Welcome to the University of Oslo and the Faculty of Theology and to this first part of
Cand. theol. Ellen Aasland Reinertsen´s doctoral examination for the degree of Philosophie
Doctor under the Faculty of Theology. My name is Anders Runesson and I'm the Dean and Chair
of today's disputation. The doctoral examination consists of two parts. First the trial lecture of
45 minutes on a prescribed topic given by the PhD adjudication committee and then after a break the
public defense of the dissertation props in the parable plots the significance of intersectional
female characters in attested and possible parable reception. The adjudication committee has
consisted of Professor Annette Mertz Protestant Theological University of
Groningen, Professor Caroline van der Stiegele, Tilburg University the Netherlands and senior
lecturer Wim Munchwist Faculty of Theology University of Oslo. Before I give the word to
Ellen Aasland Reinertsen please note that after the trial lecture there will be a break and we
will start with the defense at 12 noon sharp. I will now invite Cand. Theol., Ellen Aasland Reinertsen
to give her trial lecture with the prescribed title given by the committee an intersectional
blending analysis of mark 7 24 to 30. Please Ellen.
A Greek Syrophoenician wife asks the Jewish Jesus to help her daughter who is demon-possessed.
Jesus refuses by naming the mother and her daughter dogs. However after the mother's clever arguing
Jesus changes his mind and heals the little daughter. The Norwegian theologian Stine Kiel Saga
has shown that when priests in the church of Norway preach about this stories parallel texts in the
Gospel of Matthew they spiritualize the story and employ it to preach about missionary activities
enduring faith, struggling faith or prayer. By doing so they ignore their suppression and
marginalization in the story. The biblical scholar Sharon Ringe has analyzed the feminist scholars
in the 1980s and 90s herself included interpreted this woman as the embodiment of all categories of
the outcast and oppressed persons to whom the gospel suggests much of Jesus's ministry was directed.
Mark has placed this story after a dispute about purity regulations Jesus has with Pharisees and
scribes and the daughter has an unclean spirit because of this this story has often been connected
to impurity. Jesus calls this wife and daughter impure dogs because they are unclean female non-Jews
contaminated by an impure demon according to this view. She is a woman a gentile and thus a foreigner
impure nameless kneeling before Jesus in desperation over her sick daughter like a dog licking the hand
who beats her. In such interpretations the symmetry between her and the pure named powerful Jesus
who is a Jewish man could hardly have been greater. More recent theories about power and oppression
like intersectionality allows us to see greater cultural complexity in Jewish and Greek or Roman
antiquity and that power and vulnerability are more complicated than previously assumed.
By analyzing this text with intersectional blending I follow Kiel's saga and do not
ignore the suppression and marginalization in the story. At the same time I will ask about its
complex power dynamics. First I will present the theories and methods I employ then I will
then after a reflection on my own situatedness I will analyze the text by using intersectional
blending. I will especially focus on the dispute between Jesus and the Greek Syrophoenician wife
as intersectionally blended storytelling. I conclude with a reflection on how my approach
contributes to the study of this text and about the tools scholars employ in biblical scholars
biblical studies. Intersectional blending is a method I developed during my PhD research
where I combined elements from conceptual blending and intersectionality and advanced them into a
new method for analyzing parables. I employ intersectional blending to study for example
how a story about a wife who bakes with sourdough can be perceived as a story about a divine kingdom
and possibly also about the lives of the interpreters. This is the first time this method
is employed to study a story that is not a parable or perhaps not a parable. I will come back to that later.
Conceptual blending theory derives from the cognitive study of metaphors and is developed by
Mark Turner and Giles Forcarnia. In my method I especially employ Turner's concept of double scope
stories. Turner argues that conceptualization of narratives happen when readers or listeners map
and blend two different and sometimes opposing stories in order to create a new story.
In my dissertation I employ this to study how recipients can interpret a parable story
for example about a wife who bakes as a story about the divine kingdom.
According to conceptual blending we do not only understand the more abstract and unknown
a divine kingdom in light of the more concrete and familiar a story about baking.
Meaning making goes in both directions.
The result is also not that one story is just added to another but rather that something new
and creative happens. When stories are blended the result is a new story.
Hugo Lundhuyg was first at applying blending theory to reception studies of the New Testament.
Recently a growing number of biblical scholars applied the theory.
While Turner is mainly interested in how we blend stories in texts I analyze how stories from interpreters
situatedness affect their meaning making. Stories from their historical cultural and social contexts
their experiences life stories and other stories they might know.
To analyze this I employ insights from intersectionality.
Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989
and has in recent years become the leading theory in feminist studies.
The theory applies the metaphor of intersection to investigate discrimination power and in recent years
also identity as independent interdependent of various social culture factors such as gender, class,
social status, ethnicity or race, ability, sexuality and age.
Only the past 20 years intersectionality has been employed in biblical studies.
Earlier scholars often considered women a separate analytical category when they studied female characters.
Of particular value to my work is the intersectional New Testament research of
Elisabeth Schisler Fiorenza, Marianne Bielankarczow and Anders Martinsen.
In 2019 Gail A. Yee in her presidential address to the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature
encouraged all biblical scholars to use intersectionality in their research.
She did this so that they should become aware of how their own complex situations of privilege
and or oppression influence what they look for and how they interpret biblical texts.
Thus from being marginal in biblical studies intersectionality has become part of the field's
main theoretical and methodological discussions.
Although still only a small number of biblical scholars apply it.
Intersectionality comes from the struggle of black American women to study their oppression from multiple social factors.
As the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements have made us aware of
just being black or a black woman are in many places deadly.
It has also made me aware that the color of my skin is not neutral.
Growing up in a traditional part of Norway I've had some experience with gender discrimination.
Later I have experienced both that and ageism in the church and in broader society
and I've had the experience of speaking a minority dialect in Oslo.
I'm also a white middle class heterosexual cisgender married able bodied state employed scholar
who's also an ordained priest in the majority church in Norway.
In addition I am a mother to a daughter and a son.
