The Female Apostles Your Pastor Never Told You About: Archaeological Evidence Reveals Women Actually Led Early Christianity

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today I have the privilege of speaking with Dr. Lynn Cohick. Dr. Cohick, thanks so much for joining us today. We appreciate your time, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Nice to meet you, Johnny, and thank you so much for inviting me on Dig In. I love it.

Johnny Ova: My pleasure. We've got a great topic today. It's a controversial topic, but we're going to dig in a little. I want to go back to the early church. When most Christians today think about early church women, they think of them either as silent observers or exceptional anomalies, like Priscilla, for example. What was the biggest surprise you discovered when you first began researching how ordinary women actually lived in the first century?

Dr. Lynn Cohick: I think I was really surprised at how influential they were through the informal patterns of their culture. I don't know why I was surprised, because in our own culture today so much is informal. Who has the most influence? George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, or my local Republican or Democrat in the statehouse? Neither of those celebrities holds a formal position, but they influence people. Recognizing that, then as now, people can influence, and that there are ways culture gives influence and importance to people outside formal titles, was probably the biggest surprise for me. Because like you, when I started in this, I assumed women were in the house with no real agency and very limited opportunities. And that's not the whole story.

Johnny Ova: A hundred percent. We just recorded with another guest who's an atheist and who studied the same subject, women in religion, so I can't wait to set these conversations side by side and get the different perspectives. But one of the reasons I had to have you on was that when I was reading and listening to some of your work, you use the exact example I use, prescriptions and descriptions. I thought, Dr. Cohick and I are going down the same vein here.

Johnny Ova: I use it a lot because I think people have this view of the Bible where God's up in heaven writing with pen and paper, throwing a paper airplane down, and they catch it and go, "Thus saith the Lord." But a lot of the time the Bible describes things, and sometimes it prescribes things. So I want to turn to distinguishing prescriptions for women's behavior from descriptions of their actual lives. Can you help us understand how ancient philosophers might have skewed our understanding of women's real experiences?

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Sure. In any kind of treatise where you're describing the optimum, or describing things in the abstract, you tend to generalize to the point that you're almost making a prescription. This is the ideal. Aristotle is probably the best known for doing that. He lived about 400 years or so before the New Testament period, but his ideas were really influential. Aristotelian thought and Platonic thought had morphed a little into Stoic thought, so Stoicism would have been most prevalent. But for the average person, the ideas of Aristotle were there, especially how he saw the world as a binary. You had male, and the opposite of male is female. It wasn't just that they're different. They're different in a hierarchical way. They're opposites.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: With that kind of substructure, people started imagining how these men and women would live out their lives in the world. And you start thinking, well, grown women are not quite children, but they don't really have the rational capacity a male does, so we're not going to let them have full rights in the courts, for example. In the first century, women could make petitions in the courts, but they needed a male guardian to sign any official documents. That went back to this idea that they're grown-ups, but they don't have full rational capacity like the male. So you can see how the descriptive, what a woman is, goes back to the prescriptive, Aristotle's abstraction of what male and female mean.

Johnny Ova: Very interesting. It's wild to think about. It's hard to put yourself in that place. Let's go to family life. How did the Greco-Roman household structure actually work, and where did Christian women find unexpected power within these domestic spaces?

