30: Jesus ended hierarchy
Part 1 in a series on Jesus and gender: Nate and Tim discuss some prerequisites to looking at New Testament texts pertaining to gender. Jesus explicitly taught that his disciples were to follow his example and abandon all sense of status, power and hierarchy. This was Christianity 101 to the apostles and early church and therefore any interpretation of the gender passages that today seem so offensive to women must acknowledge this overarching Christian ethic. If Jesus said there weren’t even supposed to be positions of status in the church, and Paul believed every Christian was to lay down their power over others, how could the New Testament possibly “teach” that men are supposed to have authority and women are supposed to submit?