I'm a daughter myself. I am a wife and a dog owner as well as a sister friend colleague and neighbor.
We filter new information through what we already know and who we are.
Will my privileges make me overlook the suppression and marginalization in this market story?
Or will my vulnerabilities make me see only that which resembles those?
Will I be able to understand this story's complexities?
I employ intersectionality because I need theory and method that can help me become aware of
how my own embedded and embodied situatedness influence my interpretations.
I also do so to require a certain distance to the text.
Of particular value in seeing what I might be blind to
is Mary J. Matsuda's intersectional method of asking the other question.
The way I try to understand the interconnectedness of all forms of subordination
is through a method I call ask the other question.
When I see something that looks racist I ask where is the patriarchy in this?
When I see something that looks sexist I ask where is the heterosexism in this?
When I see something that looks homophobic I ask where are the class interests in this?
Working in coalition forces us to look for both the obvious and non-obvious relationships of domination
helping us to realize that no form of subordination ever stands alone.
In my combined intersectional blending I see interpretation as complex processes
where interpreters blend elements from biblical stories
and understand them in light of their own varied embodied and embedded stories.
Intersectionally situated stories, intertextual stories and hermeneutical stories.
Intersectional blending allows me to analyze not only how a story about a baker wife
becomes the story about a divine kingdom but possibly also about the various lives of the interpreters.
It helps us analyze how a story can be blended in many ways.
In this case how in Mark 7 24 to 30 Jesus's storytelling and the storytelling of the Syrophoenician wife
are blended in different ways.
I will focus on a number of intersectional factors in this analysis.
Some of these are mentioned and in other cases we need to ask the other question
and employ historically informed imagination to study them.
When we analyze the story about Jesus and the Greek Syrophoenician wife with insights from blending theory
we see that this story about them connects to another story about children, bread and little dogs.
The story is first told by Jesus and then by the wife.
This resembles the way parable narratives connect to their framing.
I have not found any scholars who call this text a parable.
Now we have found one scholar, really!
I should have found one scholar who calls this text a parable.
But it was not in compendium. We will talk more about that later.
Much more recent, okay, exciting.
However, applying blending and in other cases as well lets us see that it has many similarities with parables
where a concrete and perhaps familiar story Jesus tells is surrounded by one or more interpretive frame.
So maybe Anette Mertz and I have found a new parable with interesting intersectional female characters.
Or perhaps it does not matter whether this is a parable or not.
According to blending theory, meaning making always happens through blending.
Let us look closer at the blends in Jesus' storytelling in this text.
The framing story about Jesus and a Greek-Syriphoenician wife and her plea for her daughter
is compared or connected to a story about dogs should not eat the children's bread.
The outcome is a new story.
The mother and her daughter are dogs and not children, therefore Jesus should not help them.
The core element of this blended story seems to be that the mother and daughter are connected to dogs and blended as dogs.
Is it a bad thing to compare someone to a dog as Jesus does?
Many dogs today are beloved members of families.
They are cuddled, played with, cared for and searched for by the entire community when they are lost.
At the same time, my experience with dogs lets me know that I would not have liked to be one.
To be obedient, to not be able to eat when I want or go where I want
and not be allowed to jump up and lick visitors in the face, which I'm also not allowed to do as a human.
To call someone a dog is also abusive.
It might have racial connotations or religious implications when people are called unfaithful dogs
or gendered or sexual shaming when girls or women are called bitches.
Scholarship for a long time thought Judaism in the time of Jesus saw dogs as unclean animals.
Recently, however, Mark Naines and other scholars argued that Hebrew Bible and other ancient Jewish sources do not support this.
Like in the broader Greek or Roman world, dogs were parts of life.
Sometimes described in positive ways as faithful or as part of a group.
Other times used as a general insult about enemies or to slur someone as vulgar, promiscuous or shameless.
That Jesus names this mother and her daughter dogs and refuses to help them has trouble interpreted from the beginning of this story's reception history, including me.
When Jesus blends his stories, he seems to evoke stories from his own social cultural situatedness about dogs as the adversaries of children.
These dogs seem to be far away. People throw food to them.
Maybe he thinks of scavenger wild dogs from the cities in this area who steal food and maybe scare children.
Jesus is in a borderland in this story. He has traveled north from the Jewish Galilee into the region of Tyre.
Tyre was a Hellenized city, a port city and the capital of the Roman province of Syria in what is today southern Lebanon.
The region of Tyre included the rural areas surrounding the city.
As in most borderlands, the population was mixed. Both Jews and Syrophoenicians lived there.
Here, Jesus hides in a house like Jesus often conceals himself in the Gospel of Mark.
We do not know whether this is a Jewish or a Syrophoenician house, perhaps a Jewish house since no ethnicity is mentioned,
which is not the case for the wife who immediately finds him.
This wife is presented as Hellenize, Syrophoenica togenae.
Earlier, scholars have translated Hellenize, Gentile and seen this as the reason why Jesus names her dog.
These interpreters seem to connect Jesus' storytelling to stories in the Hebrew Bible where the people from Tyre and
Sidon are called enemies of the Israelites and possibly about dogs used as metaphors for enemies.
Hellenize might, however, also be translated Greek. While many feminist scholars have seen this as a poor,
marginalized woman, we could ask the other question and inquire whether she perhaps is rich.
In her house that she returns to, we hear about furniture, a couch, and she speaks of a table which suggests that she is at least not poor.
Gert Theisen suggests that this woman comes from a cultural privilege class of Greek speaking city dwellers in Tyre.
A Lebanese student I met at the conference proudly pronounced that she is a descendant of these New Testament Syrophoenicians.
According to Theisen, the Syrophoenician population in the cities were better off than the rural Jewish population in the surrounding areas.
He proposes that the Hellenized city dwellers may have used their financial means to buy up the grain supply in the countryside and in this way,
take bread out of the mouths of the rural Jews. Such an intersectional story could blend with Hebrew Bible stories of greedy, violent dogs.
