Abstract
This essay offers a narrative analysis that shows the New Testament gospels construct migration as a male activity in two interrelated ways. First, they diminish the role of women in the journeys of Jesus. Second, they frame the migrations and border-crossings that occur in their story of salvation history in masculine language and imagery. That the gospels construct migration as a male activity raises the question of whether they can serve as sources that promote an inclusive notion of justice for im/migrants and others on the move. I suggest they still can, but this requires a model of interpretation that gives primacy to the reader and accounts for the complex factors of migratory experiences, including women’s experiences, in the world in front of the text.
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Notes
- 1.
Ched Myers captures well this interpretative standpoint by stating that when it comes to boundaries that defend the privileged from the needs of others, the biblical perspective is clear: “[T]he Bible takes sides on behalf of the excluded” (Ched Myers and Matthew Colwell, Our God Is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012]), 137.
- 2.
See, for example, M. Daniel Carroll R., Christians at the Border: Immigration, the Church, and the Bible, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2013), esp. 43–101; Myers and Colwell, Our God Is Undocumented; vanThanh Nguyen and John M. Prior, eds., God’s People on the Move: Biblical and Global Perspectives on Migration and Mission (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2014); Luis R. Rivera Rodríguez, “Immigration and the Bible: Comments by a Diasporic Theologian,” Perspectivas 10 (2006): 23–36.
- 3.
Again Myers represents this view when he writes that “Jesus models a way that transgresses borders , embraces the ‘other,’ and embodies the dream of God by welcoming everyone to the table” (Our God Is Undocumented, 137). Works that read Jesus as an im/migrant or transgressive border-crosser, or that highlight Jesus’ radically inclusive ethic, include Carroll R., Christians at the Border, esp. 103–16; Daniel G. Groody, “Homeward Bound: A Theology of Migration,” in Migration as a Sign of the Times: Towards a Theology of Migration, ed. Judith Gruber and Sigrid Rettenbacher (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 131–49; Leticia A. Guardiola-Sáenz, “Border-Crossing and Its Redemptive Power in John 7.53–8.11: A Cultural Reading of Jesus and the Accused,” in John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space, and Power, ed. Musa W. Dube and Jeffrey L. Staley (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), 129–52; Paul Hertig, “Jesus’ Migrations and Liminal Withdrawals in Matthew,” in Nguyen and Prior, God’s People on the Move, 46–61; Aquiles Ernesto Martínez, “Jesus, the Immigrant Child: A Diasporic Reading of Matthew” 2:1–23, Apuntes 26, no. 3 (2006): 84–114; Martínez, “On Sheep and Goats: The Treatment of Foreigners according to Jesus (Matthew 25:31–46),” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology (January 2008): n.p., http://www.latinotheology.org/2007/treatment_of_foreigners [URL valid as of 2/12/18, but journal site being changed to https://repository.usfca.edu/jhlt/]; Myers and Colwell, Our God Is Undocumented, esp. 123–38.
- 4.
“A Migrant Being at Work: Movement and Migration in Johannine Christology,” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology (January 2011): n.p., http://latinotheology.org/2011/migrant-worker-migration [URL valid as of 2/12/18, but journal site being changed to https://repository.usfca.edu/jhlt/].
- 5.
See Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Readings from the Edges: The Bible and People on the Move (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2011).
- 6.
For contemporary classifications of migrants and reasons people migrate, see Douglas S. Massey, “Why Migrate? Theorizing Undocumented Migration,” in Hidden Lives and Human Rights in the United States: Understanding the Controversies and Tragedies of Undocumented Immigration. Volume 1: History, Theories, and Legislation, ed. Lois Ann Lorentzen (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014), 53–70; Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait, 4th ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), esp. 29–79.
- 7.
In line with literary criticism as applied to the Bible, my interpretation here seeks “to interpret the current text, in its finished form,” views the gospels “as coherent narratives” in which “individual passages are interpreted in terms of their contribution to the story as a whole,” and maintains that “[t]he story that is told and the manner in which it is told deserve full scholarly attention” (Mark Allan Powell, What Is Narrative Criticism? [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990], 7).
- 8.
