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“It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence.

And there are so many silences to be broken.”

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Consider the voices you listen to. Who informs your philosophies, politics, or theology? And why? Parents, teachers, authors, journalists, and ecclesiastical leaders often carry the weight of authority. Their charisma, kindness, status, or education command our attention, justify our trust. Yet the philosopher Michel Foucault points to other voices, sources of truth that can challenge, nuance, complement, or expand our understanding. He calls these voices “subjugated knowledges,” awareness that has been “buried or masked, . . . disqualified, or insufficiently elaborated.” Jesus, likewise, directed our attention to the “least of these”—a widow, children, sparrows, mustard seeds—suggesting that the quality of our discipleship is directly related to how we see, value, and learn from those society deems “naïve” or “hierarchically inferior.”[1]

In Greco-Roman society, one group particularly embodied hierarchical inferiority: the female slave. While slaves’ situations varied,[2] they generally existed without legal rights or recognition, officially dehumanized and disenfranchised. Their identities, including names, families, origins, and duties, were created by and for their owners. Their bodies were the property of those owners to use—and abuse—as they desired. The slave’s character was stereotypically portrayed as dishonorable and dishonest.[3] In literature they were stock characters, simplistically good or bad, often bumbling fools who complicated the lives of main characters and amused audiences with their misadventures. To be a slave, then, was to be the brunt of jokes, a source of chaos, an “instrument” of another’s labor or pleasure;[4] it was to be without honor or agency, masked, disqualified, and inferior. To be a female slave was to be the least, even, of these.

In his Gospel and in Acts, Luke introduces his readers to three female slaves whom he calls paidiskai.[5] This diminutive form of pais, meaning “child,” was commonly applied to female slaves regardless of age, linguistically equating them with children who, like those the disciples famously rebuffed (see Luke 18:15–17),[6] were habitually disregarded and dismissed. Luke, however, delights in overturning hierarchical expectations: the powerful are abased, the lowly elevated (see Luke 2:52); honored dinner guests are replaced by social outcasts (see Luke 14:15–24); the obedient bear guilt while sinners are justified (see Luke 18:9–14). And paidiskai, slave girls with reputations for dishonesty and foolishness, speak truth to their social superiors who reject it. But with the paidiskai, as elsewhere, Luke is not quite the “patron saint of gender equality”[7] we want him to be. Each of these women steps only briefly from her “outsidedness”[8] into the path of insiders, speaks a few, rejected words of truth, then, having accomplished the task Luke assigned her, retreats silently back into scriptural obscurity.

But, as Kathy Chambers notes, “textual silence need not lead to hermeneutical silence;”[9] that is, there is still much to learn from these taciturn paidiskai. So in this chapter I seek to do for them something like what Jesus did for paides, or children, of his day—to call them forward, center our attention on them, listen, and learn. First, I discuss the slave girl who identifies Peter as he furtively warms himself at the high priest’s fire (see Mark 14:66–69; Matthew 26:69–71; Luke 22:56–57; John 18:17). Though her motives are often questioned, her single statement propels Peter into deeper understanding and practice of discipleship. Next, I look at Rhoda, the slave girl who announces Peter’s miraculous escape from prison to a skeptical household (see Acts 12:13–17). Often dismissed as mere comic relief,[10] Rhoda’s insistent but rejected testimony invites serious reflection on how the advantaged mask truth with the stamp of absurdity. Finally, I consider the Philippian slave girl. Both she and Paul are defined by their “slavery” and proclaim a “way of salvation.” But while Paul’s slavery is figurative and salvific, hers is literal and, apparently, irrevocable—provoking (in some readers at least) restlessness over a privileged salvation that abandons the “ineligible” to their chains.

The brief utterances—and the extensive silences—of these women challenge modern readers to resist idealizing “authorities” and demonizing “inferiors” in favor of humanizing everyone. Engaging the complexity of these scriptural interactions between leaders—righteous but imperfect—and slave girls—significant though subjugated—can help us better navigate our own complicated moment. By listening to, and learning from the paidiskai, we practice attending to “disqualified” voices in our own sphere, growing into more faithful disciples of Christ as we imitate his inclusive awareness, humility, and love.

“This Man Also Was with Him”: The �ʲ����徱����ŧ in the Courtyard

Our first paidiskē approaches Peter in what may be his moment of greatest vulnerability. Having boldly asserted his keenness to accompany Jesus “to prison and to death” (Luke 22:33), Peter seems already to be faltering. While Jesus is interrogated inside the high priest’s chambers, Peter sits outside in the courtyard, anonymously, perhaps even symbolically, warming himself at a fire kindled by Jesus’s captors. The paidiskē, eyeing him in the inconstant firelight, comments to a companion, “This man also was with him.” Peter adamantly contradicts her, the first of his three infamous denials. As morning dawns, the convicting crow of a rooster and a knowing look from his Lord evoke sudden, searing awareness and bitter tears (see Mark 14:66–72; Matthew 26:69–75; Luke 22:54–62; John 18:15–18, 25–27).