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Again, Aristotle is where you have to start. He imagined the family as larger than we think of it today. You had husband and wife, father and child, and slave and owner. Those three pairs made up the family as Aristotle saw it in the abstract, in the prescriptive. In real life there were a lot of blended families. Life expectancy was short. Almost everyone married, and a lot of people married a second or third time after a spouse's death. There was no reliable birth control, so most women got pregnant, and as many women died in childbirth and its complications as men died on the battlefield. It was an incredibly dangerous endeavor, but children were really valued. Maybe 50 percent of children lived beyond the age of five. It was a brutal time in terms of life expectancy. I say all that because families wanted children who lived to adulthood and could carry on the family line. So pregnancy and childbirth were very dangerous, but also really desired for both families.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: The other interesting thing is that when a woman married, she never formally left her father's family. She maintained ties with it. It's a type of marriage unlike, say, Victorian England, where when a woman married, all her assets went to her husband's family. I was a big fan of Downton Abbey, and the manor house is saved because he marries a rich American heiress and gets all her money. In the ancient world, the woman brought her dowry into the marriage. She didn't control it while she was married, but if she was divorced or he died, she received it back. If he made money on the dowry, he could keep that, but if he lost money on it, he owed it to her if he divorced her.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: She could also have her own bank account, if you will, her own property separate from her husband, over which he had no oversight. We think women were completely controlled by their husbands, and from our vantage point that can ring true in certain ways, but she could also have financial assets, depending on how much money she had. She could receive gifts from her mother or father. If she was a Gentile, a Roman, she could inherit. If she was Jewish, they called it something slightly different, a deed of gift, but parents could gift their daughters date groves, for example, or half a courtyard in a big home. So she could have her own property, and so she could be a shopkeeper or businesswoman, whether Jewish or Gentile. But to exercise meaningful agency in the courts, she needed a male to sign for her: her husband, father, brother, uncle or a friend. So as you dig in below the surface and look at how day-to-day life operated, not simply at the treatises that suggest an ideal world, you realize women had a lot more agency. An ideal world for the men, anyway. I don't know that the women would have said it was ideal.

Johnny Ova: The first thing I think of as you're talking is what a disadvantage a woman from a poor family would have. At least if a woman was wealthy, she had something of her own. If she was poor, between that and the male-dominant culture, it was hard. And you go back to the beginning of the biblical narrative, Adam and Eve, and you have this tag team, for lack of a better term, a team that's supposed to be working and building together. Their oneness and unity display this complete picture of God. And somewhere along the line, as with every bad thing, Dr. Cohick, it turns into massive control and dominance, an attitude of "you should be lucky you can keep the land." So it seems that if you were a woman from a poor family, you were at an extreme disadvantage.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Especially if you were widowed, or widowed young and didn't have your parents still living. Then you'd rely on, you'd hope for, an uncle or maybe a brother nearby. That's why, though it's much earlier, in the story of Ruth, Naomi realizes she's quite vulnerable. The culture has a plan, a kinsman redeemer, but you're really at the mercy of whether that individual will be responsible. In Ruth's case, Boaz certainly was. But there's definitely a vulnerability. That speaks to a really important aspect of family life, the loyalty people felt for their family and maybe for their neighborhood or community. You really needed to rely on each other, because you were so vulnerable, even to famines or natural disasters.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: The idea of the individual that we assume today just wouldn't have been part of things. People took their identity from their family, for the most part. Men also could take their identity in part from their job. We see this on tombstones. If you were a soldier, you'd note that on your tombstone. Women tended to note something religious, if they were a Gentile priestess or something like that, but also who they were married to, who their father was, or an important son. It's not that men didn't, but women on average identified with their family much more. That becomes important as we read the biblical text. Women tend to be identified by their relatives more than men, and we need to be alert to that as we read how women are identified in the New Testament.

Johnny Ova: You've uncovered some fascinating evidence about women as patrons and benefactors. Can you walk us through how someone like Phoebe could be Paul's patron and what that meant in terms of financial power and influence? It seems like that would be an influential position and a dangerous one at the same time.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Absolutely. Patronage is one of those institutions that's very important in the culture but not part of the legal framework. Seneca, an important philosopher in the first century, says he doesn't want this institution in the legal realm. He likes it in the cultural realm because, in my words, it keeps people honest. Patronage is all about reciprocity. If you have resources, you should use them for the benefit of a particular individual or a community. And if you receive a gift as an individual, you need to honor your patron. So you have this reciprocity, this relationship that builds, and it's really important in this culture.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Let's go to your example of Phoebe, mentioned by Paul in Romans 16:1 and 2. She is the deacon of Cenchreae, the eastern port of Corinth. We know Paul spent 18 months in Corinth, so he probably got to know her well. And she is a benefactor of Paul. Sometimes English translations say "helper": she's been a helper of mine. That's a really weak translation of what is, not a title, but a descriptor of a relationship at this time. A benefactor might offer hospitality and let Paul stay in the home. Lydia, and we can turn to her in a minute, in Acts 16 would be an example. They may have financially sponsored Paul. But benefactors could also make introductions. Phoebe might have had some business in Rome. She seems to be the one who took Paul's letter to the Romans to Rome. So she might have had connections there, or just been well known in Cenchreae, and could help Paul if things got a little messy, as sometimes happened when he was preaching. "Hey, I'm a friend of Phoebe." "Oh, okay, I'll back away."

