ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the discovery of a lacuna in the gospel narratives, namely that no women were commissioned to heal. This was accompanied by an awareness of the popular claim that women had always been healers. The pastiche woven from the glimpses gained of healing women in such a context informed a new reading of women healing in the gospel narratives. Women healing emerged from the stone, the papyrus and the parchment as midwives and physicians shaping, even in small ways, the construction of gender, offering resistance in the face of a process of genderization informed by the master paradigm. A very different story of healing women is found in the Lukan narrative where the process of stereotyping or deviance-construction seems to be active. The new religio-theological imagination that has been shaped by this study can guide contemporary re-readings of the gospel in ways which will challenge and heal contemporary gendering processes, constructions of human other, and the other-than-human.
