Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 1 The Problem of Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman A Reader-Response Analysis of Mark 7:24-31 David D. M. King Abstract The story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman has been perennially problematic. The portrayal of Jesus’ character, the way he treats this woman, seems inconsistent with his larger identity, both in the minds of believers and in the context of the gospel narrative. Why is it that the Jesus who seems to offer grace and healing to just about anyone who asks is found in this pericope to refuse a request for healing and to hurl insults at the requester? How can these actions by Jesus be reconciled with his identity as gracious healer? This paper uses reader-response and narrative methods to explore varying and diverse solutions to this problem. Specifically, the work of six scholars is explored, each writing for a non-professional audience. Six possible solutions are identified: 1) Jesus is on vacation, 2) Jesus is playing, 3) Jesus has a more important mission, 4) Jesus is bested in debate, 5) Jesus is racist, and 6) Jesus is sexist. Each of these solutions is evaluated for whether it can satisfactorily answer all of three questions: 1) why does Jesus refuse the Syrophoenician woman’s request for exorcism? 2) why does Jesus indirectly refer to her as a dog? 3) why does Jesus change his mind and grant her request? Each of these six solutions is shown to be lacking. In the end, there is no satisfying way to square Jesus’ identity and characterization in this pericope with his identity and characterization in the rest of the gospel narrative. However, the fact that no interpreter can leave it unsquared says something about Jesus’ identity. Introduction The story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman is a perennially problematic pericope in Mark. Jesus’ initial refusal to exorcize the woman’s daughter, paired with his accompanying racially-loaded rebuke of her, presents the reader with a Jesus whose identity and character strain both theological and narrative expectations. Nowhere else in Mark, nor in the other three canonical gospels, has Jesus refused someone who came to him asking for healing. How, then, can the surprisingly dismissive Jesus of this pericope be explained? Readers, both professional and amateur, with or without a theological attachment to the text have struggled to find some way to vindicate Jesus from behavior that seems clearly at odds with his narrative character. Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 2 Applying reader-response techniques can illuminate the tension with which this pericope stands in and against the larger text of Mark. By seeing how actual readers deal with this text, noting the ways they define the problem presented by this text, and observing how they seek to harmonize it with a gentler characterization of Jesus, we can better understand the significance of this pericope. We can also use these inconsistencies to explore the various identities that readers have constructed for Jesus. This article presents the ways that contemporary exegetical readers respond to the problem of Jesus’ apparent heartlessness in his dealings with the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24-31. I have identified six basic responses to the problem: 1) Jesus is on vacation, 2) Jesus is playing, 3) Jesus has a more important mission, 4) Jesus is bested in debate, 5) Jesus is racist, and 6) Jesus is sexist. These are by no mean exhaustive of all possibilities, nor are these responses mutually exclusive. Most interpreters will employ more than one of them to help explain Jesus’ words and actions. I conclude that none of these six attempts to understand Jesus’ identity in Mark 7:24-31 is particularly satisfying but that the existence of these attempts highlights the lasting power of Jesus’ “nice” identity. I will engage with reader-response criticism as explicated by Robert Fowler (2008). As he summarizes, Instead of “What determines the meaning of the text?” reader-response critics prefer the question, “Who determines the meaning?” The immediate answer is “the reader,” which in turn leads to further questions. When, where, why, and how does the reader read (2008, 60)? Reader-response criticism can engage with either imagined or real readers and with either expert or average readers, “expert” being a technical term for educated, critical readers and “average” being a technical term for readers who read without the benefit or baggage of such education and training (61). Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 3 One important technique of reader-response critics is attention to gap filling. All texts leave holes readers must fill in on their own. Again, Fowler states: The gaps that appear in the path we walk through the reading experience must be negotiated somehow, but readers often have considerable freedom to handle them as they see fit. Many of the arguments between readers are over how best to deal with gaps in the texts we read (70). Gaps, whether they are created by narrative lacunae or by narrative inconsistencies, must be traversed by readers in one way or another in order to make meaning from the text. In the case we examine here, the gap is created by the characterization of Jesus in his encounter with the Syrophoenician woman, a characterization which seems inconsistent with his characterization elsewhere. This study will analyze the ways that expert readers fill the gaps created by this