Was the Bleeding Woman in Mark 5 / Luke 8 a Gentile?
Early in my pastoral career (2007ish), I preached through the Gospel of Mark—a delightful challenge, I must say! As I did so, I was struck by the role of the hemorrhaging woman in the narrative that also included a synagogue leader named Jairus and the raising of his daughter from death (Mark 5:21–43). Who was share? Where did she come from? Why do Mark and Luke include her story? Some 13 years later, I got around to writing a journal article on the topic that was published in Bulletin for Biblical Research 30.1, 2020 (pp. 64–85). Below is the abstract and a snippet from the essay. The full article can be downloaded here, though if you struggle for access, please feel free to get in touch directly and I’ll gladly share a PDF copy.
The hemorrhaging woman of Luke 8 (and Mark 5) is almost universally presumed to be of Jewish origin, but there are clues in the Gospel accounts and other primary sources to suggest that she may be a Gentile. On this understanding, her healing signals the fulfillment of Jesus’s words in Nazareth (Luke 4:16–30), as an extension of God’s mission to the Gentiles. Moreover, her faith acts as a model for both Jairus and the early church, consequently subverting expected cultural and social norms. This investigation weighs these options by considering Luke’s immediate and surrounding narrative framework alongside some linguistic parallels. By doing so, I aim to establish that seeing the woman as a Gentile is a reasonable understanding of the text, alongside its sociological/cultural implications for the early church.
Much has been made of whether or not Jesus knew who touched him or what exactly had happened. Regardless of what Jesus did or did not know, he stopped, not for his benefit, but for hers. Presumably, this woman could have escaped notice. She could have walked away “healed” (ἰάομαι) but not “saved/ made well” (σῴζω). Had she done so, she would have remained an outsider, her trauma lingering on. It so happens that she remains and Jesus stops. The stage is set for a very private and intimate miracle to become a very public encounter that presents as an act of mutual witness, as affirmed by Ephrem the Syrian:
Glory to you, hidden offspring of Being, because the hidden suffering of her that was afflicted proclaimed your healing. Using a woman whom they could see, he enabled them to see the divinity that cannot be seen. The Son’s divinity became known through his healing, and the afflicted woman’s faith was revealed through her being healed. She caused him to be proclaimed, and she was proclaimed with him. Truth was being proclaimed together with its heralds. If she was a witness to his divinity, he in turn was a witness to her faith.
The result for the woman is not just physical healing but wholeness, peace, shalom that encompasses her whole person. Shelly Rambo is correct to point out, however, that this is not an end but a beginning. After 12 years of physical and social disintegration, this woman must come to know her own restored body again, as well as the community from which she was isolated for so long. She has been given a clean slate because of her willingness to remain and testify and, equally, because of Jesus’s willingness to stop and act as witness so that the encounter could unfold. As Grundmann aptly noted, “the anonymous withdrawal of power has become a personal encounter.” Moreover, her public testimony parallels that of the Gentile demoniac from earlier in the chapter.
To summarize, Luke’s differentiating between the woman’s “healing” and her being “made well/saved,” together with Jesus’s salutation of “peace,” may specify an enactment of what was suggested earlier, namely, that Jesus’s ministry will extend salvation to the Gentiles. Moreover, this woman becomes an unlikely witness to the power of faith for the benefit of Luke’s recipients and, within the narrative itself, the Jewish synagogue leader, Jairus, who will subsequently lose and regain his daughter in the latter half of the narrative.
If my hypothesis is correct, that this woman is indeed a Gentile, there would be numerous implications. Here we pick up on two: first, if this woman is a Gentile, she exposes the superficiality of what one normally expects of a model disciple. Consider her status in relation to Jairus in table 3. Cultural norms suggest that Jairus should be the one to be presented as the exemplar within a faith community. And yet Luke presents us an anonymous Gentile woman—a trauma victim on account of a debilitating and extended illness through no fault of her own, an outsider in relation to the world— and places her in a position of honor. What she models as prototypical for Jairus and the wider church community (in all its multiethnic struggles and glories), is faith, courage, and humility. Though her outer appearance may be un-Jewish, not to mention roughshod as a result of her ailment, it is her inner character that is exemplary and dazzles those with eyes of faith to see her as Jesus does and as Jairus and the church community is effectively called to do.
The second implication of my hypothesis is that the unity of the church will not be dependent on racial uniformity. If Jesus extends his teaching and healing ministry to Gentiles and demonstrably welcomes them into God’s kingdom during an extended time of teaching (the sermon on the plain), or by healing a centurion’s servant, or by healing a Gentile woman with a debilitating hematological condition, then the church ought not shut its doors to perceived outsiders. According to Kuecker, this means that the church takes on an “allocentric” outlook, that is, it is focused precisely on the so-called other or outsider. Such a fellowship can only be born of the Spirit and is “nothing less than a different way of being human in community.” What will ultimately bind the church in unity is not race or ethnicity but faith in Jesus that is manifest through the Holy Spirit.
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