Dr. Nijay Gupta

Dr. Kelley Mathews

Dr. Nijay Gupta, author of Tell Her Story, joins BOW Team Member Kelley Mathews in this fascinating discussion of persecuted women in the early church.

What can we learn from their stories? How do their stories encourage our faith and our own courage? What can we learn from them? What do we miss when we fail to study them?

These women’s stories provide models for us today to stand up for Christ, to know that he is better than anything that comes into our lives, and to be willing to cling to him no matter what happens to us or our country in the future.

This episode is available on video if you prefer watching.

00:22 Introductions

Kelley >> Welcome to the Beyond Ordinary Women Podcast. I’m your host Kelley Mathews. And today I have with me Dr. Nijay Gupta. He is a professor at Northern Seminary and a prolific author. Welcome, Nijay.

Dr. Gupta >> Hi, Kelley. Looking forward to our conversation.

Kelley >> So this is going to be fun, I think. I mean, well, fun. That’s relative, I guess. But it’ll be intriguing I think.

Nijay has written a lot of books. He’s been a professor for a while. A lot of his books have to do with Paul and the New Testament letters that he wrote. But he’s also written one particular book that is specific to our topic today, and it is called Tell Her Story came out a couple of years ago, and it basically tells about the women in the New Testament who were really involved in leading and participating in the mission of the church.

So it has become quite popular, from what I understand. I certainly enjoyed it.

Dr. Gupta >> Yes, thank you.

Yeah, it’s funny. I, you know, just had an idea to write this book, and I sent it to an editor friend of mine, Anna Gissing, and she was so excited. And then it just sort of took off from there. So a big thank you to Intervarsity Press for publishing it.

Kelley >> Oh, they’re great.

So one of the women in that book we’re going to start with. Our topic today is specific, not that broad of women involved in the church, but specifically ones who were imprisoned for their faith. And one of the women you cover in the book does hold that honor, I suppose. And we’re also going to talk about one who is post biblical days who are still in the early church and maybe will hit a third one.

So, Nijay, tell us who Junia is and why we need to know about her.

Dr. Gupta >> Yeah. A lot of my work on this subject owes a debt to Romans 16, which is the last chapter of Paul’s big letter to the Romans. And I used to think of Romans 16 as a bunch of kind of hellos that Paul gives at the end of the letter, almost like end credits in a movie. And you sort of get up, you don’t pay attention.

You leave the movie theater. And so I had a friend in seminary who actually memorized the whole book of Romans, and he asked me, how should I memorize Roman 16? And I said, You’re at the end. Just finish it off. But there’s that sense of you’re preaching through Romans. You kind of, you know, have so much to work with.

Just in the first four chapters, let alone get to chapter 11, let alone if you get to chapter 15 that I don’t know if I hear from any very many sermons on Romans 16. But what’s amazing as a Roman 16, you have dozens of names mentioned. People where they say, greet so and so, greet so and so, and actually it’s hard to tell who might be a man’s name and who might be a woman’s name. Like Persis, Tryphaena, Tryphosa.

Some of the stuff, they’re just names are unfamiliar to us. But right there in Romans 16 verse seven, you have these two people, Andronicus and Junia. Now, we probably won’t get into the entire controversy, but there’s been a long standing discussion about Andronicus we know is a man, and Junia sometimes appears with an S at the end of her name.

Now, if you open up your Bible and you look at Romans 16:7 and Junia has an S at the end, that means that the translators intend for us to think this is a man’s name. And if it has an A at the end, then it’s intended to be a woman’s name.

Well, skipping over the whole controversy,

Kelley >> Yeah.

Dr. Gupta >> the vast majority of scholars agree that this is a woman.

And it’s interesting when you read all the details. At first glance, it doesn’t appear to be all that important. But when you really take stock and understand exactly who this person is, Andronicus and Junia are actually very, very important. We learn a few things about them. One, it says that they’re Jewish, which is interesting because Paul has kind of a tendency to have a special appreciation for his fellow Jews who are believers in Christ and leaders.

Secondly, he says that they’re in Christ before Paul, which means they became believers before Paul. He became a believer pretty dang early.

Kelley >> Right he’d been around awhile.

Dr. Gupta >> Yeah. It says something special about them. I get the sense that they could have been either part of Jesus earthly ministry, which is amazing before he died. Or perhaps they were commissioned during his resurrection appearances. We learn about that in 1 Corinthians 15, book of Acts chapter two, one and two. And then two more things it says. One very well discussed and on the other not so much.

