Your Woman Jezebel

Revelation 2:20 is a good example of how there can be significant exegetical differences between the Majority and Minority text. Whereas the minority text (and most translations, even the KJV) render the phrase in question as “that woman Jezebel”, the Majority text has a second person singular possessive: “your woman Jezebel.” This Jezebel (obviously a symbolic name), then is the wife of the “angel” of the church of Thyatira. To put it in terms closer to our vernacular: the wife of the presiding minister of presbytery was a hot mess and the entire presbytery was content to do nothing about it.

Thyatira was home to the grave of Apollo, the sun god. His myth was that of battling Python (the serpent) but in defeating her he takes her place (the Oracle at Delphi) thus reveals himself to be the duplicate of his enemy. Light is dark. Day is night. Good is evil. Rushdoony points out that this cult put forward the notion of radical continuity. In other words, everything will continue on as ever it has done and whether you do good or evil doesn’t matter all that much. We might call this the end game of moral relativism.

But this wife of the angel/pastor of Thyatira was styling herself and was being received by God’s people as a prophetess. She was teaching them to commit fornication which likely included literal sexual immorality, but the other sin she led folks into was to eat food sacrificed to idols. Both these things were in direct rebellion to the Jerusalem council. The Apostles had decreed that the union of Jews and Gentiles in Christ required the Gentiles to refrain from participation in the idolatrous practice of ceremonially eating meat sacrificed to idols. Paul, of course, later argues that it was ok to buy that meat in the markets for ordinary use, but the prohibition was on syncretism. This was because both Jewish and Gentile Christians were separated together from the world. This pastor’s wife was teaching God’s people to blur the lines between the righteous and the ungodly. She was a worldly woman and was teaching others to adopt worldliness.

This is really striking for a number of reasons. First, pastors and elders must love their wives enough to guard them from giving themselves over to worldliness. We see that the LGBT cause has been furthered in the church principally by hijacking the nurturing instinct of women and especially women in leadership capacities within evangelicalism. Second, while this Jezebel really was a problem, the bigger problem was that her husband and the other pastors had just put up with her advancement of moral relativism were content to do nothing about it. Remember, Ahab just let Jezebel do her thing because he didn’t have the courage to stand up to her and lead her out of her compromise and error. Faithful pastors must protect their wives and children from worldliness in order to protect the flock from worldliness. We are to be a holy people, after all, and this starts with elders, their wives, and their families.