2. Part I: Jesus ‘the Son of Mary’ in Mk 6.3

To show that Mark scripts the matronymic in 6.3 to suggest a female-centric nature of Jesus’ resistant hometown crowd, I will first treat the textual difficulties of this passage, overview previous interpretations and then offer a new solution based on the insights about matronymic use in broader Greek literature.

Thus stands the Nestle–Aland version of Mk 6.3. However, an early alternative reading removes the starkness of Jesus’ matronymic by reading ‘Jesus, the son of the carpenter and of Mary’ (τοῦ τέκτονος υἱὸς καὶ τῆς Μαρίας), having ‘carpenter’ in the genitive rather than the nominative. This would make Jesus’ father (otherwise unmentioned and unnamed in Mark) mentioned and identified by his profession, while simultaneously removing any gospel attribution of Jesus as a carpenter. It would also bring the Mark passage into line with Matthew, which is precisely the reason why the alternative reading is generally seen as a correction of the original.Footnote ¹⁰ However, all of the most ancient witnesses (all the uncial and the most important minuscule manuscripts) contain the reading ‘the carpenter, the son of Mary’. Only the third^-century papyrus ${\mathfrak{P}}$⁴⁵ seems to have the alternative reading, but the papyrus is not clear enough to be sure.

While it is clear to see how ‘the son of the carpenter and of Mary’ might be a later correction to Mark that puts it more in line with the other Gospels, manuscripts are not the only witness to the alternative that lacked the matronymic. Early Greek writers also show this to be an early variant. A third-century ce discussion in Origen suggests that he was using a Bible with the alternative reading that avoids calling Jesus a carpenter when Jesus’ trade became an issue in his controversy with Celsus. Origen denies Celsus’ claim that Jesus was a carpenter: ‘Furthermore, [Celsus] did not observe that Jesus himself is not described as a carpenter anywhere in the Gospels accepted in the churches (ἀλλὰ καὶ οὐ βλέπων ὅτι οὐδαμοῦ τῶν ἐν ταῖς ἐκκλησίαις φερομένων εὐαγγελίων «τέκτων» αὐτὸς ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἀναγέγραπται)’ (Origen, Contra Celsum 6.37 [Chadwick 352].Footnote ¹¹ In addition, the first Latin commentary on Mark reads it as ‘carpenter’s son’ (filius fabri Iesus uocatur).Footnote ¹²

Against Origen’s statement should be placed other early Christian writers who do refer to Jesus as a carpenter, and therefore presumably have the text ὁ τέκτων, ὁ υἱὸς τῆς Μαρίας before them, such as Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho.

Justin’s argument combines the idea of Joseph as a carpenter, found clearly in Matthew, with the idea of Jesus himself being a carpenter, found only in the more common version of Mk 6.3.

The version of Mk 6.3 that uses the matronymic alone is the more widely attested manuscript reading, as well as the more difficult reading. It is understandable to see why a scribe would wish to change the text to ‘the son of the carpenter and Mary’, and harder to see why a scribe would change it to ‘the carpenter, the son of Mary’. Therefore, we will follow the majority trend in scholarship and take the text as printed in Nestle–Aland.

Once we have accepted the text as identifying Jesus as the ‘son of Mary’ with no corresponding patronymic, we must next question the possible reasons for this unusual choice. In a 1973 article, Harvey McArthur categorised the then-current range of interpretations into four possibilities. Three of the interpretations assume that the phrase is a witness to Jesus’ missing father, but the final one suggests that it stems from stylistic considerations.

1. 1) Mary is a widow

2. 2) Jesus is illegitimate (i.e. a slur, no known father)Footnote ¹³

3. 3) Jesus’ birth from Mary alone without a human partner is being emphasised here (i.e. theological development of the understanding of the virgin birth affected Mark’s phrasing).

4. 4) The fourth interpretation turns away from finding out where Joseph has gone and instead links the matronymic use to other types of speech patterns. McArthur focuses in particular on the idea that this might be an ‘informal’ way of referring to people, which would add a touch of realism to the scene.Footnote ¹⁴ McArthur chooses this solution as the best option available.

