A feminist companion to Mark

TLDR: A Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings as mentioned in this paper is a collection of essays and commentaries on the Gospel of Mark, with a focus on women's empowerment.

Abstract: A Feminist Companion to Mark, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marianne Blickenstaff. Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings 2. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. Pp. 261. $29.95. In my office I have divided my books into various categories. One of these categories is labeled "biblical studies" and includes commentaries, monographs, and journals related to that field. Another one of these categories is labeled "theory" and includes books on literary criticism, feminism, and postcolonial theory. This book will definitely find its place in the former category stacked alongside other commentaries and monographs on the Gospel of Mark. That a "feminist" title belongs more properly among my biblical studies monographs than among my theoretical texts is a testimony both to the centrality of the feminist perspective in current exegesis and to the nature of this collection of essays itself, which seeks to illumine the text just as much, if not more, than it seeks to address modern feminist concerns. Even though A Feminist Companion to Mark is modeled on Athalya Brenner's Feminist Companion to the Bible, this collection should be essential reading for all serious students of Mark, including those few scholars who are still wont to dismiss feminist readings as "a fad" or "political." In fact, what strikes me most about this collection is the willingness of the authors to move toward a less unified feminist reading of the text, developing instead a more nuanced, even ambiguous approach to a text that admittedly was formed in a patriarchal world. Joanna Dewey, who should be considered one of the pioneers in the feminist study of the Bible, takes on a text that is not normally associated with the feminist reading of Mark: the injunction "to deny oneself (8:34). She notes that many traditional readings of this text seem to make suffering redemptive, a perspective that has tended to encourage Christian women to tolerate injustice as part of their "self-denial." But Dewey reads this saying in an ancient context with a very different understanding of the "self." In that context the self would be understood in terms of traditional ties within the kinship group so that "to deny self, then, is to deny one's kin." With this reading, denying oneself is not so much encouraging self-sacrifice as it is encouraging one to follow Jesus-a move that will invite persecution. Dewey argues that this reading better fits Mark's overall message on suffering, namely, that suffering is evil and will be brought to an end by the coming of the new age. Deborah Krause offers a reading of the healing of Peter's mother-in-law that goes against the grain of some earlier feminist readings of this text (e.g., Tolbert and Selvidge). These other readings note that "serving" in Mark's Gospel is something the angels do for Jesus and something that Jesus encourages of his disciples-the very thing the mother-in-law does upon her healing. However, Krause argues that the woman's life was not transformed by her encounter with Jesus (i.e., she was not liberated from her traditional position) but had to return to her culturally prescribed role. Still, Krause sees a "utopian" moment in the woman's healing. Wendy Cotter considers the stories of the "Woman with the Hemorrhage" and the "Raising of Jairus' Daughter." She notes that these stories seem to have been linked in the pre-Markan tradition, and she asks what this might mean. She analyzes the hemorrhaging woman in terms of Mark's apology for her behavior by comparing it to standards of female behavior found in Valerius Maximus, Pliny, and Tertullian. seen in this light, Jesus' response to the woman indicates that he is free from "the need for public honors, and also from the need to dominate women" (p. 60). Cotter analyzes the Jairus story by comparing it to other ancient resurrections performed by Asclepius, Hercules, Elijah, Elisha, Apollonius of Tyana, Empedocles, and Asclepiades. …