Was Jesus a Feminist? How Jesus Treated Women, in 10 Paintings

1. Mary of Bethany sat at his feet as a student (Luke 10:38–42).
2. The Samaritan woman heard him say plainly that he was the Messiah (John 4:1–42).
3. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna and many other women traveled with him and supported the mission out of their own means (Luke 8:1–3).
4. The bleeding woman was the only person he addressed as “Daughter” (Mark 5:25–34).
5. The woman at Simon’s dinner was the one he told Simon to look at (Luke 7:36–50).
6. The Canaanite mother answered him back, and he praised her faith (Matthew 15:21–28).
7. The woman caught in adultery was brought to him without the man (John 8:1–11).
8. The woman at Bethany was promised she would be remembered wherever the gospel is preached (Mark 14:3–9).
9. The women from Galilee stayed at the cross and went to the tomb (Mark 15:40–16:8).
10. Mary Magdalene carried the first news of the resurrection to the disciples (John 20:11–18).

Strictly speaking, Jesus could not have been a feminist, because the word did not exist. English borrowed “feminist” from French in 1892. The phrase “Jesus was a feminist” is younger still: a Catholic scholar at Temple University, Leonard Swidler, used it as the title of an article in the magazine Catholic World in January 1971, and later of a book.

Swidler’s title stuck because it names a real pattern. It also needs two honest limits. The first is that Jesus did not overturn every custom of his day: the Twelve he chose were all men, and churches draw different conclusions from that, which this article does not try to settle. The second is that Jesus was a Jewish teacher whose Scriptures already honored women such as Deborah, Ruth, Esther and Hannah. The people who objected in the stories below include his own disciples. The surprise was about him, not a verdict on his people.

With that said, here are the ten moments.

When Jesus stopped at the home of two sisters, Martha and Mary, in a village that John’s Gospel identifies as Bethany, Mary sat down at his feet to listen while Martha did the work.

She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to His message.

Luke 10:39 · BSB

Sitting at a teacher’s feet was a student’s posture. Paul describes his own training the same way: he was “educated at the feet of Gamaliel” (Acts 22:3).

Martha objected, and it is easy to sympathize with her: “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her to help me!” Jesus answered her by name, twice, and he did not send Mary to the kitchen: “Mary has chosen the good portion, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:40–42).

Before anyone feels sorry for Martha, read John 11. When her brother Lazarus died, Martha went out to meet Jesus, and she made one of the clearest confessions of faith in the Gospels. “Yes, Lord,” she answered, “I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world” (John 11:27). It runs very close to Peter’s famous confession in Matthew 16:16. Both sisters, in the end, were disciples.

Henryk Siemiradzki, a Polish painter working in Rome, finished the painting at the top of this page, a canvas three metres wide, in 1886. According to the Russian Museum, which owns it, critics at the time singled out two things: the landscape and the figure of Mary listening to Christ. Out of everything on that enormous canvas, they noticed the student.

At Jacob’s well outside the Samaritan town of Sychar, a tired Jesus asked a Samaritan woman for a drink, and the conversation that followed is one of the longest he has with anyone in the Gospels.

Just then His disciples returned and were surprised that He was speaking with a woman. But no one asked Him, “What do You want from her?” or “Why are You talking with her?”

John 4:27 · BSB

She had raised the objection first. “You are a Jew,” she said. “How can You ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” John adds the explanation for his readers: “For Jews do not associate with Samaritans” (John 4:9). She named two barriers in one sentence, and Jesus stepped over both.

Then he told her what he had not yet said so plainly to anyone in John’s Gospel. When she spoke of the Messiah who was coming, Jesus answered, “I who speak to you am He” (John 4:26). She left her water jar, went back into town and told the people there. John reports the result: “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in Jesus because of the woman’s testimony” (John 4:39).

Carl Bloch painted this scene in 1872 on a copper plate, one of 23 Gospel pictures for the king’s oratory at Frederiksborg Castle in Denmark, whose old panels had burned in 1859. The bill went to J. C. Jacobsen of the Carlsberg brewery, who paid for the whole series himself. In the burned set, this panel’s place had held the feeding of the five thousand. Now it holds one woman at a well.

As Jesus traveled through the towns and villages preaching, Luke says the Twelve went with him, and so did a group of women whom Luke takes the trouble to name.

Soon afterward, Jesus traveled from one town and village to another, preaching and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with Him, as well as some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, Joanna the wife of Herod’s household manager Chuza, Susanna, and many others. These women were ministering to them out of their own means.

Luke 8:1–3 · BSB

The mission had costs, and women helped pay them “out of their own means.” Nobody objects this time; the surprise is the list itself. Luke could have mentioned some unnamed women and moved on, and instead he gives names, a husband and a job title.

