The Role of Women in Mark's Gospel

Abstract

By examining the narrative roles of four women in Mark's Gospel (5:24b-34; 7:24-30; 12:41-44; 14:3-9) in relation to the narrator's development of key themes, this study demonstrates that Mark's Gospel presents women in unusually positive roles among the various character groups depicted in the Gospel. Without the roles of these women the reader does not have an embodied model for reader identification. These four stories prepare for the positive depiction of women that emerges in the passion and resurrection narrative. But in Mark's narrative world, women are also fallible, as 16:8 and other portraits of women indicate. Nonetheless, the roles that the hemorrhaging woman, the Syro-Phoenician woman, the widow at the temple, and the woman of Bethany play are astonishing in relation to the main narrative themes. In reflecting upon these findings, I consider also the wider testimony of the four canonical Gospels regarding the role of women, and thus call for fresh assessment of the prevailing notion that during the last third of the first century, the Christian church experienced an increasing repression of women in public leadership roles.