Richard Bauckham explains: It may be not so much their supposed unreliability as witnesses or their susceptibility to delusion in religious matters, but something even dearer to patriarchal religious assumptions: the priority of men in God’s dealings with the world. In these stories, women are given priority by God as recipients of revelation and thereby the role of mediators of that revelation to men. Is this not part of the eschatological reversal of status, in which God makes the last first and the first last, so that no one might boast before God?68 In this way God challenges the world’s
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