Luke mentions Joanna almost in passing. She appears in a list of women who traveled with Jesus and supported his movement financially, tucked between Mary Magdalene and a woman named Susanna: “Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager” (Luke 8:2-3). Most readers move through that verse without pausing, and I understand why. It reads like administrative detail. But the detail is extraordinary once you hold it still and look closely at what it actually says. Joanna was married to Chuza, the epitropos of Herod Antipas, the man who managed the tetrarch’s household, administered his estates, oversaw his revenues, and kept the financial arrangements of the Herodian court running across Galilee and Perea. That is not a minor position but the position that knows where the money goes.

Epitropos is the same Greek word Luke uses for the steward in the parable that appears eight chapters later, not a similar word or a cognate but the exact same word, describing someone who manages another’s property with delegated authority, who handles accounts and makes financial decisions on behalf of the owner, who stands between the master’s wealth and everyone who interacts with it. When Luke uses epitropos to describe Chuza’s role in Herod’s household and then builds a parable around an epitropos who manipulates his master’s accounts before being dismissed, the connection is not coincidental. Luke was working with traditions that preserved the parable’s actual historical origins, and the naming of Chuza’s wife eight chapters earlier leaves the interpretive key in view for readers who know what they are looking for.

The circumstances that produced the parable were these. Joanna had joined the movement supporting Jesus financially from her own resources, which means she was redirecting wealth that derived ultimately from Herodian administration toward a movement Herod Antipas would have considered at minimum politically inconvenient. Herod had already executed John the Baptist, with Mark describing how Herodias maneuvered her husband into ordering the beheading through the occasion of his birthday feast (Mark 6:17-29). The execution showed how Herod calculated these things: he treated challenges to his authority as problems to be eliminated once eliminating them cost less than tolerating them. Joanna’s financial support for the movement John had endorsed and Jesus was leading was exactly the kind of activity Herod would not have approved, which means Chuza was either unaware of what his wife was doing, passively complicit, or actively helping redirect Herodian resources toward a royal claimant whose Jubilee proclamation[1] was organizing precisely the constituency whose economic grievances Herodian taxation had created.

The parable, read through this context, preserves what Chuza actually did once the choice between his two masters could no longer be deferred.

The Parable as Chuza’s Story

The parable itself repays a slow reading, because the details carry more weight than they first appear to:

“There was a rich man whose household manager was reported to him for wasting his possessions. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give me an account of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’ The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I know what I will do, so that when I am removed from management, people will receive me into their homes.’ So he summoned each one of his master’s debtors. He said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’ Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’ The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly, for the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings” (Luke 16:1-9).

The rich man whose possessions are being managed is Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea, client ruler whose wealth derived from agricultural estates, fishing rights on the Sea of Galilee, and taxation of populations under his administration. Josephus documents how Herodian revenues ran large, on a scale that alone could fund the construction of Tiberias, a city Herod built on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee and named after the emperor, a project that only systematic extraction from Galilee’s agricultural surplus could have paid for (Jewish Antiquities 18.2.1-3). The household manager reported for wasting his master’s possessions is Chuza, whose wife Joanna had been redirecting resources toward Jesus’s movement, whose activities had apparently become visible to Herodian intelligence in a way that now demanded an accounting.

The internal monologue Luke preserves as the steward weighs his options tells us something precise about social position that the plot does not strictly require. Someone for whom digging is truly impossible rather than merely undesirable, and for whom begging represents an unbearable humiliation, comes from the administrative class. Chuza as Herod’s epitropos belonged to the stratum of educated administrators whose entire social identity depended on institutional service, whose skills were organizational and financial rather than manual, and whose dismissal without securing an alternative household would have meant catastrophic social descent with no path back. This is not vanity dressed up as self-assessment but an accurate reckoning of what the loss of position meant for someone whose class had no other foundation.

The debtors Chuza contacts owed obligations measured in agricultural commodities. A hundred measures of olive oil was approximately 900 gallons, the kind of debt that accumulates when tenant farmers borrow against future harvests during bad years or when obligations to Herodian estates compound across seasons. A hundred measures of wheat represented grain debt on an equivalent scale. Reducing these debts by twenty to fifty percent did two things at once, and this is where the conventional reading falls apart: the parable’s surface presents this as self-interested strategy, but the political context reveals it as Jubilee implementation through the only mechanism available to someone in Chuza’s position, using the authority his role still gave him before dismissal took it away for good.

