Joanna, wife of Chuza

Joanna, known in Christian tradition as Joanna the Myrrhbearer, appears in the Gospel of Luke as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth in first-century Galilee. Luke identifies her as the wife of Chuza, the steward (in Greek, epitropos) of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea. That office was a senior administrative post in the Herodian household, so Joanna belonged to a family of rank and resources at the court of a Roman client ruler. According to Luke 8:1-3, she was one of several women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities and who then accompanied Jesus and the Twelve as they traveled through cities and villages preaching the kingdom of God. Together with Mary Magdalene, Susanna, and many others, these women provided for the group out of their own means. The evangelist thus presents Joanna both as a beneficiary of Jesus's healing ministry and as a material supporter of his itinerant mission.

The same Gospel names Joanna among the women who went to the tomb at early dawn on the first day of the week, bringing the spices they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, did not find the body, and were told by two men in dazzling clothes that Jesus had risen. Returning from the tomb, they reported all these things to the Eleven and to all the rest. Luke 24:10 lists Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them as the ones who told the apostles. On this basis Eastern Christian tradition numbers Joanna among the Myrrh-bearing Women, the first witnesses of the empty tomb and of the resurrection. The Western Church likewise honors her as a saint. Apart from these two passages in Luke, the canonical New Testament gives no further information about her life, death, or family beyond her marriage to Chuza.

The historical context of Joanna's activity is Galilee in the early first century under Herod Antipas. After founding Tiberias as his capital around 20 CE, Herod maintained a Hellenistic-Jewish court in which Greek-speaking officials such as Chuza held influence. Joanna's capacity to travel with Jesus and to contribute financially points to a degree of personal agency and access to wealth unusual among women of the period, whether derived from her husband's position or from her own property. Her presence among Jesus's disciples is historically noteworthy because Jesus's public activity and eventual execution involved conflict with Herodian and Roman authority. Luke's Gospel, which shows a distinctive interest both in Herod Antipas and in women of independent means, is the only canonical source that preserves Joanna's name and role.

Later liturgical tradition and some modern scholarship have sought to expand this sparse record. The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates Joanna on 27 June and, with the other Myrrhbearers, on the second Sunday after Pascha. The Roman Martyrology assigns her feast to 24 May. A few scholars have suggested that Joanna might be the same person as Junia, greeted by the Apostle Paul in Romans 16:7 as prominent among the apostles, arguing from possible name equivalence and from the social world of Herod's court; this identification remains a hypothesis and is not established by the sources. Other attempts to reconstruct her later life or to connect her with archaeological finds such as ossuary inscriptions are similarly unproven. The historically secure portrait remains that of a woman of the Herodian elite who, after being healed, supported Jesus's Galilean ministry from her resources and stood among the first witnesses of the resurrection.