"The Anointing Woman" (A Response To Saint James Episcopal Church of Greenfield, MA) Apologetics

So in case you were not with us last week, or for those watching online, welcome to the second session of our Faith Matters discussion group. And I was just thinking about that word faith. The article we looked at last week was written by a man from Faith Church, and the column is called Faith Matters.

Faith in What and Faith in Whom

So it begs the question, faith in what? Faith in whom? If you'll allow me for just a moment to ask, is faith a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it would depend on the object of your faith, would it not?

If someone had faith in the devil, that would be bad. If someone had faith in the mission of the Third Reich, that wouldn't be too good. So having faith or believing in something, it matters what you have faith in.

So I think the assumption with this column is we're talking about faith in God. But what God? Tell me something about this God. How do you know these things? Where do you get your information? You see, historically, Christians, and the majority of people writing into this column profess to be Christian ministers, but historically, Christians would say they believe in the Lord, the God of the Bible, the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So Christians, in time past, we would say, and still today, but we would say we have faith in God, we have faith in His word. But based on what I see week after week, at least in this column, all that, or that concept, seems to be out the window.

So we are now two for two of ministers writing in articles that either contradict the biblical teaching, or in this case, the woman claims that the Bible has been altered. It's been changed. The stories in the gospels have evolved.

In other words, you can't just read the scripture and have faith, and you can't just believe it for what it says, it's all been changed. And she sets it up in such a way to where now you need scholars from Harvard to know what's really going on.

And then what's quote, unquote, really going on is often the opposite of what the scripture says. So the article we're gonna be looking at this week, it's titled, The Anointing Woman, by Reverend Dr. Molly Skirm of St. James Episcopal Church in Greenfield.

The Authority of Scripture Versus a Story That "Evolved"

And this week, we are going to be doing it in a more structured manner. I'll give a brief summary. We'll read through it one paragraph at a time and comment as we go. So I would summarize the article this way.

She brings up the story in the gospels where a woman anoints Jesus. John says this happens in the city of Bethany by Mary. Matthew and Mark record the same story, but don't mention her by name. And then Luke records a different story where Jesus is anointed by a sinful woman who washes his feet with her tears in an act of repentance.

We would recognize that Matthew, Mark, and John are all telling the same story about Mary anointing Jesus for his burial. And we would recognize that Luke is recording a totally different event where another woman, not Mary, but another woman comes to Jesus seeking forgiveness for her sin.

Two totally different accounts. And they could have been years apart. But what the woman who wrote the article is claiming, as far as I can tell, that the people who wrote the gospels, and I doubt she actually thinks they were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but she seems to be claiming that the authors of these gospels, or multiple authors, edited the story, altered the story, because it made them uncomfortable.

Based on this view from a Harvard professor, the woman who anointed Jesus, she claims, is actually acting as a prophet. Now, does the Bible say that? No, but that's her claim. So here is basically a feminist narrative that they're reading into the Bible, that just as the prophet Samuel anointed David as king, so this female is acting as a prophet anointing Jesus.

So this basically exalts the woman above Jesus. And the biblical authors, whoever they were, the sexist that they were, basically, they just couldn't stand for this, so they had to knock this woman down a few pegs, which is why Luke turns this amazing woman who is a prophet into just a sinful woman.

That seems to be what she's saying. And like last week, the bigger issue is that this is an attack on the Holy Scriptures. The implication is the Bible can't be trusted. It's been changed. Therefore, the Bible isn't true.

Maybe parts of it are true, but you can't just read it and believe it. You can't just read the Bible and have faith in the words that they're accurate. So yeah, maybe the truth is in there somewhere, but we need to kind of broaden our horizons.

We need to recognize that these stories were rewritten based on the author's bias. So that brings me back to my original question. Faith matters? Okay, faith in what? Faith in who and how do you know?

Faith in God? Faith in Jesus? How do you even know anything about Jesus? How do you know what you're reading is even accurate? So that's the real issue. It's the authority of the Scripture, which she is undermining.