One stream of literary theory maintains that the text implies a reader who is distinct from the real, historical reader(s) of the text and who makes all the proper interpretative moves to interpret a text as intended by its author. Applied to biblical criticism, a narrative-critical approach may examine the narrative of a biblical text for clues that anticipate the responses this “implied reader” would make, in contrast to responses that real readers may have, which are unpredictable (ibid., 19).
- 9.
The precise reason for Matthew’s inclusion of the women in his genealogy of Jesus is debated. One possibility is that Matthew’s genealogy anticipates the inclusion of Gentiles in God’s plan of salvation, since as many as four of the women mentioned are not Israelites (Rahab and Ruth are Gentiles; whether Tamar and Bathsheba are considered Gentiles is less clear). Another view holds that Matthew seeks to provide a biblical context for his own story of Jesus’ birth, since Mary’s precursors in the genealogy are women whose stories contain sexually scandalous elements that turn out to advance God’s purposes by advancing the lineage of David, which according to Matthew is Jesus’ own ancestral line. According to Daniel J. Harrington, “It seems best to leave the idea expressed by the inclusion of four women at the level of ‘irregularity’ or ‘departure from the ordinary.’ In their own distinctive ways they prepare for and foreshadow the irregular birth of Jesus that will be described in Matt 1:18–25,” setting up the reader “to expect the unexpected” and establishing the theme of “tension between tradition and newness” that runs through Matthew’s Gospel (The Gospel of Matthew [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1991], 32).
- 10.
Ibid., 37.
- 11.
As Amy-Jill Levine observes, “Although Mary is passive, her role as mother is recognized and so accorded value: the magi recognize ‘the child with Mary his mother’ (2:11); Joseph is commanded to take ‘the child and his mother’ (2:13; see also 2:20, 21)” (“Matthew,” in Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, expanded ed. [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1998], 341).
- 12.
To what scriptural text Matthew 2:23 refers is not known. Judges 13:5, 7 and Isaiah 11:1 are possibilities (Harrington, Matthew, 45–46).
- 13.
On the importance of the travel narrative to the structure and theology of Luke’s Gospel, see Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel according to Luke (I−IX) (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 162–71. Luke has a distinct concern “to move Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem, the city of destiny” (ibid., 166).
- 14.
Warren Carter and Amy-Jill Levine, The New Testament: Methods and Meanings (Nashville: Abingdon, 2013), 52.
- 15.
Fitzmyer, Luke (I−IX), 696–978.
- 16.
The question of whether Luke’s Gospel is an ally to women is contested, and scholars remain divided on this issue. For a sampling of viewpoints, see Amy-Jill Levine, ed., with Marianne Blickenstaff, A Feminist Companion to Luke (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). In her influential essay on Luke, Jane Schaberg calls Luke’s Gospel “an extremely dangerous text, perhaps the most dangerous in the Bible” because it contains much unique material about women that appears to enhance or promote the status of women but that when read more closely reveals a portrayal of women “as models of subordinate service, excluded from the power center of the movement and from significant responsibilities” (“Luke,” in Newsom and Ringe, Women’s Bible Commentary, 363). In her 2015 presidential address to the Catholic Biblical Association of America, Barbara E. Reid revisited the position she took in her earlier work on this question (Choosing the Better Part? Women in the Gospel of Luke [Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1996]) and has come to a more positive view on how Luke depicts women than she had before (though still with some reservations). See Barbara E. Reid, “The Gospel of Luke: Friend or Foe of Women Proclaimers of the Word?” CBQ 78 (2016): 1–23.
- 17.
Schaberg, “Luke,” 376. See also Marinella Perroni, “Disciples, Not Apostles: Luke’s Double Message,” in Gospels: Narrative and History, ed. Mercedes Navarro Puerto and Marinella Perroni (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015), 173–213. Luke possibly distinguishes between Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna (8:2–3a) and the ἕτεραι πολλαί of 8:3b, with the implication that it is these unnamed “many other women” who patronize Jesus and his followers (see Perroni, “Disciples, Not Apostles,” 177–78).
- 18.
Schaberg, “Luke,” 376.
- 19.
Gail R. O’Day, “John,” in Newsom and Ringe, Women’s Bible Commentary, 381–93; Sandra Schneiders, “Women in the Fourth Gospel and the Role of Women in the Contemporary Church,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 12 (1982): 35–45; Raymond E. Brown, “Roles of Women in the Fourth Gospel,” Theological Studies 36 (1975): 688–99, repr. in idem., The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves, and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (New York: Paulist, 1979), 183–98; Robert Kysar, John: The Maverick Gospel, 3rd ed. (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 177–85.