One as it says they’re prominent, noteworthy among the apostles. Now that can be taken in two different ways. It could be they’re taken as noteworthy to the apostles, but they’re not apostles or it could be taken that they’re noteworthy among or as apostles.

Now there’s been cases for this and that I won’t go on the whole controversy, but what I will say is I think that, taken as noteworthy as apostles, is the more natural reading of the text for me.

Kelley >> Right.

Dr. Gupta >> And then you have other folks that counted as apostles like Barnabas and Mark and others so we think maybe there were even hundreds of apostles because they’re people that Jesus commissioned for ministry, and we learned that he appeared to hundreds of people. He could have commissioned them for ministry. So I think of an apostolic community.

Okay, last detail and this one gets ignored. It says their fellow prisoners with Paul.

And very few sermons talk about this, very few commentaries talk about this. But as I was researching for my book, this is a huge deal because Paul kind of takes pride in being in prison for the Lord. And it’s a kind of place you don’t want to be.

And it’s a kind of thing where one thing I say about Junia because thinking about women in the early church—just whenever I talk to churches, just to kind of get their imagination going—she had to be in prison long enough for Paul to commend her. So it’s not like overnight, but short enough for her to live. Think about that.

Kelley >> True. Okay, so a couple of years ago, I got to visit Italy and we went to, it’s called the Maritime. Is that it?

Dr. Gupta >> Mamertine. Yeah.

Kelley >> Mamertine in Rome. And it’s the prison where traditionally Paul was held. And so, you know, they let you go down into it. It’s a carved out a hole in a rock with a tiny hole at the top where they would let people in. And so you think of men living there. I mean, I want to say maybe 30 people could be crammed into that space, like without personal space.

It’s horrible. Like, we wandered in and, you know, you look around, it’s unimaginable by today’s standards. And then you think of women being in there with men and just the further dangers that they would have encountered. So, yeah, this was no easy stint, you know, in the local clink.

Dr. Gupta >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one of the problems with Bible translation and reading the Bible is we bring to the Bible certain assumptions, modern assumptions, because we just assume it was like the same now as it was back then. So when you hear jail or prison, you know, you kind of think of what jail or prison is like in America today. And it’s really not like that at all in the Roman world.

So when I was in elementary school, we went on a field trip to the local jail in my small hometown, and I don’t remember much about it, but I remember two things. I think this wasn’t what I was supposed to have learned from this. Number one, they had lollipops. I remember that. And number two, they had cable TV.

Kelley >> Oh, boy.

Dr. Gupta >> Yeah. So today we differentiate between jail, which is kind of short term, you know, more minor crimes than prison, which is a bigger deal.

In the Roman world, they didn’t really have jail. They really just had prison.

And when I think of prison today, I think of like The Shawshank Redemption or I think of Alcatraz where you have we went to Alcatraz not too long ago, my family. And you have these individual prison cells. And as you kind of hinted and noted, that wasn’t what Roman prisons were like. There were a few like prisons that were built as prisons in the Roman world, like the one that you mentioned. But in many cities, there weren’t official prisons.

They would just recommission another building to be a prison. And they really didn’t have individual cells you wouldn’t you wouldn’t be in a cell by yourself unless you were like a special person of interest that they wanted to make sure didn’t die.

So really, you would be in what we get from some of the ancient sources is you kind of mentioned this is you’d have a room that fits ten, but they’d have 30 in there or 40. So we actually don’t have a ton of information about it except maybe some like fiction things that kind of ramp up the drama.

But what we learn about it is poor ventilation. So people died of suffocation, disease. No lighting. You mentioned underground. So they don’t have artificial lighting obviously unless they have like a torch or something which they don’t want to give fire to the people. People are chained. We know that from the New Testament.

But here’s what’s really interesting. Men and women would not have been separated, and I always thought, oh, they have a women’s prison. They have a men’s prison because we do that in the modern world. But they didn’t. Actually exceptionally few women were in prison statistically. Very, very, very, very few.

If you were a woman and you committed a crime worthy of prison. Well, let’s put it this way. If you committed a petty crime, you would probably be beaten or you’d be sent home to be punished by your family, if you’re a woman. If you’re a man beaten, fined, whatever.

Really prison was for major crimes, because you have to use Roman resources on these people and prison wasn’t an end in itself. Nobody was given life in prison. You could be life exiled. Ovid was exiled. John at Patmos. But nobody was put in prison for life.

Now, you may end up being in prison for a long time waiting for a trial because you’re kind of low in the pecking order. And then when you’re in prison, there could be random beatings, flogging, whatever, but you could also be assaulted by other prisoners as well.