Look at the second name. Joanna was “the wife of Herod’s household manager,” and this Herod was the ruler of Galilee who had John the Baptist beheaded. So among the people supporting Jesus was the wife of the man who ran Herod’s household, the same Herod who, Luke says, “kept trying to see” Jesus (Luke 9:9).

The list matters again at the end of the story. When Luke names the women who found the tomb empty, Mary Magdalene and Joanna are on it (Luke 24:10). The women who were there at the beginning of the road were there at the end.

James Tissot’s own caption for this watercolor is “Jesus on His way to Galilee,” so pairing it with Luke 8 is our choice. On the page before it in his illustrated Gospel, Tissot drew up his own list of the women he believed traveled with Jesus, adding Martha, the daughter of Jairus and even a name for the woman at the well: “Dinah the Samaritan.”

In a crowd beside the Sea of Galilee, on his way to heal the dying daughter of a synagogue leader named Jairus, Jesus was touched from behind by a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years.

“Daughter,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be free of your affliction.”

Mark 5:34 · BSB

Mark gives her whole history in one sentence: she had “spent all she had” on doctors, and “her condition had only grown worse” (Mark 5:26). She came up behind him, touched his cloak and was healed at once. Then Jesus turned around and asked who had touched his garments. His disciples pointed out the obvious: the whole crowd was pressing in on him (Mark 5:31). He kept looking.

She came forward “trembling in fear” and “told Him the whole truth” (Mark 5:33). He did not scold her. He called her “Daughter.” Matthew and Luke tell the same story with the same word, and nowhere else in the Gospels does Jesus address anyone that way.

Mark mentions the number twelve twice in this chapter. The woman had been ill for twelve years, and Jairus’s daughter, whom Jesus was on his way to save, was twelve years old (Mark 5:42). Jesus had time for both daughters.

Harold Copping paints the moment after Jesus turned around: she is on the paving stones at his feet, and he is looking down at her. In 1927 his publisher, the Religious Tract Society, printed his pictures of biblical women in The Women of the Bible, with a chapter under this picture’s title and a text by Lord and Lady Aberdeen. Lady Aberdeen had been the first president of the International Council of Women, which campaigns for women’s rights.

At a dinner in the house of a Pharisee named Simon, a woman known in the town as a sinner wept over the feet of Jesus, dried them with her hair and anointed them with perfume.

And turning toward the woman, He said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? When I entered your house, you did not give Me water for My feet, but she wet My feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not greet Me with a kiss, but she has not stopped kissing My feet since I arrived. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she has anointed My feet with perfume. Therefore I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven, for she has loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little.”

Luke 7:44–47 · BSB

Simon kept his objection to himself. A real prophet, he thought, “would know who this is and what kind of woman is touching Him” (Luke 7:39). Jesus answered the thought out loud, in front of Simon’s guests, and he made Simon look at her while he did it. Point by point, the woman Simon looked down on had given Jesus the welcome that Simon, the host, had skipped.

The scene ends with Jesus speaking to her directly, not about her: “Your faith has saved you; go in peace” (Luke 7:50).

One detail to notice: Luke never names her. The painting’s title calls her Mary Magdalene, which follows a tradition that began centuries later. We untangle that tradition in Mary Magdalene in art.

Béraud moved the dinner to 1891 Paris and cast it with real people. France’s national museum database identifies the Christ as the socialist journalist Albert Duc-Quercy, and the host, Simon, as Ernest Renan, whose best-selling Life of Jesus had presented Jesus as a man but not God. So the man who thinks “If this man were a prophet” wears the face of one of the most famous doubters in Paris, which is either very pointed or very funny. An English critic at the 1891 show called the picture “flippantly sensational and little more.”

In the district of Tyre and Sidon, on the coast north of Galilee, a Canaanite woman followed Jesus and his disciples, crying out for him to heal her daughter, and she would not take silence for an answer.

“O woman,” Jesus answered, “your faith is great! Let it be done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.

Matthew 15:28 · BSB

This is the hardest story in the set. At first Jesus “did not answer a word,” and his disciples urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us” (Matthew 15:23). When she knelt and said, “Lord, help me!”, he answered with a hard saying about the children’s bread and the dogs. She took his own picture and turned it into a plea: “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table” (Matthew 15:27).

Readers disagree about why Jesus answered her the way he did, and Matthew does not explain. What Matthew does record is the ending: her daughter was healed, and Jesus praised her faith in front of the disciples who had wanted her gone. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his own disciples more than once that they have “little faith.” He calls only two people’s faith great: a centurion (Matthew 8:10) and this mother.