- 20.
Fernando F. Segovia, “The Journey(s) of the Word of God: A Reading of the Plot of the Fourth Gospel,” in The Fourth Gospel from a Literary Perspective, ed. R. Alan Culpepper and Fernando F. Segovia, Semeia 53 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991).
- 21.
Rudolf Bultmann identifies the incarnational emphasis of John 1:14 as central to the Fourth Gospel’s christology and soteriology (Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel, 2 vols. [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951–55; repr., Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2007], 2:40).
- 22.
G. Ruiz, “A Migrant Being at Work.”
- 23.
Marianne Meye Thompson, John: A Commentary (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 2015), 37–39; Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel according to John (I−XII) (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 519–24. See also Martin Scott, Sophia and the Johannine Jesus (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1992); Sharon H. Ringe, Wisdom’s Friends: Community and Christology in the Fourth Gospel (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1999).
- 24.
For a compelling essay that seizes John’s dual feminine-masculine wisdom imagery and develops from it a liberative reading for persons who find themselves in liminal spaces, see Daniel José Camacho, “John’s prologue and God’s rejected children,” The Christian Century, January 5, 2016, http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2016-01/johns-prologue-and-gods-rejected-children.
- 25.
To be sure, John 1:10–12 uses masculine pronouns for the Word, but this is with reference to events that happen after the Word has crossed the cosmic border and entered the world.
- 26.
For example, theologian Elizabeth Johnson uses historical-critical biblical scholarship to reconstruct Mary’s experiences within her historical and cultural context. See Johnson, Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (New York: Continuum, 2003).
- 27.
On this matter, see Hector Avalos, “Rethinking Latino Hermeneutics: An Atheist Perspective,” in Latino/a Biblical Hermeneutics: Problematics, Objectives, Strategies (ed. Francisco Lozada Jr. and Fernando F. Segovia; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014), 59–72. Avalos questions the tendency of biblical scholars and theologians, Latinx and otherwise, to offer liberatory readings of the Bible that minimize or gloss over the imperialistic rhetoric that pervades biblical texts.
- 28.
Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Jonah, Jesus, and Other Good Coyotes: Speaking Peace to Power in the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007).
- 29.
This is a point made by Hector Avalos in his review of Smith-Christopher’s book, where Avalos correctly notes that coyotes are “ethically ambivalent figures who can also rape, rob, and kill the very people they try to help across the borders” (Avalos, review of Jonah, Jesus, and Other Good Coyotes, by Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Review of Biblical Literature [September 2008], https://www.bookreviews.org/pdf/6081_6485.pdf). To be sure, Smith-Christopher recognizes the reality of “bad” coyotes who mistreat immigrants, choosing instead to call attention to “good” coyotes who use their payments to feed, care for, and ensure the safe passage of their clients (Good Coyotes, xvii). But as Avalos notes, “Even the ‘good’ coyotes are often motivated by personal financial gain more than by some greater social or political cause.”
- 30.
For example, in his Readings from the Edges, Jean-Pierre Ruiz seeks “to avoid the language of correlation and correspondence, an approach that is too often the default rhetoric of well-intentioned theologians who are concerned with what the Bible may or may not have to ‘say’ to and about people on the move” (7). Aware that migratory experiences are complex phenomena that occur for many different reasons and involve many different persons, J.-P. Ruiz expresses caution “about the hermeneutical and ethical side effects of affirmations like, ‘The parallels of the immigrant narrative to the Exodus story are striking (Ex 13:17–17:7).’ Such correlations run the risk of doing disservice both to the world behind the text (by reducing the complexity of its generative matrix) and to the world in front of the text (by imposing one reading of the biblical text as normative)” (8, quoting Daniel G. Groody, “Jesus and the Undocumented Immigrant: A Spiritual Geography of a Crucified People,” Theological Studies 70 [2009]: 302). In contrast to this tendency, note how in his discussion of Abram and Sarai in Egypt, M. Daniel Carroll R. is careful to note that Sarai’s willingness to put herself in danger for the good of her clan reminds us of the extent to which women in migratory situations take “horrific risks for the good of their families” (Christians at the Border, 54). While Carroll R. does employ a hermeneutics of correlation and correspondence in his work, he avoids facile comparisons between the worlds behind, of, and in front of the text and hardly romanticizes the phenomenon of migration.
