The teacher whose name came first. Named before her husband in four of six New Testament mentions, and named first in the one that describes the instruction.
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Six mentions. Four put her name first.
Acts 18:2 introduces her: a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome. Paul stays with them because he shares their trade, and they are tentmakers. Aquila is named first, which is the standard convention for introducing a married couple to a stranger.
After that the order reverses and stays reversed. Acts 18:18, sailing for Syria: Priscilla and Aquila. Acts 18:26, the instruction of Apollos: Priscilla and Aquila. Romans 16:3, the greeting: Prisca and Aquila. 2 Timothy 4:19: Prisca and Aquila. Only once more does Aquila come first, at 1 Corinthians 16:19, and Paul is writing from their house, where the male householder would sign the greeting.
The ancient world was meticulous about precedence, and a name listed first indicated the greater prominence or the primary role. The order changed after eighteen months of acquaintance, which means it records something Paul and Luke learned rather than something they assumed.
[See KATHARINE BUSHNELL · THE CREDIBILITY DEFICIT]
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THE INSTRUCTION OF APOLLOS
Acts 18:24 to 26 describes Apollos before it describes what was done to him. A Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria, came to Ephesus. He was an eloquent man, logios, skilled in rhetoric and learning. He was competent in the Scriptures. He was fervent in spirit. He spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, though he knew only the baptism of John.
This was not a novice convert. Alexandria was the center of Jewish intellectual life, and the man was a trained biblical scholar already teaching.
When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately.
She corrected the biblical scholar. She taught the eloquent preacher. She completed the instruction of the man competent in Scripture. And the passage that records it is one of the four that names her first.
[See AUTHENTEIN]
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THE CHIEF INSTRUCTOR
Adolf von Harnack made the inference that the name order carries, and the logic is available to anyone who accepts the convention it rests on. Since the passage has both of them instructing Apollos, one is allowed to infer that she was the chief instructor, because otherwise she would scarcely have been mentioned.
The argument runs in two steps. If Aquila alone had taught Apollos, there would be no reason to name Priscilla at all. If the two had taught equally, the husband's name would come first by the ordinary convention. Her name comes first because her role was primary, and the alternative readings each require the convention to have suspended itself in exactly the place it would have mattered.
Henry Alford reaches the same position from the other direction, reading Aquila as the ready and zealous patron rather than the teacher, and the teaching work, or a great share of it, as belonging to his wife.
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THE WOMAN FROM ASIA MINOR
W. M. Ramsay documented what Priscilla came from. The honors and influence belonging to women in the cities of Asia Minor are among the most remarkable features of that country's history, and the evidence runs on the same lines in every period. Under the Roman Empire there are women magistrates, women presiding at games, women loaded with honors. The custom of the country reached the Jewish communities too: at Smyrna a woman was appointed archisynagogos, ruler of the synagogue.
Priscilla came from a world where women held civic office, presided at public games, and led synagogues. Then she came to Corinth, into what Ramsay calls a totally different atmosphere as regards the position of woman.
The prominence the text records is not an anomaly requiring explanation; it is what a woman of Asia Minor would have carried into a city that had no category for her.
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FELLOW-WORKER
Romans 16:3 calls Prisca and Aquila synergous in Christ Jesus, fellow workers. The term is not decorative and it is not frequent. Paul uses it of Timothy, of Titus, of Epaphroditus, of Philemon, of Mark and Aristarchus and Demas and Luke. It is his word for a ministry colleague, a co-laborer in the Gospel, a partner in the work.
Harnack reads the term as legitimizing: by its use Priscilla and Aquila are official evangelists and teachers.
Romans 16:4 adds what they did. They risked their necks for Paul's life, ton heautōn trachēlon hypethēkan, and for this not only Paul gives thanks but all the churches of the Gentiles. The specific incident is not recorded anywhere. What is recorded is the scope of the obligation. A local ministry does not put all the Gentile churches in a couple's debt, and Harnack's conclusion follows from the reach rather than from any title: the work was ecumenical.