Dr. Lynn Cohick: So benefactors could do a lot of different things, and it's a really important part of the culture. People relied on each other that way. And going back to your opening question, this was one of the things that really stood out to me when I wrote Women in the World of the Earliest Christians years ago. I'm actually working on a second edition, and I'm so excited about that. This idea that through the mechanisms of benefaction, women had real influence and voice and agency in their community without any blowback, without accusations of stepping out of line, because it was an informal institution that benefited others. So women could do that.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Lydia offers safety and a home and food for Paul and Silas, Timothy and Luke in Acts 16, there in Philippi. Paul and Silas get arrested, beaten and thrown in prison, then released when it's revealed that Paul is a Roman citizen. Before he leaves the city, he stops by Lydia's house. I think he does that because he knows she could be vulnerable to a mob coming against her, since she opened her house to him. She helped him big time. Now, with his Roman citizenship, he can help her by stopping at her house and letting everybody know, "This is my friend." So you can see the reciprocity and the care people relied on. Lydia isn't identified with the word benefactor the way Phoebe is, but she acts that way toward Paul. And Jesus had a benefactor named Mary Magdalene. In Luke 8:1 through 3, Mary Magdalene and the other women listed there helped Jesus out of their own funds. It's a ubiquitous practice in the ancient world, and we tend not to see it today.

Johnny Ova: Going to the house church model. I'm from New York, so we know a lot about benefactors over here. A little too close to home.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: That's true. It doesn't always get good press either.

Johnny Ova: Today we meet in these beautiful buildings and churches, and we can easily get caught up in our own bubble: this is the way it's always been, nothing's changed, this is how Christianity started, everybody came with their Bibles, which didn't exist in the first century.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Nowadays they're coming with their phones.

Johnny Ova: That's right. The phones, and the phones read to me while I'm driving. I think the house church model, which was central to Christianity, played such an important role, not just in how believers experienced fellowship and communion, but in how women interacted in those homes. How did hosting these gatherings give women authority and leadership opportunities we might not expect, or often overlook?

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Let's go back to Philippi with Lydia. As you read her story, when she receives the gospel message, she and her household are baptized. So she is running the house. In English we might say she's the head of the house, though Greek doesn't use the word "head" the way we do today, or the way Latin or Hebrew does. I mean the decision maker in the house. That was Lydia. She and her household were baptized. A little later in the same story, the jailer and his household are baptized. What you see is the notion of community I mentioned earlier. People saw those responsible for the household as trusted to make decisions that benefited the whole household. Unlike today, where we want everyone to make their own choice, and one of the ways you show you're an adult is making individual decisions, often the opposite of your parents, just to show you're an individual. In the ancient world that wasn't the assumption.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: I'll tell you a little story. We lived in Kenya for a couple of years in the 90s, and I got to know a younger Kenyan named Paul really well. Both his parents had died, so he was raised by his grandparents. At one point his grandfather got really sick and was in the hospital, and I asked Paul, "What's wrong?" He said, "I don't know. My grandfather's brother has come into town, and when he thinks it's appropriate for me to know, he will tell me." I was like, wow, that would not fly in America. Paul was in his early twenties at this point. But I saw in that the assumption that my elders are looking out for me, they're wise, they know what they're doing, so I'll wait until they decide. I thought, I have a window into the first century world with that story. So when Lydia decides to follow Christ, her household thinks, this must be the way to go. It's not that they don't also personally commit, but they do so in part because they trust her.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: So she most likely had believers continue to meet in her house, since she had welcomed them. Same with Priscilla and Aquila. Paul met them in Corinth, in Acts 18. They presumably had a house church meeting in Corinth, then also in Ephesus, and then they moved back to Rome. They end up traveling, but wherever they are, they seem to gather a group in their home. Then there's Nympha and the church that meets in her home. There's just not a sense of restriction on women leading the body.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: One point to note in all of this comes especially with Andronicus and Junia, another couple mentioned in Romans 16, along with Priscilla and Aquila. They're in jail, and they were in Christ before Paul. They're also Jews, like Paul, and they're promoting the gospel to the point that they're in prison, just as Paul is imprisoned for his message. I like to point to that to say that leadership in Paul's mindset, in Jesus's mindset, is that you take up your cross and you follow after me and you serve others. It's not about getting the C-suite or the reserved parking spot. I think that's really important when people ask whether women led. It sometimes feels like they're imagining leadership in glamorous ways, and that's not how the biblical text presents it. It's about service. And yes, women were leading, but leading from a prison cell.