And so when we think of a woman in prison, in many ways it’s actually riskier than a man because she’s worried about being assaulted and there just aren’t a lot of women in prison. So she doesn’t have any strength in numbers. There’s no reason to protect women. You’re fearful of the guards. You fear for other inmates.

This is one of the reasons I think, that Junia probably would have been one of Paul’s heroes, because he’s thinking she went to prison, she got out, and then she went back into ministry.

And if I went to prison as a woman in the ancient world for Christianity, I’d be like, I’m done. Afterwards I’m like, I’m going to retire, give me a mansion, whatever. And she went right back into ministry.

Kelley >> What do you think were egregious enough activities that would put a woman in prison?

Dr. Gupta >> Yeah, as I said, these are major crimes. These are crimes against the state. These are crimes that earn you a trial with a magistrate. Right? And so when we think about big crimes, we can rule the really sinful ones out. So not murder.

Kelley >> She’s there as a Christian. Yeah.

Dr. Gupta >> Yeah. Not like grand theft horse. You know, like, we’re not talking like we’re talking about things that Paul would consider noble, right?

So then I think we have a few options. And these are kind of guess this is kind of guesswork, but that’s you know, we have such little information we have to guess. One is teaching a dangerous philosophy. I don’t think that’s very likely because even when Paul did this with the Mars Hill counsel, he didn’t get thrown in prison.

It would just be like a weird cult. Kind of like in America. You kind of monitor—weird cult not dangerous, just monitor, but weird cult dangerous, you know, let’s send the FBI in. So I think it’d be like that where I doubt it would be a dangerous philosophical teaching. But take, for example, Socrates. He’s teaching against the gods, and he ends up being executed.

A second option, which I think is probably more likely because this is what Paul got in trouble for, is inciting a riot or civic strife. So they’re not so much worried about what this person is teaching or doing, but the effect of what they’re doing.

Kelley >> Okay, she might have been, she may have been involved in kind of like Paul, teaching something that then resulted in a mob or something to that effect.

Dr. Gupta >> Exactly. So you know, so I ended up writing this fictional set of letters between Junia in prison and the church in Rome, like as if like Paul writes letters from prison. So I thought, what if Junia did? So I wrote these letters and I read them in class sometimes. And the inspiration for kind of how I constructed the narrative was Paul’s experience in Ephesus, where, you know, he’s teaching the stuff and then people are upset because they’ve lost some income, because magical books are being burned and all kinds of stuff.

And so they kind of come after him. And then, you know, someone says, hey, let’s chill this out before the Roman soldiers arrive and, you know, lock everybody up or worse, I imagine, something like that.

So what’s really interesting about that, Kelley, is Junia can’t do that sitting behind a desk at a church. She can’t do that sitting at home. She’s got to be a public facing figure to be rounded up because if it’s like, oh, Andronicus was doing these things and then Junia is just sort of lumped in together, we don’t really see that happening in the ancient world if it’s just sort of the tagalong wife, she’s left out in the dust, there’s no reason to lock her up.

It would really be, and we’re guessing, but it’d really be she’s got to be equally implicated in whatever.

Kelley >> Okay.

So active, public, that sort of behavior, obviously courageous enough to be willing to risk this sort of thing. And so that’s all we really know about Junia, because she is a brief mention among other people whom Paul appreciated in Rome.

So we all transition from her to a second into the second century. We’re going to go, I believe, they were in Carthage—Perpetua and Felicity.

Dr. Gupta >> Right.

Kelley >> Perpetua is a wealthy young woman, married, we think, married with a child. It’s true, though, maybe one or two still nursing that kind of thing. And her slave woman, Felicity, who is with child so we’ve got these two very I mean, their womanhood is accentuated in this story. And yet they are in prison because they are Christians.

So can you tell us any more give us a little bit of their story?

Dr. Gupta >> This is really interesting because when I went in search of stories about women in prison in the ancient Roman world, other than Junia and Perpetua, there isn’t a whole lot and there’s very little with named women. That’s because ancient literature just doesn’t focus on women. And especially when you get in the Roman Empire, you know? Yeah, there just aren’t these kinds of stories.

So even Roman, modern Roman historians, classic scholars have to rely actually on the diary of Perpetua for most of what we learn about women’s experiences in prison. She’s the most extensive account and certainly the most extensive firsthand account.

