Abstract
Mark 7:24–30 is a story in which a Greek/Gentile (Ἑλλήνις) woman, a Syrophoenician by race/nationality (τῷ γένει), suddenly comes to Jesus, who is hiding in a house in the region of Tyre, and implores him to heal her demon-possessed daughter. Jesus’s remarks, in which he refers to this woman as a “dog,” sound harsh. Readers have understood his attitude as marked by Jewish prejudice against Gentiles, especially a Gentile woman, or as testing her faith. Due to this foreign woman’s prowess and prudence, however, Jesus is seen as breaking the boundary between Jews and Gentiles. This interpretation frequently adds that the story implies the Gentiles’ incorporation into Christianity.
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Notes
John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002), 233. While RSV, NIV and KJV translate it as “Greek,” NRSV, NASB and ESV read it as “Gentile.”
Sharon H. Ringe, “A Gentile Woman’s Story,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Letty M. Russell (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1985), 65.
See Morna D. Hooker, The Gospel According to Saint Mark (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academics, 1991), 183
Sometimes such an interpretation connotes supersessionism: “Mark’s theology of the Gentiles as the new people of God replacing the Jews.” Ernest Best, Disciples and Discipleship: Studies in the Gospel According to Mark (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1986), 183. Cf.
David Joy, Mark and Its Subalterns: A Hermeneutical Paradigm for a Postcolonial Context (Oakville, CT: Equinox Pub, 2008), 161. However, Ringe points out that the church has adapted the story to its ecclesiastical needs and that scholars, who are the insiders of the church and the privileged of society, have domesticated the Gospel and the image of Christ according to their point of view. Ringe, “A Gentile Woman’s Story,” 70–72.
Richard A. Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 212.
Donahue and Harrington, Gospel of Mark, 75. See also Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), 204; and Joy, Mark and Its Subalterns, 161.
Tolbert contends that “Greek” is more a religious label than a racial one. Mary Ann Tolbert, “Mark,” in The Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol Newsom and Sharon H. Rindge (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 268.
R. S. Sugirtharajah, “The Syrophoenician Woman,” ET 98 (1986): 13–15.
See also Simon Samuel, A Postcolonial Reading ofMark’s Story of Jesus (New York: T & T Clark, 2007), 163.
Laura E. Donaldson, “Gospel Hauntings: The Postcolonial Demons of New Testament Criticism,” in Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections, ed. Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia (New York: T & T Clark, 2005), 102–3.
Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 65
Kwok Pui-lan, Discovering the Bible in the Non-Biblical World (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995), 71.
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72.
David Rhoads, Reading Mark, Engaging the Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), 161, 164–65.
Kim Jin-Ho, “An Attempt at Ahn Byung-Mu Hermeneutics: Focusing on the Concepts of ‘Discovery of Internality’ and ‘Minjung Otherness,’” in Reading Minjung Theology in the Twenty-First Century: Selected Writings by Ahn Byung-Mu, ed. Jin-Ho Kim and Yung Suk Kim (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013). Ahn states, “If Jesus was the Wanderprediger, they were the Wanderochlos.” Thus the minjung are wanderers. Ahn, “Jesus and the Minjung,” 142.
Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 367. Ernest Best rejects the view of the feedings as symbolic of the Eucharist, in contrast to the evidence for such an interpretation in the earlier tradition and later in the Gospel of John. Instead, he asserts that food in Mark is “a regular and easily understood metaphor for teaching.” Jesus’s teaching is centered on “the passion and the discipleship which should issue from an understanding of it.” He connects the second feeding story with the Passion not in terms of the Eucharist but of the universal nature of salvation that the Passion story demonstrates. Best, Disciples and Discipleship, 189, 192–93.
Graham Ward, The Cities of God: Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 2000), 83–116. Ward especially relates transcorporeality to the eucharistic body of Christ.
See also Jin Young Choi, “Towards a Transnational Perspective on Minjung Hermeneutics,” in Contemporary & Minjung Theology 12, ed. Jin-Ho Kim (Seoul: The Christian Institute for the Third Era, 2013), 101–21.
Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, eds., Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 7–8.
David K. Yoo and Ruth H. Chung distinguish transnationalism as an impersonal force from diaspora as the fundamentally human phenomenon. Thus, they find the latter useful in discussing the concept of religion and spirituality in Korean America. David K. Yoo and Ruth H. Chung, eds., Religion and Spirituality in Korean America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 8–9.
Wanda Deifelt, “Globalization, Religion and Embodiment: Latin American Feminist Perspectives,” in Shaping a Global Theological Mind, ed. Darren C. Marks (Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 2008), 42.
Vincent B. Leitch, Cultural Criticism, Literary Theory, Poststructuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 93.
Tat-siong Benny Liew, “Reading with Yin Yang Eyes: Negotiating the Ideological Dilemma of a Chinese American Biblical Hermeneutics,” BI 9, no. 3 (2001): 315.
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Choi, J.Y. (2015). The Consumed Body (Mark 7:24–30). In: Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment. Postcolonialism and Religions. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526106_7
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