Johnny Ova: It all goes back to that partnership. We had a guest on who attributed a lot of it to the Gospels and religious texts having male-dominant writers. She leaned toward, "Of course men are going to honor the men and not the women in those writings." But more and more I find that we make the biggest mistakes and bring the most confusion when we take our 2025 mindset and implant it onto the text. My personal belief is that if we went back to the first century, we wouldn't understand half of what they were talking about. "Wait, explain this to me again." The words were different, and life was so different. I think doing our best to understand context, intent and culture can illuminate things we may have overlooked in the past.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Yes. I teach in a Doctor of Ministry program at Houston Christian University, and one of the students finishing her dissertation looked at the contributions of women writers, broadly speaking, in this period. One thing she discovered in really vivid ways was how much of women's direct knowledge or direct words are part of Luke's Gospel, to say nothing of Acts. For example, when Elizabeth feels the quickening of John the Baptist in her womb, there's no way anyone would know that unless Elizabeth said it. Or when the woman touches the fringe of Jesus's garment and is healed, and she feels the power, nobody could know that unless she told them. So there are women's voices. We just don't have the radio tuned to that frequency to recognize it. It's there, and we should tune our radio to that frequency. It's important, because when women and men recognize, as you were saying, that this is a job we do together, to faithfully represent Christ to the world together, it strengthens us and encourages us.

Johnny Ova: You've done an amazing job explaining how these women operated in these different roles. I'd like to go a little deeper into the archaeological evidence, like tombstones and inscriptions. What do they reveal about women's roles?

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Can you be more specific? I'm not sure exactly where you want me to go.

Johnny Ova: Inscriptions from archaeological digs that name some women as head of household or things like that, and any findings that might affirm some of their roles in scripture.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Sure. Let me talk about the synagogue inscriptions found in Asia Minor maybe over a hundred years ago, but only re-examined more recently, in the 80s and beyond. There's a word for leader of the synagogue, archisynagogos, which we also find in the biblical text. On these inscriptions it was connected with women. When they were first discovered, the archaeologists assumed it was an honorary title, that it couldn't actually be functional. Then more women scholars began looking at this and asking, "Why are we assuming this is honorary and not functional? What's going on?" It's that kind of re-examination of the evidence where we find women having this kind of role.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: And benefactors, for sure. People who have been to Pompeii may have seen the statue of Eumachia. She was a patron of the fullers' guild, which was a very important guild, sort of dry cleaners and clothes makers combined. She helped sponsor that trade guild, and they honored her with this statue. That kind of public honor was part of the social currency of the day. And that's not even counting the imperial cult, which was incredibly important at the time. Augustus's wife, Livia, was the main priestess for his cult. When Caesar Augustus died, she continued honoring him, and when she died she herself was deified. So by the time Paul was in Philippi, there would already have been a temple or shrine near the city for Livia. We know that because there's an inscription that mentions someone who was a priestess there. So there's enough evidence that women held important roles, even in religious communities, Jewish and pagan, at this time, and also as patrons. What survives is in stone. There was probably a lot more activity by women that we just don't know about, because it's been 2,000 years and much has been destroyed.

Johnny Ova: We just don't have it. You mentioned Mary Magdalene as a benefactor of Jesus. I believe you argue she was most likely a businesswoman or trader rather than a prostitute. How did that misidentification happen, and what does her actual story tell us?

