieving woman, who he’s he’s chosen to engage with and even created a space to engage with by letting her brother die. So we see Jesus Yeah, not not only, as I say, kind of allowing women in, but drawing them to himself and treating them with absolute sort of theological seriousness in ways that would have been extremely surprising in the first century. And in some ways, dare I say, can be surprising today.

Collin Hansen
So about 20 years ago, when I was starting my career after college, that was really when the Gnostic Gospels started to catch on. In particular, there was a scholar right there at Harvard, Karen king. And a lot of the advocacy for the Gnostic Gospels had to do with really feminist interpretations. They were thought to empower women in new ways. I’ve always found that odd, it seems that you find that odd as well. But perhaps maybe explain why all of us would prefer the accounts of Jesus with women in the actual gospels versus these so called Gnostic Gospels?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yes, when I was having a conversation just now in a coffee shop with an Irish guy who had struck up a conversation with me and referred himself as a gnostic, and I was like, Oh, I wonder what that means. So we sort of dug in, and he referenced the Gnostic Gospels as, as part of what he was saying. One of the things that it’s important to kind of get clear in our mind is that whereas the four New Testament Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were written well within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses of Jesus’s life, death and resurrection, and were written by people who were either themselves eyewitnesses. In the case of John’s gospel, or very close associates with eyewitnesses. So for example, Mark’s gospel, the first to be written down, very likely, mostly based on Peters memories.

Rebecca McLaughlin
And and each of the Gospels drawing on named eyewitnesses as they write their accounts. It’s one of the things that’s fascinated me, as I’ve explored this in the last few years is that we don’t often notice that there are many anonymous people in the Gospels. For example, almost all the people Jesus healed in the gospels are anonymous. But there are a few exceptions to that. And that’s when the gospel authors are specifically citing an eyewitness. So for example, Bartimaeus, who one of the blind men in Jesus gives His sight sighted because he’s someone who would have likely been known to the early Christian communities and, and you know, someone who could be pointed to as a as a source for this. So so we have the New Testament Gospels, it’s very close access to an actual eyewitness testimony of Jesus, the Gnostic Gospels, it’s kind of a catch all term for some other writings that were almost always actually significantly later. So beyond the the lifetimes of eyewitnesses to Jesus’s ministry, and not actually giving us stories of Jesus during his life so that the gospel, the four gospels give us essentially sort of biographies of Jesus with a strong focus often on, you know, the, the final phases of his of his life, and especially his death and burial and resurrection.

Rebecca McLaughlin
The Gnostic Gospels sort of presuppose Jesus’s life and tend to focus more on sort of hyper spiritual conversations that Jesus is supposed to have had with his followers after his resurrection. You know, an example of that is what’s commonly known as the gospel of Mary. And that gospel in particular, when I, when I say that gospel, I’ve sort of using the term loosely, that that writing in particular, is pointed to as a potentially more female centric vision of Jesus than the New Testament Gospels give us. There are a couple of problems with that. Number one, as I said, written after the first eyewitnesses likely to have died out and not accessing that sort of living testimony of Jesus. So you know, certainly far more speculative. Most of the text is actually missing. And it’s a lot of what’s missing is this supposedly sort of mystical, visionary conversation that Jesus, it has with this, this follower Mary, and the male disciples sort of mixed in their response to her some, you know, wanting to listen to her others and in particular, Peter saying, Why would Jesus have revealed himself to a woman and not to us like, that’s crazy talk? Why would he say something to a woman that he wasn’t saying in our presence?

Rebecca McLaughlin
The reality is, if you look through the Gospels, you often see Jesus revealing himself to women, when he could have revealed himself to his his male disciples not least in in the rest erection story when we see Jesus intentionally appearing to women first, and I say intentionally because John’s Gospel is clear that Peter and the author of John’s gospel have both sort of run to the tomb having heard Mary Magdalene first report, so Jesus could have sort of sought them out. And instead he actually meets with with Mary Magdalene, and some of the other the other women. So these Gnostic Gospels give us a very different picture of Jesus in the sense that their their whole kind of worldview is not based in Jewish thought, as revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures, like the the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are, but much more in this sort of gnostic philosophical tradition that was circulating in the early centuries, you know, among Greek influence thinkers.