unusual characterization of Jesus and how they explain their gap-filling exercises for the benefit of their average readers. With this goal in mind, I have chosen popular commentaries for study, not scholarly journal articles. I am interested in the ways these expert readers explain the text to average readers. With one exception, each can be taken right off the shelf at the Cokesbury Bookstore; the other was written for a denominational news service. My primary interpreters are Mary Ann Tolbert (1998), William Barclay (2001), N. T. Wright (2004 and 2009), Miguel De La Torre (2011), Lamar Williamson (2009), and William Placher (2010). To these six, I will add certain other sources for further explication in addition to some of my own analysis. My primary concern, though, is seeing how these six primary interpreters read Mark, how they deal with the problems alluded to above and defined more clearly below, and how they explain it all for a nonscholarly audience. Further, I will critique each of these interpreters’ efforts to fill the gaps based on how smoothly the gaps can be filled. If the attempt to fill the gaps cannot be done without revealing inconsistencies, if it cannot be done without producing new bulges and ripples Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 4 and explosions in the narrative, then it cannot be considered a satisfying gap-filling measure. As we will see, each of these interpreters tries unsuccessfully to smoothly fill the gaps. Clarifying the Problem The problematic gap in this pericope is defined by three questions: 1) why does Jesus refuse the Syrophoenician woman’s request for exorcism? 2) why does Jesus indirectly refer to her as a dog? 3) why does Jesus change his mind and grant her request? Any satisfying interpretation must convincingly answer these three questions and must also prove itself to be consistent with the rest of the context of Mark. The first question — why does Jesus initially refuse the request? — presents a problem not only for contemporary faith-conceptions of Jesus, but also for understanding the narrative characterization of the identity of the Markan Jesus. Christian faith wants to maintain that Jesus answers and helps everyone who calls. But even if we set aside the Jesus of faith, we are still left with a narrative identity problem inside Mark. Nowhere else in the gospel does Jesus refuse to perform a healing or exorcism when asked. He is confronted by all kinds of different characters, many of whom are far less polite supplicants than is this woman, but this is the only occasion when he refuses. What makes the difference in this one case? This leads to the related question of why, when rebuffing the woman, Jesus indirectly refers to her and her daughter as dogs.1 Virtually every interpreter seems to recognize this as an 1 I do not wish to belabor the point, but Jesus’ use of the word κυναρίοις is within the context of metaphorical speech. He does not directly say, “You and your daughter are dogs,” he speaks a metaphorical saying in which the players representing the two woman are dogs. If we were to accept this as a direct insult, we would also have to accept that in the parable of the wicked tenants (Mk 12:1-11) Jesus literally refers to God as ἄνθρωπος and as an absentee landlord. More pointedly, perhaps, we would have to accept that Lukan Jesus refers directly to God as an unjust judge in 18:2-8. The language in all these cases is metaphorical, and metaphorical language does not always apply directly. That being said, it’s safe to assume that no one listening to Jesus or reading Luke would make the mistake of thinking that God is unjust. When Jesus speaks of dogs, it is directly to the woman in question. It is hard to conceive a scenario in which the woman would not feel insulted by the use of this word, even if it was used indirectly. Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 5 extreme insult, in any of the relevant contexts. Donahue and Harrington list several Hebrew Bible and New Testament references to dogs, none of which are flattering, and state that “dogs were regarded as unclean animals and almost always have a negative connotation” (2002, 234). Malina and Rohrbaugh insist that “dog” is an insult in both Israelite culture and in the broader Mediterranean context, “since dogs were considered scavengers (like rats to an American), not domestic pets” (2003, 177). Collins notes that by the time of Jesus and Mark, “dog” was already a commonly-used Jewish metaphor for Gentiles, indicating that Gentiles were lawless (2007, 366-7). Even Barclay, the most conservative of our interpreters, insists that this term was universally contemptuous, denoting shamelessness in Greek contexts and uncleanness in Jewish contexts (2001, 206). Some will argue that the use of the diminutive κυναρίοις might make these pet house dogs rather than wild scavenging dogs, (Barclay 2001, 206) though, as Donahue and Harrington point out, the fact that food is “thrown” to the dogs is more indicative of wild, outdoor scavengers than of house pets (2002, 234).2 In a modern context, it is hard to hear anything except that Jesus is calling this woman a bitch, and as Burkill so eloquently points out, “as in English, so in other languages, to call a woman ‘a little bitch’ is no less abusive than to call her ‘a bitch’ without qualification” (1967, 173). Finally, once interpreters explain why it is that Jesus refuses the request and does so with an insult, how then do we explain why Jesus changes his mind? For some, like Tolbert and De La Torre, this change is the key for understanding the passage. Jesus learns something from the 2 Another method for softening the impact of κυναρίοις, which I will not detail in this article, is claiming that it refers not to dogs, but to cynics. Tolbert hints at this interpretation, arguing that the woman’s boundary-busting actions make the designation “little cynic” an apt one. However, she stops short of claiming that the woman was an actual cynic philosopher or that Jesus is recognizing her philosopher status (1998, 356). Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 6 woman, and that is the point. For others, notably Barclay and Wright, the idea that Jesus might change or learn something through this exchange is deeply problematic. Jesus Is on Vacation While no interpreters use this as their primary argument, many begin to fill the gap by pointing out that Jesus was trying to get away from the constant stress of his mission by going to Tyre, and this is part of the reason he responds so negatively to the Syrophoenician woman’s request. Ringe might explain it most aptly when she says, “The very strangeness and the offensiveness of the story’s portrayal of Jesus may suggest that the core of the story was indeed remembered as an incident in Jesus’ life when even he was caught with his compassion down” (1985, 69). Barclay (2001, 205), Placher (2010, 104), Wright (2004, 95), and Tolbert (1998, 356) all touch, if briefly, on this theme in explaining Jesus’ behavior. He traveled all the way up to Tyre, “[h]e entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet, he could not escape notice” (Mk 7:24). It may not be as obvious as it is in the Gospel of Luke, but there is still a consistent theme in Mark of Jesus trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to get away from the crowds and have time to himself. It occurs first on the morning after Jesus heals Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. Jesus sneaks out of the house in the middle of the night to be alone and pray, but the disciples track him down (Mk 1:35-37). A more important example comes after the twelve return from their first apostolic mission. Jesus “said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in a boat to a deserted place by themselves” (Mk 6:31-32). Of course, we know what is coming next. Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 7 The crowds beat them there. “As he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them” (Mk 6:34). This is the beginning of the story of the feeding of the five thousand. The question is, of course, if Jesus has compassion on the crowd when he is trying to get away in chapter 6, why when he is trying to get away in chapter 7 does he refuse the Syrophoenician woman and call her a dog? One could argue that all the pent-up stress of trying to get away and failing finally explodes here. Jesus actually left Galilee, his mission field, to get away, and this woman still managed to find him. He just cannot handle it anymore and he blows up at her and refuses a request that he would normally accept. This has the benefit of explaining all three of our questions: Jesus is caught at a moment that is not his best, leading to a refusal and harsh words; the woman’s retort snaps him back into reality, and he grants her request. It does not, though, explain why Jesus blows up in this case and this case only. Neither does it do much to explain the need to go to Tyre, the extensive explanation of the woman’s heritage, or the particularity of the dialogue. It serves to show Jesus’ perceived humanity, but little else. Had Mark simply wanted to show that Jesus was human and could lose his temper occasionally, there would be no need to send him all the way to Tyre to do it. There would be no need to make so certain that the person Jesus was dealing with was a Gentile and a woman. None of our primary interpreters argue that the peculiarities of this story suggest that it is historical, only Ringe (1985, 69). In fact, Placher, when quoting Ringe, leaves out the claim to historicity (2010, 104). Due to its failure to explain these otherwise extraneous details in the narrative, this reading is unsatisfying. Jesus Is Playing Another method for dealing with Jesus’ disturbing behavior in this passage is to deny that it is in fact disturbing. After all, so much of the meaning is contained in the tone, and that tone is Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 8 lost when Jesus’ words are converted into text. “The same word,” Barclay asserts, “can be a deadly insult and an affectionate address, according to the tone of voice. We can call someone ‘an old rascal’ in a voice of contempt or a voice of affection” (2001, 207). Jesus is not insulting the Syrophoenician woman. He is only playing a game, he is only giving her a little goodnatured teasing. This reading deals with the three questions we identified as problems by attacking the premises of the first two. It only appears that Jesus is refusing the woman’s request. In fact, he has already decided to heal her daughter, but he wants to give her the chance to win an argument with him. Furthermore, Jesus only appears to insult the woman. In truth he is only teasing her. Since Jesus never really denies the request, and since he never actually insults her, he never actually changes his mind to exorcize her daughter. This protects Jesus from any sin or culpability in the rejection and insult, and it also maintains that Jesus is unchanging by relying on Jesus’ omniscience to shield him