Today, scholars employ the label ‘narrative Christology’ with relative frequency, though they mean different things when they do so. In this article, I argue that to date, narrative Christology has not yet fully explored the parameters of what it means to attend closely to the narrative form of the Gospels’ presentations of Jesus. I propose, further, that recent developments in literary theory’s so-called ‘New Formalism’ offer useful tools and concepts for moving in that direction. The first part of the article briefly outlines previous scholarship, identifying similarities and differences between various approaches labelled ‘narrative Christology’. The second section introduces the major concepts of New Formalism and how they might extend narrative Christology’s capacity to take narrative form seriously as an object of analysis. The third section of the article offers a case study of a passage that appears in the triple tradition – the intercalated healing stories of Jairus’ daughter and the haemorrhaging woman in Mark 5.21–43; Luke 8.40–56; and Matthew 9.18–26 – in order to explore narrative structure on the micro-level. My ultimate goal is to show how New Formalism can contribute to a more robust narrative Christology and, in so doing, advance our understanding of the distinctive ways in which the Synoptic Gospels construct the figure of Jesus.
In 1979, Robert Tannehill published a groundbreaking article introducing the concept of ‘narrative christology’, which he defines as an approach that ‘tak[es] seriously the narrative form … in discussing th[
The first part of my article briefly outlines previous scholarship, identifying similarities and differences between various approaches labelled ‘narrative Christology’. The second section introduces the major concepts of New Formalism and how they might extend narrative Christology’s capacity to take narrative form seriously as an object of analysis. The third section of the article offers a case study of a passage that appears in the triple tradition – the intercalated healing stories of Jairus’ daughter and the haemorrhaging woman in Mark 5.21–43; Luke 8.40–56; and Matthew 9.18–26 – in order to explore narrative structure on the micro-level.
Christology in the Synoptic Gospels was a topic of scholarly discussion long before Tannehill’s 1979 article introducing ‘narrative Christology’. Questions related to the various Gospels’ depictions of Jesus are hardly new, and of course Christology as a theological or dogmatic category has been explored for centuries. What, then, distinguishes
Until now, this special attention has tended to coalesce around one of the following three foci: (1) the nature of narrative and its unique capacity to communicate theological truths; (2) literary characterisation as a set of strategies for portraying Jesus as a literary figure (Some of the discussion of literary characterisation in this article reflects claims I develop more fully in Dinkler
The first kind of narrative Christology emphasises how and why the narrative form is particularly well suited to expressing theological messages. This concerns the nature of narrative itself. Narrative is not just the aesthetic packaging of rational discourse, but a unique form of knowing in and of itself (dubbed by Walter Fisher the ‘Narrative Paradigm’; Fisher Narrative does not receive raw experience and then impose a form upon it … Human experience is inherently narrative; this is our primary way of organizing and giving coherence to our lives. (p. 56)
David Ford’s pithy summary applies: ‘A realistic narrative is both a “finding” and a “fashioning”’ (Ford
Furthermore, if narrative is a form of knowing, and if form itself communicates, then theological truths should not be extracted from their narrative forms and repackaged as theological tenets: ‘Far from falling under some thesis detachable from its illustration, therefore, the narrative structure renders any such detachment an act of violence’ (Sternberg [
One of the most obvious counter-examples is, of course, non-narrative early Christian accounts about Jesus.
Unlike other forms of communication (such as rational discursive argument), narrative allows for a high degree of tension, irony and paradox. For example, Dennis Hamm argues that in the Samaritan Leper story (Lk 17:11–19), the Samaritan – a religious outsider – ironically sees what the religious insiders – the Pharisees – cannot see (i.e. the reality of the Kingdom of God in the person and actions of Jesus). Based on the presupposition that narrative uniquely expresses theological truth, Hamm concludes that this pericope stands as its own narrative Christology in miniature (Hamm
George Aichele also emphasises that narrative allows for a greater degree of paradox and enigma than non-narrative discourse, but he adds the important nuance that not all narratives do so equally. Looking at the structures of the Synoptics comparatively, Aichele contends that Mark’s Gospel, which structurally lacks a proper beginning and end, also has the most mysterious understanding of Jesus; Mark’s Jesus is, paradoxically, the triumphant Messiah and the suffering servant, the utmost authority and the slave of all (on which see Davies
The second prominent line of interpretation in the realm of narrative Christology concerns the Gospels’ depictions of Jesus as a literary figure. Literary characterisation is an enormous area of study in and of itself, in both literary studies and biblical studies; it touches, for example, on questions of identity, narrational strategies and the narrative functions of characters within an unfolding plot – all of which are significant for narrative Christology.