Rebecca McLaughlin
So you knew much more about just salvation as escaping from the body, and from physical reality, versus the New Testament vision of the promise of resurrected life, you know, properly embodied, new life in Jesus. So we have, from a historical perspective, far less grounds for taking the Gnostic gospel seriously than the New Testament Gospels. And within the New Testament Gospels themselves, we actually have all the material that we need, for a fully orbed affirmation of women as as disciples of Jesus as people whom Jesus specifically loved and loves. Today, we have, whereas the the four New Testament Gospels, as far as we can tell, are written down by men. They’re written on the basis of eyewitness testimony, often of others, and in particular, recording women’s voices. So the idea that the New Testament Gospels instead of stifling a more feminist perspective on Jesus just doesn’t align with what we see in the New Testament Gospels.

Collin Hansen
Well, for all these reasons, and many others, it’s not too small a thing to say that Jesus unleashed a revolution for women. Would you describe that revolution, though, as more sudden, or as more of a slow burn? over 2000 years?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Gosh, I would say both. It’s sudden, in that the vision is all there in the Scriptures. And this is this would actually be true with almost any kind of ethical line, we want to trace from the New Testament to now. The vision is all there. So it’s not like, well, the New Testament into some ideas, and then some really smart Christians later on kind of figured out some you know, how to improve on those ideas. Today, exactly. I don’t really hold with that. That sort of trajectories view I think, actually, it’s all there. In the pages of the scriptures. I think, I don’t just think I know that the Christian vision of male and female both made in God’s image, both beloved of Christ, both woven into Jesus’s body, in the sense of his body on earth today, which is, which is the church is actually both in marriage playing profoundly important roles in picturing the gospel. You know, as Paul gives us Christian marriage as a little almost scale model of Jesus’s love for His church where husbands are called to love and sacrifice for their wives as Christ’s sacrifice for us on the cross. I mean, that that, in and of itself is an extraordinarily radical idea in the first century, when men were not even expected to be faithful to their wives, quite frankly, let alone to pull themselves out and sacrificial love for them.

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s radical if we, if we’ve just imbibed a sort of Victorian or even a dare I said, sort of historic Christian cultural view of marriage, which is all too often sort of the wife, serving the husband, and the husband’s needs and priorities kind of coming first and the wife, you know, following on in in a subservient fashion. That’s actually not the vision that New Testament gives us at all. It’s husbands, dying for their wives, and wives submitting to their husbands as to the Lord, not because they are not equal in dignity and worth. But because they’re picturing the church and our submission to Christ. So we have in it all the resources in the New Testament. And one of the profound ironies that I think we’re seeing today, and that we’ve seen in recent decades is is that whereas there are ways in which even sort of supposedly Christian cultures historically have kind of missed the mark in terms of what what marriage ought to look like and and how Singler sought to be valued actually, is a piece of that as well. Today, even even those among our peers who think that they are most in favor of women’s rights and Quality are actually often buying into a system and a culture that is demonstrably bad for women.

Rebecca McLaughlin
So so our modern beliefs, or the beliefs of our non Christian friends in commitment, free sex as being a sort of general good, is mountains of psychological and sociological evidence to show that actually commitment free sex is specifically bad. It’s bad for everybody, let’s be honest, but it’s specifically bad for women. It’s incredibly hard for children to but like if we look at the, you know, the the negative effects of commitment, free sex on women. And so there are ways in which today while we may think that we have created a sort of prove female system of equality, we’ve actually in many ways reverted to pre Christian paradigms, where men could access commitment through sex in its least loving forms. And when we’re just sort of expected to go on with it. You know, tragically, I think we’ve, we’ve recreated some of that today.

Collin Hansen
While I was just speaking about sexuality and transgender identities at a church last night, and the church that was giving away your secular creed book, and that was exactly one of the topics that I brought up there. And I suppose that’s an answer to one of my questions, or my next question here, which is, let’s imagine somebody might acknowledge that when you look back on human history, there’s a turning point with Christ. But they reject His authority, obviously, his claim to divinity. And they say, yeah, yeah, I mean, sure, that’s helpful. Now, let’s just get Jesus and Christianity and let’s just keep these aspects of what we like within a feminist package, and then go from there. What’s the problem with that?

Rebecca McLaughlin
There’s an extent that we can do that with any of our deepest moral beliefs. So we can say I deeply believe in universal human equality, I deeply believe in care for the poor. I deeply believe that the strong and the rich and the powerful should not trample on the weak and the poor and the marginalized, but rather, rather care for them and share with them. I deeply believe in love across racial, racial difference, I deeply believe in the equality of men and women, we can say all of those things. But if we take Jesus out of the foundations, and historically, that’s, it’s Jesus, from whom all of those beliefs have flowed, those were not self evident truths at all, in the first century. They haven’t been self evident truths. In most cultures are most of time that haven’t been in any way kind of attempting to follow Jesus’s teaching. So we can say, you know, I just happen to believe this, and I can’t Yes, I can give it no real philosophical grounding. In reality, we can do that.

