While Paul makes a number of strong statements about the work of sisters in his writings, there can be no question that he respected, loved and honoured them and prized their many contributions to ecclesial life, for their names occur all through the brief report of his life that Luke has given us in the Book of Acts, and he refers to them frequently in his letters, particularly in the greetings with which he typically concludes, but also in other places.
The very first to appear in Paul’s life is Eunice, “a certain woman, which was a Jewess, and believed” (Acts 16:1). Eunice lived in Lystra, one of the cities of Lycaonia, a province in central Asia where Paul and Barnabas had preached the gospel on their first great missionary journey (14:6–23).
Lystra stood on an important east-west road, and Augustus had made it a Roman kolonia in 6 BC to protect the lands to the west. Its citizens were a curious blend of traditional peasants, still speaking their Lycaonian language; cultured Greeks; retired Roman soldiers, now become gentleman-farmers; and the ubiquitous Jews, who had been deliberately scattered across Asia two centuries earlier by the Seleucid emperors because of their strong work ethic, commercial skills and international networks.
While preaching in Lystra Paul had healed a man born lame; the superstitious people had quickly identified Barnabas and Paul as Zeus and Hermes, the chief of the gods and his messenger; the priest of Zeus, seizing the moment, had endeavoured to lead the town in worship, and the two preachers had barely succeeded in preventing the idolatry. The people had been left confused and disappointed, and the situation had been ripe for exploitation by Jewish emissaries from Antioch and Iconium, who insinuated that Paul was a deceiver with dangerous powers, and persuaded the mob to stone him. Presuming him dead, they dragged him out of the city, and left him to die.
The Jews of Asia were fanatical, and opposed Paul bitterly. They had chased him out of Antioch. They had planned to lynch him in Iconium. They finally succeeded in Lystra. Later in Ephesus, he would work for eighteen months “with many tears, and temptations … by the lying in wait of the Jews” (20:18–19) “from the first day” that he came into the province of Asia. It was Asian Jews who spotted him in the Temple in Jerusalem and set about to kill him (21:27). Little wonder: for Paul had probably belonged to “the synagogue of the Libertines, and Cyrenians, and Alexandrians, and of them of Cilicia, and of Asia” during his early days in Jerusalem (6:9), and they would have felt his defection to Christianity keenly as a great stain on their honour.
It is telling that it was Jews from Antioch and Iconium who descended on Lystra and engineered the mob violence. It appears that the Jewish community in Lystra itself was relatively small and lacked influence. They made no move against Paul, and are not blamed for what happened. All the trouble is laid at the feet of the visitors.
“A certain woman, which was a Jewess, and believed”
Eunice was a Jewess, but she was married to a Greek, of whom we know nothing, not even his name. Her situation is possibly another indication that Lystra’s Jewish community was small and isolated. It is never wise to marry out of the faith; and Paul’s instruction is, “only in the Lord” (1 Cor 7:39). Her mother Lois was also Jewish.
How challenging it must have been for them, caught between two different perspectives! As Jewish women they would have endorsed Paul’s emphatic rejection of the local idolatrous cult, and his argument that the character of the one true God had been presented to them in the good seasons year upon year. They were clearly drawn to his message, that in Jesus Christ God had fulfilled the promises to the fathers, fulfilled the types and shadows of the Law, and held out forgiveness of sins and salvation to those who would believe and repent ahead of the day of judgment and His kingdom. But Jews had come from other towns to work behind the scenes and stir up the Lycaonian townspeople against Paul!
The women “fully knew” what Paul had suffered (2 Tim 3:10–11), a term that suggests they had been eyewitnesses of the mob violence inflicted on Paul. They saw through the outward professions of orthodoxy from their fellow Jews to the inward malevolence that inspired these enemies of the gospel, and they decisively rejected their spirit. Eunice and Lois became believers.
Timothy, their son and grandson, also became a disciple, “well reported of by the brethren that were at Lystra” and even those who were at Iconium, 30 km to the north (Acts 16:1–2). When Paul came by Lystra on his second missionary journey with Silas, he was so impressed with Timothy that he desired to take him with them. It was no light thing for Paul to take an assistant, when we consider how strong had been his prejudice against Mark at the outset of this journey! But the sisters had done their work very well. Eunice might not have circumcised her son, but she had circumcised his heart, which was the true circumcision that Moses had sought from Israel so long before (Deut 10:16; 30:6).
As Paul would later challenge the Jews: “shall not uncircumcision which is by nature, if it fulfil the law, judge thee, who by the letter and circumcision dost transgress the law? For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God” (Rom. 2:27–29). Timothy was the real thing; and in fact his name means, ‘Honoured by God’.
An unfeigned faith
Paul remembered and commended Lois and Eunice for two principal things. First, he remembered the “unfeigned faith” that dwelled first in Lois (2 Tim 1:5): she had communicated that faith to her daughter; and Eunice had instilled it in her son, Timotheus, in turn.