In this interpretation, Jesus says, like this urban elite, the Syrophoenician mother and daughter are dogs who are asking for something that is not theirs.
The woman is further presented as a gynae, most often a free married woman, a wife, with a status and relative independence that came with marriage in Roman society in the first century CE.
We hear that she has at least one child. She could have had more. Her status would depend upon the number of children she had.
According to the Augustan laws, Lex Julia and Lex Papia Poppea, free women who had three live births and freed women with four live births were allowed to conduct business and legal affairs on their own.
Perhaps she could also have been educated, although not many girls in Jewish and Greek or Romans antiquity received formal education.
Some did. Or is she a smart lady without formal education?
None of the New Testament texts say that Jesus was married or had children.
As Halva Moxnes suggests, if this is the case, Jesus in this respect breaks with the masculine expectations of being a part of familias, a lord of the household whom wife, children and slaves should obey.
Even though some New Testament texts suggest Jesus could read and possibly write, we do not know whether he had any formal education.
If the woman is an educated, Greek speaking, urban elite wife with more children, who is perhaps also a neighbor in the house of the house, of the people in the house where Jesus is possibly unknown,
the power balance between her and Jesus is more complex than those in former feminist interpretations.
By asking the other question, we could also inquire whether this mother perhaps was enslaved.
Slaves were the master's belongings like dogs were. Perhaps she were an elite female slave who was educated to be a tutor for her master or her master's children.
Perhaps gendered slavery plays part in Jesus's offensive slur in the same way as female dogs, bitches, were seen as shameless and sexually available, so were slaves.
Is Jesus blending a slave mother and her daughter as slave bitches that should not be helped?
She could also have been interpreted differently. Is it perhaps more likely that she would be viewed as a free woman?
Perhaps a female slave would not have dared to seek Jesus out and petition him to heal her daughter.
Would she, if she were enslaved, even be seen as the mother of her daughter, since slaves in Jewish and Greek and Roman antiquity had no legal bonds to their offspring?
The power dimensions between Jesus and the Syrophoenician wife are further complicated when age and disability intersect with the other social factors.
The Greek term used for the wife's sick daughter is figatros, a diminutive of figater daughter. She's thus a little daughter.
Although Mark could be using these two terms interchangeably, this could also signify that this is a girl before puberty.
The daughter is also called pardion, a young child, and a girl in marriageable age would perhaps be called pathenos, virgin.
Another figatros in the gospel is said to be 12 years old.
Jesus also uses diminutive about the dogs he compares to the little demon possessed daughter.
They are little dogs or puppies.
Demon possession is a common way of understanding disease in the ancient world, and we do not know what sort of disease the daughter has.
The girl who is healed by Jesus on this icon is not the Syrophoenician little girl.
I have not been able to find any images of her healing. This is of another little daughter in the gospel.
The Jewish daughter of Jairus, whom Jesus does not hesitate to heal earlier in the gospel.
Jesus comes to their house, he takes the little girl's arm and restores her to life.
With the Syrophoenician little girl, there is no touching. Jesus does not come to a house, but heals from a distance.
Anna Rebecca Solovog suggests that both disability and ethnicity are animalized and used to other the girl and therefore refuse to help her.
As a mother in a safe neighborhood in Oslo, I am able to get my children to help their need without begging.
The Syrophoenician mother throws herself down on the floor to ask for help and thus tells a story with her body.
If we had been present in the house, we would probably understand a lot about her intersectional situation based on her body language.
An elite free wife would dress and pose differently from a slave.
An educated woman familiar with public disputes might walk into an assembly another way than a person who are not.
We only get one postural cue in this text when the wife throws herself at Jesus's feet.
Jennifer Glancy points out that to lower oneself before another person was the most common visual marker of submission to superior authority in Roman antiquity.
The wife thus tells the same story about subordination with her body as she does with her voice when she calls Jesus Kyrie, Lord or master.
To be at someone's feet is also the position of a dog who is who in obedience is to come to the master's heel, as suggested by David wrote.
However, the Greek Syrophoenician's wife's bodily and verbal story moves on.
To be at someone's feet is also a student's position.
From this foot perspective, the wife continues to speak and becomes a dialogue partner of Jesus.
In all the other four gospels, Jesus always wins a dispute, as analyzed by Tyson and Annette Matz.
Here, however, the Syrophoenician wife takes over the storytelling.
She accepts Jesus's blend, the mother and her daughter are dogs.
The children should be fed before dogs.
However, however, she connects Jesus's narrative to new stories about dogs.
She blends it with stories of dogs that are close, not far away.
In these stories, which might be recognizable both today and in the ancient ancient world, dogs are not children's enemies.
Rather, they are members of the household.
They are under the children's table.
They do get parts of the children's bread when the children spill.
Namely crumbs which fall to the floor.
Possibly, we could also hear echoes of fond relationships between children and their pets,
even that children might slip bread, pieces of bread to their friends on the floor.
When these new stories are connected to the blend, the outcome becomes another.
In the new blended story, even though the daughter and her mother are dogs, Jesus should help the daughter.
We do not know why the mother wants Jesus to help her daughter.
It could be because she loves her.
It could also be because of fear or shame for her illness.
It could have economic motivation.
If the daughter is demon possessed, they might not be able to marry her off.
If the daughter is enslaved, the mother might be afraid that her master would dispose of her if she's not useful.
Nevertheless, Jesus accepts her new blended story and heals her daughter.
However, in this complex intersectional situation, Jesus heals as a distance as the dogs in his story are removed from the children.
As a theologian, as an intersectional feminist, as a teacher of homiletics for students who might become priests,
I am interested in characters and biblical stories we can identify with and the theology we derive from these stories.
Throughout these texts' reception history, it has given rise to much theology and identification.
In antiquity, some church fathers saw this wife as the ecclesia, the church,
who prayed for her gentile children that they should be saved from their demonic pagan unfaith.
For Martin Luther, she is an example of persistent faith in the grace of God,
even in situations where it seems like God is against you.
