Lois: The Grandmother in Whom the Faith Lived First

A woman of the New Testament era

Lois belongs to the New Testament era, placed at around 4 BC to AD 33 (era placed on Ussher's chronology (1650)). Everything Scripture records of her fits inside one verse, 2 Timothy 1:5, which is both her first and her only appearance. She is named there as a grandmother, and that is the whole of her public record: one sentence in one letter, in one book of the Bible.

The single verse

The words are these: "having been reminded of the sincere faith that is in you, which lived first in your grandmother Lois, and your mother Eunice, and, I am persuaded, in you also" (2 Timothy 1:5).

Read it slowly and notice what kind of mention this is. It is not a story. There is no scene, no dialogue from her mouth, no journey, no house, no town. It is a remembrance inside the opening of a letter, a passing note in which the writer counts backwards through three generations of one family and says where the faith he sees began. Lois is the furthest back he goes.

Three things the verse does say about her. First, she is a grandmother, the mother of Eunice, and Eunice is the mother of the one the letter addresses. Second, the faith named here is called sincere, and the writer places it in her before he places it in the other two: it "lived first" in Lois (2 Timothy 1:5). Third, the writer is not guessing about her. He states her faith flatly, while about the one he addresses he says only, "I am persuaded, in you also" (2 Timothy 1:5). The one link in the chain he expresses with certainty and no qualification is the grandmother.

Beyond the verse, the dossier records one more family tie by inference from it: Eunice had a father, the husband of Lois, and Scripture never names him. He is a blank space beside her.

No scene, and no failure recorded

Honesty about a person this small in the record means naming what is absent. There is no scene told about Lois anywhere. Not one action of hers is described. We never hear her speak. We are not told that she prayed, taught, travelled, suffered or died. The Bible gives her a name, a relationship and a faith, and then moves on to the business of the letter.

That also means Scripture records no failure and no sin of hers. This is not a verdict that she had none; it is simply that the record is one verse long and says nothing on the subject. It would be dishonest to build her into a portrait of household virtue, and equally dishonest to hint at faults the text never raises. The one thing the verse asserts about her inner life is that the faith in her was sincere, that is, unfeigned, not put on. The writer does not explain how he came to know it.

What we do not know

Scripture does not name her parents. No tribe and no people is given for her, so we cannot say from the Bible where she was born or to whom she belonged. Her husband is unnamed. We are told nothing of her age, her circumstances, her means, or whether she was still living when the letter was written. Whether she ever met the writer of the letter, the Bible does not say. Where anyone has filled these gaps, it is not the text doing the filling.

Two generations of a family are set in front of us and the middle and end are described only in relation to her. Lois herself stays almost entirely out of view.

The line that the one verse draws

The only New Testament reference Lois has is 2 Timothy 1:5, so that verse alone must carry whatever line is drawn from her. It does not name Christ. What it does is name faith, call it sincere, and trace where it had been living: first in Lois, then in Eunice, and, the writer is persuaded, in the one he writes to (2 Timothy 1:5).

That is a small thing to be remembered for and a large one. A woman about whom no episode is preserved is the point at which a letter locates the beginning of a faith it trusts. The writer reaches for her name to reassure someone else about his own. Nothing of her speech survives, nothing of her work, nothing of her household arrangements. What survives is that the faith was in her, and that it was not pretended, and that it did not stop with her.

For readers who like their Bible characters with stories attached, Lois is a rebuke and a comfort. The text gives her one verse, one relationship and one word about her faith, and calls that worth writing down.