Rebecca McLaughlin
But that’s ultimately boils down then to just sort of sort of preference. Equally, somebody else could say, well, you know, I believe that this racial group is more important than that racial group, or I believe that men are, in fact, more important than women, or I believe, you know, and all that we can say to them at that point is okay, you, you, you, you know, we have, we’ve know that there’s no plugging in of our deepest moral beliefs to the fabric of the reality of the universe. What Jesus offers us and what the Scriptures give us, is a profound and intimate and indissoluble relationship between what we believe morally. And what we believe about the universe itself, is a fascinating book called Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind by an Israeli historian named Dr. Noah Harare. And he identifies as I think, agnostic or atheist. And he makes sort of searing statements like homosapiens has no natural rights, just as chimpanzees, hyenas and spiders have a natural rights.

Rebecca McLaughlin
And he says human rights are a figment of our fertile, fertile imaginations, and that there’s human rights and equality, embarrassingly little in common with a scientific study of Homosapiens. So for our friends who may not want to believe in God at all, or certainly not in a sort of fully formed creator god, there then left kind of clinging on the one hand to a supposedly sort of scientific view of the world that thinks that we can, you know, analyze everything, know everything that’s worth knowing kind of from the ground up scientifically. They’re grasping that we want to we, on the other hand, are sort of snatching out Christian beliefs about the actual value and worth of human beings that have nothing to do with this, the scientific study of Homosapiens so I think we find ourselves on any very fragile philosophical grounds when we try to take Jesus’s teachings about human beings in general and men and women in particular and and that have grounded them on, on nothing or on you know, grasp at science which is, you know, not going to not going to support that view at all.

Collin Hansen
You devolve into a meaningless tolerance. I would like you said you do you are you dissolve or do you devolve into power struggles? Just asserting your dominance of your view, even if it’s a feminist view, just simply demanding conformity to it for the sake of conformity? A kind of right side of history approach, perhaps, but nothing beyond that, that you can refer to. Got a few more questions Who are the Rebecca McLaughlin, talking about Jesus through the eyes of women? Have the first female disciples help us know and love the Lord? As you’re working on this book, Rebecca, any scholars, preachers, commentators, you found who really grasped the significance of this aspect of Jesus’s ministry.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Possibly my favorite scholar when it comes to this to the Bible is a British guy named Richard Balkan. Forgive my pro British.

Collin Hansen
Everybody loves Balkan. I feel like most

Rebecca McLaughlin
I feel like many people haven’t heard of Bolcom. Well, it makes me sad. Yeah.

Collin Hansen
I mean, it’s stuff can be pretty dense. I’m reading through Jesus. You know, Jesus to the eyewitnesses that was

Rebecca McLaughlin
Jesus and the eyewitnesses.

Collin Hansen
It’s some dense stuff. It’s like reading anti rights apologetics. It’s It’s long, it’s dense, it’s detailed, very academic. That might be why, yeah,

Rebecca McLaughlin
if I can in any small way via sort of profit of Richard Bauckham, speaking his words, and in more accessible ways, that would be a great aspiration for it. Yeah, I just I drew a lot on on him. They’re both in terms of explaining why we should believe that the New Testament Gospels are in fact, our most solid ground when it comes to just the historical reality of Jesus’s you know, life and teaching and death and, and claimed resurrection. And also, he wrote a fascinating book called gospel women, oh, where he is looking, in particular, at named women and the Gospels. And it’s, you know, very scholarly and you know, there I said, I agree with you rather dense tone, but fascinating in terms of the historical background that he can give to the the named women in the Gospels.

Rebecca McLaughlin
For instance, when in Luke’s gospel, halfway through when Luke is citing three named women among Jesus’s itinerant disciples, he cites Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons have been cast out, and he has gone on to become, by far and away the most famous of Jesus’s female disciples, arguably other than Jesus, mother, Mary, who was obviously a disciple in one sense as well, but about whom the Gospels tell us very little, in fact, other than that she had seven or seven demons cast out from her and that she was the one of the first witnesses of the resurrection. Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and a woman named Susanna. unreachable, can have to suddenly a whole pages and pages on what we can learn from this description, Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager.