Kiel Saga has shown that these modes of interpreting still live on in the preaching in the Church of Norway.
In the interpretation above, Jesus is the character that points to God.
When we do not ignore the marginalization and dominion in the text, but study it as intersecting,
it can give room for more diverse theology.
If we have more nuanced understandings of the mother, Jesus, the dogs and the daughter,
we might find renewed ways in which we, with our complex lives, might recognize ourselves.
If Jesus here shows a glimpse of God, what would that theology be?
Would it be, if you are smart and persistent enough, God will help you?
In Matthew's version of this story, Jesus praises the wife's faith,
and the faith is the reason why he heals the daughter.
In our text, however, he approves of her reasoning, her word, logos.
It's the theology, if you can argue well enough, God gives in.
Alternatively, does this story tell of a God who is moved by people's needs and stories?
Is it a God who is biological, as Sylvia de Lima Silva suggests?
What happens if we theologize about the Syriac Phoenician wife?
Her possible love for her vulnerable daughter might spark theology.
Luther uses a mother's love for a sick child to create theology when he interprets the parable
with a wife with a ten drachmas.
Luther compares this wife to a mother with many children.
This mother loves all her children equally.
However, when one of them gets sick, all her love is transferred to this one sick child.
According to Luther, Christ treasures a sinner as highly as a mother does her sick child.
A mother's or other people's protective love is also the motive in many folktales and in contemporary literature.
The Syriac Phoenician wife has often been the identification figure.
In feminist interpretations, she has been seen as a victim of Jesus's othering.
What if we ask the other question and see her as privileged and a representative of the rich elite that exploits the poor?
Nicaraguan peasants and their companions recorded in the gospel in Solentiname interpret this woman as a rich old lady who must have been an oppressor.
And they appreciate the fact that she needs to humble herself to get help for her privileged daughter.
The wife might also be an identification figure in opposite ways.
Rangini Ribera sees her as a hero and inspiration for feminists in South Asian cultures where the girl child is aborted,
killed at birth or discriminated against.
Yi's presidential address, where she urges all biblical scholars to employ intersectionality,
sparked discussions about the legacy of the theories and methods we imply in biblical studies to invest in marketization and power.
One discussion is how intersectionality rely on former academic works and methods that are embedded in ideologies of sexism and white supremacy.
This debate shares some similarities with the discussions in Karoline van der Stichel and Todd Penner's Her Master's Tools,
Feminist and Post-Colonial Engagement of Historical Critical Discourse.
Van der Stichel and Penner employ a quote from Audre Lorde, the American writer, womanist, lesbian, radical feminist, professor and civil rights activist.
What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?
It means that only the most narrow perimeter of change are possible and allowable.
For the master's tool will never dismantle the master's house.
They may never enable us to bring about genuine change.
Biblical, intersectional and post-colonial research is dependent upon the tools of our masters.
Findings and approaches which we have inherited from scholars and systems embedded in sexism and racism.
The cornerstone of this house is the Bible, which is also sometimes racist, sexist, ableist and a number of other ists.
In addition, these texts are still influential.
The Matthew version of this story will be preached about again in the Church of Norway, the fifth of March this year.
As Jorunn Öklund reasons, we cannot not inhabit of our father's house.
Van der Stichel and Penner argue that the master's tools will not easily dismantle the master's house.
It can only be done gradually, brick by brick.
I also suggest that perhaps it does not only come down to whether we destroy the master's house or let it stand,
but how we use its spaces, how we use the tools.
Who are invited in to use the tools in the house?
How do they employ them? Do they also bring new tools?
Do we tear down the fences around the garden and talk to our neighbors?
Have a big table where we discuss and dialogue, visit our neighbors and learn from them?
I have analyzed Mark 7, 24 to 30 by employing intersectional blending.
This analysis shows that the Syro-Foenician wife might have been both vulnerable because of her ethnicity
and a sick daughter and a rich, elite wife.
She might have been with or without formal education, enslaved or free, a stranger or a neighbor wife.
When Jesus in the in his storytelling blends this wife and a sick little daughter as dogs,
he engages stories about dogs as the adversaries of children.
The wife tells a story about subordination with her body and words,
but also takes over Jesus's storytelling.
When she adds new stories about close relationships between dogs and children to the blend,
the blended story and thus the outcome becomes a new one.
Even though Jesus accepts her blended story and heals her daughter,
the complex power and marginalization in the story endure.
Here I stand in my father's and mother's house.
I have analyzed an ancient complex text using both old and new tools.
My embodied and embedded situations and concerns have shaped my analysis and interpretations.
It might have made me emphasize some aspects of the text exceedingly or overlook others.
I have also invited my, also visited my intersectional neighbors,
invited them in and tried to blend their interpretations with my own reading.
Intersectional blending analysis of this text contributes to a more nuanced way of studying it
than those analyzed by Kiel Saga and Ringe.
Intersectional blending and asking the other question makes us aware of how understandings of ethnicity,
class, marriage status, number of children, education, neighborhood,
whether a character is enslaved or free, age, ability, bodies and non-human characters,
intersect in this story and can be interpreted in different ways.
It also helps me analyze what my positionality makes it hard for me to see.
I have found it especially intriguing how this method enables us to study this text storytelling
as intersectionally blended, as dependent on complex power and marginalization
and how first Jesus and then the wife blends the story about children, bread and dogs
with unlike embedded and embodied stories and thus get different outcomes.
In addition, intersectional blending lets us see that all interpretation,
including those of scholars, are embedded and embodied.
Perhaps it has also made us find a new parable with interesting apparent and hidden intersectional female characters.
The broader interpretational possibilities this approach allow for can also give rise
to more nuanced identification figures and theologies.
Now I have told my intersectionally blended story.
Later, other people will talk inside or outside the house.
Thank you very much.
Welcome to the University of Oslo and the Faculty of Theology
and to this first part of Kantial Ellen Oslund-Reynholdsen's doctoral examination
for the degree of Philosophie Doctor under the Faculty of Theology.