The master’s commendation of the dishonest manager has generated more sustained scholarly discomfort than almost any other passage in Luke’s Gospel. Joseph Fitzmyer, in his Anchor Bible commentary, catalogued eight distinct scholarly interpretations without finding one that resolved the problem, concluding that the parable is “among the most difficult in the Gospel tradition.” John Calvin called it one of the hardest passages in the Gospels. The discomfort persists because within the conventional framework the commendation requires either Herod approving someone who defrauded him, which makes no political sense, or Jesus approving someone who cheated his employer, which makes no moral sense given the teaching about God and money that appears three verses later in the same chapter. Neither reading works, and two thousand years of commentary have not resolved the difficulty, because the conventional framework has the wrong idea about who is speaking, to whom, and about what.

Reading the commendation as the Radical endorsing Chuza through a parable that encoded what Chuza had actually done changes everything. A royal claimant organizing a movement around Jubilee liberation, whose mission required debt cancellation that the system prevented through its normal operation, would commend exactly the strategy Chuza employed: using remaining institutional authority to accomplish what Jubilee required before that authority disappeared through a dismissal Herodian intelligence had already made inevitable. The commendation makes complete sense from this position. The fictional narrative protected Chuza while preserving the endorsement in a form that could circulate without leaving direct evidence of what the movement knew and approved.

The Verse That Dissolves Two Thousand Years of Confusion

“And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings” (Luke 16:9).

This is the verse that has made serious interpreters reach for explanations the text cannot fully support, because every reading inside the conventional framework ends up importing assumptions the text does not provide, or treating the Greek as vaguer than it actually is.

Fitzmyer argues that “unrighteous wealth” describes all worldly wealth through its general association with sinful human arrangements, making the instruction about how followers should use whatever money they possess for purposes serving eternal relationships. That reading treats mamonas adikias as a general term for worldly wealth, when the Greek adjective adikias marks wealth characterized by injustice in particular, not wealth generally tainted by material existence. It softens what the text says to make the instruction morally manageable.

I. Howard Marshall argues the verse instructs followers to give charitably to the poor so that the poor will welcome them into eternal dwellings after death. Theologically attractive, and it connects to the Rich Man and Lazarus parable that immediately follows. But it requires the friends who welcome givers into eternal homes to be poor recipients of charity, which the text does not say, and it requires poor recipients to hold authority over eternal dwellings, which the text does not explain either. Rudolf Bultmann, in History of the Synoptic Tradition, treats verse 9 as a secondary addition by the early church that connected an originally secular parable to Christian teaching about eternal life, dissolving the problem by removing the verse from Jesus’s mouth through source-critical surgery that conveniently eliminates the difficulty without explaining why the early church would create instruction generating exactly the moral confusion it has always produced. Bultmann’s move here does not persuade me, though the source-critical question stays open in ways the reconstruction I am offering here cannot fully settle on its own.

Every one of these readings from serious scholars fails at the same point. They try to make verse 9 address general audiences about a universal ethical principle when it was addressed to particular people, in particular institutional positions, taking a particular strategic action their circumstances made possible and the movement’s Jubilee program required them to take while their institutional authority lasted.

The wealth Chuza managed was unrighteous in a precise descriptive sense. Herodian revenues derived from taxation of an occupied population, from tithes collected through arrangements benefiting Temple aristocracy and Herodian client rulers at the expense of agricultural workers whose surplus production the system extracted systematically. Josephus documents how Herod the Great and his successors built their wealth through these mechanisms (Jewish Antiquities 17.11.2, 18.2.1-3), how fishing rights on the Sea of Galilee were taxed through arrangements Magdala’s fish-processing industry exemplified, how agricultural production in Galilee faced multiple layers of obligation flowing upward through tenant arrangements, Temple tithes, Herodian taxation, and Roman tribute, together claiming a substantial share of what rural families produced across the growing season. Someone managing this wealth on Herod’s behalf was administering mamonas adikias in the precise sense the Greek carries, not as theological metaphor but as a factual description of where the money came from.