Rebecca McLaughlin
And what Richard Bauckham explains is that this woman would have been part of Herod’s court. And in this instance, this is not King Herod who ordered for all the baby boys in Bethlehem to be killed, but one of his sons, who was really ruling over the region that Jesus was ministering in at the time, and had the sort of I was gonna say love hate relationship with Jesus doesn’t quite represent it, but certainly, you know, interest in Jesus in some ways, but ultimately, you know, if hostility towards him, and the reality is this, this high status woman who was part of Herod’s court had apparently left Herod’s court to traipse around the countryside, with Jesus and this disreputable bunch of of disciples of guys and women. And quite what that signals about Jesus’s attractive power not only to the poor, and it’s very, I mean, the the theme, especially in Luke’s gospel of Jesus love and care for the poor is is unmistakable. But Jesus, it seems, was able to draw poor women and rich woman of high status like Joanna to to follow Him. They were supporting his ministry out of their means. So these are, you know, wealthy women. But they weren’t just doing that from a distance they were actually walking around the countryside with Jesus, and go on to be some of the witnesses of the resurrection. It’s extraordinary.

Collin Hansen
Oh, my next question, I think I’ve I think I already have an answer to it, but it’s going to ask you what one thing could our churches do right now that would reflect Jesus and how he treated women. One thing I was going to recommend this isn’t quite at the practical level at which I was seeking, but I was going to say preach the gospel of Luke. I’ve I’ve found that it is very challenging and very rewarding. And it will upend a lot of a lot of a preacher’s assumptions, I think. But that’s one thing, you could do this a little bit hovering above where I was asking the question, but what comes to mind for you?

Rebecca McLaughlin
I want to say three things which I know you only asked for one, I’m sorry, sorry. And also not sorry. One is, treat women with theological seriousness. It don’t make your women’s ministry about crafts, and you know, chats about motherhood, both of them are fine. Like there’s nothing wrong with chat about motherhood, and, and crafts. But actually, if we look at Jesus in the gospels, we see him having some of his most profound theological conversations with women. So expect to have, you know, if you’re a pastor expect to have some of your most profound theological conversations with women. Number two, there have always been more Christian women than men, as far as we can tell from historical records, and as far as we can see in the global church today, and that’s very likely true in your local church as well. One of the implications of this is that there will always be more single, but Christian women than there are single Christian men.

Rebecca McLaughlin
And this is actually in many ways, really good news. Because single women can be incredibly powerful agents of the gospel, when properly supported and integrated into the family of the church. But if we construct our churches along the idolatrous lines of only recognizing the nuclear family, as you know what, what family really is, and I see idolatrous because I think idolatry of the nuclear family, as you know, real problem that we have, instead of leading entity testament, community ethics, it shows us that the local church is the primary family unit for Christians, then we’re going to leave single Christian women, you know, alone, and no, we’re not designed to work alone. So that’s number two. And I’m forgetting what number three was. Number three, when we are talking and thinking and debating about the role of women in the church, we need to all remind ourselves of what Jesus taught again and again in the gospels, which is that leadership in his kingdom is not about power and privilege, but about service and sacrifice.

Rebecca McLaughlin
And so often we come into these conversations, whatever our views, and whatever kind of outcomes we want the conversation to have, we come in with the assumption that leadership is, in fact about power and privilege. And so you know, for example, denying women the opportunity to serve as a senior pastor is like, you know, pushing them pushing them down into a subservient position. Well, not according to Jesus, actually, according to Jesus, if you want to be great in the kingdom, you need to be the servant of all. So and sometimes we will actually, you know, those of us who might take a, you could call a complementarian view of women’s roles in the church can fall prey to the same problem of actually acting as if leadership is about power and privilege rather than about service and sacrifice. So it will help all of us if we remind ourselves of this, and it’s a truth that Jesus had to teach his disciples again and again and again, and they didn’t get it and nor are we today. So I think we need to keep reminding ourselves, actually, the real gospel work, the most important powerful gospel work in your church today is very likely being done by the least visible people. Whether it’s an often those often those are women actually,

Collin Hansen
Listeners to gospel bound are going to hear a live article pitch for me to Rebecca. There’s I just saw a study that showed that for the first time, or in some surprising way, the proportion of women to men has come closer to equalizing in the church in the United States. Now, there are many reasons why, as you rightly observed that it’s always been more women in the church. And that’s, like you said, that’s all of time. That’s all the world. That’s not a uniquely American thing. But what seems to be a uniquely American thing right now, is the radical widening gap between single women and married women on politics. And so in terms of so a lot of single women are leaving the church for a lot of reasons connected to politics and inside the church. I haven’t thought much about that. But as you mentioned that I thought, oh, Rebecca would have some really interesting this and this difference of that. So I’ll send you something.

Rebecca McLaughlin
I’ll refrain from my response in real time.