So this is yet another article trying to attack the Bible. And I think an attempt to deconstruct the Christian faith and everything we thought we knew in the past 1 ,800 years, the past 1 ,900 years, tear that all down.

So now there is this emerging Christianity. All right, so here's the irony. The things that she claims the biblical authors are doing, tampering with the Bible, changing things, well, that's what she's doing.

So is that a fair assessment? I think it's fair. Okay.

Jim, you had something? Yeah, I just wanted to indicate, let me see if it's the 1st, 2nd, 3rd paragraph, where she says, I love this story, not only for it's emotional power,.

But for the betrayal of Jesus. You gotta speak up so we can catch it.

All right, the 3rd paragraph, I love this story, not only for it's emotional power and for it's betrayal of Jesus' humanity in the day before his death, but also because it provides a fascinating example of the ways in which biblical narrative evolved, was shaped by the dynamics of a young Christian movement wrestling to understanding memory that did not fit their religious and cultural paradigms.

I thought that was interesting, that she would go back in that direction. Yeah.

Mary of Bethany, Not Mary Magdalene

Okay, well, let's go through this chapter by, or excuse me, let's go through this paragraph by paragraph. So let's start reading. She says, the gospel text for this Sunday, in many Christian denominations, is John's account of the woman who anoints Jesus.

As with other texts for these days approaching Holy Week, so you can tell the article is a little old. It is a, it is somber in tone, and this story is particularly poignant. In it, a woman anoints Jesus with perfumed oil, a rather shockingly intimate gesture.

Another disciple objects to the action as representing a waste of funds that could have gone to the poor. And Jesus defends the expenditure on the oil as preparation for his burial. Okay, so let's start out.

Who is the anointing woman? Who is it? Mary. Okay, so Mary is a common name. Which Mary is it? One of the sisters. Okay, so there's Mary, like the Virgin Mary, Mary, the mother of Jesus. There's Mary Magdalene.

And then there's the other Mary,.

Lazarus and Martha's sister.

Okay, so this is Mary, the sister of Lazarus and Martha. So Mary of Bethany. Does everybody agree with that? I did a Google search, and again, you, what's my, see, I said Google and my phone. So was listening.

Yeah, let me shut it off. But I did a Google search, and you can't trust Google. So who is the Mary in this story? And it said Mary Magdalene. Apparently that's Christian tradition that it's Mary Magdalene who did it.

That makes no sense at all. So John chapter 12, go there if you're not there already. Turn to John 12. This is almost certainly Mary of Bethany. The thing about this article compared to the one last week, there's more scripture mentioned in this one.

So we have something to kind of sink our teeth into. So that's good. So yeah, this is Mary of Bethany because her name is mentioned in the same sentence as Lazarus and Martha. So it's almost certainly her.

This is not Mary Magdalene like some people claim. Who's the disciple who gets upset? Judas. Judas, right. Because he objects not because he cares about the poor. This was just a front. Instead, he wanted to sell the oil, which was worth like a year's salary back in those days.

He wanted to sell the oil so he could skim some of the money for himself. So she says, I love this story not only for its emotional power and for its portrayal of Jesus's humanity in the days before his death, but also because it provides a fascinating example of the ways in which the biblical narrative evolved.

What does that mean? The biblical narrative evolved. Everything evolves.

In her world, everything is evolving. Yeah.

Monkeys evolve into people. The biblical story kind of changes and evolves. It was one thing back then. And then, yeah, people altered it. And she says, so the biblical narrative evolved and was shaped by the dynamics of a young Christian movement wrestling to understand a memory that did not fit their religious and cultural paradigms.

Yes, Marcus.

I want to go back to 2 Peter. We've got to go to history now. 2 Peter 1 .21. Just to get a real gist on how the Bible came. It didn't evolve. Prophecy came not in old time by the will of man or woman, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

Right. That sounds pretty solid to me. Right.

