Biblical Views: Priscilla—An Extraordinary Early Christian Life

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More than 40 years ago, my wife and I moved to Durham, England, for me to do my doctoral thesis on women in the New Testament. Usually doctoral theses get someone a degree and then are quickly buried in some back room of a library. In my case, the opposite happened, and it led to three books on women in the New Testament for Cambridge University Press, one of which became their best-selling scholarly New Testament monograph ever.¹ A significant portion of those books was devoted to Paul’s female coworkers—Phoebe, Junia, Mary, and others, but clearly the most frequently mentioned one in the New Testament is Priscilla. We find her in Corinth, Ephesus, and Rome working for and with Paul and with her husband, Aquila.

Why? Why such prominence?

Let’s start with her name: Priscilla, or the shortened form, Prisca. This is a famous Roman name, after which a catacomb in Rome is even named. I suspect the Priscilla in the New Testament had some connection with the Priscilla gens (“clan”), but we also know she was a Jewess who had a trade with her husband. They were expelled from Rome in the 40s C.E. presumably because of their witnessing about Jesus in Jewish circles and causing some turmoil (see Acts 18).

Let us also consider an oddity about Priscilla. In a male-dominated world, it is unusual to mention a wife before her husband. But that seems to have been the regular practice of Paul and of Luke (see Romans 16:3; Acts 18:26). Some scholars have suggested that this is because Priscilla was of higher social status than her husband, Aquila, but those sorts of considerations hardly seem likely to have motivated the verbiage of Paul, who said that “in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, and no male and female, for all are one in him” (Galatians 3:28, author’s translation). Nor does it seem likely to explain Acts 18:26, for Luke provides us with numerous cameos of women playing a variety of roles in early Christianity.

The likely reason is that Priscilla took the lead in her family in doing ministry work. In Acts 18:26, we are told she and Aquila took Apollos aside and instructed him more accurately in the way of the Lord. Now Apollos was not just any preacher. He was a notable early Christian evangelist as both Acts and Paul’s letters make clear (see 1 Corinthians 3; Acts 18). Priscilla was a teacher of Apollos, and some later readers of Acts didn’t like that notion. The Western text of Acts gets out a big eraser and eliminates Priscilla’s teaching role in that verse.²

According to Paul himself in Romans 16:3, Priscilla and Aquila are both considered his vital coworkers who “risked their lives for me, and not only I, but all the churches of the Gentiles are grateful to them.” This is because they had helped start and nurture many of those churches, as 1 Corinthians 16:19 makes clear, referring to the “church which meets in their house.” Priscilla was not a mere patroness or supporter of men in ministry. She was a coworker and minister alongside Paul, including teaching both men and women.

They had gotten to know each other apparently because they shared a trade—leather-working. Paul worked with them in Corinth to support himself (see Acts 18:1-4). Notice how we find this couple in Corinth with Paul, in Ephesus with Paul (1 Corinthians 16), and in Rome (Romans 16). They were missionaries—just like Paul—who worked both with and without Paul for the spreading of the good news about Jesus of Nazareth. Paul’s itinerant ministry mainly transpired during the 50s C.E., and, if you look closely, it is no coincidence that the places where he had the most success and stayed the longest were in Corinth (a year and a half, producing several letters back to that church) and in Ephesus (more than two years)—the cities in which Paul worked with Priscilla and Aquila over a long period of time.

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In Romans 16, writing c. 57 C.E., Paul is hoping to come to Rome for the first time, the hometown of Priscilla and Aquila (see Acts 18:1-4), and he says that “all the churches of the Gentiles are grateful to them.” They had returned to Rome after the exile edict of Claudius had expired when Claudius died in 54 C.E., and they were working away for the gospel there, preparing for the coming of the “apostle to the Gentiles.”

In my novel, Priscilla: The Life of an Early Christian,³ I tell the story of the Jesus movement from 30 to 95 C.E., through the eyes of Priscilla, who seems to have been a Christian even before she met Paul. Christianity did not come to Rome in the first place because of Peter or Paul, but probably because pilgrims from Rome at Pentecost in Jerusalem carried the message back to the Eternal City (see Acts 2:10-11). Perhaps Priscilla had even been one of those present at Pentecost, for the woman for whom she is named, a Roman matron also named Priscilla, seems to have been a God-fearer who might have made such a pilgrimage with young Priscilla in tow.

On the Via Salaria in Rome, there is a catacomb called the Catacomb of Priscilla. It seems to have been named for the wife of a very high-status Roman—the consul Manius Acilius Galabrio. He became a Christian and was executed on the orders of Emperor Domitian in the late 80s or early 90s C.E. Perhaps it was this family from which the Priscilla of the New Testament came. Possibly she had started life as a slave, been freed by her master, and taken the name of her owner, Priscilla, as former slaves often did.

This is only a conjecture, but what is not a conjecture is that Priscilla played an important ministerial role in the Pauline outreach to Gentiles. Not just Paul, or even just the Gentile Churches of the first century, but all of early Christianity owes her a great debt. Her story needs to be known.

More than 40 years ago, my wife and I moved to Durham, England, for me to do my doctoral thesis on women in the New Testament. Usually doctoral theses get someone a degree and then are quickly buried in some back room of a library. In my case, the opposite happened, and it led to three books on women in the New Testament for Cambridge University Press, one of which became their best-selling scholarly New Testament monograph ever.1 A significant portion of those books was devoted to Paul’s female coworkers—Phoebe, Junia, Mary, and others, but clearly the most frequently […]