- 31.
See Fernando F. Segovia, “Hispanic American Theology and the Bible: Effective Weapon and Faithful Ally,” in We are a People! Initiatives in Hispanic American Theology, ed. Roberto S. Goizueta (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 21–50.
- 32.
Recent works by Latinx biblical scholars that emphasize the interplay between scriptural texts and the worlds “in front of them” include Julián Andrés González Holguín, Cain, Abel, and the Politics of God: An Agambenian Reading of Genesis 4:1–16 (London: Routledge, 2018); Jacqueline M. Hidalgo, Revelation in Aztlán: Scriptures, Utopias, and the Chicano Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); J.-P. Ruiz, Readings from the Edges; David Sánchez, From Patmos to the Barrio: Subverting Imperial Myths (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008).
- 33.
See Randall C. Bailey, Tat-siong Benny Liew, and Fernando F. Segovia, eds., They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009); Francisco Lozada, Jr. and Fernando F. Segovia, eds., Latino/a Biblical Hermeneutics: Problematics, Objectives, Strategies (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014); Francisco Lozada Jr., Toward a Latino/a Biblical Interpretation (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2017).
- 34.
Readings from the Edges, 138.
- 35.
Latina theologian Neomi DeAnda emphasizes this point with respect to theological reflections on and pastoral responses to migration (“Border Cuentos: Sources for Reflections on Migration,” New Theology Review 20 [August 2007]: 24–35), and indeed prioritizing daily lived experience (lo cotidiano) is an integral component of Latinx theological method (see Carmen M. Nanko-Fernández, “Lo Cotidiano as Locus Theologicus,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theology, ed. Orlando O. Espín [Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 2015], 15–34). See also Victor Carmona, “Theologizing Immigration,” in Espín, Latino/a Theology, 365–86, and Jorge E. Castillo Guerra, “From the Faith and Life of a Migrant to a Theology of Migration and Intercultural Convivencia,” in Migration as a Sign of the Times, 107–29. Though she succumbs to the tendency of presuming biblical texts are prima facie liberatory toward im/migrants, Regina Polak also develops the importance of actually dialoguing with persons marked by a migration background for the development of both theological and migration studies (“Migration as a Sign of the Times: Questions and Remarks from a Practical-Theological Perspective” in Migration as a Sign of the Times, 47–78).
- 36.
Anthologies of interviews with im/migrants, such as Peter Orner, ed., Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2008), and studies that incorporate interviews with im/migrants—such as Jacqueline Maria Hagan, Migration Miracle: Faith, Hope, and Meaning on the Undocumented Journey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), Marie T. Friedmann Marquardt and Manuel A. Vásquez, “ ‘To Persevere in Our Struggles’: Religion among Unauthorized Latino/a Immigrants in the United States,” in Hidden Lives and Human Rights in the United States: Understanding the Controversies and Tragedies of Undocumented Immigration. Volume 3: Economics, Politics, and Morality, ed. Lois Ann Lorentzen (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014), 303–23, and Cecilia Menjívar, Leisy J. Abrego, and Leah C. Schmalzbauer, Immigrant Families (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), esp. 79–105 on gender and immigrant families—may facilitate the task of interpreting the Bible with attention to im/migrant women’s voices and experiences, as would consulting works by Latinx theologians, biblical scholars, and sociologists of religion that foreground women’s experiences (e.g., María Del Socorro Castañeda-Liles, Our Lady of Everyday Life: La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Catholic Imagination of Mexican Women in America [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018]; Daisy L. Machado, “The Unnamed Woman: Justice, Feminists, and the Undocumented Woman,” in María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez, ed., A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002], 161–76).
- 37.
Hagan, Migration Miracle, 26; Marquardt and Vásquez, “To Persevere in Our Struggles,” 304–309.
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Ruiz, G.A. (2018). “Out of Egypt I Called My Son”: Migration as a Male Activity in the New Testament Gospels. In: Agosto, E., Hidalgo, J. (eds) Latinxs, the Bible, and Migration. The Bible and Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96695-3_5
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