Dr. Lynn Cohick: The story goes completely sideways, I think around 591, in the late sixth century, when she is identified by a pope as a compilation of several Bible stories: the sinful woman in Luke 7 who anoints Jesus's feet at the house of Simon the Pharisee; Mary Magdalene, named in Luke 8; the unnamed woman with the alabaster jar in Mark and Matthew who anoints Jesus at the end of his life; and the one named in John 12 as Mary of Bethany. They all get pulled together because of the anointing theme, formally by the sixth century, although Tertullian in the second century was already combining Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons were cast out, with the sinful woman in the chapter before in Luke. Very early on, those seven demons were allegorized as the seven deadly sins, and then, because she's female, they all had to be sexual, according to the monks. That's how it all went sideways.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: But if we just look at the biblical evidence, Mary Magdalene is mentioned in Luke 8 as a benefactor of Jesus and as someone who was healed. That's all we know: she was healed. Maybe she was healed of a crippling disease, similar to the woman later in Luke, the daughter of Abraham who had a spirit that crippled her. At times what we would call illnesses were described as having a demonic dimension. So she had seven demons cast out, which may simply have been an exorcism, or may be a way of describing a serious illness she was healed from. And she followed Jesus.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: We know women were shopkeepers and could run family businesses. From the early second century we have an archive from a woman named Babatha that talks about properties she owned. She had date groves. She was married once and had a son from that marriage. Her husband died and she remarried, but she kept trying to get more support for her son, whose name was Jesus, from his guardians. Legally he was considered an orphan, even though his mother was alive. She kept going to court saying, "Look, I can contribute my own money to his monthly allowance," so that he could live at a higher status, and his guardians wouldn't do it. We have records of her doing that, and in all those court records, a guardian or a male friend signs for her. So she clearly has money and resources. We know that from the date groves.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: So Mary Magdalene could have had something similar. I don't know what business she was in. Women were just there doing their work, and she might have been a widow continuing her family's trade. She had enough that she was able to contribute and be known for contributing to Jesus's ministry. She follows him in Galilee, according to Mark 15, verses 40 and 41, which talk about the women who followed Jesus in Galilee. But she's probably best known for seeing Jesus in the garden when he is raised, in John 20. A church father, I think Chrysostom, or maybe a later figure, describes her as an apostle to the apostles, someone who is sent to the apostles. There's so much artwork in the medieval and Renaissance periods that depicts this scene, Noli me tangere, "do not cling to me." It's a moment that's very precious to the church.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: So there's extra-biblical tradition about Mary Magdalene that is positive. One I find interesting is that she preached to Tiberius about the resurrection while holding an egg, and he said, "I'm not going to believe in the resurrection unless that egg turns red." Of course the egg turned red. I don't know that he believed in the resurrection. And if you go to Ephesus, there's the tradition that she joined Mary, the mother of Jesus, and John there to end her days, and helped John write the Gospel. She's beloved in the church on up through the centuries, and the extra-biblical stories about her are all really good.