Adolf Hölzel was one of the early German painters to move into abstraction, which is why this scene is built from broad, simplified areas of color. One fact about him suits this story. In 1910 he took over the women’s class at the Stuttgart art academy, which was down to its last three students, and according to a Stuttgart newspaper the class grew almost at once to sixteen.

In the temple courts in Jerusalem, the scribes and Pharisees brought Jesus a woman caught in adultery and asked whether she should be stoned, as a test to trap him.

When they continued to question Him, He straightened up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.”

John 8:7 · BSB

The accusers said she was caught “in the act” (John 8:4). An act of adultery takes two people, and the Law they were quoting says so: “both the adulterer and the adulteress must surely be put to death” (Leviticus 20:10). Only one of the two was standing in front of Jesus.

He refused to be the judge they wanted. The accusers went away “one by one, beginning with the older ones” (John 8:9). Then Jesus spoke to the woman herself. Until that moment, everyone in the story had talked about her. “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?” He neither condemned her nor pretended that nothing had happened: “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Now go and sin no more” (John 8:10–11).

One honest footnote: some early manuscripts of John do not include this story, and many modern Bibles, the BSB among them, print it with a note saying so.

Vasily Polenov spent about fifteen years on this six-metre canvas, with a trip to Palestine along the way. He meant the title to be Jesus’ own question. “I called this painting ‘He That Is Without Sin Among You’. That was its message,” he later wrote in a letter. “But the censor prohibited me from printing these words in the catalogue.” The censor allowed only Christ and the Sinner, and Emperor Alexander III ended the argument by buying the picture. Today the Russian Museum labels it with both titles, which seems fair.

At a dinner in Bethany two days before the Passover, a woman whose name Mark never gives anointed Jesus with a jar of costly perfume, and some of the guests turned on her.

While Jesus was in Bethany reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke open the jar and poured it on Jesus’ head.

Mark 14:3 · BSB

Some of the guests did the arithmetic. The perfume, they said, could have been sold for “over three hundred denarii,” and in one of Jesus’ own parables a denarius is a day’s pay (Matthew 20:2). “And they scolded her” (Mark 14:5). Matthew says it was the disciples who were indignant (Matthew 26:8).

Jesus told them to leave her alone. “She has done a beautiful deed to Me,” he said, and he told them what her gift meant: “She has done what she could to anoint My body in advance of My burial” (Mark 14:6–8). Then he made her a promise: “wherever the gospel is preached in all the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her” (Mark 14:9). Nearly two thousand years later, here we are, still telling it, although Mark never recorded her name. John tells of an anointing in Bethany too, and there the woman is Mary, the sister of Martha (John 12:3).

Copping follows Mark and Matthew here: the perfume goes on Jesus’ head. The title the picture now goes by, Mary Anointing Jesus, borrows the name from John’s account, where Mary anoints his feet. Mark left her unnamed, and a picture library could not resist giving her one.

Outside Jerusalem, when Jesus was crucified, women who had followed him from Galilee watched him die, saw where he was buried and came back with spices after the Sabbath.

And there were also women watching from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These women had followed Jesus and ministered to Him while He was in Galilee, and there were many other women who had come up to Jerusalem with Him.

Mark 15:40–41 · BSB

Mark is blunt about the men. At the arrest, “everyone deserted Him and fled” (Mark 14:50). John adds that one disciple, the one Jesus loved, stood near the cross with Jesus’ mother and the other women (John 19:25–27).

Mark is also careful about the women. Two of them “saw where His body was placed” (Mark 15:47), and when the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene came back with the others to anoint the body (Mark 16:1). So at least one of the women who found the tomb empty, Mary Magdalene, had watched him laid in it.

Tanner’s title counts three Marys, a traditional way of naming the women at the tomb, although Mark’s list has two Marys and a Salome (Mark 16:1). According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 1991 Tanner catalogue, the woman in front carries the traditional signs of Mary Magdalene, long loose hair and a thin gown, and the other two carry none. Tanner showed the picture at the Paris Salon of 1910, where a French critic doubted the faith of the Salon’s religious painters, Tanner included, and still praised this picture’s color.

Early on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene stood weeping outside the empty tomb in a garden near Jerusalem. The risen Jesus called her by name and sent her to tell the disciples.

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them what He had said to her.

John 20:18 · BSB

Luke records how that kind of news was received. When Mary Magdalene, Joanna and the other women told the apostles about the empty tomb, “their words seemed like nonsense to them, and they did not believe the women” (Luke 24:11).

That reaction fits the century. Josephus, a Jewish historian writing near the end of the first century, retold the law of witnesses from Deuteronomy, which says nothing about women, and added a rule of his own time: “But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex.” It is hard to imagine anyone inventing women as the first witnesses of the empty tomb to win over skeptics. All four Gospels name them anyway.