Yeah, we believe that the Bible was written by the prophets and the apostles or the close associates of the apostles, not by a group of editors who changed it over time, which is what she is proposing.

Okay. So I would say the first paragraph was pretty decent. I mean, it was straightforward. It's fine. The first paragraph. The second paragraph, things quickly go off the rails. So she says that the biblical narrative evolved.

And another way of putting that is that the story is changing over time.

Yes. And if this is the case that one person said one thing and another person said another thing, and therefore it's up for debate, then who should you believe? Which one of these writers should you believe?

Or should you believe the author of this? Hmm.

Yeah, and that kind of goes to that issue. Who are you going to believe? Yes. Right? Who is your faith in? Yeah, what is your source of authority? That's what all of this is about. Every article we're going to review, it always goes back to that.

It will go back to that. All right. Any comments so far?

We're going to continue. She doesn't really address anything later in the article about the humanity of Jesus, which she says is one of the things she admires in this story, Adam.

Yes. There's no link here. Right, and liberal ministers tend to like the humanity of Jesus because most of them don't believe he was divine. So they would tend to focus on his humanity because to many of them, I suspect she is in that camp, that they don't believe Jesus is divine.

So humanity is all you have, really, Larry.

Well, she also then says that it was changed or evolved by the religious and cultural norms of the day, just as today is different, cultural, so we should follow socially what's going on in the change of culture around us and religious change today.

Right, and that's what they're doing. They're changing Christianity to make it fit what's popular today because this, she gets into the whole homosexuality stuff and being open and affirming at the end in the church write-up.

So that's what this is about. There is no source of authority. The scripture is unchanging. No, we've got to constantly evolve and Christianity kind of morphs into the new 21st century version.

Yes. Well, I had a question, and in keeping with not criticizing the author or the Episcopal Church where she is a pastor, but I did start to read in the, and it's difficult to read, but it says this church is an emerging church community.

Right. And I thought it might be good to talk about this emerging church because that's also, to me, sounds a little bit like evolving. Right, yeah. Whereas the church, the church is a solid edifice built on Christ as the chief cornerstones and the apostles and us as living stones.

It's a solid thing. It's not a transient thing that changes all the time. Is that what emerging means?

What does emerging mean? Yeah, if we can wait till the end, that's at the end. So I've got to cover that. We'll address the term emergent or emerging. So the next paragraph, she says, all four New Testament gospels include an anointing story, but they differ in the details.

Mark's account in Mark 14, three through nine, is chronologically the earliest written. Now that's debatable, okay? More on that in a second, but that's not necessarily the case. In it, in Mark's gospel, an unnamed woman anoints Jesus's head and the disciples collectively object to the gesture as wasteful.

Jesus silences them, stating that she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Then he then goes on to observe that what she has done will be told in remembrance of her. In Matthew's account, Matthew 26, six through 13, is virtually identical.

Okay, so this is the same account as Matthew's. There are some details given in one account that's not in the other. Did anyone pick up on that? If you compare these stories, Mark and Matthew, that there's some differences.

What are those differences?

I don't recall specifically. I wish I'd brought my harmony of the gospels, but just because one, and there are other stories in the Bible where Jesus healed one leper or, and it's another account says he healed two lepers, and that does not bother me.

They just shed light on each other. If two lepers were healed, well, then one certainly was. Okay, so what are the differences?

Between Mark and Matthew, you're asking? Yes. Well, it was in Simon the leper's house. Okay. In Bethany.

That's both Mark and Matthew. Okay. I think Mark said made of pure yard, and Matthew left that detail out. Okay.

So some of the details that differ include the location, the identity of Mary. Mary is identified in one and not the other, but the other one just doesn't give her, it's not saying, oh, that was Susanna, and then this one says Mary.

It just doesn't mention her name. So it's not a contradiction. And even the location isn't a contradiction. We'll get to that in a second. Here's the main difference, I think. In one gospel account, Jesus, his head is anointed.

