Salty Wives, Spirited Mothers, and Savvy Widows

capable Women of purpose and persistence in luke’s gospel

F. Scott Spencer

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

© 2012 F. Scott Spencer

All rights reserved

Published 2012 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

www.eerdmans.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spencer, F. Scott (Franklin Scott)

Salty wives, spirited mothers, and savvy widows: capable women of purpose and persistence in Luke’s gospel / F. Scott Spencer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8028-6762-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Bible. N.T. Luke—Criticism, interpretation, etc.

2. Women in the Bible. I. Title.

BS2595.52.S64 2012

226.4′0922082—dc23

2012020151

“Lot’s Wife” from Poems of Akhmatova, by Anna Akhmatova and translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Originally published by Little, Brown & Co. © 1973 by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward. Used courtesy of the author’s estate. All rights reserved.

“Lot’s Wife” by Gene Fendt. Theology Today 50 (1993): 116.

To the consummately capable cadre of women FBI agents

from whom I’ve learned so much

Contents

preface

1. Toward Bluer Skies: Reducing the Threat Level and Resurrecting Feminist Studies of Women in Luke

2. Can We Go On Together with Suspicious Minds? Doubt and Trust as Both Sides of the Hermeneutical “Coin” (Luke 15:8–10)

3. A Woman’s Right to Choose? Mother Mary as Spirited Agent and Actor (Luke 1–2)

4. The Quest for the Historical Joanna: Follower of Jesus, Friend of Mary Magdalene, and Wife of Herod’s Official (Luke 8:1–3; 24:10)

5. A Testy Hostess and Her Lazy Sister? Martha, Mary, and the Household Rivals Type-Scene (Luke 10:38–42)

6. A Hungry Widow, Spicy Queen, and Salty Wife: “Foreign” Biblical Models of Warning and Judgment (Luke 4:25–26; 11:31; 17:32)

7. The Savvy Widow’s Might: Fighting for Justice in an Unjust World (Luke 18:1–8)

8. A Capable Woman, Who Can Find? We Have Found Some in Luke!

index

Preface

I can’t find the reference now, but I recall reading years ago how the graduate students at Harvard working with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, the most influential feminist NT scholar of our time, dubbed themselves, tongue in cheek, FBI agents—that is, diligent practitioners of Feminist Biblical Interpretation. I instantly loved and coveted the label, partly because I loved The F.B.I. TV show growing up (a Quinn Martin production starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr., we were solemnly told at the beginning of each episode; the show had nothing to do with budding “second wave” feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, but I guess it counts for something that daughter Stephanie Zimbalist went on to star in her own show in the mid-1980s as an unmarried private eye who owned her own detective agency)—but mostly because a good bit of my postdoctoral academic career has been engaged with feminist biblical scholarship. ...