Medieval writers such as Rabanus Maurus and Thomas Aquinas called her apostolorum apostola because of that morning, and in 2016, when the Vatican raised her memorial day to a feast, the article that accompanied the decree put the English form in its headline: “apostle of the apostles.”

Fritz von Uhde painted the first messenger of Easter as a young village woman in a brown woollen shawl, in a meadow below buildings that his early biographer, Fritz von Ostini, identified as the Schlossberg of Dachau, near Munich. Ostini found it a peculiar whim to set a Christ who might have stepped out of a Rubens beside a completely modern Magdalene, and decided the contradiction did the picture no harm.

Ten moments are only a start. A few more worth reading in full:

• The widow of Nain. Jesus stopped the funeral of a widow’s only son and told her, “Do not weep” (Luke 7:11–17).
• The bent-over woman. Healed on the Sabbath over a synagogue leader’s objection, she was “this daughter of Abraham” to Jesus (Luke 13:10–17).
• Peter’s mother-in-law. Jesus “took her by the hand, and helped her up” (Mark 1:29–31).
• The widow’s two small coins. Jesus called his disciples over to point out a poor widow’s gift (Mark 12:41–44).
• The lost coin. In a parable about God’s joy over a sinner who repents, the one who searches is a woman sweeping her house (Luke 15:8–10).
• The persistent widow. The heroine of a parable about praying and not giving up (Luke 18:1–8).
• The daughters of Jerusalem. On the road to the cross, Jesus turned to speak to the women mourning him (Luke 23:27–31).
• His mother, Mary. She brought him the problem of the wine at Cana (John 2:1–11), and from the cross he entrusted her to the disciple he loved (John 19:25–27). Her story is in the life of the Virgin Mary in paintings.

Put the ten moments side by side and a pattern appears. Jesus looks at women whom other people look past, and he speaks to them directly: “Daughter” to the woman in the crowd, “O woman” to the Canaanite mother, “Mary” in the garden. He lets them learn, travel, give, argue, grieve and testify. More than once he takes their side when the people closest to him object.

The early church put the theology behind it in one sentence: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Paul wrote that line some years later. The Gospels show what it looked like in person. Jesus did not treat women as a cause. He treated each one as a person God had made and had come to find.

Which of these women do you most need to stand beside today: the one who wanted to learn, the one who had been talked about, the one who had been ignored, or the one who carried good news that nobody believed?

If you would like to stay with one moment a little longer, try Visio Divina, a way of praying with a painting and a Bible passage.

1. Look. Open Tanner’s The Three Marys and give it a full minute before you decide what it means.
2. Meditate. Read Mark 16:1–8 slowly, then look at the painting again. The women walked to the tomb asking, “Who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb?”
3. Pray. Tell God, in plain words, about the stone in your own life that you cannot move.
4. Contemplate. Stay quiet for a few minutes with the painting in front of you.

Was Jesus a feminist?

In the way he treated women, yes. The Gospels show him teaching, defending and trusting women in ways that surprised even his own disciples. The word itself dates only from the 1890s, and Jesus led no movement for women’s rights.

Why is Jesus called the first feminist?

Because of the pattern above: he included women in his teaching and his mission, and the Gospels record the objections. The phrase goes back at least to Leonard Swidler’s 1971 article “Jesus Was a Feminist.”

How did Jesus treat women differently from the culture around him?

The Gospels show the difference through people’s reactions. His disciples were surprised to find him talking with a Samaritan woman (John 4:27), a dinner host thought no prophet would let a sinful woman touch him (Luke 7:39), and the apostles dismissed the women’s Easter report as nonsense (Luke 24:11).

Did Jesus have female disciples?

Yes, in the sense of women who learned from him and followed him: Mary of Bethany sat at his feet (Luke 10:39), and women traveled with him from Galilee (Luke 8:1–3; Mark 15:41). Acts later calls a woman named Tabitha “a disciple” (Acts 9:36), using a feminine form of the Greek word that appears nowhere else in the New Testament.

Who were the women who followed Jesus?

The Gospels name Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, Mary the mother of James and Joses, Salome, and Mary the wife of Clopas, along with his mother Mary and the sisters Martha and Mary of Bethany. Luke adds that there were “many others” (Luke 8:3).

Why were all twelve apostles men?

The Gospels record the choice without explaining it, and churches answer the question differently. They also show women doing what the apostles did not: in Mark, the women stay at the cross and go to the tomb.

Who saw the risen Jesus first?

In Matthew, the risen Jesus meets Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” as they run from the tomb (Matthew 28:9). In John, he appears first to Mary Magdalene alone (John 20:14–18). Luke does not describe an appearance to the women, and Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 15:5 begins with Peter.

Which paintings show Jesus with women?

The ten in this article are listed below, and you will find many more in our gallery.