The other one, his feet. I was like, well, which is it? Maybe both. Both, right. One records one detail. The other records the other. It's not a contradiction. Yes, Janet. It was, I don't think it was a contradiction because it was two different.

Yeah, well, these are not, but the other one is back in Luke. Yeah.

Also, I wasn't sure about the time. One said six days before Passover, and then one said two days something about Passover. I didn't know if that was the same day or not. Okay.

Well, I didn't pick up on that, but sometimes Passover is referring to the week. Sometimes it's referring to the day. So I didn't notice that, but so Matthew, Mark, and John are all the same. Same story, same event.

Luke is the one that's different. Of course, she's saying they're all the same.

Yes, Jim. I just think that each one of the women portrayed in each of these narratives, they were all, each of them were very, well, the woman is very overwhelmed with her sinfulness, and her admiration for Jesus, and it's an extraordinary display of Jesus' forgiveness.

In all of the accounts you're saying? Yeah. Because? Because each one of them avoided the Lord. Right, but it And realized that there was sinfulness, and that Jesus would be or is the Savior, the Messiah that they had hoped for.

Okay.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but only one account mentions a sinful woman, right? That's Luke. So the other three is Mary, and Mary is actually honored that she's doing this for my burial. Okay, so you see that even we're all getting confused now, because they're similar details, and this one has one detail, this has a, so you can sort of understand how the average person who picks up the Bible and compares these accounts would be a little confused.

I mean, that's understandable. So you have to understand something about liberal ministers. They don't actually believe the Bible is the word of God the way that we believe it's the word of God. They believe that it's the word of man, and that parts of it contain divinely inspired ideas, however they would define that.

So they have this theory that Mark is the first gospel written, and that the other gospel writers were basically copying off of Mark, and then embellishing. That's basically their theory. Also that they would say it's not actually the apostles, it's not actually Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John writing.

So people come along later and edit it. So in the end, this narrative, or the narrative these days, is that these events, all of this is kind of untrustworthy. We kind of need to explain to you what's really happening.

And here's the main narrative that's woven into this. It's a feminist narrative, exalting the anointing woman to the level of prophet, exalting her above Jesus. Basically, the liberal ministers today think that the people who wrote the Bible were basically sexist, homophobic bigots living 2 ,000 years ago, and we need to correct that.

That is a very common view in progressive liberal mainline churches. So you have to understand that's where they're coming from. They view things in the Bible as sexist and homophobic. You've heard of the term, the patriarchy.

I think she brings up that term somewhere in here. So from what I can tell, she's injecting this feminist narrative to make this woman into a prophet, exalting her above the Lord Jesus Christ. We just read the Bible and take it at face value and believe what it says.

That's not what they do. Okay. So any comments on that paragraph before we move on? All right. She continues Luke's gospel, includes an anointing story. That's Luke 7, 36 through 50, but the details are strikingly different.

In it, the anointer is described as a quote, a woman in the city who was a sinner. Instead of anointing Jesus's head, she anoints his feet after bathing them with her tears and drying them with her hair.

When the homeowner criticizes Jesus for allowing him to be touched by a sinner, Jesus responds by justifying her action as one of gratitude for the forgiveness of her sins. So the reason why the details are different in Luke's account is what?

It's a different person. Right, it's a different person. Luke's story, if you compare the gospels, Luke's story happens at the beginning of Jesus's ministry. The other accounts happened at the end, right at the end.

If you take the Bible for what it says, this is clearly a different woman. Now, here's another thing that I can see how it would confuse people. Luke's story happens at the house of what? Simon the leper?

No, Luke's account happens at the house of a Pharisee who happens to be named Simon. So I think that's what happens. People saw it. This is at Simon's house, Simon the leper. Well, this is Simon too. Well, it must be the same person.

