Joanna the Myrrhbearer
The Holy Myrrhbearer and Righteous Joanna, Wife of Chuza the Steward of Herod
Myrrhbearer · Righteous · d. 1st century, in peace
Commemorated 27 June — Commemoration of the Myrrhbearer Joanna, Pascha offset 14
Joanna was the wife of Chuza, the steward of Herod Antipas, and one of the women who followed Christ from Galilee, supported His ministry out of their own means, and came to the sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection. Saint Luke names her twice and only twice — among the women healed of infirmities who "ministered unto them of their substance" (Luke 8:3), and among those who brought the news of the empty tomb to the apostles and were not believed (Luke 24:10). The tradition adds one act to the Gospel record: that when Herodias had the head of the Forerunner thrown away in an unclean place, it was Joanna who recovered it and buried it in a vessel on the Mount of Olives, where it lay until the First Finding. She reposed in peace in the first century. Her fixed commemoration is June 27; her great commemoration, the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, is movable.
The house of Herod
Everything certain about Joanna comes from a single clause of Saint Luke, and that clause is extraordinary. Listing the women who travelled with Christ and the Twelve through the towns of Galilee, Luke names "Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod's steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance" (Luke 8:2–3).
Chuza — Χουζᾶς, a name that is probably Nabataean — held the office of ἐπίτροπος to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea: the manager of the tetrarch's household and estates, a position of real standing and real money. Joanna was therefore a woman of the court, and of the court of the man who had beheaded John the Baptist and who would shortly mock Christ in His Passion. That such a woman was among the disciples, and was using her husband's resources to maintain the Lord and the apostles on the road, is one of the quietest and most startling facts in the Gospels: the Kingdom had a foothold inside Herod's own house.
Luke says also that she was among those "healed of evil spirits and infirmities" — so she came to Christ, as Mary Magdalene did, out of a personal deliverance. What that sickness was is not said. Whether Chuza himself believed is not said either; the tradition has sometimes identified him with the "nobleman" (βασιλικός) of Capernaum whose son Christ healed at a distance (John 4:46–53), which would make the family's attachment begin in the same way, but the Gospel does not name that man and the identification is a guess.
At the tomb
Joanna's second and last appearance in Scripture is at the Resurrection. Having watched the burial and rested the sabbath, the women came at earliest dawn on the first day of the week with the spices they had prepared, found the stone rolled away and the body gone, and were met by two men in shining garments who told them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen. They returned and told the Eleven; and Luke, closing the account, names them: "It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles. And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not" (Luke 24:9–11).
She is thus one of the small number of named women who are, in the strict sense, the first witnesses of the Resurrection — and among the first to be disbelieved for it. The Church has never let that detail go: the myrrhbearers are honoured precisely as those whose testimony preceded the apostles' faith.
The head of the Forerunner
Beyond the Gospels, one tradition attaches to Joanna, and it is a considerable one. The synaxarion account of the First and Second Findings of the Head of the Forerunner (February 24) relates that after the beheading at Machaerus, Herodias, not daring to let the head be buried with the body, had it hidden in a dishonourable place within the palace precincts. Joanna — being of the household, and secretly a believer — took it, put it in an earthen vessel, and carried it away to be buried on the Mount of Olives, on an estate belonging to Herod. There it lay, unknown, until a monk digging the foundations of a building on the same ground uncovered it in the fourth century.
The tradition is not scriptural and does not claim to be; it is transmitted in the hagiographical account of the Findings and repeated in the synaxaria. Its plausibility rests on exactly the fact Luke gives: that there was a disciple of Christ inside Herod's household with access to the household's secrets. The full account is given in this collection under John the Forerunner.
Repose
Nothing further is transmitted. She is said to have reposed in peace, in the first century, and the calendars record neither the place nor the year. No relics are claimed for her, and no proper Life was ever written; her memory is carried by the Gospel text, by the tradition of the Head, and by her place among the Myrrhbearing Women.
Feast and commemoration
June 27 (church date; New Calendar civil June 27, Old Calendar civil July 10) is Joanna's fixed commemoration, kept in the Greek and Slavonic books alike and shared with Sampson the Hospitable, who dominates the day's hymnography.
Her principal commemoration, however, is movable: the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers, the third Sunday of Pascha (14 days after Pascha), on which the Church honours together the women who came to the tomb, together with the righteous Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. That commemoration has no fixed date and belongs to the movable cycle, not to June 27; it is recorded here in movable_feasts and is listed under that rule, not under this day. June 27 falls in most years within the window of the Apostles' Fast, whose beginning is itself movable; no seasonal note is asserted for the day.
Hymns
Troparion
The noble Joseph, taking down Thy most pure body from the tree, wrapped it in clean linen with sweet spices, and laid it in a new tomb; but on the third day Thou didst rise, O Lord, granting to the world great mercy. Unto the myrrhbearing women standing by the grave the angel cried out: Myrrh is fitting for the dead, but Christ hath been shown a stranger to corruption.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Joanna is almost never painted alone. Her place is in the composition of the Myrrhbearing Women at the Tomb — one of the oldest scenes in Christian art, found already in the third-century paintings at Dura-Europos — where two or three women in long tunics and maphoria approach the opened sepulchre carrying covered censers or lidded vessels of spices, and an angel in white sits on the rolled-away stone and points into the empty grave-clothes. Where the figures are individually inscribed, Mary Magdalene stands first; Joanna, when named, is a mature woman in a dark red or purple maphorion, holding the myrrh-vessel in both hands.
She appears also, occasionally, in the narrative cycle of the Finding of the Head of the Forerunner, in the act of concealing the head in its vessel — a rare scene, chiefly in Russian menaion-icons and in illustrated Lives of the Baptist.
No pre-1900 image of Joanna alone, or of a myrrhbearer group with her name legibly inscribed, has been located for this collection; the group icons examined on Wikimedia Commons bear no identifying inscriptions and cannot be shown to depict her rather than another of the women. Her feast being in June, the Menologion of Basil II (September–February) contains nothing for her.
Disputed questions
- How many myrrhbearers, and which? The Gospels name the women differently at different points, and the received list of the Myrrhbearers — usually Mary Magdalene, Mary of Cleopas, Salome, Joanna, Martha and Mary the sisters of Lazarus, Susanna, and Mary the mother of James and Joses — is a harmonisation, not a Gospel list. Joanna's place in it is nevertheless secure, because Luke names her explicitly at the tomb (24:10).
- Joanna and "Junia." Some modern writers have proposed identifying the Joanna of Luke with the Junia whom Saint Paul calls "of note among the apostles" (Rom. 16:7), on the theory that a Jewish Joanna at Rome would take a Latin name of similar sound. The Church's tradition keeps them distinct — Junia is commemorated with Andronicus on May 17 — and this reference follows it.
- Chuza the nobleman of Capernaum. See above: attractive, unattested.
- Not to be confused with the other myrrhbearers of the same or similar name in the calendar, nor with the many women called Mary; her identifying tag in every source is the wife of Chuza.