Furthermore, the women’s unique role as initial recipients of cherished testimony was an additional challenge to the old, male-oriented order. 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
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