Why is that not a fair conclusion? It's Simon the tanner too. Right, yeah, Simon is one of the most common names back then. All right, so with this article, things started out okay in the first paragraph, quickly went off the rails with the stories evolving.

Now it's getting even worse. It's all based on speculation and assumptions that the Bible has been changed. And it's totally understandable for the average person in the pew to get confused because of the details.

I get it, but a pastor is supposed to know better. A pastor is supposed to teach the word of God and do the study. So she should be able to pick up on this. Of course, she goes into it with the assumption that the Bible has been manipulated.

So I guess it's no surprise. So now we get to this professor of divinity. She is the one who kind of establishes the basis for this theory. What's a professor of divinity? Yeah, professor of divinity, whatever that means.

So she weaves in a, I know what it is, but she weaves in a feminist narrative that the gospel writers, again, were just a bunch of sexists. The real hero of the story is not Jesus. It's the anointing woman.

The woman anoints Jesus just like Samuel anointed David. Now in their relationship, Samuel and David, David's probably the superior character in the Bible, but in their relationship, who is the superior?

Samuel, I mean, there's no question about it. Samuel was the superior in their relationship. So Samuel was above David, and now you have the woman acting in that same office as prophet. The implication is this woman is above Jesus.

Samuel, David, and the Claim That the Woman Was a Prophet

All right, the article says, Elizabeth Schussler Florenza, Harvard professor of divinity, offers a compelling analysis of this change in the story, noting that in the tradition of the Hebrew scriptures, the prophet designates the king by anointing his head.

That's true enough, as Samuel did with David. So she interprets Mark's anointing narrative as representing the woman's prophetic recognition of Jesus as the Messiah. Further, Schussler Florenza observes in pairing the action with oil used at the time of burial, the woman is alone among the disciples in understanding Jesus's Messiahship to be one of suffering and death.

It was a politically dangerous story for a patriarchal, there's the word, for a patriarchal Greco-Roman audience. She contends to have the woman disciple in the role of prophet, and to have Jesus lift her up for remembrance, that's just unacceptable, right?

The memory of thus transfigured by Luke, she suggests into the more palatable narrative of the woman as a sinner. In other words, you can't have a woman in this exalted role as prophet, so you gotta turn her into a sinner.

I mean, I guess that would be a sexist thing to do, right? We can't have this woman, so we have to slander her by, isn't that what she's saying? I mean, again, correct me if I'm wrong. All right, so translation, Luke, or whoever wrote Luke, was a sexist bigot.

I don't know about you, but if I really believed that, I probably wouldn't go to church, if I really believed the people who wrote the Bible were just these terrible people. And that's kind of the fruit of the mainline denominations.

So it's kind of sad. But let me ask you, was this woman actually a prophet? Well, if she was, the Bible doesn't say that. And we know who the woman is. It's Mary of Bethany. There's no evidence anywhere in the scripture that Mary was a prophet.

Now, are there women in the Bible who are prophets? I mean, you could point to a woman or two that were a prophetess, but Mary isn't one. That's a whole other discussion, but Mary is not one of them.

Yes? So would what she did, though, be considered like a prophetic act, or no? I mean, not her being a prophet, but just, you know, what she did be considered as like a prophetic act.

Foreshadowing, anyways. Well, I guess that's part of the argument, right? Yes, Linda.

Well, I mean, it's true. She's had a defeat of Jesus. She heard all the same stuff that the apostles heard, and she believed it. She believed that he was going to die, and she got it, is what I'm saying.

So maybe that piece of it is true. She got it, but that doesn't make her any different than us reading this and believing it. Sure.

Yeah, and let's face it. There are plenty of passages in the Gospels where the apostles do look bad. They say and do a lot of things they shouldn't do, and there are passages where the women were faithful.

They were at the cross. So we're not saying that that type of thing didn't happen. It's just this whole narrative is exactly that. It's a narrative. It didn't really happen like that.