The friends Chuza made by means of this wealth were not vague spiritual beneficiaries of charitable giving. They were named agricultural debtors in Galilee who received actual debt relief through Chuza’s manipulation of the accounts before his dismissal took away his authority to reduce what they owed, people who now had a concrete reason to receive him into their homes and into the movement’s networks that Joanna’s participation had already connected the family to through her traveling support of the program.

The eternal dwellings into which these friends would receive Chuza once the wealth failed, once Herodian dismissal cut off his access to Herod’s resources, were the movement’s communities that the Jubilee proclamation was building toward the kingdom’s establishment. The eschatological dimension is real rather than a metaphorical extension of social pragmatism, but it describes the movement’s communities as both a present reality and a future destination rather than pointing to some undefined heavenly reward that charitable giving would purchase from grateful poor recipients.

“When it fails” refers to the moment Chuza’s institutional authority ends, when the wealth he managed stops being reachable through his position, when dismissal removes the mechanism through which debt reduction had been possible. The instruction addresses the window between the accounting being demanded and the dismissal being completed, the stretch when Chuza still holds authority to act on the accounts even though everyone, himself included, already knows that authority is about to be revoked for good. This is not general instruction about using worldly wealth wisely before death removes access to it, but instruction aimed at using the remaining window of institutional authority to accomplish what the movement required while that window stayed open.

The moral dilemma that has troubled interpreters for two millennia dissolves in the Chuza reading, because the instruction does not ask anyone to do anything dishonorable in personal moral terms. It asks people with institutional access to wealth marked by systemic injustice to redirect that wealth toward relationships and communities Jubilee justice required, rather than letting it keep flowing through arrangements that perpetuated the injustice it came from. The betrayal of Herod that the parable encodes as fraudulent account manipulation was faithfulness toward the program Jubilee liberation required, and the commendation names this faithfulness through the fictional narrative that protected Chuza while preserving the endorsement in a form that could circulate without leaving direct evidence of what the movement knew and approved.

The Sons of Light and the Sons of This World

The statement about sons of this world being shrewder than sons of light in dealing with their own generation (Luke 16:8b) has always read as a mild rebuke of followers for strategic naivety compared to worldly actors who understand how power and wealth operate. That reading holds up as far as it goes, but it misses the actual target the statement was aimed at when spoken in the context of what Chuza had done.

The sons of this world who operated with strategic sophistication were Herodian administrators and Roman officials who understood perfectly how institutional wealth could be used to build political networks and secure personal positions through the careful distribution of patronage and manipulation of the obligation systems agricultural debt created. This was not incidental to how the Roman world operated. It was the mechanism through which the entire social fabric, from imperial level down to local administration, held itself together through patron-client relationships whose currency was precisely the kind of selective debt relief and resource redistribution Chuza had performed with Herodian accounts. Josephus describes how Herodian court politics operated through these same mechanisms across multiple volumes of both the Jewish War and the Antiquities: positions secured through gifts, loyalty purchased through debt relief and economic patronage, networks of obligation sustaining political arrangements that naked power alone could not have maintained in populations whose resentment of occupation made compliance something that had to be bought rather than simply commanded.

The sons of light possessed moral clarity about what the kingdom required but had not yet developed the equivalent strategic sophistication for using available institutional positions and resources toward the movement’s purposes. The Radical was not criticizing followers for lacking moral seriousness. He was instructing them to combine moral clarity with the strategic intelligence Chuza had demonstrated, to understand that building the movement required using available mechanisms with the same sophistication existing power structures employed to perpetuate themselves, and that someone in Chuza’s position who used Herodian wealth for debt relief before losing access to it had shown exactly the combination the movement needed from people whose institutional positions gave them temporary access to resources Jubilee justice required redirecting.

Joanna at the Tomb

Joanna appears again in Luke’s resurrection narrative, and the detail confirms that her significance runs well past the brief introduction in Luke 8. She is among the women who went to the tomb and found it empty, among those who reported to the eleven that resurrection had occurred (Luke 24:10). Her presence at the tomb places her among the primary witnesses to the resurrection discovery whose testimony generated the proclamation that transformed the movement after the crucifixion.