This experience is often recognized as a turning point for Peter. President James E. Faust, for example, says that it “strengthened Peter to the point that he would never fail again.”[11] Elder Richard G. Scott affirms that from then on Peter’s “life began to change forever.” He became God’s “unwavering, rock-solid servant.”[12] Elder Neal A. Maxwell defines the event as one of discreet, divine “tutoring.”[13] He credits the rooster’s simple contribution, but neither he nor the others elaborate the slave girl’s part in Peter’s education.

This may reflect both her “minor character” status, and her presumed intent which has been described as ranging somewhere between impertinence and wickedness. F. Scott Spencer, for instance, sees Luke using her as an “agent of Satan” who intentionally seeks to undermine Peter’s faith.[14] Bernadette Kiley, reading from a Markan perspective, makes the case that the slave girl serves as a “stumbling block,” a “trap,” and a “threat” to Peter’s discipleship.[15] President Spencer W. Kimball calls her a “smart aleck damsel,”[16] while Clifford E. Young lumps her in with “the rabble” who question Peter.[17] These negative readings are not unreasonable given ancient views about slaves, Gospel authors’ portrayals of her, and the fact that she is serving in the antagonistic high priest’s household. Ultimately, however, we cannot know the girl’s motivations, so rather than presuming negative intent or focusing on her role as adversary, I follow President Kimball’s example of reading Peter with charity by reading the slave girl charitably as well.[18] By suspending assumptions about paidiskai and prophets, we can recognize her as a contributor to Peter’s growth rather than only a threat to his discipleship.

Reading in this way illuminates how the paidiskē (narratively if not intentionally) is allied with Jesus in Peter’s tutoring, for she initiates Peter’s courtyard education as Jesus ends it, quietly, with a look. Certainly, she wasn’t the only person to see Peter in the firelight, but she is the first to recognize him and the only one to “earnestly look” (atenisasa) at him (Luke 22:56).[19] This Greek verb, from ���ٱ�Ծ���ō, is used almost exclusively by Luke in the New Testament and carries special significance. The object of such a gaze is usually a holy person, the observer possessed of intuitive, even prophetic insight.[20] The paidiskē is one of only two nonapostolic individuals to employ the gaze in Luke’s writings[21] and the only female to do so. Before she even speaks, then, the girl’s scrutiny violates expectations—the “dishonorable” paidiskē levels her steady gaze at a leader who lowers his; the “irrational” slave intuits the disciple camouflaged among unholy companions, disguised by his own flagging devotion.

The irony escalates when the “dishonest” slave girl speaks the truth—“This man also was with him”—and the apostle prevaricates—“Woman, I do not know him” (Luke 22:56–57). Her phrase “with him” articulates Luke’s particular concept of discipleship as proximity and companionship.[22] Since Jesus first stepped into Peter’s boat (see Luke 5:3) Peter had been “with him.” But, after Jesus’s arrest, Peter began “following at a distance” (Luke 22:54). Peter’s recent insistence that he would stay with Jesus is belied by this slave girl’s truth—Peter was with him; now he is not. Rather than taking the girl’s words as an invitation to verbally close the distance he has created, to reassert his discipleship by ratifying her words with his own, Peter lies—“but a lie that speaks the truth of the moment.”[23]

Why Peter denies Jesus is a matter of speculation. Kiley cites the paidiskē’s literary role as a stumbling block (skandalon), a “woman as an agent of temptation,” who “cause[s] Peter to fail.”[24] James Brashler credits the slave girl’s powers of intimidation.[25] Christy Cobb shifts the blame to Peter. It is he, not the girl, who, in his own self-interest, intimidates, burying her truth under the weight of his gender and freedom.[26] President Kimball hypothesizes that Peter’s words were intended to limit violence and preserve church leadership.[27]