Kelley >> Okay, I love the fact that we have a woman’s writing that still exists from 1800 years ago. Yeah. And so, yeah, I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I wanted to accentuate that. What we know of her comes from her own hand and the appendix maybe as she would say, that somebody added on to the end to give us the rest of the story.

Dr. Gupta >> We learn a lot of interesting things from her story. We learn that the Roman Empire obviously was non-discriminating when they throw people in prison in the sense that she is thrown in with men. And that was actually one of her concerns in the story is that she has a baby, and she’s worried about her baby.

She’s worried about herself. She’s worried about her purity being compromised. And so she kind of requests to get put, you know, in a safer place. Now, this tells us another thing, which means if you had money and connections, you can get things done, maybe not get out, but you could maybe, you know, create a little better environment for yourself.

So she does. In terms of kind of her circumstances, we do have to differentiate first century Christianity and second and third century Christianity. Because in the first century, Christians really aren’t on the radar of the Roman Empire. It’s this upstart, you know, cult, cult meaning new religious group. And they weren’t really calling themselves Christians until the end of the first century.

They would be mistaken for kind of an offshoot, kind of a subcategory, let’s say, of Jews, zealous Jews for this person named Jesus. When we get to Perpetua, we have to think in terms of like now Christianity is a thing that that the Roman Empire is aware of and concerned about because, you know, the Roman Empire was pretty tolerant towards new religions or foreign religions as long as they kind of respected the Roman way.

And I just want to pivot really quickly a story of Polycarp. So Polycarp is a second century Christian leader who, you know, gets on the radar of Rome and they arrest him. And it’s really kind of a funny story. If you read the story. Polycarp, it’s really enjoyable.

He’s super old. These police arrive at his house and he’s like offering them food and then he’s they’re come to take him and he’s like, I need to pray. They wait for him to pray, and he’s really entertaining.

And then he gets taken the Colosseum. And there’s a really interesting moment where, you know, the emperor says, “You have to swear. You have to swear by my genius,” which means by the spirit of, you know, the emperor, and say to the other Christians, “Away with the atheists.”

And Polycarp turns to the pagan crowds and he says, “Away with the atheists,” to them instead. And then Caesar’s like, “burn them up,” you know, “Let’s kill this guy.”

And it’s this, you know, there’s this story that’s often retold of these heroes kind of dying peacefully, even though they’re being tortured, et cetera, et cetera.

Similar story with Perpetua, where they weren’t necessarily going out looking for Christians, but by this time they are concerned with a cult that is so anti-worshiping the Roman gods, the Roman emperor and that sort of thing.

But what’s really fascinating and I don’t know that you know this, you wouldn’t have any way of knowing this, Kelley, but I’m writing a follow up book to Tell Her Story. You may know that. And actually, the first chapter is about Perpetua.

Kelley >> Perfect. Here we go.

Dr. Gupta >> And what I say. So I’m leaking some of this.

Kelley >> Dump it all. Go. Let’s hear it.

Dr. Gupta >> I’m leaking some of this. So the second book is going to be about women prophets in the Bible. And the hook for the idea is in the Roman world, you definitely had a hierarchy of power and women were lower on that hierarchy. However, there was a loophole, and the loophole was prophets, prophets and soothsayers and oracles. I mean, these people basically operated independently of power systems because they had a direct line to God, or the realm of the divine.

And so all that to say, it’s focusing on prophecy. Now, I consider Perpetua a prophet, but I’m defining that pretty broadly because she could compel visions from God at will.

So the hook for my book, the very beginning of it, says, Did you know three women were wildly famous and second century Christianity, wildly famous celebrity Christians? One was Perpetua and two were (they were actually heretics), but they were women, part of something called the New Prophecy, which is the Montanist movement.

There’s two women Maximilla and Priscilla, not the Priscilla from the New Testament, but these three women were wildly famous. They were celebrity Christians in the second century, and they were all prophets. Two of them were condemned. One of them is praised, Perpetua. Anyway, something you probably didn’t know.

Kelley >> Had not made that connection. No. How was Perpetua such a celebrity in the second century when she was.

Dr. Gupta >> Second and third century. Yeah, I fudged it a little bit because I wanted to just sort of yeah, no second and third century.

Kelley >> And I say that for the audience because she was killed in 203. Which is technically the third century.

Dr. Gupta >> She was. I’m reaching a little bit there.

Kelley >> Right around then. Yeah, okay.

So she’s in prison. She’s got her slave girl with her. They’re both condemned to die in the arena, which was a favorite way for the Empire to get rid of their dissidents, that kind of thing.

