If there is one story in the New Testament that I can't stand, its the one in today's Gospel, the account of the Syro Phoenician woman and the healing of her daughter. It is Matthew 15: 21-28. However it also appears in Mark, but not in Luke. The incident has a happy ending, the woman received what she asked for, the healing of her daughter. And it marked a turning point in Jesus' ministry, that it represented the extension to non-Jews of salvation. Jesus said, "Your faith has saved you." However it puts words in Jesus' mouth that are anything but Christ-like. I have heard some very lame homiletic attempts to say that the actual translation of "dogs" here is "puppies". Our priest today even said it was lame, that dogs in Jesus' time and place weren't the pampered fluffy pets of today, they were mostly semi-feral and kind of lived on the peripheries. But he really didn't resolve the issue, for me it's still hanging there with the ugly taste. So I draw my own conclusions; that the incident was not reported as it actually happened. Or that it didn't actually happen, or that we are missing crucial contextual details. I am unwilling to believe that Jesus said the offensive words; if any of us had said a similar thing it would be a sin. So I've got nothing in the way of explanation. Maybe others will weigh in.
John P. Meier, in Vol 2 of A Marginal Jew (pp. 660–661) says, "Weighing all the pros and cons, it seems to me that the story of the Syrophoenician woman is so shot through with Christian missionary theology and concerns that creation by the first-generation Christians is the more likely conclusion."
ReplyDeleteI found an interesting post on a blog named Scribes of the Kingdom whose author states, "To conclude, Jesus almost certainly did not share our sensitivities concerning race and ethnicity. Like other Jews of his day, Jesus did not generally regard gentiles positively—nor was he particularly interested in them. To him, as to other Jews, gentiles were complicit in their own corruption (Romans 1:18-32, Wisdom 13-15). While God’s kingdom would neutralize the pagan threat, heal heathen ignorance, and subordinate the nations to Israel, Jesus had no intention of granting even righteous and God-fearing gentiles equal membership among God’s people—nor of letting dogs snatch bread from the children’s table." It is a beautifully designed, well written blog, but the author seems to be anonymous (using the pseudonym καταπέτασμα), and I can find no information about the blog itself, so I am a little bit hesitant to quote it and can't recommend for or against it.
I confess I lean toward the (heretical) view that Jesus saw himself as a Jew with a mission to preach only to other Jews, and most of what we get from early Christianity is through the filter of Gentile converts attempting to justify their own place in the Jesus movement.
I am not sure you are heretical. Jesus himself says in the Gospel passage we're discussing, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel". Presumably, that means that he was in the district of Tyre and Sidon to reach out to Jews there.
DeleteEven Paul, who called himself the apostle to the Gentiles, would usually preach first at diaspora synagogues upon arriving in a new city.
There is a line in Jesus's meeting with the woman at the well (in John's Gospel) that may lend some support to the views of the poster at Scribes of the Kingdom. He tells the Samaritan woman, "You people worship what you do not understand; we worship what we understand, because salvation is from the Jews."
DeleteDuring the summer we have been regularly celebrating Mass with the Saint Cecilia Livestream. It has been featured in America Magazine's video on parish life. They had over four thousand viewers this morning.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXDauLgHIGk
The pastor really struggled with the Gospel. He admitted he did NOT want to preach on it this morning. His explained was along the lines that although Jesus was divine, he had to go through the same human learning as we all do, in this case learning to go beyond the ethnic prejudices that he had learned from his Jewish upbring.
At the end of Mass, he gave a half apology to Jesus and perhaps some of his congregation and threw out the idea that this was just a sophisticated way of getting his disciples to go beyond their prejudices.
This seems to me to be an authentic incident from the life of Jesus since it was in Mark and kept by Matthew. I could see why Matthew would keep it for his Jewish Christian audience, and Luke would put it aside for this Gentile audience.
While we may consider its ethnic and anti-feminist prejudices sinful, I doubt more of the people of the time of Jesus would think of it as sinful. And probably not many people since. Ethnic prejudices against Irish, German, Italian, Polish, Hungarians, etc. (even though they were fellow Catholics) were very common in my grandparent's generation. This dissolved in my parent'[s generation, just as prejudices against Protestants dissolved in my generation after Vatican II.
If we speculate that Jesus was—to some extent, at least—a man of his time, and had to grow out of certain prejudices, we have to explain how God Incarnate, raised by the most perfect mother there could ever have been (the sinless, immaculately conceived Virgin Mary) came to have prejudices to grow out of.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course we have to remember that although Jesus was a Jew, who in this story looks down with unconcealed contempt on Gentiles, nevertheless he founds a movement that for most of history is tainted with anti-Semitism.
It seems to me that to have Jesus say, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel," is to have him deny what Christians now consider his mission to have been. And of course it has long puzzled me that Jesus throughout his public life made pronouncements on Jewish Law which Paul within a few decades after the death of Jesus declares to be inapplicable—that is Jewish Law itself, not merely the pronouncements of Jesus about it.
At the end of Matthew's Gospel, he instructs his followers to go forth and make disciples of all nations. And in this encounter with the Canaanite woman, only a few sentences after claiming he was sent only to the "lost sheep of Israel", he works the miracle the Canaanite requested. I think it's a little more complicated than an Israel-only mission.