I was gonna allude to that also. I mean, there are, Jesus certainly did not look down on women because of their gender at all. I mean, he first revealed himself to women at the tomb after the resurrection or in instances like this, yes.

This Mary and obviously the Virgin Mary who was not always a virgin, but when she conceived, she was, obviously God and the Lord does value.

Women. Right, and nobody is saying otherwise, but again, the bigger issue is she's saying that the Bible was changed, that the narrative evolved. I mean, that's the issue.

Yeah, again, you're left with who am I going to believe? Am I going to believe?

Schuster Florenza or Mark?

Or Harvard University or, I mean, if you wanna name drop, if you want my vote, you'll name a good solid seminary.

Sure, and here's the thing about, and you say, well, she did, she anointed Jesus. Well, the word anoint basically means to pour or to apply oil. So to anoint something, you could pour or rub oil on that person or object, but that just because you're anointing something doesn't automatically make you a prophet.

Now, maybe she's not saying that the woman was a prophet. Okay, that's how I'm seeing it, but maybe not. Again, the issue is she's saying the Bible was changed. Here's the real anointing though that Jesus received.

Not from this woman, Jesus was anointed by whom? By God. His father. Right, the word Christ or Messiah means the anointed one. So whether or not this woman anoints Jesus, I mean, this is years later, Jesus as a baby in Luke 2 .26, he is called the Lord's Christ or the Lord's anointed.

So Jesus was anointed long before Mary came along, but this, again, I propose this is a feminist narrative that seeks to elevate women to the same level of Jesus. Any one of you who's ever read the book, The Da Vinci Code, that movie, right?

There is The Da Vinci Code, right? I mean, that's what that was. It was a way to exalt the divine feminine and the disciples were sexist and it's the female disciples that were really, Mary Magdalene should have been the one leading the church, not Peter, and that is a major theme in liberal churches.

So much so that in some progressive churches, the past 10, 15 years, they've dropped masculine pronouns for God. They don't even refer to God as he or him. I mean, you know about all the pronoun stuff going on.

Some of them either just refer to God in a genderless form or some of them even pray to the heavenly mother. I'm not saying that this woman does it, but it's becoming a more common thing. All right, she continues John's account, we're almost done, of the anointing, John 12, one through eight, written decades after Mark, Matthew, and Luke seems to be the compromise version.

John returns to the tradition of the anointing representing the woman's preparation of Jesus's body for burial. It tells the less controversial story that it is Jesus's feet that are anointed. So again, she can't have him anointing his head, that's too elevated of a position, so let's knock her down by she just did his feet.

That's what she's saying. He also places the event at the home of Jesus's friends, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, and identifies Mary as the anointing woman. This is John implying that her attention is a gesture of support during a trying week.

She sees him. Okay, she's doing it again. Did any of you pick up on this? Okay, she's contradicting the Bible again. Where is she doing it? Who spotted it? Again, this one's real easy to miss.

The dinner was given in Jesus's honor. It doesn't say it was given in the place.

Okay. Well, she's saying that John is the compromised. Yeah.

Right, so it's generally accepted John, his gospel is written last, so John is just taking what this guy wrote and this guy wrote and like, all right, let's meet halfway in between and we'll settle for this story.

If that's how the Bible's written, it's not really authoritative. Did anyone have anything else?

Yeah, Ray? Anytime I listen to two accounts of an incident of work, there's always two different viewpoints. You know, somebody's standing over here, saw one thing, somebody's standing over there, saw something different, because it could be somebody was talking when the bed was getting anointed and then looked over when the feet were getting anointed.

Right, right. So I don't understand how they could think that just one version, I'd be suspicious more of just one version being all exactly the same.

Right, yeah. In all accounts. Yeah, having differing details, that's no problem. Joyce, did you have something?

Where it says that her attention is a gesture of support. And where did that come from? Right.

It's a gesture of admiration. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of assumptions. That's true. Well, here's what I picked up on. And it may seem like a small thing, but the fact is Matthew and Mark both identify the location as the house of Simon the leper.

