Women Healing / Healing Women: The Genderization of Healing in Early Christianity

by Elaine M. Wainwright

The impetus for this book was the startling realization that within early Christianity, which is characterized by healing, no women are explicitly commissioned to heal. The work begins with a search for the women who were healers in the Graeco-Roman world of the late Hellenistic and early Roman period, finding them honoured in inscriptions, named by medical writers, and stereotyped by playwrights and other literateurs. What emerges by the first century of the Common Era, is a world in which women functioned as healers as well as healed and that healing was a site of contestation in relation to gender. The interpretive lens brought to bear on the wide range of sources used in this study is a multi-dimensional one informed by feminism, post-colonialism and ecological studies. The methodology is socio-rhetorical drawing on tools from medical anthropology. The turning of the multi-dimensional lens and these tools on the gospels, informed by the context constructed in the first part of the study, enables new interpretations of the stories of women healing to emerge. A woman pours out healing ointment; healed women bear on their bodies the language describing Jesus and the stereotyped demon-possessed women of the Lukan gospel may, indeed, be healers.

262 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2006

About the author

Elaine Mary Wainwright (1948 -2024) was an Australian theologian and biblical scholar. Wainwright was Richard Maclaurin Goodfellow Professor in Theology at the University of Auckland until her retirement at the end of 2014. She is known for her feminist scholarship in Matthew's gospel, and work on gender and healing within the Graeco-Roman world. Some of her recent publications are The Bible in/and Popular Culture: A Creative Encounter (SBL, 2010), Women Healing/Healing Women: the Genderisation of Healing in Early Christianity (Equinox, 2006), and Shall We Look for Another: A Feminist Re-reading of the Matthean Jesus (Orbis, 1998). Wainwright initially studied at the University of Queensland and then obtained a master's degree at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and a PhD at the École Biblique in Jerusalem.