In narrative as in life, identity construction is better understood in terms of an individual’s actions and intentions as embodied in and through interactions with others. Tannehill’s ( Jesus assumes certain roles in relation to other persons in the narrative, and our understanding of Mark’s narrative Christology will be advanced by considering these role relationships. (p. 63)
This is true of all narratives; literary figures are always being characterised in various ways
The well-known ‘Messianic secret’ provides an illustrative example of narrative Christology’s shift towards characterisation. In all of the Synoptics, but most commonly in Mark, Jesus refuses to claim Messianic status, silencing those who identify him as such. More traditional approaches explain this motif as evidence of Mark’s ‘low Christology’ (as opposed to the ‘high Christology’ found elsewhere in the New Testament (NT), where ‘low Christology’ represents an emphasis on what Jesus
Elizabeth Struthers Malbon’s five separate categories of Christological characterisation provide a useful way of laying out textual examples from the Synoptic Gospels (Malbon
One need not necessarily adopt Malbon’s framework to recognise that any understanding of Jesus as a literary character ought to take into account what John Darr describes as the ‘web of interrelationships’ established by each Gospel narrative (Darr
A third major strand of narrative Christology underscores the role of narrative sequence in shaping readerly meaning-making. This can also take a number of different forms. Mark Coleridge ( … attending less to the OT background (
According to Coleridge, one of the ways in which ‘the narrator shapes a Christology in the act of narration’ is the strategic use of narrative sequence; Coleridge’s monograph,
Kavin Rowe, on the other hand, traces the use of a particular title – ‘Lord’ (κύριος) – through the story. In
Let me offer a textual example of how sequence can impact the Synoptic Gospels’ narrative depictions of Jesus. All three of the Synoptic Gospels recount the episode in which Peter confesses that Jesus is ‘the Christ’ (Mt 16:16; Mk 8.29; Lk 9:20). Following this assertion, Jesus teaches his disciples that the Christ must suffer and die, and in Matthew and Mark, Peter promptly responds by taking Jesus aside to rebuke him (Mt 16:22; Mk 8:32). Luke, however, omits any negative exchange between Jesus and Peter, moving directly into the spectacular scene of the Transfiguration. The effect of this sequential narration is that Peter’s confession that Jesus is ‘the Christ’ stands unchallenged, and the Transfiguration, immediately following, serves as a powerful corroboration of that claim.
There are, of course, overlaps between the three iterations of narrative Christology enumerated above. Rowe’s ( … tell the human or earthly story of the heavenly Lord. Luke uses κύριος, in other words, to unify the earthly and resurrected Jesus at the point of his identity as Lord. (p. 27)
This is entirely appropriate within the bounds of narrative Christology. While it is important to recognise that there is nothing distinctive about characterisation as a literary phenomenon in the canonical Gospels as opposed to noncanonical narratives,
Narrative Christology has advanced our understanding of the Gospels’ presentations of Jesus through its appreciation of narrative as a unique communicative genre, the Gospels’ characterisation strategies and the importance of narrative sequence. Still, I contend that narrative Christology has yet to do real justice to the Gospels’ narrative form. I would argue that this is, in part, because of poststructuralist discourses that have engendered in academics a general sense that structuralism is outdated and unhelpful. We can see this, for example, in the fact that studies labelled ‘narrative Christology’ often fail even to define narrative. The constitutive features of narrativity are debated among narratologists, but most would agree that a narrative must have characters, emplotment, sequential (though not necessarily chronological) narration, causal connections and a teleology or communicative goal.