My name is Anders Ryne-Som and I'm the Dean and Chair of today's disputation.
The doctoral examination consists of two parts.
First, the trial lecture of 45 minutes on a prescribed topic given by the PhD adjudication committee
and then, after a break, the public defense of the dissertation props in the parable plots
the significance of intersectional female characters in a tested and possible parable reception.
The adjudication committee has consisted of Professor Annette Mertz,
Protestant Theological University of Groningen,
Professor Caroline van der Stiegele, Tilburg University, the Netherlands,
and Senior Lecturer Veemon Blomkvist, Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo.
Before I give the word to Ellen Oslund-Reynholdsen, please note that after the trial lecture,
there will be a break and we will start with the defense at 12 noon sharp.
I will now invite Kent Thioll, Ellen Oslund-Reynholdsen, to give her trial lecture
with the prescribed title given by the committee, an intersectional blending analysis of Mark 7, 24 to 30.
Please, Ellen.
A Greek Syrophoenician wife asks the Jewish Jesus to help her daughter who is demon possessed.
Jesus refuses by naming the mother and her daughter dogs.
However, after the mother's clever arguing, Jesus changes his mind and heals the little daughter.
The Norwegian theologian Stine Kiel Saga has shown that when priests in the church of Norway
preach about this story's parallel texts in the Gospel of Matthew,
they spiritualize the story and employ it to preach about missionary activities,
enduring faith, struggling faith, or prayer.
By doing so, they ignore their suppression and marginalization in the story.
The biblical scholar Sharon Ringe has analyzed the feminist scholars in the 1980s and 90s,
herself included, interpreted this woman as the embodiment of all categories of the outcast and oppressed persons
to whom the gospel suggests much of Jesus's ministry was directed.
Mark has placed this story after a dispute about purity regulations Jesus has with Pharisees and scribes,
and the daughter has an unclean spirit.
Because of this, this story has often been connected to impurity.
Jesus calls this wife and daughter impure dogs because they are unclean female non-Jews contaminated by an impure demon,
according to this view.
She is a woman, a Gentile and thus a foreigner, impure, nameless,
kneeling before Jesus in desperation over her sick daughter like a dog licking the hand who beats her.
In such interpretations, there's symmetry between her and a pure named powerful Jesus
who is a Jewish man could hardly have been greater.
More recent theories about power and oppression like intersectionality allows us to see greater culture complexity
in Jewish and Greek or Roman antiquity, and that power and vulnerability are more complicated than previously assumed.
By analyzing this text with intersectional blending,
I follow Kiel's saga and do not ignore the suppression and marginalization in the story.
At the same time, I will ask about its complex power dynamics.
First, I will present the theories and methods I employ.
Then after a reflection on my own situatedness,
I will analyze the text by using intersectional blending.
I will especially focus on the dispute between Jesus and the Greek Syrophoenician wife as intersectionally blended storytelling.
I conclude with a reflection on how my approach contributes to the study of this text
and about the tools scholars employ in biblical studies.
Intersectional blending is a method I developed during my PhD research,
where I combined elements from conceptual blending and intersectionality
and advanced them into a new method for analyzing parables.
I employ intersectional blending to study, for example,
how a story about a wife who bakes with sourdough can be perceived as a story about a divine kingdom
and possibly also about the lives of the interpreters.
This is the first time this method is employed to study a story that is not a parable
or perhaps not a parable. I will come back to that later.
Conceptual blending theory derives from the cognitive study of metaphors
and is developed by Mark Turner and Giles Forcarnia.
In my method, I especially employ Turner's concept of double scope stories.
Turner argues that conceptualization of narratives happen when readers or listeners map and blend
two different and sometimes opposing stories in order to create a new story.
In my dissertation, I employ this to study how recipients can interpret a parable story,
for example, about a wife who bakes, as a story about the divine kingdom.
According to conceptual blending, we do not only understand the more abstract and unknown
a divine kingdom in light of the more concrete and familiar a story about baking.
Meaning making goes in both directions.
The result is also not that one story is just added to another,
but rather that something new and creative happens.
When stories are blended, the result is a new story.
Hugo Lundhuyg was first at applying blending theory to reception studies of the New Testament.
Recently, a growing number of biblical scholars applied the theory.
While Turner is mainly interested in how we blend stories in texts,
I analyze how stories from interpreters' situatedness affect their meaning making.
Stories from their historical, cultural and social contexts, their experiences,
life stories and other stories they might know.
To analyze this, I employ insights from intersectionality.
Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989
and has in recent years become the leading theory in feminist studies.
The theory applies the metaphor of intersection to investigate discrimination, power
and in recent years also identity as independent, interdependent of various social culture factors
such as gender, class, social status, ethnicity or race, ability, sexuality and age.
Only the past 20 years intersectionality has been employed in biblical studies.
Earlier scholars often considered women a separate analytical category
when they studied female characters.
Of particular value to my work is the intersectional New Testament research
of Elisabeth Schisler Fiorenza, Marianne Bielan-Kartsov and Anders Martinsen.
In 2019, Gail A. Yee, in her presidential address to the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature,
encouraged all biblical scholars to use intersectionality in their research.
She did this so that they should become aware of how their own complex situations of privilege
and or oppression influence what they look for and how they interpret biblical texts.
Thus, from being marginal in biblical studies, intersectionality has become part of the field's
main theoretical and methodological discussions, although still only a small number of biblical scholars apply it.
Intersectionality comes from the struggle of black American women to study their oppression
from multiple social factors.
As the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements have made us aware of,
just being black or a black woman are in many places deadly.
It has also made me aware that the color of my skin is not neutral.
Growing up in a traditional part of Norway, I've had some experience with gender discrimination.
Later, I have experienced both that and ageism in the church and in broader society,
and I've had the experience of speaking a minority dialect in Oslo.
I'm also a white, middle-class, heterosexual, cisgender, married, able-bodied, state-employed scholar,
who's also an ordained priest in the majority church in Norway.
In addition, I am a mother to a daughter and a son.