An unfeigned faith is a faith anupokritos, a faith “without hypocrisy”. It is not a forced faith. It is not a spirituality turned on for special occasions. It is not a faith that has been overdressed to impress. It is utterly genuine. What is in the heart is also on the surface. And given that this is Paul’s commendation, Paul with his very high view of the importance and power of faith, the unfeigned faith that characterised mother and daughter must mean not only assent to the great doctrines of Scripture, not only a belief in the great promises of God, but a steadfast commitment to the wholly trusting life that is utterly focused on God and His great power to save and bless.
There is another indirect tribute to these sisters in Paul’s first letter to Timothy. Challenged by those who claimed to see deep things in the Law but failed to follow through with godly living, Paul nailed the purpose of the Law: “the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned” (1 Tim 1:5). Although Paul does not name Lois and Eunice in this place, it is is quite probable that here, as in his second letter to Timothy, he is drawing on the wonderful spiritual qualities displayed by Timothy’s grandmother and mother to make his point: the same terms occur in both places.
Despite their difficult situation, therefore, Lois and Eunice had a faith that was clear-eyed and whole-hearted, a love that was pure-souled, and “a good conscience”. Their relationship with God was untroubled by any secret sins or manifest faults. They were perfect expressions of “the righteousness of the law” (Rom 8:4) which all sincere Jews strove to keep, but which could only be fulfilled in those who were transformed by the death and resurrection of the Son of God, and who walked in the Spirit.
Timothy himself was well-placed to know this. He had been reared by them. He knew that Paul’s description of them was perfectly true.
Devotion to Scripture
The second thing for which Paul remembered them was their devotion to Scripture. We do not even know whether there was a synagogue in Lystra; and it would have been unusual for a private citizen to own even one scroll of the Bible, as they were so expensive to produce.
However Lois and Eunice came by their knowledge of “the holy scriptures”, they did exactly what Moses commanded in his great declaration, Sh’ma Yisra’el: “Hear, O Israel, Yahweh our God, Yahweh is one: and thou shalt love Yahweh thy God … And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children …” (Deut 6:4–9).
Poignantly, Eunice and Lois were very far from the Land promised to their fathers, in a small city with a small Jewish population somewhere in the semi-barbarian backblocks of Turkey. But they clung to their faith, and they lived by their faith, and they taught it diligently to the young boy who was the heart and soul of their little family. As far back as Timothy could remember, he had “known the holy scriptures”: and Paul reminded him not only from whom he had received his extensive knowledge, and what he had learned, but also what he had “been assured of ”. They had communicated everything they knew, and their absolute confidence in the inspiration of the Scriptures as the very Word of God written, profitable for teaching the truth and refuting error, correcting our waywardness and instructing us in righteousness (2 Tim 3:14–17).
Goodbye, Timothy
It would have been heart-wrenching for mother and grandmother to see Timothy leave home with Paul. The boy had never been in the best of health, with a poor digestion and subject to “often infirmities” (1 Tim 5:23). They would naturally have worried about his wellbeing. They knew something of the dangers of travel – slippery mountain trails and perilous sea crossings, bandits and shipwrecks. They could not have foreseen the great perils which we know Timothy did share with Paul – more Jewish antagonism, more mob violence, compounded by biased magistrates and cynical proconsuls and jingoistic silversmiths; and in the background, the constant threat of the assassin’s knife. For Timothy was Paul’s constant companion while the apostle assembled that daunting catalogue of troubles and tribulations, perils and pains, not to mention “the burden of all the ecclesias” (2 Cor 11:23–29). “Without were fightings, within were fears” (7:5).
Yet they were no doubt content to know that their years of diligent discipling had led to this: that they had trained a “man of God”, “the servant of the Lord”, and that it was now time for him to leave home and do God’s work.
We do not know whether they ever saw him again. Perhaps reports filtered back of the work Timothy was undertaking for Paul in Philippi and Thessalonica and Athens and Corinth and Ephesus – and eventually, in Rome. Ranging far and wide on difficult missions; at the end left alone, without his great father in the gospel, charged with the grave responsibility to carry on the work begun, to make full proof of his ministry in “perilous times”, and train the next generation of preachers and teachers.
Meanwhile his mother and his grandmother sat at home, a little more isolated, a little more lonely, “content to fill a little space if God be glorified”, confident that in the end the great family of God would be brought back together in a day of unmixed and irreversible joy and gladness, the great rest for the people of God.
What an extraordinary impact these two sisters had on the first century ecclesias, and through them, on us! Then who would presume to discount their contribution? Give us a hundred grandmothers and mothers like Lois and Eunice, and the gates of hell will not prevail over the ecclesia of God: for it will indeed be built upon the Rock