Scholars today tend to consider literary Formalism (e.g. Russian Formalism and New Criticism) outdated. In fact, Richard Strier says Formalism has become a ‘dirty word’ in literary theory (Strier
One key theoretical development was New Formalism’s rejection of the earlier Formalist view that critics must offer objective value judgements about a text. Verena Thiele writes that instead, New Formalism ‘suggests that a text’s formal features, its aesthetics, in close conjunction with cultural context, convey a politically and historically significant literary experience that is both intentional and affective’ (eds. Thiele & Tredennick
Like the variegated Formalisms of the early 20th century, New Formalism cannot be reduced to one perspective, although New Formalists do share certain distinctive aims. Levinson’s two strands of New Formalism both aim (albeit in different ways) to recover earlier Formalists’ valuing of form, structure and literariness, and to address critiques of Formalism’s earlier iterations. Whereas a common supposition, namely that literary theory is changing, that New Criticism is not nefarious, that Russian formalism has never been disreputable, that post-structuralism, despite its prefix, does not mark the end of structure, and that New Historicism is not the catch-all that it has been frequently made out to be. (p. 16)
The New Formalist reading I shall advance in the following section shares these views. It is worth remembering, though, that this represents just one of the ‘myriad of answers’ regarding how to ‘hone form (back) into a viable theoretical shape’.
Our case study is a set of two miracle stories that appear in all three Synoptic Gospels: the twinned stories of Jairus’ daughter and the haemorrhaging woman (Mk 5:21–43; Lk 8:40–56; and Mt 9:18–26). These Synoptic parallels clearly reflect the use of the same source materials. The fundamental plot structure is the same in each version: the precipitating event is that a ruler comes to Jesus in search of help for his daughter, who is dead (Matthean version) or dying (Markan and Lukan versions). Suddenly, the narrative is interrupted by a woman who comes up behind Jesus as he is teaching. The woman has been bleeding for 12 years, and she seeks healing. In all three versions, the woman touches Jesus’ garment and is miraculously healed of her infirmity; in all three versions, Jesus – Christ the Healer – commends the woman for her faith. The narrative then returns to the ruler’s predicament. When Jesus eventually arrives at the ruler’s home, he is mocked by the mourners outside, but ultimately heals the girl, raising her up from her deathbed.
The following New Formalism-inflected discussion of these Synoptic healing stories touches on all of the emphases of narrative Christology described above, but most closely aligns with the third – i.e. a concern with the effects of narrative sequence for readerly meaning-making. At the same time, it expands our analysis to consider narrative structure in the light of New Formalist views. New Formalism’s distinctive contributions will be clearer by contrast if we begin by considering how these stories have been read traditionally in modern scholarship.
Many critics have sought to contextualise these stories in their historical
Still, other historically minded critics have explored the story from an economic perspective; Jerome Neyrey, for example, raises the possibility that the woman takes something of Jesus’ without remuneration and therefore, her act is illicit: ‘[
Physical, individual and social boundaries have also figured prominently in NT scholars’ interpretations of these pericopes. Most commonly, 20th-century scholars appealed to boundaries between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’, or ‘pure’ versus ‘impure’. Bruce Malina ( [
This category is, for many interpreters, the pivotal link between these two stories (even, for some, extending into a wider literary context). William Lane, in his 1974 commentary on Mark, expresses the typical view:
A detail which may have contributed to the association of Ch. 5:21–42 with Ch. 5:1–20 is Jesus’ contact with the unclean, since the man of the tombs (who is probably a Gentile), the flow of blood and the presence of death all involve Jesus in ceremonial uncleanness. (p. 190 n.35)
A sociological perspective focuses on the social boundaries instantiated by purity or impurity concepts, and the ritual guidelines for inclusion or exclusion that accompany and sustain them. As Mary Douglas ( The only way in which pollution ideas make sense is in reference to a total structure of thought whose keystone, boundaries, margins and internal lines are held in relation by rituals of separation. (p. 51)
If physical imperfections or ailments were viewed as visible manifestations of invisible impurity, then, ‘As undesirables, the physically and mentally imperfect functioned materially and symbolically as metaphors or paradigms for religious and social transgressions’ (Vlahogiannis
According to this reading, porous bodily boundaries like the haemorrhaging woman’s, are dangerous because they threaten the transgression or even dissolution of appropriate social boundaries. If ‘the physical body and the corporate social body were thought to mirror each other’, then an imperfect physical body ‘had the potential of defiling the social body’ (Parsons
To what extent are Jewish ritual purity laws in view (e.g. Theissen If a woman has a flow of blood (the LXX has ῥύσει αἵματος) for many days, not at the time of her impurity, or if she has a discharge beyond the time of her impurity, all the days of the discharge she shall continue in uncleanness; as in the days of her impurity, she shall be unclean. (15:25) If a man lies with a woman having her sickness and uncovers her nakedness, he has laid bare her flow and she has laid bare her flow of blood (the LXX has τὴν ῥύσιν τοῦ αἵματος αὐτῆς); both of them shall be cut off from their people. (20:18)
According to this reading, the Levitical stipulations situate the haemorrhaging woman in a state of perpetual impurity (see also Lv 12:2, 15:19, 20:18; Ezk 36:17). As such, the woman becomes the personification of boundary transgression and deserves to be rebuked, or at least shunned, for appearing in public and touching Jesus.
