© 2013, by Susan J. Charles. All rights reserved

Lizzy turned from the white board where she’d just listed a timeline for the first century Middle East and noticed several pairs of male eyes looking suddenly away. She wondered if her miniskirt had ridden up when she was stretching to reach the top of the board. Even with three-inch heels, the board was a little high for her. She hoped she hadn’t flashed her class.

She supposed that once she had her Ph.D. in hand, she’d have to start wearing more professional, longer skirts when teaching her classes. But for now, as a low level instructor, she liked the way the boys kept eying her shapely legs. What was the point of being a girl if she couldn’t show off a little?

“Okay,” she told her class, “Tomorrow we’ll start examining the way the early church was shaped. Start reading the chapter on Irenaeus.” As she finished speaking, the bell rang and the class filed out.

Lizzy gathered up her notes and started down the hall to the office she shared with two other instructors and three teaching assistants. Not for the first time she thought how nice it would be if the state would start restoring funding for the university back to its previous levels so it could afford more space for its staff.

“Lizzy, do you have a moment?” Dr. Richard Williams, her faculty advisor, was standing in his doorway.

“Sure, Dick. Just let me put these notes on my desk.”

As Lizzy walked into Dr. Williams’ office, she immediately spotted the thesis proposal on the desk in front of him. Her Ph.D. thesis proposal. “Finally!” she thought.

“Lizzy, the committee has reviewed your proposal, and we have some reservations,” Williams said.

“That’s what I expected,” she said. “I am taking a pretty controversial stand.”

“That’s putting it mildly. A couple of the more conservative members of the faculty, had much stronger words for it.”

“But I can defend everything I propose! I purposely didn’t include all my arguments in the proposal because of the resistance I anticipated from those people.”

“Look, Larry...” Williams stopped speaking. “Ah...God, I’m sorry LIzzy. I don’t know where that came from. It’s just I want what’s best for you.”

“I know, Dick. And don’t worry. Even my parents slip once in a while. And I’ll always be grateful for you giving me this job so I could complete my transition using the University health plan and University hospital. We go back too far for me to get excited by a slip like that.”

Dr. Williams had been Lizzy’s advisor and friend ever since the small, shy freshman had realized that he was more Lizzy than Larry. In fact, Williams’ Early Religious Studies specialty had helped a very conflicted Larry come to the realization that God was not against transgendered people. It was this counseling that moved Larry to undertake the life-changing events leading to a much happier and fulfilled Lizzy.

“I appreciate that,” Williams replied. “It’s just that you are so good, and have already made some significant breakthroughs. I don’t want any controversy to derail an extremely promising career.”

“Dick, what I’ve gone through in the past six years has taught me that whatever happens I can deal with it. And I want to be academically honest. What I’ve outlined in my proposal is true. It goes against centuries of tradition, but false tradition.

“You know as well as I do, that the men in the church deliberately excluded and expunged almost all references in the Bible to the major role women had in the early church. The Council of Nicaea left in Peter’s assertion that women should remain barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, but excluded the woman’s view of Jesus in the Gospel of Mary. In fact there’s almost nothing about the women’s view of any of the events of that time and place.”

“Look, Lizzy, we’ve been over this before and I agree with you. But I have to say that your crusade to have the women restored to their rightful place in the story of the early church is starting to sound like a broken record to some members of the committee.

“I can understand where you are coming from. You chose the female role and you want to advance your new gender. But some feel you are letting emotions get in the way of objective academic research. It’s like if the only tool a man has is a screwdriver he thinks the solution to every problems is screwing.”

“Most men feel that anyway,” Lizzy said, smiling.

“You know what I mean,” Williams said. “The point is that it is pretty radical to assert that the Three Wise Men were actually women.’

“Dick, it’s only radical if you don’t consider the efforts of the early male church leaders. All the letters Paul wrote are in the traditional Bible, thanks to that highly political Nicaea concave that decided what would and wouldn’t be in the Bible. But where are the letters written by the female leaders of the early church? They’ve been hidden away and you’ve got to look for the few clues still left in what has come down to us.

“Lizzy, you’re preaching to the choir here. But you’re going to need a lot of concrete proof if you’re going to get a Ph.D. with this assumption.”

“But the clues are there,” Lizzy retorted. “You just have to pay attention. Look, I admit that my ‘situation’ probably caused me to look at things a little differently. But when I first asked the ‘what if ‘question, everything fell into place.

“You know that drawing of the pretty girl which suddenly ‘pops’ and becomes a picture of an old woman? Well that’s the same ‘pop’ I had when I wondered if the Wise Men could have been women. Suddenly everything looked a little differently. All of it was there, if you just looked at it differently. Consider the Gifts. Gold is pretty gender neutral. But Frankincense was used for healing in the ancient world. And who did most of the healing? Women, that’s who.

“And Myrrh. It’s used to prepare a body for burial. Who traditionally prepared corpses for burial? The women. Those were women’s gifts.”

“You do make a case,” Williams said. “But the Bible does state that they were Wise Men.”

“I think I could make a case that long distance travel for women in those days would be safer and more practical if they disguised themselves as men,” Lizzy said. “But there’s a big, fat statement right there in plain sight in the Bible that proves that the Three Wise Men were really women.”

“And that is....?”Williams asked.

And then Lizzy told him the revelation that would win her a Ph.D.

“The Three Wise Men stopped and asked for directions!”