As with the girl’s intentions, we simply cannot know what Peter was thinking. He might have been afraid, but this feels incongruous with his recent boldness in defending Jesus by the sword. That he had forgotten Jesus’s prediction seems unlikely given the intensity of that recent conversation. Focusing on the paidiskē raises another possibility. Perhaps Peter’s denial arose not out of fear, forgetfulness, or foresight but out of oversight. His cultural milieu, as described above, had possibly predisposed him to see female slaves as non-entities, disqualified as sources of truth, unworthy interlocutors. Having been told he would testify before kings, governors, and religious elites (see Luke 21:12) and having proven he would defend Jesus at his own risk, Peter may not have recognized a test posed by a “hierarchically inferior” paidiskē. Denying his identity to a slave who couldn’t even claim her own may not have registered as a denial.[28] In C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, the lion Aslan gives Jill Pole signs to guide her quest, then warns her that they “will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them.”[29] As a result, Jill and her friend Eustace “muff” the first three signs. Peter too may have fallen victim to his own expectations. Despite Jesus’s prophecy, despite his own good intentions, the “sign” didn’t look as he expected it to, so he muffed it. In this scenario, Jesus’s concluding look (blepson), recalling to Peter’s mind their former conversation, becomes less a reminder of something forgotten, or a “see, I told you so” censure, but an invitation to self-awareness, to new insight—that the denial of another’s humanity leaves us susceptible to denying our own identities as disciples of Jesus.

That Peter internalized this lesson is suggested in Acts where, in the process of establishing his “rock-solid” discipleship, he adopts, for the first time, the paidiskē’s gaze (atenisasa).[30] As the object of that penetrating stare, Peter had crumbled in self- and other-denial; as its possessor he accurately intuits the masked holiness of its objects, a beggar and gentiles, generating companionship where assumptions of “inferiority” and “disqualification” might have perpetuated estrangement.

Peter first applies this new way of seeing when, on his way to the temple, he encounters a lame beggar.[31] Just as the paidiskē had looked “earnestly” (atenisasa) at him, Peter now looks “intently” (atenisasa) at the beggar. The man reciprocates, significantly, by “fixing his attention” (blepson) on Peter in the same way Jesus had. This time, Peter does not shrink under the scrutiny. He answers his Lord’s gaze, reflected through the beggar’s eyes, by clasping the man’s hand, raising him up, then walking with him to the temple (see Acts 3:1–8). Later, Peter performs a “close” examination (atenisasa) of unclean beasts shown him in vision (see Acts 11:6). He discerns thereby God’s cleansing and acceptance of “unclean” gentiles, hence his own mandate to welcome them into God’s congregation (see Acts 11:17). So, Peter “invite[s] them in” the house, and “[goes] with” them to theirs (Acts 10:23; emphasis mine). We can see here that, by having Peter adopt the paidiskē’s gaze, Luke reverses the earlier distance between Peter and Christ, reestablishing Peter as a faithful disciple who demonstrates he is “with” Jesus by discerning faith in the inferior and holiness in the disqualified, then joining “with” them.

“She Insisted It Was So”: The �ʲ����徱����ŧ at the Gate

If the first paidiskē meets Peter in his weakness, the second encounters him at the peak of his unwavering discipleship. Shortly before knocking at her gate, he had been chained up in Herod’s prison awaiting imminent execution. It seemed he would finally keep his earlier promise to follow Jesus to prison and to death. Instead, an angel appears, breaks him out, then disappears. Peter walks to Mary’s house, where members of her house-church are praying for his safety, and knocks at the gate. Rhoda, Mary’s paidiskē, responds. But when she recognizes his voice, she is so overjoyed that she forgets to let him in, instead running to share the good news with the others. Despite their prayers, they disbelieve. “You are out of your mind!” they tell Rhoda, but she “insist[s] that it [is] so.” Meanwhile, Peter continues knocking. Finally, they open the gate, see Peter, and are “amazed.” Peter never enters, but speaks a few words there in the doorway, then leaves for “another place” (Acts 12:6–17).

Luke’s contemporaries would have recognized in Rhoda the servus currens, or “running slave,” a stock, comedic character popular in Greco-Roman theater. These slaves often thought they saw people who weren’t really there. They dashed about breathlessly with important messages, the delivery of which they inevitably bungled by careless delays, forgetfulness, or garbled facts. In the end, the slave was revealed as “stupid, drunk, or insane,” and everyone had a good laugh at their expense.[32] The connections to Rhoda are obvious: she recognizes someone others don’t see, runs to deliver her message, humorously forgets to admit Peter, and the people with whom she shares her message think she’s crazy. Luke’s employment of the servus currens makes us laugh; his reversal of roles and expectations within the story makes us think.[33]

We are not, for instance, in the habit of laughing at prophets. Yet Luke opens the story describing Peter’s “enslavement”—imprisoned, chained, guarded—and quickly impresses him into a slave’s comedic service.[34] Peter is oddly unperturbed by his impending execution, sleeping so soundly between his guards that the “angel of the Lord”—accustomed to prefacing his messages with the phrase, “Fear not!” (Luke 1:13, 30; 2:10)—actually has to “smite” Peter to wake him up! Peter resembles a sleepy teenager, too befuddled even to dress himself, so, “like a patient parent, the angel must supervise his toilet. First the shoes are laced up, then his belt secured. Do not overlook the cloak. (All this will madden anxious readers. Why spend all this time perfecting the outfit? He is breaking out of jail, not going to a papal reception.)”[35] Properly accoutered, Peter finally follows the angel to safety. Still, not until the angel leaves him on a lonely Jerusalem lane does he come to his senses. He has been rescued from Herod!