The thesis of McArthur’s article is that the phrase should not be seen as odd or problematic. He believes that it is, in fact, casual, and therefore bears little interpretive weight – especially unable to bear the weight of the theological concept of Jesus’ virgin birth.Footnote ¹⁵ He thinks that in cases such as these, if there was need to make an official genealogy, Jesus would be connected with his father.Footnote ¹⁶

Since McArthur’s article, other scholars have added additional possibilities and expansions to McArthur’s list. Tal Ilan’s 1992 article re-analyses McArthur’s data set, discounting the Old Testament examples as irrelevant and adding in more contemporaneous examples from Josephus, the Talmud and Jewish inscriptions that McArthur had not considered. She concludes that matronymics in Jewish literature around the time of Jesus were used when the mothers were more important than the fathers, and ends by saying that those Gospels which give Joseph a royal line use the patronymic for Jesus.Footnote ¹⁷ Mark, then, simply has little use or concern for Joseph. Ilan’s argument was further supported by Melanie Howard’s work that argued that the matronymic was meant to point to the high status of Mary.Footnote ¹⁸ This view echoes the idea floated earlier by John Dominic Crossan in 1973. His claim is that Mark was using a source that included all the names of Jesus’ family: Joseph, Mary, and the names of the brothers and sisters. Mark chose to drop Joseph, because of Joseph’s unimportance to the rest of Mark’s story: Joseph’s name ‘was deliberately erased’ because of ‘positive uninterest’.Footnote ¹⁹

All of these previous articles have focused on Jewish uses of the matronymic, both in preceding Jewish scriptures, in Greek Jewish sources such as Josephus and in contemporary Aramaic inscriptions. However, there is a noticeable lack of investigation into the non-Jewish Greek tradition of matronymic use. Lars Hartman attempted to correct this oversight in a short article that turned to non-Jewish Hellenistic examples from inscriptions to map the ‘horizon of understanding’ (Verstehenshorizont) for ancient readers coming to the text with less Jewish cultural knowledge. Hartman follows Ilan’s argument that matronymics are used when the mother is more important in the contemporaneous Jewish tradition to show that this was similarly the case in the non-Jewish Greek context of many of Mark’s readers,Footnote ²⁰ concurring that using a matronymic should not be seen as a slur.Footnote ²¹

My interpretation of the scene could be seen as a subset of McArthur’s fourth category that focuses on speech patterns, but also aligned with Hartman’s focus on the Greek readers of Mark, many of whom were not Jewish. The writers of Mary in the New Testament questioned McArthur’s thesis, asking ‘what would be the purpose of informality in what is otherwise a dramatic scene?’Footnote ²² Rather than ‘casual’, I would argue that the idiom carried the force of characterisation and significantly impacts how one reads the scene. Part of Mark’s crafted realism in a crowd scene is that it includes both men and women – especially the home crowd of Nazareth. I will argue that it is part of Mark’s artistic realism that shows the ‘family crowd’ knowing how to ‘speak like a woman’ according to Greek literary custom, and his connecting that moment with larger gendered patterns in his Gospel about negative lines of female authority.

3. New Solution: Matronymics as ‘Women’s Speech’

When we turn to the Greek literary context, the arena where matronymics are most commonly used in the ancient Greek-speaking world are for the ‘families’ of female prostitutes.Footnote ²³ At times, scholars have concluded not only that prostitutes commonly used matronymics, but that matronymic use without further evidence might be evidence of prostitution.Footnote ²⁴ As Elaine Fantham has explained in reference to the ancient culture of Athenian courtesans: ‘There was something like a caste of courtesans, a sequence of mother and daughter families; indeed an ageing courtesan without a daughter would look for a foundling to rear as her economic substitute.’Footnote ²⁵ Anise Strong found in the mother–daughter bonds among prostitutes a ‘startling alternative to the conventional father–dominated narratives of the ancient family’.Footnote ²⁶ Identifying prostitutes with their ‘mothers’, whether biological or social, would be part of a social scene where fathers were unknown or unimportant because of alternative sexual ethics and family structures. You can see how this specialised use of the matronymic in Greek literature corresponds to McArthur’s second option, that calling Jesus ‘the son of Mary’ was meant to imply that Jesus is illegitimate.

