Jesus' Healings of Women: Conformity and Nonconformity To Dominant Cultural Values as Clues for Historical Reconstruction

Abstract

The six synoptic miracles involving females are studied with attention to gender, classification of miracle narratives, presence of conforming and counter-cultural behavior, issues of orality and textuality, and comparison to the early Christian miracle lists. Those women's stories with strong counter-cultural elements are also those that have strong oral story dynamics. The story of the woman with the hemorrhage and the story of the Syrophoenician woman and Jesus certainly derive from oral tradition, probably transmitted primarily by and among women, and may go back to Jesus. The far greater overlap of synoptic miracles involving males with the written miracle lists suggests that the male stories have been more influenced by textual transmission than the synoptic women's stories. The transmission history of the women's stories may be significantly different from that of the men's stories, maintaining a higher counter-cultural emphasis because of less interaction with textuality.