He has not, however, been rescued from Luke’s irony. Having broken two chains, eluded two sets of two soldiers, breached prison walls, and passed seamlessly through iron gates, Peter, the famous keeper of the keys to the kingdom of heaven (see Matthew 16:19), is powerless to penetrate the gate Rhoda keeps.[36] So he waits outside while Rhoda herself takes up the apostolic role, becoming witness and messenger.[37] For Luke, one’s witness derives from the physical acts of seeing and hearing. Paul, for instance, hears a voice and sees the Lord, becoming “his witness to all the world of what [he] ha[0] seen and heard” (Acts 22:6–16).[38] As a “running slave,” Rhoda’s witness should have been unreliable, but, just by the sound of his voice, she correctly identifies Peter—in fact, Rhoda’s hearing, combined with the first paidiskē’s seeing, creates a witness for Peter mirroring Paul’s witness of Christ.[39]

Like a typical “running slave,” Rhoda is anxious to deliver her message and humorously leaves Peter outside; on the other hand, she upends expectations with her prompt, accurate delivery. Those gathered at Mary’s, though, appear stuck within their preconceived notions. It’s easier for them to believe Peter is dead and their prayers unanswered than to credit the words of a slave girl.[40] Like the disciples who could not believe the women’s announcement of the empty tomb (see Luke 24:9–11), Rhoda’s auditors obstruct revelation by refusing to hear, see, and understand (see Acts 28:27).[41] Their prejudice generates skepticism, transforming truth into an “idle tale.” As Chambers observes, only by “leaving their routine way of thinking”—and behaving—do “they gain access to the truth.” Like Peter when he heard the women’s resurrection pronouncement, they must suspend their bias enough to go and see for themselves. To do this they must “become slaves” by humbly assuming the slave’s duty to open the gate. When they do, they experience something like the “madness” they had imputed to Rhoda; they are “beside themselves.”[42] The story does not end as the servus currens trope leads us to expect. We do not find Peter and the household members laughing good-naturedly around a dinner table at Rhoda’s expense. She is not revealed to be foolish or insane; she was right.[43] Now, instead of welcoming Peter into their home, the congregation stands in the doorway watching Peter’s back as he retreats instead to “another place.”

President Kimball, no fan of the first paidiskē, provides one of few Latter-day Saint commentaries on Rhoda,[44] encouraging us to emulate her by “constantly affirm[ing] the . . . presence of living prophets who are among us.” As we have seen, this is her witness. But Luke’s blatant democratizing of both humor and honor, clarity and confusion, bondage and liberation within this account nudges us beyond a singular, authority-centered interpretation. We are prodded to attend to the “subjugated knowledge” as well. We sense, therefore, an additional call—to affirm the “Rhodas” among us, to take seriously those who, in our supposed superiority, we have deemed unreliable or ridiculous but who act as gatekeepers with power to usher us through skepticism into faith, from exclusion into inclusion, or estrangement into communion.

“These Men Proclaim to You a Way of Salvation!”: The �ʲ����徱����ŧ on the Streets

When Peter walks away from Mary’s house, he departs (mostly) from Acts, and Paul strides in. Paul and his mission companions are called by the Spirit to Philippi, a “leading city of the district of Macedonia,” where they meet and baptize Lydia, “a dealer in purple cloth,” along with her entire household (Acts 16:12–15). Next, a slave girl inauspiciously interrupts them on their way to “the place of prayer.” This paidiskē is possessed of “a spirit of divination” (Greek ���ٳ�ō�Բ�), literally a “Python spirit,” evoking the serpent that guarded the Delphic Oracle and its affiliation with Apollo’s cult. She earns her owners “a great deal of money by fortune-telling” (Acts 16:16). For days she follows Paul’s group through the city, crying, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation!” (Acts 16:17).[45] Paul becomes “very much annoyed” at this and abruptly exorcises the spirit from the girl—and the girl from the story. Her owners, very much annoyed at their lost income, have him imprisoned. That night, as their fellow prisoners listen to the missionaries sing and pray, a sudden earthquake rattles the edifice, opening every door and unfastening every chain. The astonished jailer is baptized, like Lydia, with his household. A brief stay at Lydia’s concludes this mission to Philippi (Acts 16:11–40).