DeleteThe mystery is even more profound.
ReplyDeleteHow did Jesus who spoke in Aramaic found a movement in Galilee that then became a Greek speaking movement in the diaspora? Part of the answer may lie in the destruction of Jerusalem. However, both Paul and likely Mark wrote and conducted their ministries before the destruction of Jerusalem.
Some scholars have seen Paul as the second founder of Christianity. Some have seen Mark as the recorder of the preaching of Peter. Some have seen him as a companion of Paul. Acts sees both Peter and Paul as apostles of Christianity.
However, Rodney Start, an agnostic sociologist who likes to apply social science methods, not just theories, to early Christianity has a interesting book, Cities of God, on Christianity as an urban movement. The following hypotheses were supported by data.
1. Port cities tended to have Christian congregations before inland cities. The people of the Roman Empire traveled more extensively and easily than anyone prior to the nineteenth century. The roads were built to move Roman armies. Much of the transportation was by sea.
2. The closer a city was to Jerusalem the earlier it had a congregation.
3. Greek speaking cities had congregations sooner than Roman speaking ones. There was a large population of Jews in the Diaspora. More Jews spoke Greek than spoke Hebrew.
4. Large cities had Christian congregations earlier than smaller one. There was more religious diversity in large cities.
5. The closer a city was to Jerusalem, the more likely it was to have a significant Diaspora Jewish community.
6. Diaspora Jewish communities tended to be located in port cities.
7. City size was not significantly related to the presence of Diaspora Jewish communities.
8. Paul concentrated on the more Hellenized cities.
9. Paul tended to missionize port cities.
10.Paul tended to missionize cities with substantial Jewish Diaspora communities.
11. Cities missionized by Paul had churches sooner than cities Paul did not visit.
12. Cities with a significant Diaspora community were Christianized earlier than other cities.
Because Stark was dealing with quantitative data he was able to do a regression analysis on all this. What he found was that Paul had NO independent effect on the rise of Christianity. All the data suggest that Paul’s impact on Christianity was incidental to the reception by diaspora communities to Christian missionary activity.
Remember that Paul had a lot of opposition, both from Jews who resisted Christianity (probably because it was so successful) and from fellow missionaries because there were many of them.
While all eight cities visited by Paul had a church by 100CE, some of them had a church before he arrived, and five cities that he did not visit had churches by 100CE. Clearly there are plenty of other missionaries who were busy and effective.
So much for the theory that Paul was the second founder of Christianity.
Thanks, Jack, that's interesting. Especially since Rodney Start is an agnostic, so had no pet idea to prove.
DeleteJack, that is very interesting. I had not heard of Stark before.
DeleteIf Stark's finding is right, Paul is still a significant figure in the history of Christianity. But it seems the story of evangelization is a good deal more complicated than Paul's starring role in Acts would suggest.
Stark reminds us that Judaism was the first great missionary religion. The best estimate is that by the first century Jews made up from 10 to 15 percent of the population of the Roman Empire, nearly ninety percent of them living outside of Palestine.
ReplyDeleteThe numbers are so large that they are not easily explained by birth rate. Likely there were many conversions to Judaism. Judaism would have been very attractive because of its ancient scriptures had been translated into Greek, the language of trade in the Greek speaking cities of the Eastern Empire and also a language of the educated Roman elite. Judaism had high moral values, and its temple was one of the wonders of the ancient world. But conversion was also difficult involving giving up other gods, circumcision and dietary practices.
Christianity was an easier way of being Jewish. While retaining the Jewish scriptures in Greek, and their high morality, circumcision and dietary practices were not required. Worship in the Temple was replaced by baptism and the Eucharist.
Of course, even in the time of Jesus, the Pharisees had prepared an eventual alternative to the Temple in terms of study of scripture and a ritual purity for all Jews similar to that observed by the priests in the Temple. Thus, the eventual conflict with Christianity.
It's hardly an exaggeration to state that the whole purpose of the project of the Old Testament was to preserve Judaism in a pure state, unsullied by the other, competing pantheons and mystery religions. Law, Prophets and History all seem focused on it. Looking at it that way helps us appreciate how potentially catastrophic the Diaspora was. If Jews in their homeland kept drifting into the worship of other gods, how much more likely was it when Jews no longer had a homeland where they were the dominant culture and their faith was the "state religion"?
DeleteI guess, depending on the audience, the Christian evangelists had to make clear that God the Father of Jesus is one and the same as the God of Israel (rather than some other god) - and that the person of Jesus is the continuation and culmination of that history between God and his chosen people. Istm that pretty much all of the New Testament writers take pains to make this point. That idea surely underlies the Gospel story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman: Jesus seems to making the point that he isn't some magician from some mystery cult: he's more like one of the Old Testament prophets whom God has sent to his his people.
ReplyDeleteThat this new movement would have to be distinguished from Judaism, and in what ways it would be distinguished, strike me as more fraught topics, and we can see the New Testament writers wrestling with them. Paul certainly is wrestling with them in this past Sunday's second reading with his notion that, in some way, God works through the Gentiles to save his own people.