Jesus, because he does not condemn her, represents a counter-cultural departure from first-century thinking in this regard. Selvidge, for instance, concludes that Jesus ‘subtly shatters the legal purity system and its restrictive social conditioning’ (Selvidge
On the other side of this interpretive debate, however, stand those who aver that Levitical purity laws are irrelevant to this story, and that race and anti-Jewish views are inextricably bound up in the above scholarly assessments (see, e.g. Kelley The Gospel story about the woman with a twelve-year discharge, clearly a case of
These interpreters also argue that by the first century CE, purity laws would have been less paramount the further away one lived from the Jerusalem Temple, and note that the Gospel texts avoid the most common terms for menstruation in antiquity (see especially Cohen
The literary form, or structure, of these stories entered modern NT scholarship from a number of different directions, though all reflect ‘restrictive ideas of form’s
Form critics and literary critics alike have also recognised the literary technique of intercalation as significant. A1) 5:21–24 – Jairus asks Jesus to help his daughter B) 5:25–34 – Jesus heals the hemorrhaging woman A2) 5:35–43 – Jesus raises Jairus’ daughter
This formal structure has significant narratological effects; in Mark and Luke, the delay caused by healing the woman along the road creates the narrative time necessary for the girl to die before Jesus arrives. In all three versions, bracketing the Jairus narrative increases the dramatic suspense for readers who must wait to discover what will happen to Jairus’ daughter, while simultaneously heightening the miraculous nature of Jesus’ act of healing when he arrives (e.g. Shepherd
Plot pacing is not the only effect of the intercalation. The structure also invites comparison between characters through the use of a literary foil: a character, that is, who ‘through contrast underscores the distinctive characteristics of another’ (Harmon & Holman
Other scholars draw parallels between Jairus and the woman: both come to Jesus with faith in his ability to heal, and both believe in the efficacy of his physical presence; the woman desires to touch him, while Jairus asks him to come physically to his home to heal his daughter. In the Markan and Lukan versions, both express their desperation by falling down (πίπτω) at Jesus’ feet. Both are contrasted with the unbelieving surrounding crowds, and both are rewarded for their faith with the experience of a miracle.
Still, others compare the woman to Jesus, especially with respect to their various forms of power.