MacDonald and others note that Luke seems to have composed this account in the form of a Greco-Roman novel, possibly intending to boost Christianity’s reputation in the Greco-Roman world.[46] This is not to say the story is fiction, but that Luke appears to have taken some creative license in casting Paul’s Philippian mission as a heroic adventure: Paul, an evangelical virtuoso, swoops into Philippi in response to a visionary plea for help, meets Lydia, a paragon of Roman feminine virtue, and baptizes her with her whole household; unshaken by imprisonment, he and his companions sing hymns, and—voila!—an earthquake demolishes the prison walls (I’m not sure what that says about their singing); everyone is free, but the noble Paul sticks around to physically save his jailer—from suicide and from execution for losing his prisoners—then lead him to spiritual salvation.

Centered in this story, bookended by Paul’s missionary triumphs, is the paidiskē.[47] For Luke she serves a narrative purpose, as antagonist, the religious competition Paul vanquishes by superior power. The incident lets Luke demonstrate—to his marginalized, sometimes persecuted Christian community, and to a suspicious Roman empire—that Christianity can be comfortably integrated into respectable Roman society. It attracts the “right” kind of people (Lydia and the jailer), while purposefully and powerfully rejecting the “wrong” kind, like the paidiskē.[48]

Her “outsidedness” rivals even that of the first two paidiskai. While they serve respectively in an elite Jewish household and a proper Christian home, this girl is a pagan slave of pagan owners. We meet her, not in a courtyard or at a front gate—homey, familial intersections—but on the streets. Insinuations of her sexual impropriety are multilayered. The term paidiskē itself connotes her unrestricted sexual availability to those with power over her.[49] As the shared property of multiple “owners,” her subjection, and thus her vulnerability, especially to sexual exploitation is expanded.[50] Finally, her possession by the “Python spirit,” said to enable women’s prophecy via “sacred intercourse,” may amplify her disgrace.[51] So, though she speaks truth like the other paidiskai, it does not, even momentarily, elevate her. No ironic reversal plays in her favor. She is entirely a disruptor, an annoyance. She is not permitted, like them, to fade away, but is intentionally expelled.

This paidiskē is pushed further to the margins by her unfavorable comparison to Lydia,[52] the embodiment of the Roman feminine ideal, as described on one woman’s grave maker: she was “a worker in wool, pious, chaste, thrifty, faithful, a stayer at home.”[53] So we read that Lydia works with expensive purple cloth, while the paidiskē plies the despised trade of fortune-telling; Lydia worships God and he opens her heart, while the paidiskē serves Apollo and is manipulated by the Python; Lydia is free of male entanglements, a chaste widow or virgin, but the paidiskē is sexually suspect; Lydia awaits Paul at “the place of prayer” and “listens eagerly” to his message, but the paidiskē disrupts his journey to that place by shouting her message; Lydia offers hospitality, but the paidiskē roams the streets; Lydia converts, the paidiskē competes.[54] The paidiskē’s unworthiness compared to Lydia justifies—demands!—Paul’s response. He silences her, spurns her, walks away. She is not the type of person Christianity embraces. She is the type, Luke says in effect, that we defeat and dismiss.[55]

Narratives like this contribute to Paul’s reputation as a feisty fellow but are best held in tandem with his own writings that indicate a practice and promotion of “more and more” overflowing love and conspicuous gentleness (Philippians 1:9, 4:5; see also 1 Corinthians 13 and Romans 15:1–7). Paul, like the slave girl, is perhaps a victim of Luke’s authorial flair and literary objectives. Writing from the perspective of a religious minority within a dominant, sometimes hostile, political empire, Luke is motivated to encourage and empower his people with dramatic examples of an idealized “good” (Paul) triumphing over a wholly evil “villain” (the slave girl). This technique, notes Anne Lamott, can offer helpful catharsis for marginalized people, a vision of vicarious justice that inspires hope for an ultimately just reality. But for many today, a just reality is antithetical to narratives of victory and defeat.[56] We sense, with Lamott, that in real life, “the ‘villain’ has a heart,”[57] and find Paul’s call to “generosity” and “overflowing love” more useful than competition and conquest for constructing justice. Our task from this perspective becomes less about deciding how to emulate Paul and Lydia, Luke’s powerful and perfect, and more about finding compassion for the paidiskē, repersonalizing her by asking, “What might her life have been like? What likely happened to her after meeting Paul? What should, or could, have happened?”

