Deborah was judging Israel before there was a king (Judges 4–5). Huldah was the prophet the king’s officials went to when they needed God’s word interpreted (2 Kings 22:14–20). The women at the empty tomb were sent to announce the resurrection to men who did not believe them (Luke 24:9–11). If the Bible silences women, someone forgot to tell the Bible.
That is not a dodge. It is the starting point Dr. Nijay Gupta uses in his scholarship on women in the early church. Any reading of the passages that seem to silence women has to account for the many places where God plainly entrusts women with leadership, proclamation and his word. Gupta spent years working through those passages carefully, and his answer changed his mind.
Gupta Used to Believe Women Shouldn’t Be Pastors
That detail matters. Gupta is not approaching this question from outside the conservative tradition. He held the complementarian position, believed it and taught it. What changed was an extended, careful study of what the full biblical record says. He found more than he expected.
The arguments saying that women should not be in ministry are not as strong as we think they are.
— Nijay Gupta
He says this not as someone who came to the text wanting a particular outcome, but as someone who did the work and was surprised by it. Deborah is not a marginal figure. She leads Israel as both a judge and a prophet at a time when no king sat on the throne. When the book of the law is found in the temple, the king’s officials are directed to Huldah, not to a male prophet, to interpret God’s word. Both women hold roles with enormous authority, and neither is presented as an exception or an embarrassment.
Phoebe Delivered the Letter, and Junia Was Called an Apostle
Gupta walks through two women in Romans 16 that most churches speed past. Phoebe carried Paul’s letter to Rome (Romans 16:1–2). This was not a clerical errand. The person who carried a letter and read it aloud to the congregation would also have fielded questions about it, making her the first interpreter of the text in that community. She is, in practice, the first expositor of the letter to the Romans.
Paul calls Junia an apostle:
“Salute Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellowprisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who also were in Christ before me” (Romans 16:7).
For centuries, Gupta notes, early Christian readers simply assumed Junia was a woman and took her apostolic designation at face value.
Almost universally, they take for granted that Andronicus’s partner is a woman, and is an apostle.
— Nijay Gupta
The male version of the name, Junias, appears later in some translations. It has no historical basis. No evidence exists that Junias was ever a real name in the ancient world, and it appears to have been introduced precisely to avoid calling a woman an apostle. Gupta points to a detail that makes the original reading even stronger. Paul says Junia was imprisoned for the gospel. Women were rarely jailed in the Roman world unless they were seen as a genuine threat. Her ministry put her life on the line.
Where Did the “Submit” Passages Come From?
The household codes in Colossians, Ephesians and 1 Peter tell wives to submit to their husbands (Colossians 3:18; Ephesians 5:22; 1 Peter 3:1). For many readers, these are the definitive texts. Gupta says understanding where they come from changes how we read them.
The household codes don’t derive from the Old Testament. They don’t derive from the teaching of Jesus. They actually derive from Roman political philosophy. They actually come from Aristotle.
— Nijay Gupta
Aristotle’s political philosophy held that the household, with a male head in charge, was the basic unit of a functioning society. Paul and Peter were not creating a Christian structure from scratch. They were working within the existing Roman household framework, which their readers already lived under. They did not invent the hierarchies they were writing into.
But they did seed those structures with something different. Gupta points to Philemon as the clearest case. Paul tells a slaveowner to welcome his returning slave not as property but as a beloved brother, as if he were welcoming Paul himself (Philemon 1:16–17). The category does not get abolished. It gets transformed from inside. Dr. Esau McCaulley, reflecting on the same dynamic in how the New Testament handles slavery, calls this “the floor, not the ceiling.” The starting point is not the permanent endpoint.
The New Testament writers also anticipated Jesus returning soon. They were not writing a social charter for the next two thousand years. They were writing to people who expected the age to end in their lifetime. When it did not, the question became: what does the Spirit’s direction require of us now?
We Already Read the Slavery Texts This Way
Gupta makes a comparison that is direct and worth sitting with. During the abolition debates, defenders of slavery could point to passages that told enslaved people to obey their masters. The Christians who won the argument did not abandon Scripture. They appealed to a deeper logic: every human being bears the image of God, and no institution can override that.
Most Christians today read the slavery texts through that lens. The question Gupta presses is why the women passages get different treatment. The instinct is available. He is asking whether we are willing to use it consistently.
He is careful about what he is and is not claiming.
Not all of them carry the same level of weight of normativity for the kingdom of God. That doesn’t mean I’m throwing out my Bible. I believe every word of Scripture is true, but how we apply Scripture changes.
— Nijay Gupta
His book speaks to readers across the spectrum of views on this question. His main concern is practical: stop making women fit into boxes God never built, listen to the women in your community and learn from their experience of the church. That last one is the hardest for many congregations and the most important.
Dr. Charlie Dates, in the Jude 3 Project’s Contributions of the Black Church course, offers a frame that applies here: “We did not read the Scriptures from the viewpoint of the empire but we saw ourselves as those on the margin.” The Black church developed a hermeneutic that read from the bottom up. That instinct is exactly what Gupta is asking readers to bring to the women passages: start from the people the text is regulating, not the people who benefit from the regulation.
What About 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14?
Gupta does not pretend these passages do not exist. He engages them in his book. The short version of his argument is that both passages address specific situations in specific communities. 1 Corinthians 14 comes in a section addressing disruptive worship practices, not a blanket prohibition on women speaking. 1 Timothy 2 is shaped by specific problems in Ephesus that the letter references. Neither reads naturally as a universal, permanent ban when you sit in the text and read it alongside the women Paul praises and empowers in his letters.
The question is not whether these verses are true. They are. The question is what they are doing, and whether we are reading them in their actual setting or lifting them out and applying them as a universal rule that the rest of Scripture does not support.
Quick Answers
Does the Bible say women must be silent in church? There are verses that read that way, but Gupta argues they have to be read alongside the women Scripture clearly shows leading, teaching, prophesying and being named by Paul as co-workers and apostles.
Was Junia really a woman and an apostle? Gupta says early Christian writers assumed so for centuries. The male version of the name appeared later in some translations and has no historical basis.
Where do the “submit” passages come from? Gupta traces the household codes to Roman political philosophy rooted in Aristotle, which the New Testament writers worked within while seeding it with kingdom values.
Is this just a liberal reading of the Bible? Gupta holds that every word of Scripture is true. His argument is about purpose and application, and he says his book speaks to readers on different sides of the question.
What is the practical takeaway? Listen to women. Learn from their experiences of church. Stop assuming the women in your congregation belong in a smaller role than the women in Scripture.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This piece draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation with Dr. Nijay Gupta about the women of the early church. The full episode walks through Phoebe, Junia, Deborah, the household codes and more.
Dr. Nijay Gupta teaches New Testament at Northern Seminary in Chicago, co-hosts the Slow Theology podcast and is the author of Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church. He came to faith from a Hindu background in high school.