Two developments in New Formalism offer helpful perspectives from which to answer this question. Firstly, many New Formalists embrace multiple possible readings where their predecessors would not. Daniel Schwarz, for instance, lauding New Formalism, advocates a ‘pluralistic approach, which allows for multiple perspectives’ (Schwarz
Secondly, viewing form and content as embedded in particular social and historical contexts, New Formalists appreciate references to external background information where a strictly New Critical or ‘old’ Formalist approach would not. Federico poses the relevant question: ‘Is there a way to combine a wish to delve into the aesthetic complexity of a literary work with a concern for its life in politics and history?’ (Federico
Take, for instance, the contrasts between Jairus and the woman. Jairus, as a healthy male, a father and a synagogue leader (ἄρχων/ἀρχισυνάγωγος) in a first-century Hellenistic Jewish world, likely would have occupied a venerated social position; standing at the centre of his community or communities, he represents the values of those in power. It is appropriate, then, that he approaches Jesus face-to-face. Situated in this first-century
New Formalism invites us to ask how these social and cultural dynamics function
Consider again the chiasmus created by the two stories. Drawing on cognitive stylistics to bridge the gap between the ‘activist’ and ‘normative’ strands of New Formalism, Karin Kukkonen insists that ‘form organizes content and provides a pattern of thinking’ (Kukkonen [
While Jairus pleads with Jesus to heal his daughter, the woman – with her excessive blood flow – interrupts the narrative flow. The reader’s perception of the interruption is focalised through the woman, who is described not only as having bled for 12 years, but (in Mark) as having ‘suffered much’ (πολλὰ παθοῦσα, 5.26), and (in Luke) as incurable (οὐκ ἴσχυσεν ἀπ᾿ οὐδενὸς θεραπευθῆναι, 8.43);
The narrator’s control of knowledge and perspective guides readers in their interpretive judgements of this scene. The reader – unlike the other characters in the story – sees the woman in the crowd, the reader is told the reason for her presence, and the reader watches her come up behind Jesus and touch his garment. Because readers have more knowledge than certain actants in the story, it can be difficult for them to remain neutral outside observers. Narrative development turns on the discrepancies in knowledge between the characters and the reader. The readers’ understanding of the story is aligned with the woman’s perspective, in contrast to the disciples’ and Jesus’ perspectives. For example, Jesus’ question in Luke 8.45 (τίς ὁ ἁψάμενός μου;) and the reader’s knowledge of the answer heighten the tension and create dramatic irony. With these reader-elevating strategies of focalisation, the narrator effectively creates a cohort of informed insiders; as Paul Duke puts it, ‘Irony rewards its followers with a sense of community’ (
From a New Formalist perspective, what is remarkable about these intercalated tales is that ‘the chiasmus inverts relationships between content’ – that is, Jesus and Jairus are decentred as the central active agents, while the woman takes centre stage as the protagonist at the inner core of a framed narrative (Kukkonen
Moreover, if we accept the Formalist view that form itself communicates, then we can see the interruption as a literary instantiation of an important theological message, one with ramifications for our understanding of the Synoptic narratives’ Christology or Christologies: those in the centre are not more deserving of Christ’s attention than those on the margins. The Messiah does not prioritise those with power, nor even those whose need seems more urgent. This is especially striking when one considers that in Mark and Luke, Jairus’ daughter has not yet died when the woman stops Jesus. The woman has been bleeding for 12 years – the entirety of the young girl’s life. Presumably, a few more hours while Jesus attends to the dying girl would not make much of a difference in the woman’s condition. The Christ nevertheless stops, and Jairus’ plotline is put on hold. Indeed, it is only
And yet New Formalism also points up intricate and contradictory connections between the body In women the nature of glands … is loose textured … but in males both the compactness and the solidity of their bodies contribute greatly to the glands not becoming big … the female, on the other hand, is loose textured and spongy. (
Further, as Cohen rightly points out, ‘underlying the Hippocratic characterization of male and female flesh is a value judgment: firm and compact is good/loose and spongy is bad’ (Cohen
A New Formalist interpretive lens allows us to see hierarchical gender disparities operating not only on the level of sentience, but on the level of the sentence – not only on the level of bodily form, but on the level of narrative form. Consider again the fact that Jairus’ story ‘forms a parenthesis’ around the woman’s story. This could be read in two contrasting ways: on the one hand, it could be read in feminist terms as an unusual centring of a female character, on the levels of both form and content. As the woman’s story is recounted, Jairus and his concerns fade into the background. On this reading, Christ liberates the woman not only from her physical ailment, but also from the larger societal structures that oppress and constrict her (Douglas
A New Formalist approach is richly textured and widely contextualised, allowing for capacious (sometimes contradictory) considerations of the formal features of narrative. To reiterate, my resistance to arguing definitively for one or the other of the above readings should not be construed as implicitly advocating interpretive relativism or anarchy. Narrative form limits our interpretive options even as it gives rise to multiple potential meanings. In my view, the more important point is that a narrative Christology informed by New Formalism can help us reshape our own perceived disciplinary boundaries, which have unnecessarily limited our inquiries into the structures of the Gospel narratives.