Admittedly, by asking these questions I am inviting the reader into one of Chambers’ textual silences, into imagination. Not a flight of fancy, mind you, but a constructive imagining,[58] informed by close textual reading and historical awareness, a creative exercise in empathy, a breaking of hermeneutical silence. My lens for this exercise is the comparison and contrast interpreters have made between Paul’s encounter with the slave girl and Jesus’s casting out of devils in Luke’s Gospel. The similarities—the “crying out” of a spirit who makes truthful statements but is authoritatively dismissed and silenced—encourage us to set the stories side by side, but the differences disrupt a direct correspondence—between Paul and Jesus, between the slave girl and the demoniacs—in ways that unmask the paidiskē so we can feel for and learn from her. [59]

One foundational difference, easily overlooked in casual reading, is in the nature of the possessing entity. The paidiskē was possessed of a “spirit of divination,” a Hellenistic “gift of prophecy,” granted by another god but not Satanic. This, and the profit she generated by her gift (a no-no in Luke) may have designated her false, misled, or other, but not explicitly demonic like the entities Jesus encountered (see Luke 4:33; 8:27).[60] This detail cautions us to be clear about the difference between banishing something evil and banishing someone who is misled or different, and to beware the ease with which our minds leap the gap from “different” to “evil.”

We also notice that, in contrast to the demons of Luke’s Gospel who beg Jesus to leave them alone (see Luke 4:34, 8:28), the paidiskē follows Paul’s band persistently.[61] “It seems she is drawn to them in some way,” observes Cobb, since Paul was presumably not paying for her services, in defiance of her owners’ demands that she earn their living.[62] Did she hope to change her allegiance, to become a disciple? If so she was disappointed, for while women whom Jesus “cured of evil spirits and infirmities” later remained “with him” as disciples (Luke 8:1–3), there is no indication that the paidiskē, once liberated from her Python spirit, joined with Paul.[63]

Even the notion that she was liberated is questionable. Though Paul’s action has been called a “healing,”[64] that designation is shaken by comparison to Jesus’s healings, which are depicted as relieving physical and mental suffering and restoring relationships. The demoniac in Luke 8, for example, haunted the tombs, eerily suggestive of his inner corruption. He was naked, isolated, and self-destructive. Jesus renewed his wholeness of mind and body, then sat and talked to him before restoring him to his community and family (see Luke 8:26–39). Paul, in contrast, speaks only to the Python spirit, not to the slave girl. Once the spirit is expelled, the record offers no indication that he converses with her, restores her to her community, or invites her to join his.[65] His motivation for exerting his power is overtly attributed to annoyance; once his discomfort is alleviated then, there seems to be no reason to linger. He simply moves on. Has he relieved her suffering? We are certainly free to assume so. The text is silent on the matter. He may, however, have loosened one chain only to tighten others. Scholars accounting for textual clues (including the slave girl’s apparent abandonment to greedy, vindictive owners, the loss of her income-generating skill, and the sexual insinuations that swim around her), ancient literary correlations, and historical-cultural realities conclude that the slave girl’s most likely destiny was a life of prostitution.[66] Her liberation, in this case, is at best limited.

Finally, Jesus’s healings restored people’s voices. We find them going away “declaring” and “proclaiming” God’s goodness (see Luke 4:35; 8:39; 11:14). The Philippian slave girl enters Acts 16 with a voice; in fact, as the capstone of Luke’s trio of paidiskai, her voice marks a literary culmination of the slave girls’ Lukan witness described above: the first sees, the second hears, the third testifies. But she departs in silence. Paul has not muted the Python to release the woman’s agentive testimony of God’s good work in her life but quashed her voice altogether.

And yet, not altogether. Her story, her words remain in Luke’s record. Socially marginalized but narratively centered—beside Paul, “with” him, a disciple of sorts—her testimony stands. She speaks back to Lydia, forward to the jailer, and to all who read Luke’s work: “These men . . . proclaim to you a way of salvation!” We are somewhat taken aback by this; as if in the eye of an evangelical storm, surrounded by salvation but untouched by it, she speaks the unfortunate truth of her reality: salvation is for you, not for me. But documentary evidence suggests another, more hopeful possibility. In some textual variants, she says the men “proclaim to us a way of salvation.” She includes herself. Could this mean she continued with Paul after all? Did she find her way of salvation? We hope, but we cannot know. We can, however, let her interrogate us, to ask what we will we learn from her story. Will we look for ways to keep people outside, or include them in meaningful connections? Will we view people who are different as competitors to defeat and destroy, or as real people with feeling hearts whose suffering we can and should relieve? Will we stifle voices we find threatening or annoying, or engage them in conversation? The Philippian slave girl silently awaits our answers.