I am a daughter myself.
I am a wife and a dog owner, as well as a sister, friend, colleague, and neighbor.
We filter new information through what we already know and who we are.
Will my privileges make me overlook the suppression and marginalization in this market story?
Or will my vulnerabilities make me see only that which resembles those?
Will I be able to understand this story's complexities?
I employ intersectionality because I need theory and method that can help me become aware
of how my own embedded and embodied situatedness influence my interpretations.
I also do so to require a certain distance to the text.
Of particular value in seeing what I might be blind to is Mary J. Matsuda's intersectional method
of asking the other question.
The way I try to understand the interconnectedness of all forms of subordination is through a method
I call ask the other question.
When I see something that looks racist, I ask, where is the patriarchy in this?
When I see something that looks sexist, I ask, where is the heterosexism in this?
When I see something that looks homophobic, I ask, where are the class interests in this?
Working in coalition forces us to look for both the obvious and non-obvious relationships of domination,
helping us to realize that no form of subordination ever stands alone.
In my combined intersectional blending, I see interpretation as complex processes
where interpreters blend elements from biblical stories
and understand them in light of their own varied embodied and embedded stories,
intersectionally situated stories, intertextual stories and hermeneutical stories.
Intersectional blending allows me to analyze not only how a story about a baker wife becomes the story
about a divine kingdom, but possibly also about the various lives of the interpreters.
It helps us analyze how a story can be blended in many ways.
In this case, how in Mark 7, 24 to 30, Jesus's storytelling
and the storytelling of the Syrophoenician wife are blended in different ways.
I will focus on a number of intersectional factors in this analysis.
Some of these are mentioned, and in other cases, we need to ask the other question
and employ historically informed imagination to study them.
When we analyze the story about Jesus and the Greek Syrophoenician wife
with insights from blending theory, we see that this story about them
connects to another story about children, bread and little dogs.
The story is first told by Jesus and then by the wife.
This resembles the way parable narratives connect to their framing.
I have not found any scholars who call this text a parable.
Now we have found one scholar, really!
I should have found one scholar who calls this text a parable.
But it was not in compendium, was it?
We will talk more about that later.
Much more recent, okay, exciting.
However, applying blending and in other cases as well,
let's see that it has many similarities with parables where a concrete
and perhaps familiar story Jesus tells is surrounded by one
or more interpretive frame.
So maybe Anette Mertz and I have found a new parable with interesting
intersectional female characters.
Or perhaps it does not matter whether this is a parable or not.
According to blending theory, meaning making always happens through blending.
Let us look closer at the blends in Jesus's storytelling in this text.
The framing story about Jesus and a Greek-Syriac-Phoenician wife
and her plea for her daughter is compared or connected to a story
about dogs should not eat the children's bread.
The outcome is a new story.
The mother and her daughter are dogs and not children.
Therefore, Jesus should not help them.
The core element of this blended story seems to be that the mother
and daughter are connected to dogs and blended as dogs.
Is it a bad thing to compare someone to a dog as Jesus does?
Many dogs today are beloved members of families.
They are cuddled, played with, cared for, and searched for
by the entire community when they are lost.
At the same time, my experience with dogs lets me know that I would not have liked to be one.
To be obedient, to not be able to eat when I want or go where I want,
and not be allowed to lick, to jump up and lick visitors in the face,
which I'm also not allowed to do as a human.
To call someone a dog is also abusive.
It might have racial connotations or religious implications
when people are called unfaithful dogs or gendered or sexual shaming
when girls or women are called bitches.
Scholarship for a long time thought Judaism in the time of Jesus saw dogs as unclean animals.
Recently, however, Mark Nainos and other scholars argued that Hebrew Bible
and other ancient Jewish sources do not support this.
Like in the broader Greek or Roman world, dogs were parts of life,
sometimes described in positive ways as faithful or as part of a group,
other times used as a general insult about enemies,
or to slur someone as vulgar, promiscuous, or shameless.
That Jesus names this mother and her daughter dogs and refuses to help them
has trouble interpreted from the beginning of this story's reception history, including me.
When Jesus blends his stories, he seems to evoke stories from his own social,
cultural situatedness about dogs as the adversaries of children.
These dogs seem to be far away. People throw food to them.
Maybe he thinks of scavenger wild dogs from the cities in this area
who steal food and maybe scare children.
Jesus is in a borderland in this story.
He has traveled north from the Jewish Galilee into the region of Tyre.
Tyre was a Hellenized city, a port city, and the capital of the Roman province of Syria
in what is today southern Lebanon.
The region of Tyre included the rural areas surrounding the city.
As in most borderlands, the population was mixed.
Both Jews and Syrophoenicians lived there.
Here, Jesus hides in a house like Jesus often conceals himself in the Gospel of Mark.
We do not know whether this is a Jewish or a Syrophoenician house,
perhaps a Jewish house since no ethnicity is mentioned,
which is not the case for the wife who immediately finds him.
This wife is presented as Hellenize, Syrophoenica togenae.
Earlier, scholars have translated Hellenize, Gentile and seen this as the reason why Jesus names her dog.
These interpreters seem to connect Jesus' storytelling to stories in the Hebrew Bible
where the people from Tyre and Sidon are called enemies of the Israelites
and possibly about dogs used as metaphors for enemies.
Hellenize might, however, also be translated Greek.
While many feminist scholars have seen this as a poor, marginalized woman,
we could ask the other question and inquire whether she perhaps is rich.
In her house that she returns to, we hear about furniture, a couch,
and she speaks of a table which suggests that she is at least not poor.
Gert Theisen suggests that this woman comes from a cultural privilege class
of Greek-speaking city dwellers in Tyre.
A Lebanese student I met at the conference proudly pronounced that she is a descendant
of these New Testament Syrophoenicians.
According to Theisen, the Syrophoenician population in the cities were better off
than the rural Jewish population in the surrounding areas.
He proposes that the Hellenized city dwellers may have used their financial means
to buy up the grain supply in the countryside and in this way take bread out of the mouths
of the rural Jews.