That significance cannot be separated from who she was and what her household had done. She was the wife of Herod’s household manager, a woman of social position and political connection whose participation in the Jesus movement had always carried a different order of risk than what peasant women from Galilee accepted by following a wandering teacher. Her continued presence after the crucifixion, her involvement in preparing spices for burial anointing, her testimony about the empty tomb, all of it suggests her commitment to the movement outlasted the institutional position that had given her husband access to the resources through which they had served the program.

If Chuza’s story underlies the Unjust Steward parable, then Joanna’s testimony at the empty tomb represents the movement’s reception of the family that had made friends for themselves by means of unrighteous wealth during the window when Chuza’s institutional authority had made such friendship possible. The eternal dwellings into which those friends received them included the community that gathered around the empty tomb and the testimony Joanna contributed from her position as witness, whose social credibility, drawn from the same Herodian connections that had given the family access to the resources they redirected, lent weight to the proclamation the movement’s survival required.

The Verse That Names the Choice

“No servant can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money” (Luke 16:13).

This absolute statement appears three verses after the commendation of shrewd management and has always read as an awkward fit beside the parable’s endorsement of exactly the kind of strategic money manipulation that serving God over money would seem to prohibit. Inside the corrected framework, which assigns the Unjust Steward to the Radical’s voice and this statement to the Teacher’s, the tension stops looking like moral incoherence needing resolution and starts looking like historical evidence of a composite text Luke’s editorial assembly joined without harmonizing. The Teacher’s absolute statement names the theological reality underneath the practical choice the Radical’s parable had encoded through narrative. Chuza had served two masters for some stretch of time during which Joanna’s participation in the movement was apparently compatible with his continuing administration of Herodian accounts. The moment the accounting was demanded and dismissal became certain, the two masters could no longer be served at once, and the choice the Teacher’s absolute statement described in general terms was the choice Chuza’s own circumstances had made concrete and unavoidable.

The two voices Luke assembled into chapter sixteen were addressing the same situation from angles their distinct missions produced. The Radical’s parable commended the strategic use of institutional authority for Jubilee liberation before dismissal closed the opportunity, preserving the endorsement through fictional encoding that protected Chuza while instructing others in similar positions about what faithfulness to the program required. The Teacher’s absolute statement named the theological impossibility of sustained divided loyalty that the parable’s narrative had described as reaching its crisis point once the accounting was demanded and the window of dual service closed for good.

Together they address what Chuza and Joanna represented within the movement: people whose institutional connections to existing power structures gave them access to resources and information the movement needed, while at the same time creating loyalty conflicts the kingdom’s demands eventually made impossible to leave unresolved. What the Unjust Steward parable has preserved, buried inside a story that looks like a morality tale about a clever fraudster, is the memory of one man making one choice in one week when his wife was already traveling through Galilee with a company of followers, and the accounting had finally been demanded, and the window was closing. He used what he had. The commendation followed. And the parable circulated in a form that protected him while encoding what he had done and why it mattered.

That is the parable behind the parable. That is what Luke preserved without quite saying so, leaving the key where anyone who had read chapter eight carefully could find it.

References:

Josephus. Jewish Antiquities. Translated by Louis H. Feldman et al. 10 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930–1965.

Bailey, Kenneth E. Poet and Peasant: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976.

Bultmann, Rudolf. The History of the Synoptic Tradition. Translated by John Marsh. Rev. ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968.

Calvin, John. A Harmony of the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke. Vol. 2. In Calvin’s Commentaries. Edited by David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance. Translated by A. W. Morrison. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1972.

Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel According to Luke X–XXIV: Introduction, Translation, and Notes. Anchor Bible 28A. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985.

Fitzmyer, Joseph A. “The Story of the Dishonest Manager (Lk 16:1–13).” Theological Studies 25, no. 1 (1964): 23–42.

Marshall, I. Howard. The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text. New International Greek Testament Commentary. Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1978.

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[1] Luke 4:18-19, citing Isaiah 61:1-2: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” The phrase “year of the Lord’s favor” translates the Greek eniauton Kyriou dekton, the Septuagint rendering of the Hebrew šĕnat-rāṣôn YHWH, the Jubilee year of Leviticus 25, in which debts were cancelled, slaves freed, and land returned to its original holders.