But prostitution is not the only place where matronymics are regularly used in the ancient world. What has been missing from all discussions of matronymics in New Testament studies concerned with the phrase ‘the carpenter, the son of Mary’ is the central argument mounted by Marilyn Skinner first in 1987, and again throughout her career,Footnote ²⁷ that matronymics are a normal part of women’s speech patterns, whether the author is a woman, or whether the text is written by a man representing a female speaker. While discussions of ‘naming by the mother’ within Classics almost always cite Skinner’s important arguments,Footnote ²⁸ no treatments of the question about ‘Jesus, son of Mary’ has brought this argument to bear on the text. Our examples of using the matronymic alone in Greek literature, without corresponding patronymic, come almost exclusively from intra-female conversations in literature.Footnote ²⁹ In the Greek context, then, we should understand it as part of focalisation, as characterising the speaker just as much as the identified person.Footnote ³⁰

4. Could the Speakers in Mk 6 Be Women?

What happens if, inspired by Skinner, we think about the crowd of Nazareth in Mk 6 as being characterised primarily as female, of women talking to each other about Jesus? We should hardly be surprised if in Mark the crowds are mixed gender, and sometimes even female focused. In the story immediately prior, Mark tells a story about a woman in the crowd (ὄχλος πολύς) following Jesus, the woman with the flow of blood who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment (Mk 5.24–7).Footnote ³¹

But the setting of Mk 6 is more specific than the crowd of Mk 5, which included the haemorrhaging woman. It is set in the synagogue in his hometown (εἰς τὴν πατρίδα αὐτοῦ, Mk 6.1, ἐν τῇ συναγωγῇ, Mk 6.2). What are we to imagine about the gendered make-up of synagogue attendance during the time of Jesus? Bernadette Brooten’s important work from forty years ago, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue, revealed the rich inscriptional evidence for women taking leadership roles in synagogues throughout the Mediterranean world.Footnote ³² Ross Shepard Kraemer took up and expanded upon Brooten’s work and her own earlier work on women in ancient synagogues to add even more evidence about ancient female synagogue attendance.Footnote ³³ Both scholars conclude that there is plentiful evidence from throughout antiquity of women not only attending the synagogue, but sitting in places of honour and being involved in leadership roles.Footnote ³⁴ Therefore, the setting in the synagogue should be no barrier to thinking about the speakers as women.

I think that we have something of a bias, perhaps, in imagining unidentified voices from crowds as masculine, forgetting that women are a persistent part of crowds in Mark and that in Greek the masculine plural is used for mixed-gender groups.Footnote ³⁵ When the crowd speaks, we should feel free to imagine either male or female speakers. I am not arguing here that the crowd should be imagined as entirely female. There certainly seem to be men in attendance at the Nazareth synagogue too, since Mark does not use female-only general terms for the group as a whole (οἱ πολλοὶ ἀκούοντες, Mk 6.2, and ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς in Mk 6.4). However, I am arguing that the general murmurings of the mixed-gendered crowd have a specific and pointed female element within them, which might be understood as Mark’s characterisation of a female-inflected comment about Jesus’ family. Mk 6 is set in not just any synagogue – it is the synagogue in Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth, a hometown full of his relatives.

5. Jesus’ Larger Family Context in Mark

Mk 6 is in fact the last we hear about Jesus’ mother in the Gospel: Mary is not present during Jesus’ trial and death (although other Marys stand at the foot of the cross).Footnote ³⁶ There are only two moments where Jesus’ family appears in Mark. Unlike the other Gospels, Mary is not portrayed positively in either scene and is placed on the side of those trying to stop Jesus’ ministry.

The only other mention of Jesus’ mother in Mark is earlier during a ‘sandwich scene’ in Mk 3, in which the frame narration tells of Jesus’ mother and brothers erroneously trying to stop him from his mission. When we first hear of them, the term used is quite generic (οἱ παρ’ αὐτοῦ, Mk 3.21), but when they arrive, it gets more specific, becoming his ‘mother and his brothers’ (ἡ μήτηρ σου καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοί, Mk 3.32–3).Footnote ³⁷ The expansion of the masculine plural of οἱ παρ’ αὐτοῦ into the more specific ἡ μήτηρ σου καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοί shows how a generic masculine can not only contain female members, but that women might play the most important role in the group designated with the masculine, as Jesus’ mother seems to be for the internal speakers of Mk. 3.32–3.Footnote ³⁸

