King's College London

This chapter expands on aspects of Joan Taylor’s previous argument that the designation ‘two by two’, δυο δυο, in Mark 1:7 suggests that the twelve male apostles appointed by Jesus in Galilee were not paired off internally as masculine teams but were paired with unnamed and obscured female companions as they went to heal and preach in Galilee. It is argued that the use of δυο δυο in Mark, found without a preposition, needs to be distinguished from the usage in Luke 10:1 in regard to the seventy (or seventy-two) apostles sent out ανα δυο δυο, since the Gospel of Peter [9].35 indicates this latter expression means ‘two after two’: namely, pairs going off in sequence, successively. The expression δυο δυο, without any preposition, is not idiomatic Koinē but rather is an expression reliant on the Semitic pattern of distributive repetition, and in Sirach 33:14-15 it is used precisely in regard to pairs of opposites, or contraries, created by God, which would normatively include the binary pair of male and female, in accordance with Aristotelian archetypes.