from discredit. Of all the interpretations I explore in this article, this one seems most concerned with protecting the orthodoxy of a high Christology. Barclay, not surprisingly, best exemplifies this orthodox argument. He defends Jesus on several fronts. While initially arguing that there is no way to get around the fact that calling the woman a dog is an insult, he then proceeds to try get around that fact. He says that the diminutive form of the Greek word changes the meaning of the word from a scavenging street dog to a beloved house pet (2001, 206). He then proceeds with his argument about tone: “Without a doubt, his tone of voice made all the difference… Jesus’ tone took all the poison out of the word” (207). Continuing with his theme of tone, Barclay not only dismisses the negative Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 9 meaning of dog, but also sets up the entire incident as Jesus giving the woman a chance to shine:3 The woman was a Greek, and the Greeks had a gift of repartee; and she saw at once that Jesus was speaking with a smile… So the woman said, ‘I know the children are fed first, but can’t I even get the scraps the children throw away?’ And Jesus loved it. Here was a sunny faith that would not take no for an answer, here was a woman with the tragedy of an ill daughter at home, and there was still light enough in her heart to reply with a smile (207). How exactly Barclay knows that this banter was so good-natured and cheery is a question left unanswered. Presumably he, like many others, can simply not imagine Jesus behaving with anything but the best of intentions, cannot imagine Jesus ever denying asked-for healing or hurling unearned insults, and so he fills the gap accordingly. The solution is to plaster a smile on Jesus’ face, changing him from a momentarily cruel healer into a jolly jokester. This does answer all three questions of our problem, but unfortunately, as Placher points out, “Nothing in the text justifies such interpretations” (2010, 105). There is no textual clue whatsoever that points to this argument being all in good fun. Furthermore, Barclay’s reading promotes the ethically questionable idea that if one does not receive what we want from God in prayer, it must be because one did not ask cheerfully enough; if one experiences tragedy, it must be because one did not put on a happy face. Wright also makes an argument based on tone, saying, “The tone throughout, though urgent and (on the woman’s part) desperate, is nevertheless that of teasing banter” (2004, 95). Again, how Wright discerns the tone of this passage is left unanswered. I am left to assume that he concludes the tone to be that of “teasing banter” because any other tone would be 3 Placher, in arguing against this sort of reading, notes the interpretation of John Chrysostom that Jesus, being omniscient, knew beforehand that the woman would respond wittily, and so gave her the chance to receive praise from him for her remark, not just to receive the requested healing. Placher surmises that, while this is more grounded in the text than is the argument about tone, it still “makes her just an actor in the performance Jesus has all-knowingly staged” (2010 105). Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 10 theologically unacceptable. Any other tone would leave Jesus culpable. Therefore, the tone must be a teasing tone. While this interpretation that Jesus is only playing does manage to answer our problem, it seems rather contrived. Nothing in the text can be used to argue for the teasing tone that is essential to making this interpretation work. It seems far too easy — and far too convenient for the purpose of exonerating Jesus — to simply assert that this must all be just good-natured ribbing. For failing to give textual evidence and for seeming so blatantly apologetic for Christological orthodoxy, this reading is unsatisfying. Jesus Has a More Important Mission A third way of handling our problem is by reading the exorcism of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter as outside the scope of Jesus’ primary mission. Jesus refuses the request because he is wary of being distracted from his true calling. The fact that he eventually relents signals that the Christian mission will later be expanded from its Jewish beginning to include all nations. Williamson argues that this pericope is primarily a means of handling the problem that Jesus dealt almost exclusively with Jews, while the later Christian movement was dealing increasingly with Gentiles: Jesus’ initial rebuff of the woman… affirms the priority of the Jews in Jesus’ mission. The woman’s response (v. 28) allows that priority to stand but persistently asks for attention to Gentiles also. Jesus’ granting of her request (v. 29) approves the woman’s attitude and provides for the early church a warrant for its mission to the Gentiles by grounding that mission in the earthly ministry of Jesus himself (2009, 138). Williamson shows little interest in explaining the character problem in this passage. Instead, this pericope is simply a means of providing scriptural cover for the church’s Gentile mission while explaining why Jesus worked in a mostly Jewish context. By deemphasizing the narrative and Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 11 characterization, and by emphasizing ecclesiastical motivation, Williamson is able to negate the problem of Jesus’ behavior, making him not a round character, but simply a cardboard-cutout vehicle for pushing late first-century missiology. Wright takes