Conclusion

The word “conversation” derives from the Latin conversor, “to abide or keep company with.” Jesus, we might say, lived in conversation, He kept company with beggars, strangers, and children; he abided with sinners and tax collectors (see Luke 5:29–32; 15:1–2). He came, he said, to “release the captives” (Luke 4:18), and for those whose voices were buried deep in hierarchical inferiority, conversation opened the prison doors. Called to follow him, we are called to live in this kind of liberating conversation.

Luke’s three paidiske narratives, in which disciples interact with literal captives, illustrate the complexity and necessity of breaking silence by breaking through barriers to conversation. In each instance people of good intent—Peter, Mary and her friends, Paul—see in slave girls exactly what their culture primed them to see—an inferior, a fool, an outsider. The result, instead of a mutual liberation, is a kind of contagion of captivity: Peter locks himself into denials, Mary and others are barred from prophetic association, Paul delimits the church within respectability. But Luke’s disruption of social constructs within the narratives, his blurring of boundaries between who is right and who is wrong, who discerns truth and who doesn’t, who is captive and who is free, invites us to ask, “What if?” What if Peter had seen a tutor in the woman sitting across the fire? What if Mary’s group had seen in Rhoda an evangelist, a bearer of good news? What if Paul had seen a disciple in the mantic slave girl? What if I resisted my own inclinations to sort and sift people into hierarchies of value, to dismiss “fools” and defeat “enemies”? What if, instead, I followed Jesus, saying, “My brother, my sister, come, keep company with me”?

Notes

[1] Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 7.

[2] Susan E. Hylen, Women in the New Testament World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 94–95.

[3] Carolyn Osiek, “Female Slaves, Porneia, and the Limits of Obedience,” in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. David L. Balch and Carolyn Osiek (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 256–58.

[4] Christy Cobb, Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke–Acts and Other Ancient Narratives (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 17–18.

[5] Walter Bauer, “paidiskē,” in A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed., ed. Frederick William Danker, trans. William F. Arndt, F. Wilbur Gingrich, and F. W. Danker (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000), 749–50.

[6] Scripture citations: Harper Collins Study Bible, NRSV, (San Francisco: Harper One, 2006).

[7] Amy Peeler, review of Benjamin H. Dunning, ed., The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality (RBL, sblcentral.org, August 20, 2021), 4.

[8] Cobb, Slavery, 57.

[9] Kathy Chambers, “‘Knock, Knock—Who’s There?’ Acts 12:6–17 as a Comedy of Errors,” in A Feminist Companion to the Acts of the Apostles, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff (London: T & T Clark International, 2004), 97.

[10] Cobb, Slavery, 126.

[11] James E. Faust, “Hope, An Anchor of the Soul,” Ensign, November 1999, 61.

[12] Richard G. Scott, “Full Conversion Brings Happiness,” Ensign, May 2002, 24–25.

[13] Neal A. Maxwell, “Irony: The Crust on the Bread of Adversity,” Ensign, May 1989, 63.

[14] F. Scott Spencer, “Out of Mind, Out of Voice: Slave-Girls and Prophetic Daughters in Luke–Acts,” Biblical Interpretation 7, no. 2 (1999): 141.

[15] Bernadette Kiley, “The Servant Girl in the Markan Passion Narrative: An Alternative Feminist Reading,” Lutheran Theological Journal 41, no. 1 (May 2007): 55.

[16] Spencer W. Kimball, “Peter, My Brother,” in The Ministry of Peter, the Chief Apostle, ed. Frank F. Judd Jr., Eric D. Huntsman, and Shon D. Hopkin (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University: Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2014), 381.

[17] Clifford E. Young, in Conference Report, October 1954, 102–4.

[18] Kimball, “Peter,” 381.

[19] Cobb, Slavery, 88, 104.

[20] Rick Strelan, “Strange Stares: Atenizein in Acts,” Novum Testamentum 41, no. 3 (1999): 236. The one exception to this rule in Luke-Acts is Act 13:9, where Paul employs this gaze to discern the special wickedness of a false prophet.

[21] The other is Cornelius (see Acts 10:4), who gazes this way at the angel who directs him to Peter.

[22] Cobb, Slavery, 112–13.

[23] Francois Bovon, Luke 3: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 19:28–24:53 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 231.

[24] Kiley, “Servant Girl,” 54–55.

[25] James Brashler, “Struggling Faith,” Presbyterian Outlook 198, no. 5 (2016): 26.

[26] Cobb, Slavery, 114.

[27] Kimball, “Peter,” 380–81; Eric D. Huntsman, “The Accounts of Peter’s Denial: Understanding the Texts and Motifs,” in The Ministry of Peter, the Chief Apostle, ed. Frank F. Judd Jr., Eric D. Huntsman, and Shon D. Hopkin (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2014), 127–49.