Collin Hansen
Well, wait and see the survey to make sure that I’m actually on the right track. But it made sense in terms of the Democratic Party’s priority that they’ve placed for some time on single women. And then the shifts in the Republican Party after that, and, and people often talk in politics about women. But it’s not specific enough, because there are significant differences between married and single women. When it comes to views on all kinds of different things, abortion would be one of those examples. But anyway, and that could also be a function of the Dobbs decision as well, which has really up ended some different political allegiances in the United States. Okay, so there’ll be there’ll be over email. All right, tell us about confronting Jesus love to hear about how that book differs from your other work. And I was just thinking about this. I looked it up, Rebecca, it is amazing to me. And what a blessing as you’re your friend and editor, and over the years that your first book came out only a little bit more than three years ago. It’s been a good run.

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s yeah, so it’s funny, my son, Luke, is just turned four and I wrote confirmed Christianity when I was pregnant with Luke. So all this craziness is like late years old. Yeah, I’m going to receive my my personal copies of confronting Jesus. Today, I just got a notification from UPS, right. And it was tiny, because I just had a long conversation with an Irish guy in a coffee shop, who sort of struck up a conversation with me while I was working on my new book. And I was talking to him about Jesus, because what else? Would anyone want to talk about? Various points, he’s like, Have you always been like this? Pretty much. And I offered to, to send him a copy of confronting Jesus. And actually, right after this, I’ll go and see if he’s still at the coffee shop, if my copies have arrived, confronting Jesus is designed as a gateway drug to the Gospels. What do I mean by that? I wrote, confronting Christianity, my first book, especially for those friends of mine, and maybe yours, you have a lot of principled reasons for not even considering Christianity. You know, isn’t Christianity against diversity? Isn’t Christianity, homophobic?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Doesn’t Christianity denigrate women? Those kinds of things. So that guy sought to address those questions. And in doing so, bring in the scriptures in general and the Gospels in particular, but the the front foot was the questions rather than the scriptures. Confronting Jesus is, is sort of flipping that around and saying, Okay, imagine you have a friend who is genuinely interested in Jesus, but maybe not quite ready to sit down and read the gospel for themselves. This is a book that I’m hoping will help whet their appetite for reading, reading a gospel. And the best way I can explain it is my 12 year old Miranda is really into the musical Hamilton at the moment. And a few weeks ago, she read for Yeah, she read the biography. It’s like 800 pages or something crazy, the biography that on which, on which the musical was sort of based. And she kept coming to me and saying, Mum, Hamilton in real life is so much less you so much worse than Hamilton in the musical, she was like, you know, let me tell you about all the bad things that Hamilton did and all the skeletons in his closet. I think when we read the gospels, we had the opposite experience.

Rebecca McLaughlin
So I have a sort of hazy view of Hamilton from having watched the musical but not having read the 800 page biography. And he strikes me as kind of a great guy with, you know, for sure, some bad patches, like when he committed adultery, and that, you know, definitely not good. But she has a much a much clearer view of the real man. I think when we read the gospels, we go from a hazy view of Jesus as like, yeah, you know, good moral teacher, but who knows if he ever really claimed to be you know, various things to being absolutely stunned by who Jesus is. And so that was that’s what I would love for people to experience, as they read confronted Jesus sort of being confronted by Jesus in the gospels. And if if halfway through people put the book down and pick up a gospel and read it instead, I will be only delighted.

Collin Hansen
Well, what could be better Rebecca, then talking with you about Jesus? That is fun. That is some fun stuff. I love being able to read through your works and be able to interact with you about them and to and to think about the revolution that Jesus affected and that he continues to affect and that we continue to live into as we’re confronted by Jesus as I read him one of the main things I said last night It was, if we are not offended by Jesus and we are not reading.

Rebecca McLaughlin
We’re paying attention.

Collin Hansen
We aren’t paying attention. He has, he says plenty of harder things for all of us to be offended by in our flesh. And yet, of course sends us his Comforter, the Holy Spirit to help guide us into all that all truth into hearing it and obeying it. And it’s amazing and he loves us loves us all the way he knows how we fall short, at the same time loves us to to holiness and ultimately is coming again soon. So my guest on gospel bound has been Rebecca McLaughlin, we’ve been talking primarily about Jesus through the eyes of women. How the first female disciples help us know and love the Lord knew from the gospel Coalition. We also there touched on her latest confronting Jesus nine encounters with the hero of the Gospels, published by crossway with the gospel coalition Rebecca, it’s always a joy. Thanks for joining me.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Thanks, Collin.