Such an intersectional story could blend with Hebrew Bible stories of greedy,
violent dogs.
In this interpretation, Jesus says, like this urban elite,
the Syrophoenician mother and daughter are dogs who are asking for something
that is not theirs.
The woman is further presented as a gyne.
Most often a free married woman, a wife, with a status and relative independence
that came with marriage in Roman society in the first century CE.
We hear that she has at least one child.
She could have had more.
Her status would depend upon the number of children she had.
According to the Augustan laws, Lex Julia and Lex Papia Poppea,
free women who had three live births and freed women with four live births were
allowed to conduct business and legal affairs on their own.
Perhaps she could also have been educated, although not many girls in Jewish and
Greek or Roman antiquity received formal education, some did.
Or is she a smart lady without formal education?
None of the New Testament texts say that Jesus was married or had children.
As Halva Moxnes suggests, if this is the case, Jesus in this respect breaks
with the masculine expectations of being a part of familias, a lord of the
household, whom wife, children and slaves should obey.
Even though some New Testament texts suggest Jesus could read and possibly
write, we do not know whether he had any formal education.
If the woman is an educated, Greek speaking, urban elite wife with more
children, who is perhaps also a neighbor of the house, of the people in the
house where Jesus is possibly unknown, the power balance between her and
Jesus is more complex than those in former feminist interpretations.
By asking the other question, we could also inquire whether this mother
perhaps was enslaved.
Slaves were the master's belongings like dogs were.
Perhaps she were an elite female slave who was educated to be a tutor for
her master or her master's children.
Perhaps gendered slavery plays part in Jesus's offensive slur.
In the same way as female dogs, bitches were seen as shameless and
sexually available, so were slaves.
Is Jesus blending a slave mother and her daughter as slave bitches that
should not be helped?
She could also have been interpreted differently.
Is it perhaps more likely that she would be viewed as a free woman?
Perhaps a female slave would not have dared to seek Jesus out and petition
him to heal her daughter.
Would she, if she were enslaved, even be seen as the mother of her daughter
since slaves in Jewish and Greek and Roman antiquity had no legal bonds
to their offspring?
The power dimensions between Jesus and the Syrophoenician wife are further
complicated when age and disability intersect with the other social factors.
The Greek term used for the wife's sick daughter is figatros, a diminutive
of figater daughter.
She's thus a little daughter.
Although Mark could be using these two terms interchangeably, this could
also signify that this is a girl before puberty.
The daughter is also called pardion, a young child.
And a girl in marriageable age would perhaps be called pathenos, virgin.
Another figatros in the gospel is said to be 12 years old.
Jesus also uses diminutive about the dogs he compares to the little
demon possessed daughter.
They are little dogs or puppies.
Demon possession is a common way of understanding disease in the ancient
world and we do not know what sort of disease the daughter has.
The girl who is healed by Jesus on this icon is not the Syrophoenician
little girl.
I have not been able to find any images of her healing.
This is of another little daughter in the gospel, the Jewish daughter of
Jairus whom Jesus does not hesitate to heal earlier in the gospel.
Jesus comes to their house, he takes the little girl's arm and restores her
to life.
With the Syrophoenician little girl, there is no touching.
Jesus does not come to a house but heals from a distance.
Anna Rebecca Solvog suggests that both disability and ethnicity are
animalized and used to other the girl and therefore refuse to help her.
As a mother in a safe neighborhood in Oslo, I am able to get my children
to help their need without begging.
The Syrophoenician mother throws herself down on the floor to ask for
help and thus tells a story with her body.
If we had been present in the house, we would probably understand a lot
about her intersectional situation based on her body language.
An elite free wife would dress and pose differently from a slave.
An educated woman familiar with public disputes might walk into an
assembly another way than a person who are not.
We only get one postural cue in this text when the wife throws herself
at Jesus' feet.
Jennifer Glancy points out that to lower oneself before another person
was the most common visual marker of submission to superior authority
in Roman antiquity.
The wife tells the same story about subordination with her body as she
does with her voice when she calls Jesus Kyrie, Lord or master.
To be at someone's feet is also the position of a dog who is who in
obedience is to come to the master's heel as suggested by David wrote.
However, the Greek Syrophoenician's wife's bodily and verbal story
moves on.
To be at someone's feet is also a student's position.
From this foot perspective, the wife continues to speak and becomes
a dialogue partner of Jesus.
In all the other four gospels, Jesus always wins a dispute as analyzed
by Tyson and Annette.
Here, however, the Syrophoenician wife takes over the storytelling.
She accepts Jesus's blend the mother and her daughter are dogs.
The children should be fed before dogs.
However, she connects Jesus's narrative to new stories about dogs.
She blends it with stories of dogs that are close, not far away.
In these stories, which might be recognizable both today and in the
ancient world, dogs are not children's enemies.
Rather, they are members of the household.
They are under the children's table.
They do get parts of the children's bread when the children spill.
Named crumbs which fall to the floor. Possibly, we could also hear
echoes of fond relationships between children and their pets.
Even that children might slip bread pieces of bread to their friends
on the floor.
When these new stories are connected to the blend, the outcome becomes
another. In the new blended story, even though the daughter and her
mother are dogs, Jesus should help the daughter.
We do not know why the mother wants Jesus to help her daughter.
It could be because she loves her.
It could also be because of fear or shame for her illness.
It could have economic motivation.
If the daughter is demon possessed, they might not be able to marry
her off. If the daughter is enslaved, the mother might be afraid that
her master would dispose of her if she is not useful.
Nevertheless, Jesus accepts her new blended story and heals her daughter.
However, in this complex intersectional situation, Jesus heals as a
distance as the dogs in his story are removed from the children.
As a theologian, as an intersectional feminist, as a teacher of
homiletics for students who might become priests, I am interested in
characters in biblical stories we can identify with and the theology
we derive from these stories.