And she's saying that, well, John puts it somewhere else in the house of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. John, that's not what it says. John does not say that. What does John say? It says that Martha served.

Okay. So that, she's assuming that. But we know something about Martha, don't we? Yeah, she likes to serve. Yeah, she always is keeping busy wherever she is, whenever she's mentioned, she's busy doing something.

Simon the leper, now presumably he was healed by Jesus of his leprosy, otherwise he wouldn't have had a crowd to his house. But at his house, he's not gonna be the one serving. Back in that culture, the women served.

Martha always was doing that, staying busy. The fact that Martha is serving at Simon's house, that's sort of what you would expect. That doesn't mean that John got the location wrong. So again, it's just another example of, she's saying, well, this would contradict that.

And the Bible does contradict itself. No, it doesn't. These are all just assumptions.

All right, anything else? Well, Jesus spoke directly about, she has anointed my body, possibly alluding to the name of which was on his head that she anointed at the time, beforehand for his burial. Yeah.

And he didn't say for his proclamation as his king because she's anointed him for his kingship as a representative of that. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's not stated that that's why she was doing this. For his burial, not to recognize him as king of Israel or to anoint him. So the article closes, the biblical narrative never fails to challenge us with its complexity and it so often calls to us as well with its abiding wisdom.

A gesture of love and recognition in a difficult time and place is a good idea for all of us. Okay, so how, my question is, how can the scripture have such wisdom if it's not true? Okay, how can the scripture have such wisdom if it's not reliable?

What it seems like is they are making it intentionally because it is kind of a confusing thing to start with. I recognize that, but they are trying to make it so that you can't understand the Bible. The Bible is all jumbled up.

You kind of need these gatekeepers who have their degrees and who have studied at Harvard. They are the ones who are going to explain to you because you can't read it for yourself and just believe what it says.

You need someone up here to explain it to us because we're these backwards people who believe every word of the scripture is true.

That's exactly how it was before the scripture was given to common man. The church, the Catholic church, did not want it printed to give them to the common man because there's no way they can understand it.

They need us to tell them how it is.

And then when the common man started reading it, they recognized that the Catholic church is doing the opposite. That's the thing. If people would just read it, they're going to see that what this woman is saying is the opposite of the truth.

So in conclusion, one last thing, the feminist narrative that's injected into the whole story should come as no surprise. And I'm surprised nobody mentioned this, but another glaring issue. Last time we talked about the glaring issue of the article.

What's the glaring issue? Before you even start reading, what's the glaring issue of this article? She's not answering. Everyone's answering, so that's good. I just couldn't decipher what, yes. She's not answering.

Right, right. She is called Pastor, right, Pastor Molly. And this isn't personal, but the scripture says in 1 Timothy 2 .12 that a woman is not permitted to hold that office. She's not permitted to teach nor to have authority.

Now, it's really unpopular to say that in the 21st century, but that's what the scripture teaches. Jesus chose 12 men to be apostles. He chose Peter, James, and John, not Patty, Jamie, and Joanne. 1 Timothy is a pastoral epistle.

The whole point of writing that is to tell you how to conduct the affairs of the church. And Paul roots his argument not in the culture that, well, hey, things change. He roots it in creation, that Adam was formed first and then Eve.

So that's the glaring issue that by her holding this office she's defying the word of God by even doing it. So yeah, beware these people want to overturn the biblical teaching. And just one last comment that it does call, they do call it an emerging church.

What is emergent? What does that mean, emerging? Who knows what it means? Huh? Changing? Changing, right. No. The term emerging in a religious context usually means that we are the new form, that we are the new thing that is taking shape.

In other words, we are the new version of Christianity. Just like we saw last week, American Christianity is homophobic. It's, you know, this week it's sexist. It needs to be rejected. We are the new emerging Christianity.

And what they teach is the exact opposite, oftentimes what the Bible teaches.