a somewhat different approach but using the same theme of the priority of Jesus’ mission. For him, Jesus has a very specific mission as the Jewish Messiah for inaugurating God’s kingdom. To begin a medical mission in Gentile territory would be a dangerous distraction from this all-important kingdom mission. Jesus refuses to help this woman because he cannot afford to be drawn away from his designated path. Jesus does, though, eventually make an exception here, and this exception serves as a sign that he was serious about changing the definitions of clean and unclean. Just as he had argued to redefine clean and unclean in Mk 7:1-23, now in the next pericope, he acts to redefine purity as it relates to Jew and Gentile. For the time being, he cannot afford to expand the point by reaching out to more Gentiles, but once Jesus completes his mission at the cross, the short-term urgency of his mission as Messiah no longer exists, and Jesus’ mission is rightfully (and according to plan) extended to Gentiles, as anticipated by this event. Wright argues further that the faith proclamation of the centurion at the crucifixion is the proof that the completion of Jesus’ mission at the cross ends the temporary prohibition on reaching out to Gentiles (2004, 95-96). It is not that Jesus is rejecting the needs of Gentiles, it is just that he needs to finish his Messiah-mission before he can give real attention to them. This does serve to explain why Jesus rejects the woman’s request and then accepts it, though it does make for a rather schizophrenic Jesus. If Wright’s interpretation is correct, then would we not expect Jesus to say something more like, “The son of man has come to endure suffering, and nothing must serve to distract him from the appointed plan. However, the time Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 12 will come when the kingdom of God will reach to all nations…” If it were just a matter of the priority of Jesus’ mission as the Jewish Messiah, then why does Jesus insult the woman? Wright cannot explain this second question in reference to the urgency of Jesus’ mission. He must, instead, as we have seen, rely on an argument of a teasing tone. But if Jesus is so intent about the specificity of his mission, then why would he be so jokey in explaining its serious urgency? Urgency and teasing seem like rather incompatible moods. Furthermore, if Jesus’ mission is so urgent, what is he doing up in Tyre in the first place? If the five minutes it would take to exorcize this unclean spirit is such a distraction, then how can we explain Jesus taking several days off to slum in Gentile territory? Perhaps we could say that he does not want to be mobbed with other Tyrian requests, but mobs have never kept Jesus from slipping away in the night before. Appealing to the primacy of Jesus’ Jewish mission does seek to address questions one and three, why Jesus rejects and then accepts the woman’s request. However, it either ignores narrative and characterization altogether, or it fails to maintain internal consistency and spawns more narrative problems. For failing to explain Jesus’ use of insulting language and for falling short of detailing why Jesus changes his mind instead of asserting the priority of the Jewish mission but still agreeing to perform the exorcism up front, this reading is unsatisfying. Jesus Is Bested Up to this point we have explored interpretations which assume that the encounter with the Syrophoenician woman did not change Jesus. He knew all along what his mission was and he stuck to it. At best, Jesus was jarred from a momentary hardness of heart, but his identity was not substantially changed. Now, though, we will turn to interpretations that assume that Jesus Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 13 was in fact changed by his dialogue with the Syrophoenician woman. The most generic of these is the claim that Jesus is bested in argument by this woman. Donahue and Harrington remark broadly on the doubly unique nature of this episode: “Just as Jesus’ initial response is uniquely harsh, the response of the woman is the sole place where Jesus is ‘bested’ in verbal repartee” (2002, 234). This acknowledgement of the woman’s skill at challenge and riposte is the first step in allowing that Jesus may have been changed by the encounter. If she actually bests him, it means that he was wrong and that she corrected him. Both Tolbert and Placher note the woman’s uniquely effective verbal skill in making their cases. Tolbert remarks: Indeed, she is the only character in the entire Gospel of Mark to best Jesus in an argument… Her unconventional behavior, which initially draws the dominant male’s wrath, by its increasing boldness, cleverness, and basic moral correctness eventually subverts that wrath into agreement. Jesus has already taught others that religious customs should not stand in the way of doing good for those in need (see 2:23-28; 3:1-6). Now he must be taught that social conventions should not do so either (1998, 356). According to Tolbert, the lesson Jesus learns is a lesson about gender relations, but the important point for us to note now is that she is the one who teaches him. It is her wit that turns him around. She is the only character in the gospel who ever manages to change Jesus. Placher makes a similar case in an interpretation that he attributes to Martin Luther: Jesus’ attitude to Gentiles will never again be the same. If Mark did not show us Jesus’ initial harsh remark, we could not see the grace with which Jesus concedes defeat in an argument. That the woman does win the argument is a point any valid interpretation needs to acknowledge. To say that that could not happen is to deny Jesus’ full humanity. Here yet again humanity and divinity come together in a single narrative of a single agent—the same Jesus who loses the argument can cure her daughter. It is her faith, though, that lies at the center of the story (2010, 106). For Placher, the issue is ethnicity, not gender, but the emphasis on the woman’s action is the same. It is her faith that turns Jesus around and that changes the way he operates from this point on. Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 14 This is a reasonable interpretation. It takes seriously the conflict in the text. It accounts for why Jesus shifts from refusal to acceptance, our third question. Unfortunately, it is also an incomplete interpretation. It does not adequately explain why Jesus makes the initial rejection or why he uses insulting language. These things are taken for granted, but they are not explained simply by pointing out that Jesus is bested by the woman. We will explore Tolbert’s explanation for those first two questions below. Placher appeals to some generic sense of Jesus’ humanity but does not detail what it is that that humanity implies. Presumably it has to do with some sort of learned cultural bias toward Gentiles, but this is not fully fleshed out. As we will see in the following section, suggesting that Jesus carried biases toward Gentiles before this episode and that afterward he did not is somewhat problematic. So the claim that the Syrophoenician woman bests Jesus is supported by the text, it is internally consistent, and it does explain why Jesus changed his mind about performing the exorcism. However, because of its failure to fill all the gaps and explain why Jesus initially refused and why he used derogatory language, this reading is unsatisfying. Jesus Is Racist Miguel De La Torre (2011) builds on the idea that the woman teaches Jesus something (though he does not focus so much on her besting him in argument) to suggest that what Jesus is cured of is racism. Jesus is a product of his culture, and one of the things that he learned from his culture was racism. To deny this would be to deny his humanity. Overcoming this racism is the lesson he learns from the Syrophoenician woman.4 4 A few caveats are necessary. First, unlike all of the other interpretations we are exploring, this one is not a biblical commentary but rather an essay that is drawing upon the biblical story in order to make an ethical point about racism in modern America. I am not including much of the main argument of the essay because I am interested here in the interpretation of the story, not in its real-world application. Second, De La Torre is actually interpreting Matthew’s version of this pericope. However, his exegesis is not so minutely detailed that it loses coherence when applied to Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 15 De La Torre argues that Jesus, in the fullness of his humanity, learned a prejudice against non-Jews from his culture of origin. He learned an attitude of Jewish superiority. When this ethnic prejudice came into conflict with the needs of the Tyrian woman, Jesus has a moment of change and self-discovery: To deny this woman a healing and call her a dog reveals the racism his culture taught him. But Jesus, unlike so many within the dominant social structure of today, was willing to hear the words of this woman of color, and learn from her. And thanks to her, Jesus’ ministry was radically changed… Her remark shocked Jesus into realizing that faith was not contingent on a person’s ethnicity (2011). Jesus carried cultural biases before this incident that prevented him from reaching out to Gentiles. The woman in Tyre sets him straight. From that point on, Jesus is able to reach out to Gentiles. De La Torre extends the point by arguing that the chronology of the gospel does indeed support this thesis: Up to this point, the gospel message was exclusively for the Jews. In Matthew 10:5, Jesus sends his 12 disciples on their first missionary venture. He clearly instructs them, ‘Do not turn your steps into other nations, nor into Samaritan cities, rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ Yet five chapters later, Jesus encounters the Canaanite woman who existed on the margins of his society. She challenged Jesus with the good news that healing was not the exclusive property of one ethnic group. Instead, healing should be available to all who come. Jesus learned something about his mission from this woman of color. How do we know this? By the end of his ministry when he gives the Great Commission, he commands his followers to go out to all nations, not just the people of Israel (2011). It seems a compelling argument. Before this, Jesus performs healings and exorcisms for Jews. He feeds the five thousand in Jewish territory. After this event, he proceeds on a missionary tour Mark. Third, since De La Torre’s main aim is to ethically apply this passage to Latino/a issues in the United States, he occasionally applies anachronistic terms to the biblical text. Racism, for example, does not emerge as the concept we know today until the modern era. To call Jesus ethinicist or bigoted would make more historical sense. Also, to call this woman a “woman of color” is equally anachronistic. However, if we forgive him these overreaches, we can still appreciate his argument about Jesus’ learned ethnic biases, what, if it occurred today, we would indeed likely call racism. Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 16 through the Gentile Decapolis, exorcizing and healing and feeding the four thousand. It all seems very neat and tidy. Unfortunately, there is a glitch in this explanation. Contrary to what De La Torre claims, Jesus has in fact offered healing to Gentiles before he encounters the Gentile woman in Tyre. In Mark, he has already healed the Gerasene Demoniac (Mk 5:1-20). In Matthew, which De La Torre is reading, Jesus has already healed at least three Gentiles: the Centurion’s servant (Mt 8:513) and the two Gadarene Demoniacs (Mt 8:28-34). If it is Jesus’ ethnic prejudice that prevents him from offering healing to this Gentile woman and leads him to call her a dog, then why does this ethnic bias not manifest itself in these previous cases? Why does Jesus exorcize the Gentile demoniacs, who do not even ask for exorcism, and then refuse the reasonable and humble request of this Gentile mother? Filling the gap with racism has created a bulge elsewhere in the narrative. Claiming that Jesus is influenced by ethnic prejudice which is later corrected by his encounter with the Gentile woman in Tyre does answer all three of our questions. Jesus rejects the request and uses derogatory language because of his learned cultural bias, and he changes his mind because he learns from the woman that God’s grace is for people of all ethnicities. However, this argument is not consistent with the actual chronology of the gospel story. Because it fails to account for Jesus’ previous exorcism of Gentiles, this reading is unsatisfying. Jesus Is Sexist So perhaps it is not racism or ethnic bias that causes Jesus to reject the Syrophoenician woman, but rather sexism. The argument runs similarly. Before the encounter with the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus holds a culturally learned sexism that prevents him from offering Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 17 healing to women. The Syrophoenician woman teaches Jesus that grace is open to all, not just to men. Afterward, Jesus extends his ministry to women. Tolbert puts forward this case by appealing to previous healings to systematically eliminate anti-Gentile sentiment as a motivation for Jesus’ actions and words: Like Jairus, who also bowed down before Jesus to make his request, she is interceding in behalf of her child, not herself; but unlike Jairus, she is not a Jewish male of high status who can speak openly to Jesus in public. [Hence her coming to him in the house.] Moreover, Jesus’ response to her is strikingly different from his response to Jairus, whom he had willingly joined at once to go to the sick child. To this foreign woman, Jesus expresses his refusal to accede to her request in a disdainful metaphor, which compares her and her daughter to little dogs who are not to be fed the children’s bread. Since Jesus has already healed a foreigner, the demoniac from the Decapolis (5:1-20), the woman’s nationality and religious affiliation alone are insufficient to explain his negative response or the disparagement with which it is delivered. While her nationality, religion, and gender distinguish her from Jairus, only her gender differentiates her from the demoniac. (1998, 356) It cannot be ethnic bias, so it must be gender bias. As we noted above, Jesus has already offered ministry to a Gentile. However, as we saw with the argument for racism, there is another similar flaw in the argument for sexism. Though Tolbert has been careful to account for previous healing of Gentiles, she has not made any account for previous healing of women. Though she mentions on this same page the story of the hemorrhaging woman, sandwiched into the story of the healing of Jairus’ daughter, Tolbert does not explain why it is that she is healed without complaint. Now, true, the hemorrhaging woman does not ask Jesus for healing: she sneaks it from him. But when Jesus discovers who it is that has been healed, he does not rebuke or scold her; he praises her for her faith and grants her a verbal healing (Mk 5:34). If Jesus is willing to let her be healed, then how can we say that he later refuses the Syrophoenician woman on account of sexism? Tolbert does nuance this argument, though. As she sees it, what is problematic about the Syrophoenician woman is that she inappropriately acts as the pater familias, brokering healing on behalf of a family member: “Even though the foreign woman’s setting and posture were Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 18 conventional, the request itself—coming from a woman—was shameful, drawing both Jesus’ refusal and disdain” (1998, 356). She bowed before him as a woman should. She approached him in the privacy of the house, as any respectable woman would. Nevertheless, the mere fact of her being a woman and making a request is what sets Jesus over the edge. Though she does not address this problem, Tolbert’s framing does get her out of the pickle of explaining why the hemorrhaging woman was healed: she did not request healing from Jesus, and it is the request that was stepping out of a woman’s proper place. However, is it really reasonable to say that a woman humbly supplicating Jesus in private for healing for her daughter was more culturally problematic than a ritually-unclean, bleeding woman sneaking up and actually touching Jesus in public? Tolbert herself makes the point that only shameless women interacted with men in public; that is why the Syrophoenician woman has to approach Jesus in the