Tell us a little more about Felicity’s experience.

Dr. Gupta >> It would be odd to put a slave in prison. Slaves were expendable. And so you wouldn’t waste government resources on a slave, no matter how educated they were, no matter how. So I think this must be a special circumstance. The special circumstance being they rounded up a group of catechumens, which means they were in training.

And so she must have been lumped together and somehow kind of was just taken as a package with these other catechumens.

I’m honestly not as familiar with Felicity as I am Perpetua because of the work I’ve been doing lately on Perpetua.

But it would be odd, I mean, what these stories reveal and why they were passed down from generation to generation is what people were willing to do for the sake of their Christian faith. And what tended to rise to the surface of popularity was the more extreme examples: imprisonment, martyrdom, speaking out against authorities.

But I think there is a perhaps a flavor, just a taste of that sense of the early Christians defying the structure system of the Roman Empire, saying, we’re going to focus on a slave, we’re going to focus on a woman slave, we’re going to focus on a pregnant woman slave. If there’s someone that you don’t send into battle inside the Roman Empire.

But obviously today you don’t send a pregnant woman.

Kelley >> Even now.

Dr. Gupta >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Into battle. And yet this is what the early Christians are saying is, you know, “We don’t do what other people do. We are willing to risk everything because of our passion for Christ.”

This actually reminds me of a story. This is getting a little bit nerdy and in the weeds here, but reminds me of a story from the era of the Maccabees. So the Maccabees were these freedom fighters that were fighting for the sake of Judaism in the second century B.C. and they were fighting off a tyrant named Antiochus.

And there’s all these stories about heroes. And one hero is this mother of seven sons. And this tyrant is trying to do everything to get these people to recant their faith.

And one of my favorite moments (I want to say this is in fourth Maccabees, but I don’t remember exactly) is they say to her like, “We’re going to kill your children and then we’re going to kill you.” And most of us would say, “Don’t kill my children.” And she says, “As horrible as that would be, I stand by my faith.”

And then they’re like, “We’re going to gut you.” And she rips out her own intestines and throws it at them and says, “Take, take my intestines.”

Now, the fact that that’s a woman in that story in the second century B.C., this before Jesus, is fascinating because you just don’t see stories like this you have the Amazonian women, you know, you just don’t see stories like this.

And both in early Judaism and in early Christianity, you have stories of these incredibly daring, courageous it’s literally death defying in the sense that, you know, they survive. They’re experiencing, you know, you know, pious transcendence while they’re being martyred. You have these women in of the faith in our stories.

Kelley >> Yeah. In the second century, right before Perpetua and Felicity, about 25 years before them Blandina is another slave woman. She was outside of Rome or over in Gaul, modern day France. She again was sent to the arena. There’s a whole story about her, and she pretty much laughed in their face like fine, do your worst.

And she was there with mostly men who again rounded up with her, and her courage inspired the men to die honorably. She lasted till the end. Apparently, the story goes that she ended up being crucified. They just stuck her on a pole right there in the arena, and the image that reminded them of Christ so much like that was an inspiration to the people in there.

And so her story has lived on because one of the things that these women are showing that is anti-cultural or countercultural, as we would say. The virtues in Rome, as you well know, were gendered and courage was male, strength was male, honor was male.

And there were ways for women to show that, but not it was not their dominant thing. They had piety and other sorts of virtues assigned to them. But what these women are showing us is that no courage can be female to courage, strength, honor. They’re just human virtues.

Dr. Gupta >> Absolutely.

Kelley >> They’re not gendered. And that all of them, all of these women displayed these virtues because of their faith in Christ. Really brings honor to him and also inspires the rest of his followers.

Dr. Gupta >> Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And I’m certain that these second, third century accounts go back to the Old Testament and women like Moses’ mother. Women, you know, who courageously save, you know, Moses’ life. Moses’ sister, who follows, you know.

Kelley >> She’s smart.

Dr. Gupta >> You know from the movies, Miriam who follows the boat, the little boat, and, you know, make sure he’s okay. The courage of the Egyptian princess who takes in this child. The courage of the midwives who are protecting you know. The courage of Rahab, who hides these spies at the risk of her own family.

You have this over and over and over again.

Shout out to my colleague, Ingrid Faro and Joyce Dalrymple, who co-wrote a book coming out called Redeeming Eden, which show women at strategic points in the story the Bible tells of salvation. Fantastic book coming out this year.

