Joanna: a female follower of Jesus with political connections
The character from Luke's gospel, who hasn't been depicted on film very often, has joined the sprawling cast of The Chosen in its third season.
The following is adapted from ‘Obscure Gospel Elements in Jesus Films’, a chapter I wrote for The T&T Clark Handbook of Jesus and Film (ed. Richard Walsh, 2021, pp 19-30). I figured it might be relevant in light of Joanna’s appearance in the Season 3 premiere of The Chosen, which played in theatres last month and was livestreamed Sunday night.
As noted earlier, Christian tradition has elevated Mary Magdalene to a unique position of prominence for her role as a witness to the death and resurrection of Jesus, even though most of the gospels specify that she was one of multiple women who witnessed those things. By extension, whenever a film has paid any attention to Jesus’s female followers during his ministry, it has usually focused on Mary Magdalene to the near exclusion of all others. But in the only biblical passage that refers to Mary Magdalene outside of the passion events, she is just one of “many” women—three of whom are named—who traveled with Jesus and the Twelve and supported them out of their own means (Luke 8:1-3).
Perhaps the most intriguing of these patrons is Joanna, whose husband Chuza was the manager of Herod Antipas’s household. Jesus and Antipas did not exactly get along: Antipas had executed Jesus’s mentor John the Baptist, and Antipas and his minions were now trying to kill Jesus himself (Mark 3:6, Luke 13:31). Jesus, in return, dismissed Antipas as “that fox” (Luke 13:32-33) and told his followers to beware of Antipas (Mark 8:15; see also Jesus’s reference to “a reed swayed by the wind” in Matthew 11:7 and Luke 7:24, which is likely a dig at Antipas, whose rule was symbolized by a reed on the coins minted during his reign). When the early Christians looked back on the events that led to Jesus’s death, they blamed Antipas and Pilate equally (Acts 4:27). And yet a woman who was very close to Antipas’s household was an active sponsor of Jesus’s ministry—so much so that, even after Jesus was executed with Antipas’s support, she continued to be associated with the Jesus movement and was one of the several women who discovered the empty tomb (Luke 24:10).
Despite the potential for drama here, films have largely ignored Joanna’s existence. However, two exceptions appeared on television just a few weeks apart in the spring of 2015—and, not incidentally, both of those programs had a particular interest in the Jesus movement’s political context. In Killing Jesus, Joanna overhears a threat against Jesus in Herod’s palace and tries to warn him, while in A.D. The Bible Continues, Antipas and Pilate discover her ties to the Christian community during the events of Acts, and her fictitious Roman execution serves as an added catalyst for the guilt-stricken Cornelius’s conversion to Christianity.
When I interviewed The Chosen creator Dallas Jenkins in December 2019, after the second half of Season 1 came out, he told me the show would “absolutely” introduce Joanna at some point. So I’m glad to see that she has finally made her debut, three years later. Interestingly, in February of this year, Jenkins revealed that Season 3 almost began with a scene introducing Joanna, which suggests that she could be a major character this season. We shall see.