house. How can we possibly then argue that the Syrophoenician woman stepped over gender boundaries but the hemorrhaging woman did not? If Jesus does not learn the evils of sexism until he engages with the Syrophoenician woman, then why does he not rebuke the hemorrhaging woman who was stepping out of her place? Filling the gap with sexism has created another ripple in the narrative which cannot be smoothed out. Like De La Torre’s racism argument above, Tolbert’s sexism argument answers all three of our questions. She even goes on to point out the chronological problems with an argument for ethnic bias. However, she does not apply this same chronological analysis to her own work. For failing to account for Jesus’ completely graceful treatment of the hemorrhaging woman, this reading is unsatisfying.5 5 Incidentally, Wright goes out of his way to argue against “feminist agendas” that claim the Syrophoenician woman corrected Jesus’ prejudice. “This is hardly Mark’s intention,” he insists, arguing that since the woman accepts Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 19 Conclusion We have explored six approaches to explaining the problem of Jesus’ treatment of the Syrophoenician woman, none of which, I argue, is ultimately satisfying in explaining why Jesus refused her, why he insulted her, and why he eventually granted her request. Either they do not adequately answer all three of these questions, or they are not fully consistent with the text of Mark. None of these, or any combination of them, can fill the gap and cleanly and tidily explain Jesus’ behavior and identity. What is perhaps most interesting, though, from a reader-response perspective, is that despite these interpreters’ inability to explain away Jesus’ identity problem in this pericope, none of them can leave it unexplained. None can leave the gap unfilled. Even those who work the hardest to exonerate Jesus and insist that Jesus’ identity is consistent must at least briefly acknowledge that this behavior seems inconsistent with Jesus’ theological or narrative identity. No amount of lexical research, narrative criticism, or social-science research can wholly and definitively fill the gap and make sense of this identity problem. Perhaps we never can fully explain why it is that Jesus acts the way he does in this story. Perhaps we never can unravel how his actions here fit with his larger identity. Perhaps we can never fill the gap without exploding both narrative and Christology. But the fact that so many have tried and failed to do so highlights just how shockingly different Jesus’ identity here is from his identity in Mark or in the general understandings of Christian believers. The way that this Jesus treats this Syrophoenician woman seems categorically unlike Jesus. Jesus should not be cruel to this woman, nor should he refuse her. It is not the Christlike thing to do. But is this a problem with the parable, or is it a problem with our constructions of Jesus’ identity? Put another way, is this pericope a problem characterization as a dog this pericope has nothing to do with correcting Jesus (2004, 95). In his Mark study guide, he spends one of only three special exegetical notes asserting this point (2009, 44). Journal of Religion, Identity, and Politics, 2014 20 for Jesus’ identity, or is it the exception that proves the rule of his identity? Should it make readers question the “niceness” they associate with Jesus, or should its very incongruity with our construction of Jesus’ identity prove the lasting power of that construction? 21 Bibliography Barclay, William. The Gospel of Mark. The New Daily Study Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Burkill, T. A. "The Historical Development of the Story of the Syrophoenician Woman." Novum Testamentum 9, no. 3 (1967): 161-177. Collins, Adela Yarbro. Mark: A Commentary. Hermeneia: A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. Edited by Harold W. Attridge. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. De La Torre, Miguel. "Was Jesus a Racist?" Associated Baptist Press, February 23, 2009. http://www.abpnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3870&Itemid =9 accessed October 30 2011. Donahue, John R. and Daniel J. Harrington. The Gospel of Mark. Sacra Pagina. Vol. 2. Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2002. Fowler, Robert M. “Reader Response Criticism: Figuring Mark’s Reader.” Chap. 3, in Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, edited by Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore, 59-94. Second ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. Malina, Bruce. J. and Richard. L. Rohrbaugh. Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels. Second ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. Placher, William C. Mark. Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. Ringe, Sharon H. "A Gentile Woman's Story." Chap. 5, in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, edited by Letty M. Russell, 65-72. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1985. Tolbert, Mary Ann. "Mark." In Women's Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe. Expanded ed., 350-62. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998. Williamson, Lamar Jr. Mark. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. Wright, N. T. Mark: 20 Studies for Individuals and Groups. N. T. Wright for Everyone Bible Study Guides. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009. ______. Mark for Everyone. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.