The author declares that she has no financial or personal relationships which may have inappropriately influenced her in writing this article.
Tannehill’s article concerns the Gospel of Mark, but scholars have since read the other canonical Gospels through the same lens.
This theoretical discussion ought to be distinguished from the late 20th-century movement among poets that is also called ‘New Formalism’ (on which, see McPhillips
Because of space, I have chosen to focus here on the micro-level of structure, and on one story shared by the Synoptics, but it would also be profitable to consider how these concepts apply at the macro-level, and how the Synoptic versions differ from one another. For example, how does Luke’s rearrangement of Markan materials shape his Christology (e.g. his geographic schema focused on Jerusalem)? How does Matthew’s alternation of Jesus’ discourses and actions throughout his Gospel impact Matthean Christology? How do Matthew’s versions of the stories of Jairus’ daughter and the haemorrhaging woman in Matthew 9.18–26 differ from those in Mark 5.21–43 and Luke 8.40–56?
I do not mean to imply an absolute dichotomy between narrative and sayings sources (nor do I posit that there were distinct early Christian communities ‘behind’ them). See the important discussion in the work of Hultgren (
Root appeals to Robert Alter (
The following were published just in the past few years: (Bennema
Anthony Thiselton makes a compelling argument about the latter based on the speech-act theory of J.L. Austin and John Searle: (Austin
Characterisation is instantiated and functions similarly across ancient narratives (canonical or otherwise); many scholars – particularly classicists – are doing important comparative work that challenges NT scholars’ tendency to privilege this one set of texts as exceptional literarily. I can only gesture towards such studies; engaging them directly would take us too far afield here. Some consider specific genres or corpora, while others treat the same figure across multiple ancient texts. On the former, see, e.g., ed. Temmerman (
Individual narratologists add various other elements. Monika Fludernik, for instance, argues that narrativity is dependent on some degree of experientiality evoked for the reader (Fludernik
Douglas Bruster traces Dubrow’s first use to a 1989 MLA session titled, ‘Toward the New Formalism: Formalist Approaches to Renaissance New Historicism and Feminism’ (Bruster
For a brief survey of the major Greek writers’ terms for menstruation, see Selvidge (
Luke underscores the public nature of Jesus’ response. In contrast to the Markan text (‘[The woman] came in fear and trembling and fell down before him, and told him the whole truth’ [5:33]), Luke has, ‘[
Cohen says this ‘important point’ is ‘unappreciated’ by Selvidge (
Examples of other ‘demand stories’ in the Synoptic Gospels include the accounts of the leper (Mk 1:40–45); the father of the boy with the demon (Lk 9:38–42); the ten lepers (Lk 17:11–19); the Canaanite woman (Mt 15:21–28); and the centurion (Mt 8:5–13).
The usual assumption is that intercalations such as this one originated with Mark and are the direct result of his editorial hand (see, e.g., Koch
Cf. Matthew, where the girl is already dead before Jairus approaches Jesus.
On the possibility that the woman’s faith is in Jesus as a
Moss (
Notably, this transfer of power does not require human contact; even contact with a holy person’s garment can engender miraculous healing (Mk 6:56; cf. Mt 9:20; 14:36; Lk 8:44; Ac 19:11–12). This may reflect the view that one’s garments are somehow connected to the self (cf. Plutarch’s
The difference between Jairus and the woman is even more pronounced in the Markan and Lukan versions than in the Matthean version, because Jairus is named in Mark and Luke, but remains unnamed in Matthew. On the significance of proper names (see Bauckham
Several early manuscripts reflect a Lukan change here. Whereas Mark tells his readers that the woman spent all her money on doctors, Luke (traditionally, but not likely, the ‘Beloved Physician’) simply says that no one could help her.
Yamasaki (
One self-proclaimed ‘attempt to answer that call’ is Scott-Baumann (
See also, e.g., Aristotle,