I do not advocate an "office of deaconess." However, this lamentable footnote from J.B. Lightfoot of Cambridge, a scholar of microscopic precision, I must add.

J.B., btw, was considered the number 1 defender of Christianity in his day - a day in which enormous efforts were made do discredit the integrity of the Holy Scriptures:

He's one of the few guys I know, other than Bruce, who has mastered a half a dozen languages. :-D

....the deaconess is mentioned only in one other passage in the New Testament (Rom.16:1); and there also it is obliterated in the English Version by the substitution of the vague expression 'which is a servant' for the more definite (Greek). If the testimony borne in these two passages to a ministry of women in the Apostolic times had not been thus blotted out of our English Bibles, attention would probably have been directed to the subject at an earlier date, and our English Church would not have remained so long maimed in one of her hands.

On a Fresh Revision of the English New Testament, p 114
Macmillan and Co. 1871

let love continue,
David Anderson
Tennessee