And then in the New Testament, I think we do see this pattern of courage. I think of, for example, Mary, the mother of Jesus, showing up to the cross. I’ve talked to numerous historians about this. We don’t see a lot of women standing in front of crucifixions in normal Roman accounts. They just it’s not a place where you would find—it’s not a safe place.

Yeah. And to have Mary there and have these other women there when the men were actually hiding. It says “Strike the shepherd, the sheep will scatter.” It’s interesting.

You have that courage. You have Mary Magdalene, you have you know, you have Euodia and Syntyche in Philippians 4 where Paul says they contend or fight side by side with me for the faith gospel. I mean, they got to be doing really risk taking, really dangerous things for him to use that language. He’s using language of battle when he’s doing that. And so he’s saying these are warriors.

Kelley >> Good point. Yeah. I think the language that we have in our New Testament, Old as well, the words become common to us. And so we gloss over them and don’t necessarily see the connection of what was the significance of using that word to describe these people. Coworker is another word he uses for Euodia and Syntyche. And he uses that same word with Timothy and Mark and those sort of guys..

So yeah. So women in the early church and biblical times and beyond, we’re just as courageous, just as active.

Dr. Gupta >> Risk taking.

Kelley >> And spreading the gospel and defending Christ, and just living for him in really extraordinary and dangerous ways specific to these women who experience prison and sometimes martyrdom.

Dr. Gupta >> I remember coming across, kind of by chance. I was reading Saint John Chrysostom’s homilies on, I think it was Colossians.

Kelley >> You’re a nerd.

Dr. Gupta >> I know – occupational hazard.

And what’s interesting is in modern Pauline scholarship, scholars, we won’t get into it, but they don’t think Paul wrote Colossians, Ephesians and therefore those texts get kind of sidelined in academic conversations. That’s not what I think. But those ideas are out there.

And if you go back to Chrysostom, he didn’t talk about authorship issues but he says the prison letters are more precious than the non-prison letters because Paul courageously wore the bonds of Roman imprisonment. And in those moments his thinking would be clarified about what’s really important.

So Chrysostom goes on this whole sidetrack of saying blessed be the bonds. Blessed be the bonds that Paul wore. And he wishes he could kiss the bonds. He wishes he could wear the bonds. There’s this whole idea of like suffering for the name, right? We get this in Philippians One. It’s been given to you as a gift, not only to believe in him, but to suffer for his sake.

You have in the Book of Acts where they were praising God when they left prison counting it an honor to suffer for the kingdom and so forth.

And I think Paul would have had a special circle of honor for people that went to prison for the gospel. And he had a special respect for them.

Kelley >> And the uncertainty of.

Dr. Gupta >> Uncertainty, degradation, anxiety, all of it, of imprisonment.

I think it’d be worse for women than men. And so for someone like Junia, I mean, Andronicus face the same things and we should acknowledge that. But for Junia to do it means that she has to realize she belongs to Christ. Her life is not her own. And she’s called to, as Paul says, not to live for themselves, but for the one who died and rose for their behalf.

That’s what she was doing.

Kelley >> Like you said a minute ago, when you read the words the suffering, you know, in the Scripture, I think that as 21st century people we think one thing of suffering. And often we just think any confrontation is suffering or any pushback. You know, it could be real weak or it could be some actual I lost my job versus, you know, or I lost a relationship—actual suffering.

But the stories of the physical and the life-threatening and the just your whole life could fall apart because you chose to stick with Jesus. You were aligned with him. Your faith was in him, you’re team Jesus, not team Caesar. It made a huge difference in how your life went forward. And every person that we’re talking about, basically, they are a witness to say, well, Jesus is better, even though he might not look like it right now, Jesus is better.

That’s my new catchphrase. I love it. I stole it from a friend of ours. But yeah, I appreciate your insight, the historical perspective that you bring to us. We can’t wait for your second book, this next one that’s coming up, not your second, just your next one.

So yeah, maybe if you have the title, we will put that in the show notes or you can tell us when to be looking for us, okay?

Dr. Gupta >> It’s called well, it’s tentatively titled (IVP does a great job with titles), but right now it’s called God Spoke Through Her and hopefully late 2026 or early 2027.

These things take time.

Kelley >> A year, year and a half. Okay, that sounds good. Well, thanks for being here. This will be a great addition to our library. Beyond Ordinary Women has plenty of resources that are free to access for anyone who’s teaching or leading women. And we even have some that relate to the early church and these sorts of things.

So thanks for being here, Nijay. And we’ll catch you again soon.

Dr. Gupta >> My pleasure. A great conversation. Appreciate it.

Kelley >> You bet.