Abstract
Anna Rebecca Solevåg’s accessible and rigorous work is a welcome addition to the literature on disability in the ancient world and early antiquity. Polyphonic representations are key in thinking with the disabled body, and polyphonic methods underpin her approach; the book is rich and nuanced as a result. Asking simple questions with significant answers, Solevåg challenges readers to consider who has helpers and who has friends or servants; who healing is for; what marks someone as “other” and who benefits from the labeling; and what and who marks bodies as “other.”
The broad utility of the work and its fresh insights are clear from the outset. Solevåg’s introduction gives a good overview of the field: her attention to the cultural particularities in the appropriation of the different models of disability is refreshing and certainly animates the discussion. For new readers in the world of disability studies, this work clearly orients without being overwhelming or jargon-heavy, yet the extensive footnotes enable further research. The simple presentation of major concepts demonstrates Solevåg’s mastery of the field, and her explanation of kyriarchy is a good example of this. Illustrating these concepts with texts from Early Christianity, the introduction could serve as a good introduction to disability studies and studies in Early Christianity or Biblical Studies. In her conclusion, Solevåg situates her work with the past and present studies of disability in the Bible, and three main trends in scholarship (the rejectionist, redemptionist, and historicist approaches). This section is concise and clear and would be a welcome addition to the introduction.
Exegetes should, Solevåg argues, interact with texts through many different lenses. A strength of Solevåg’s approach lies in the incorporation of a striking number of different theories. She draws upon feminist classics, stigma theory, monster theory, and McRuer’s crip theory and cripping, engaging well known texts with different apparatuses. These approaches support her nuanced reading of the texts. Her work focuses on disability but does not naively assume that disability is the only factor at play. She is sensitive to the differences between the ways disabled people and “racial and sexual minorities” (29) have been treated and does not group them together. At the same time, she sensitively probes the intersections between ethnicity, gender, class, and disability.
The book is organized through case studies, focusing both on texts where healing takes place and on “textual contexts that are not preoccupied with healing” (27). The chapter on Mark looks at how age, gender, class, and ethnicity change lived experiences of disability and juxtaposes the “man with the four helpers” (Mk 2) with the “demon-possessed girl” (Mk 7). She focuses on the social location of the man in Mk 2, stating that it is unlikely that the man was poor and helpless because of his home-owner status, and that the people who lowered him through the roof were likely helpers or servants. She questions whether there is a link between ethnicity and demon possession and acknowledges that there are no healings of non-Jews by touch in Mark. Elsewhere in the book, Solevåg cites Louise Lawrence’s work Sense and Stigma,” 1 and integrating her work on haptic reflexivity with ethnicity and haptics may deepen Solevåg’s argument here.
Turning to the familiar texts of healing in John’s gospel, Solevåg shows how metaphors are culturally constrained, constructed, and resultantly diverse. Metaphors of sight and blindness in one context are replaced by metaphors of mobility and movement, madness and sanity in others. The same metaphor can also be applied to different illnesses and/or disabilities in other contexts. Although she uses metaphor theory and the concept of “narrative prosthesis,” she does not stop here, integrating theological concepts and more traditional biblical studies to study characters in multiple ways. A particular strength of this book, which shows in this chapter, is Solevåg’s attention to the characters of the text, the society of the text, and its reception, both in the early Christian world and in contemporary societies. Memorably, she observes that in John, healing takes place more for the readers than the characters.
Solevåg’s use of Greek in this work is excellent; she integrates it smoothly into her arguments, with good explanations for non-linguists. At the same time, she builds arguments based on vocabulary used (for example, her suggestion that the adjective παραλυτικóς (paralutikos / paralyzed) indicates that the man might have a recently acquired disability). In her chapter on John and disability, she manages to integrate discussion of Greek verbs and the social model of disability, with impressive results.
Introducing the dynamic between healing and unhealing, Solevåg turns to disabling women in the Acts of Peter and integrates traditional textual studies with fresh insight. How disabled bodies are depicted, Solevåg states, says a great deal about who is depicting them. The influence of narrator on perspective is not a novel concept, but she adds depth by elucidating it through the concept of the “gaze,” a term drawn from feminist film criticism.
When stigma theory is applied, it becomes apparent that “attributions of difference are socially constructed and quite arbitrary” (116). Solevåg investigates the rhetoric of madness and demon possession, as well as accusations made against Jesus and others, and highlights how dependent this rhetoric is upon a society’s speakers. Importantly, she notes that stigma theory is dependent on interaction between those who are stigmatized and the non-stigmatized, not on dichotomies. This observation is crucial, and greater attention to this and its implications would be welcome. Monster theory also accounts for the dynamic relationship between the one who is stigmatized and the culture which stigmatizes; it “is a method that reads culture through the monsters they [cultures] create” (118). Illustrating this through “Judas the monster” she shows how labeling people as “monsters” delineates a society’s ingroups and outgroups; in context, the ideal and outcast Christian. Disability and ancient rhetoric combine to scapegoat and stigmatize, revealing more about what cultures fear and repress than the monsters themselves.
Increasing numbers of scholars investigate the relationship between gender, sexuality, and disability, and Solevåg’s chapter on eunuchs is a welcome, text-based, addition to this field. Using McRuer’s crip theory, she notes how eunuchs challenge ancient notions of male and female, and she ambitiously considers the relationship of ethnicity, gender, and disability through the example of the Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8). She concludes this section by questioning how the central location of the “queer, broken, disabled body” in early Christianity is “aligned with the crip body of Christ” (152).
Solevåg highlights frequent interpretative biases: the assumptions made by scholars whose interpretations conflate identity and disability, and by those who make assumptions. In emphasizing the social location of the paralyzed man of Mk 2, she highlights that most scholars (and readers of the gospels) assume that all people with disabilities are poor and powerless. She, following Sontag, asserts that “illness metaphors are never innocent” (54), and that forming and forwarding metaphors unthinkingly stigmatizes people in the past and present. Similarly, both contemporary commentators and ancient texts use physiognomics and conflate illness with personality; Solevåg cautions against this with more nuanced ways of negotiating disability and illness.
In her conclusion, Solevåg brings the reader back to the present, reiterating her challenging questions and relating them to a contemporary example. She is aware of the impact which discussions about disability in the ancient world relate to experiences of disability in the contemporary world. With a central work which will doubtless become a staple for research and teaching on the subject, Solevåg should be commended for a work which gives tools for thinking about disability in the ancient world, and which gives an example of how biblical scholarship can think with and through disabled bodies, negotiating worlds with them.