Throughout this text's reception history, it has given rise to much
theology and identification. In antiquity, some church fathers saw this
wife as the ecclesia, the church, who prayed for her gentile children
that they should be saved from their demonic pagan unfaith.
For Martin Luther, she is an example of persistent faith in the grace of
God, even in situations where it seems like God is against you.
Killsaga has shown that these modes of interpreting still live on in the
preaching in the Church of Norway. In the interpretation above, Jesus is
the character that points to God. When we do not ignore the marginalization
and dominion in the text, but study it as intersecting, it can give room
for more diverse theology. If we have more nuanced understandings of
the mother, Jesus, the dogs, and the daughter, we might find renewed
ways in which we, with our complex lives, might recognize ourselves.
If Jesus here shows a glimpse of God, what would that theology be?
Would it be if you are smart and persistent enough, God will help you.
In Matthew's version of this story, Jesus praises the wife's faith, and
the faith is the reason why he heals the daughter. In our text, however,
he approves of her reasoning, her word, logos. It's the theology.
If you can argue well enough, God gives in. Alternatively, does this
story tell of a God who is moved by people's needs and stories? Is it a
God who is biological, as Sylvia de Lima Silva suggests? What happens if
we theologize about the Syriac Phoenician wife? Her possible love for her
vulnerable daughter might spark theology. Luther uses a mother's love
for a sick child to create theology when he interprets the parable with a
wife with a ten drachmas. Luther compares this wife to a mother with
many children. This mother loves all her children equally. However, when
one of them gets sick, all her love is transferred to this one sick child.
According to Luther, Christ treasures a sinner as highly as a mother does
her sick child. A mother's or other people's protective love is also the
motive in many folktales and in contemporary literature. The Syriac
Phoenician wife has often been the identification figure in feminist
interpretations. She has been seen as a victim of Jesus' othering. What if
we ask the other question and see her as privileged and a representative
of the rich elite that exploits the poor? Nicaraguan peasants and their
companions recorded in the gospel in Solentiname interprets this woman
as a rich old lady who must have been an oppressor. And they appreciate
the fact that she needs to humble herself to get help for her privileged
daughter. The wife might also be an identification figure in opposite ways.
Rangini Ribera sees her as a hero and inspiration for feminists in South
Asian cultures where the girl child is aborted, killed at birth, or
discriminated against. Yi's presidential address where she urges all
biblical scholars to employ intersectionality sparked discussions
about the legacy of the theories and methods we imply in biblical studies
to invest in magnetization and power. One discussion is how intersectionality
rely on former academic works and methods that are embedded in ideologies
of sexism and white supremacy. This debate shares some similarities with
the discussions in Caroline van der Stichel and Todd Penner's her master's
tools, feminist and post-colonial engagement of historical critical
discourse. Van der Stichel and Penner employ a quote from Audrey Lord,
the American writer, womanist, lesbian, radical feminist, professor, and
civil rights activist. What does it mean when the tools of a racist
patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?
It means that only the most narrow perimeter of change are possible and
allowable. For the master's tool will never dismantle the master's house.
They may never enable us to bring about genuine change. Biblical intersectional
and post-colonial research is dependent upon the tools of our masters.
Findings and approaches which we have inherited from scholars and systems
embedded in sexism and racism. The cornerstone of this house is the Bible,
which is also sometimes racist, sexist, ableist, and a number of other
ists. In addition, these texts are still influential. The Matthew version
of this story will be preached about again in the Church of Norway the 5th
of March this year. As Jorunn Öklund reasons, we cannot not inhabit of our father's house.
Van der Stichel and Penner argue that the master's tools will not easily
dismantle the master's house. It can only be done gradually brick by brick.
I also suggest that perhaps it does not only come down to whether we destroy
the master's house or let it stand, but how we use its spaces, how we use the
tools. Who are invited in to use the tools in the house? How do they employ them?
Do they also bring new tools? Do we tear down the fences around the garden and
talk to our neighbors? Have a big table where we discuss and dialogue? Visit our
neighbors and learn from them. I have analyzed Mark 7, 24 to 30 by employing
intersectional blending. This analysis shows that the Syrophoenician wife might
have been both vulnerable because of her ethnicity and a sick daughter and a rich
elite wife. She might have been with or without formal education, enslaved or free,
a stranger or a neighbor wife. When Jesus in his storytelling blends this wife and a
sick little daughter as dogs, he engages stories about dogs as the adversaries of
children. The wife tells a story about subordination with her body and words, but
also takes over Jesus' storytelling. When she adds new stories about close
relationships between dogs and children to the blend, the blended story and thus
the outcome becomes a new one. Even though Jesus accepts her blended story and heals
her daughter, the complex power and marginalization in the story endure.
Here I stand in my father's and mother's house. I have analyzed an ancient complex
text using both old and new tools. My embodied and embedded situations and concerns
have shaped my analysis and interpretations. It might have made me emphasize some
aspects of the text exceedingly or overlook others. I have also visited my intersectional
neighbors, invited them in and tried to blend their interpretations with my own reading.
Intersectional blending analysis of this text contributes to a more nuanced way of
studying it than those analyzed by Kiel Saga and Ringe. Intersectional blending and
asking the other question makes us aware of how understandings of ethnicity, class,
marriage status, number of children, education, neighborhood, whether a character is
enslaved or free, age, ability, bodies, and non-human characters intersect in this story
and can be interpreted in different ways. It also helps me analyze what my positionality
makes it hard for me to see. I have found it especially intriguing how this method enables
us to study this text storytelling as intersectionally blended, as dependence on complex power and
marginalization, and how first Jesus and then the wife blends the story about children,
bread, and dogs with unlike embedded and embodied stories and thus get different outcomes.
In addition, intersectional blending lets us see that all interpretation, including
those of scholars, are embedded and embodied. Perhaps it has also made us find a new parable
with interesting apparent and hidden intersectional female characters. The broader interpretational
possibilities this approach allow for can also give rise to more nuanced identification
figures and theologies. Now, I have told my intersectionally blended story. Later, other
people will talk inside or outside the house. Thank you very much.