When Jesus says that those who follow him are his true family, rather than his biological one, he adds the expansion of ‘sisters’ as well, dividing his earlier generic masculine plural into the more specific singulars, both masculine and feminine. ‘And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers (ἡ μήτηρ μου καὶ οἱ ἀδελφοί μου)! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother (οὗτος ἀδελφός μου καὶ ἀδελφὴ καὶ μήτηρ ἐστίν)”’ (NRSV, Mk 3.34–45). Jesus’ sisters are not specified in the party sent to stop Jesus. When he brings up sisters here, he sets up a parallel with the other mention of the mother of Jesus in Mk 6.3, when not only his brothers are mentioned but his sisters too.Footnote ³⁹ Here, the inclusion of the separate form for ‘sister’ in addition to the masculine allows Mark to single out female disciples in his new ‘found family’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The crowd around Jesus is made to contain ‘sisters’ explicitly and emphatically, even though the family delegation to bring him home had only included his mother and his generic masculine plural ‘brothers’ or ‘siblings’.

In chapter six, we know that the crowd (οἱ πολλοί) is listening to him in the synagogue, and we hear them speak, but we are not otherwise informed about their make-up. I have suggested that the matronymic is a hint at female-centric discourse in this hometown synagogue, and there is yet another detail that might point in this direction. It has to do with the rest of Jesus’ family: his brothers and his sisters.

Jesus’ brothers and sisters are spoken of differently. His four brothers are identified by their names: James, Joses, Judas and Simon. But his sisters are unnamed, which only brings out further how odd it is that his mother is named. Why name a mother and brothers, but not a father and sisters? It seems that something more is going on here than gendered modesty expectations. One suggestion is that Jesus’ mother and brothers have already been selected out in the earlier passage we just discussed where they attempt to bring him home (Mk 3.21). There is a connection between the people in Jesus’ family who travel, and also those who are named. But, in addition, it increases the feminine aspect of Nazareth, which is where Jesus’ sisters stay, where sisters can be added to his family list. Jesus’ fatherland (ἡ πατρίς), which is the term that the author uses here instead of the name of Nazareth, in one way completes the family circle by adding in the missing father to the scene, but in another way, the fatherland remains persistently feminine, along with its grammatical gender.Footnote ⁴¹

Jesus had already added ‘sisters’ to his ‘real/spiritual family’ in Mk 3.35, but here we see Jesus’ biological sisters make their first explicit appearance, only once he has returned to Nazareth. Instead of being identified by name, Jesus’ sisters are identified with the prepositional phrase ‘with us’ (πρὸς ἡμᾶς).Footnote ⁴² Jesus’ brothers are not spoken of this way. Perhaps this further implies that some of the speakers in the group are women, claiming that Jesus’ sisters are with them that very moment, even if his mother and his brothers are known to them, but perhaps not there at precisely that moment, within the speaking group itself.

6. Part II: The ‘Daughter of Herodias’ (Mk 6.22)Footnote ⁴³

As mentioned in the Introduction, there is one more probable matronymic in Mark, the ‘daughter of Herodias’ in Mk 6.22. However, the text is even more controversial than the matronymic in Mk 6.3, and, as Bruce Metzger has said, ‘It is very difficult to decide which reading is the least unsatisfactory.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Some of the oldest manuscripts avoid the matronymic altogether, reading the passage as ‘when his daughter, Herodias, entered’ (καὶ εἰσελθούσης τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτοῦ τῆς Ἡρῳδιάδος, adopted by Nestle–Aland) rather than ‘when the daughter of Herodias entered’ (καὶ εἰσελθούσης τῆς θυγατρὸς αὐτῆς τῆς Ἡρῳδιάδος, or removing the αὐτῆς entirely, adopted by SBL Greek NT). The uncial manuscripts are split. Codex Sinaiticus along with B, D, L, and Δ do not have ‘daughter of Herodias’ while A, C, Θ and W do. The most important minuscule families (f¹ and f¹³) hand on texts that contain matronymics both for the ‘son of Mary’ (Mk 6.3) and ‘daughter of Herodias’ (Mk 6.22), which became the reading of the Majority Type. Therefore, although there are some important ancient witnesses against having two matronymics in Mark (e.g. the Codex Sinaiticus), most manuscripts (including other fifth-century uncials) contain matronymics at both points.