[See WOMEN'S SPEAKING JUSTIFIED]
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THE HOUSE CHURCH
1 Corinthians 16:19 sends greetings from Aquila and Prisca together with the church in their house. Romans 16:5 greets the church in their house again, in a different city. They hosted congregations in Ephesus and in Rome.
The early assemblies met in homes, and the householder who hosted the assembly ordinarily led it. Priscilla was co-host of congregations in more than one city of the empire.
And Paul was most likely writing 1 Corinthians from her house in Ephesus, which puts the letter under her roof. The passage commanding women's silence in the churches sits in a letter composed in a house a woman was hosting a congregation in, and it interrupts a passage that has, lines earlier, regulated how women are to prophesy and pray in the meeting.
[See THE LEXICAL TRESPASS]
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THE FOUR CONTAINMENTS
Priscilla is not erased. She is admitted and then neutralized, and the neutralizing takes four forms.
The name reversal. The Textus Receptus, which stands behind the King James, has Aquila first at Acts 18:26, where the earliest witnesses have Priscilla. Modern critical texts have restored the order in most places. The tradition built on the older printing did not follow. When she comes first in Greek she frequently comes second in English.
The shared credit. Commentary assumes the two taught Apollos together and equally. But equal teaching would have produced the conventional order, husband first. The assumption of male leadership is supplied by the reader and then read back out of a text that does not contain it.
The private instruction defense. Some argue she taught Apollos only privately, kat' idian, and so did not breach the silence principle. The text says they took him aside, proselabonto, which describes not correcting a teacher publicly in the synagogue. That is pastoral discretion, and it is what any competent teacher would do to a colleague. It is not a restriction on who may teach.
The husband's permission theory. Some suggest she could teach because her husband was present and sanctioned it. The name order refutes this directly. If Aquila were the authority licensing her, his name would come first, and it comes second in the very passage about the instruction.
Each defense adds to the text something the text does not contain, in order to contain what it does.
[See THE PARTIAL WITNESS · TESHUQAH]
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THE LETTERS THAT SILENCE HER ARE NOT THE LETTERS THAT NAME HER
The apologetic move at this point is to say that Paul was protecting women in a specific and deadly moment, that the Neronian persecutions made public prominence lethal for women, and that the cautions to Timothy were emergency measures rather than permanent doctrine. It is a generous reading and it is not needed, because it concedes a premise that does not hold.
1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus are almost certainly pseudonymous, written decades after Paul's death. The silencing text at 1 Timothy 2:12 is not Paul defending himself against an emergency. It is a later hand writing in his name. And 1 Corinthians 14:34 to 35, in a letter that is authentically his, interrupts a passage that has just authorized women's prophecy and prayer in the assembly.
So the tension is not inside Paul and does not need excusing. The letters that name Priscilla first, greet her as synergos, and record all the Gentile churches thanking her, are the undisputed ones. The letters and passages that silence women are the disputed ones and the interrupting ones. Someone later needed to overwrite what Romans 16 shows, and the overwriting is legible as a separate hand.
This costs the entry one piece of evidence and the cost is worth naming. 2 Timothy 4:19 is one of the four mentions that names her first, and under this reading it is not Paul's greeting. Set it aside. Three of the remaining five still name her first, both exceptions have ordinary explanations, and the one that carries the argument, Acts 18:26, is not in dispute.
[See PAUL OF TARSUS]
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Priscilla's story is not obscure. Six mentions, the name order preserved in the critical texts, the teaching role explicit in the Greek. Harnack, Alford and Ramsay are not marginal figures, and mainstream scholarship has acknowledged her prominence for well over a century.
What the record says is short. She explained to him the way of God more accurately. Her name came first. All the Gentile churches gave thanks.
What was built on top of it is the qualification: she taught with her husband present, she taught privately, she was exceptional, times were different then. Every one of those is an addition. The text carries none of them, and the woman it does carry taught the man who was competent in the Scriptures.
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