Johnny Ova: All in a positive light. Awesome. I have a few more questions, if you don't mind, and I have to get to this one. Paul's writings about women have been debated for centuries. Based on your research into their social context, how should we understand passages like "women should be silent," when we know women like Junia were recognized as apostles? And touch on Junia a little if you would, because some still argue Junia is a man and that the name was changed. What you brought up is one of my points: then what kind of relationship would that be with Andronicus, if it's a woman? Things like that.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Sure. I like to start with how Paul actually describes his relationships with his coworkers. He talks about Euodia and Syntyche as his coworkers whose names are written in the book of life, in Philippians 4. He speaks only with praise for Prisca and Aquila. And we know from Acts 18, I think verse 26, that Priscilla and Aquila taught Apollos the finer, deeper things about scripture. He was a believer, but they spoke privately with him about deeper truths. They educated him. He has no problem that Phoebe is a deacon, and it's the word deacon, not deaconess. It suggests an office, because she's the deacon of the church in Cenchreae. So it's a church that functionally has this role, whatever that function was. It's hard to know, because they're just getting started. But she's identified that way. So I look at Paul's practice and assume he's consistent, that he won't require something opposite to what he's comfortable doing.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: When we look at what's going on in Corinth, remember Priscilla and Aquila worked there alongside Paul for 18 months, and presumably Priscilla was teaching. So that church is used to a woman's voice. What seems to be happening in the passage you mentioned, that women should be silent, in chapter 14, is that there's a lot of chaos in that church meeting. You can see it in chapter 14. Just before this passage, Paul says the person prophesying has control of the prophecy. You can't just speak out and interrupt. If you're going to speak in tongues, there needs to be an interpreter. Then Paul says women should be silent and ask their husbands at home. And I think, okay, ask your husband at home. What percentage of women in the church were married, versus widows? Was it 50/50? And then there are slave women, who wouldn't technically be married or have a husband.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: So I think, is there some chaos going on where a wife is interrupting her husband? In which case, ask at home. Don't do it in front of everyone. If a man today constantly interrupts his wife when a group of friends is out to dinner, everyone starts to feel uncomfortable. Or if a woman constantly interrupts her husband in public, everybody feels sorry for the spouse. That's how I would construct the setting. It keeps Paul consistent all the way around, and it's attuned to what the church was actually like. Not every woman had a husband at home to ask.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Then 1 Timothy 2: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man. She must be quiet." That doesn't mean never talking. I think, okay, that's Ephesus. We know Priscilla and Aquila were teaching in Ephesus. Timothy knows them. He'd know many of Paul's coworkers, maybe Euodia and Syntyche up in Philippi, maybe Junia and Andronicus. He's been with Paul a while. The problem Timothy is dealing with in Ephesus is false teaching permeating everything. It's not just a few women teaching heresies. From the very beginning of the letter, Paul says you've got to shut down these teachers, with their myths and endless genealogies, and it goes on for six chapters about different problems. I could spend a long time on 1 Timothy 2, but suffice it to say, I think the key in that passage is that at the beginning of the section, verse 11, Paul commands that women should learn. A woman must learn. That's the imperative.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: Everything that follows is Paul encouraging Timothy to create an environment where these Gentile women, who don't know the gospel story the way Prisca and Aquila or Andronicus and Junia knew it as Jews, can learn. The Jews had such an advantage because they knew God's Word. The Gentiles are just catching up and learning it. Timothy can hang out at Starbucks and teach the guys, but he can't do that with the women, so he has to come up with a strategy, and Paul wants him to. Of course, this letter is to Timothy, but it's going to be read to the whole church. So in saying this to Timothy, Paul is also saying to everybody else in the community: give this guy space. Yes, he's a young pastor, but let him do his job. Let him live into what I've called him to do.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: With Andronicus and Junia, the church fathers in the first several centuries who comment on it know that Junia is a female name. We have something like 250 inscriptions in Rome alone with that female name. Junias, with an S on the end, is actually a made-up name, and that happened in the 13th century. The monk who did it was using the Latin text, and there are different endings on Latin names. It gets really complicated. Bottom line, he wanted to make the name masculine, and Junias stayed for a long time, up until very recently. Then people realized it just isn't accurate. The most reliable texts have it as a woman.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: So then what was questioned was whether she and Andronicus, presumably her husband, maybe a brother, but presumably a husband, were known by the group called the apostles, rather than being apostles themselves. It comes down to this wee little preposition and how to understand the dative. But the natural, typical way to understand it is that they are well known among the apostles, part of the group of the apostles. Barnabas is called an apostle too. It obviously doesn't mean one of the Twelve, because Paul is also an apostle. Epaphroditus, mentioned in Philippians, was sent by the church at Philippi to help Paul while he was in prison. We tend not to think of Epaphroditus as an apostle with a capital A for the whole church, more a localized envoy sent by that church, and the context makes that pretty clear. Barnabas seems to have had more of an international reputation, if we can say that, and it feels to me like Romans 16 with Andronicus and Junia has that same flavor. That's the debate. But I think if it were Bob and Ray among the apostles, everybody would be like, yeah, they're part of the group of the apostles. It's just that it's a woman's name, so it gives pause.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: I have the Center for Women in Leadership organization, and people can reach it at leadershipwithoutapology.org, all one word. They can certainly connect with me that way. And as I mentioned, I'm at Houston Christian University, so they can connect with me there too. Thank you so much, Johnny, for this conversation. It's so fun. I love to geek out on this stuff.

Johnny Ova: It's been great. I've been feasting on this myself. It's such good information, and honestly a much-needed conversation. I love having these kinds of conversations, and I'll put all your information in the YouTube description and our email blast so people can connect with you. Again, Dr. Cohick, thank you so much. There's so much more I had here, but we're constrained by time. I hope to have you on again in the future.

Dr. Lynn Cohick: That'd be awesome. Thanks so much, Johnny.

Johnny Ova: You're welcome.