The story of Herodias, although in the same chapter according to our modern editions, is not typically linked up narratologically with the Nazareth rejection. The beginning of Mk 6, the ‘son of Mary’ section, is seen as ending one story arc, and Mk 6.6b as beginning a new entwined section with the calling of the twelve and the death of John the Baptist.Footnote ⁴⁵ But what happens when we think about Jesus’ biological family from Nazareth in relationship to the family situation that immediately follows – that of Herod, Herodias and the dancing daughter?Footnote ⁴⁶

As I explained earlier in my discussion of the matronymic, one of the key places where it was used in the ancient world is in the discourse around the ‘families’ of Greek prostitution. There are so many echoes of Greek prostitution in the second half of Mk 6 that it is very easy to make an argument that Mark is trying to put the daughter of Herodias into a line of succession with her mother, as both prostitutional-type women, who would dance to please men and marry the kin of their dead husbands willy–nilly, as ‘a madam and her fledging courtesan daughter’.Footnote ⁴⁷

In no way do I wish to deny this connotation, but I also want to insist that this is not the whole story. When we take into account the earlier matronymic in Mk 6.3, which does not come with these same prostitutional connotations, we see that matronymics have to do more generally with female lines of authority. The logic behind the importance of mothers and daughters in prostitution is part of a broader pattern of female sociality. Rather than prostitution being the link, I propose that the link is lines of female power, of which the prostitutional type on display in Mk 6.22 is only a sub-type.Footnote ⁴⁸ Mk 6.3 and Mk 6.22 show the logic behind matronymic use as a marker of female lines of power in different, albeit related, ways. The first, while negatively reflecting his family’s rejection of Jesus’ role as a prophet, does not carry a sense of sexual slur with it. Instead, it appears that it comes from a familial, and specifically female and close-kin group that views Jesus not in his public persona but in his private one. To get that across, Mark increases the ‘female’ language of the text and the female perspective. In such a setting, Jesus’ mother matters more than she would in other social settings or in settings outside of Nazareth. The second, spoken not by an internal character, but instead by the narrator himself, has more to do with Mark’s attempt to create a female line of succession between two powerful and sinful women, mother and daughter.

The commentary on maternal power in evidence in the two stories in Mk 6 has been overlooked by scholars who predominantly wish to connect the story of the beheading of John the Baptist with Jesus’ earlier feasting scenes,Footnote ⁴⁹ or with the failure of the disciples even in the midst of their greatest achievementFootnote ⁵⁰ or with the upcoming death of Jesus.Footnote ⁵¹ If my argument is right that one of the valences of the scene in Nazareth in Mk 6 is the emphasis on a female social network that rejects the message of Jesus, then a parallel with Herodias and her daughter later in the same chapter begins to emerge. Female collusion against Jesus (and John) follows a pattern: such women are given names, and their names are used to identify the next generation.

7. Gendered Patterns of Characterisation?

Some of the most extensive work on characterisation in Mark has been carried out by Elizabeth Malbon.Footnote ⁵² Her view is that Mark’s female disciples follow patterns similar to their male counterparts, all ‘fallible followers’. At the same time, she admits that women tend to be more positively portrayed than the men in Mark.Footnote ⁵³ Malbon is also one of the few scholars to try to fit in the negative portrayal of some women in Mark. She argues that just as women followers are fallible like men, so too the ‘bad women’ follow patterns similar to the ‘bad men’. For instance, Herodias uses those of inferior position (her daughter) to get to those of superior position (Herod), like the chief priests use the crowd to get to Pilot. Herod’s maid accosts Peter twice, just as the high priest questions Jesus twice.Footnote ⁵⁴ Malbon’s interpretation sees a harmony in Markan characterisation across the genders, whether those characters are followers or villains.

Like Malbon, I wish to emphasise that ‘women can be villains as well as heroes in the Gospel of Mark’.Footnote ⁵⁵ But, unlike Malbon, I think that the characterisation of these two types follows specifically gendered patterns. Malbon herself admitted that there was some gendered difference in the ‘follower’ side – the women were generally portrayed more positively than the men. So, too, I have argued in this article that there are gendered differences on the ‘villain’ side. Most explicitly, the negative women in the pre-passion narrative in Mark are the only named female characters, and their names are used in matronymic constructions. When we take the negative examples into account, a richer gendered pattern emerges. Women are not simply ciphers for the male disciples. They have their own dynamics and inflections.