[28] A possible weakness of my proposal here is that Peter subsequently denies to two men, whom he was unlikely to dehumanize. I answer this by noting that Luke, according to scholarly consensus, used Mark as a source. In Mark the paidiskē speaks first directly to Peter. After his denial, she speaks again to “bystanders”—perhaps fellow slaves who would listen to her. Finally, those “bystanders” challenge Peter with the paidiskē’s truth. The fact that Luke alters Mark actually supports my thesis. Luke, it seems, isn’t satisfied with Peter denying to mere women and slaves. This lacks impact, fails to elicit the shock he wants his readers to experience at Peter’s denial. So, Cobb speculates, Luke presents a tiered escalation of denials—to a female slave, to a male slave, and finally, to a free male—ensuring that readers could not minimize the denials as simply a reasonable response to an untrustworthy accuser.

[29] C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 21.

[30] Cobb, Slavery, 108.

[31] John is with him, but Peter is the actor in the narrative and focus of this study.

[32] Chambers, “Knock, Knock,” 91; Cobb, Slavery, 125–26.

[33] Cobb, Slavery, 125–62.

[34] Amy-Jill Levine, “Introduction,” in Levine and Blickenstaff, Acts of the Apostles, 10; Cobb, Slavery, 134.

[35] Richard I. Pervo, Profit with Delight (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 62.

[36] Amy-Jill Levine, “Introduction,” 11.

[37] Chambers, “Knock, Knock,” 94.

[38] Other examples of Luke’s connection of seeing and hearing to revelation and witness include Luke 1:41–45, 7:22, 8:23–24; Acts 2:8–11, 32-33, Acts 8:6.

[39] Cobb, Slavery, 142–43.

[40] Chambers, “Knock, Knock,” 91; Cobb, Slavery.

[41] Cobb, Slavery, 146.

[42] Chambers, “Knock, Knock,” 94–95; Greek ��澱����ŧ����: lit: remove from a standing position, astonish, amaze, out of one’s mind.

[43] Cobb, Slavery, 148.

[44] Spencer W. Kimball, “The Uttermost Parts of the Earth,” Ensign, April 1980; other references found in a search of the Church’s website include Susan W. Tanner, “All Things Shall Work Together for Your Good,” Ensign, May 2004; Steven C. Walker, “Between Scriptural Lines,” Ensign, March 1978; Ann N. Madsen, “Cameos,” Ensign, September 1975.

[45] The KJV’s “the way of salvation” contrasts with the NRSV’s “a way of salvation.” The Greek lacks the definite article making the NRSV more correct.

[46] Dennis R. MacDonald, “Lydia and Her Sisters as Lukan Fiction,” in Levine and Blickenstaff, Acts of the Apostles, 105–10; Pervo, Profit, 21–24; Cobb, Slavery, 165; “Christianity” is an anachronistic term, but I use it here for convenience.

[47] Richard I. Pervo, “Acts: A Commentary,” in Hermeneia-A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible, ed. Harold W. Attridge (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 400.

[48] Cobb, Slavery, 33–34, 172.

[49] Cobb, Slavery, 8–9, 156-57; Moses I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 95–96.

[50] Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied (London: Routledge, 2018), 55–56.

[51] Shelly Matthews, “Elite Women, Public Religion, and Christian Propaganda in Acts 16,” in Levine and Blickenstaff, Acts of the Apostles, 130, 137–40.

[52] Cobb, Slavery, 169, 172–73.

[53] Hylen, Women in the New Testament World, 19; this reflects an “ideal” rather than lived reality; Demetrius K. Williams, “The Acts of the Apostles,” in True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, ed. Brian K. Blount, 213–48 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).

[54] Matthews, “Elite Women,” 129.

[55] Joseph A. Marchal, Hierarchy, Unity, and Imitation: A Feminist Rhetorical Analysis of Power Dynamics in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 87–88.

[56] Kwok Pui-Lan, Postcolonial Politics and Theology: Unraveling Empire for a Global World (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2021), 180.

[57] Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 65–66.

[58] Kwok, Postcolonial Politics, 15.

[59] Shelly Matthews, First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism and Christianity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 138; Cobb, Slavery, 188.

[60] Cobb, Slavery, 177–78, 183; Matthews, “Elite Women,” 128; Spencer, Out of Mind, 149.

[61] Spencer, Out of Mind, 149.

[62] Cobb, Slavery, 189, 185.

[63] Williams, “Acts,” 235.

[64] N. T. Wright, “On Earth as in Heaven,” March 30, 2016, ntwrightpage.com.

[65] Cobb, Slavery, 171, 188.

[66] Cobb, Slavery, 185, 199; Kartzow, Slave Metaphor, 57; Osiek, Woman’s Place, 107.