The Healing of a Canaanite Woman's Daughter (Matthew 15: 21–28)

Abstract

The story of a Canaanite woman is complicated, because it contains Jesus' initial harsh attitude towards this woman. This story has led to some scholars assuming that Matthew is a Jewish document and the community behind it was a kind of Christian Judaism, not actively involved in the Gentile mission. However, from the literary point, this story contains several literary devices to highlight Jesus' dramatic healing of a Gentile patient. Jesus' initial responses are exactly what the contemporaries would expect of a rabbi. However, Jesus, like a wise teacher who uses a tactic to give an impressive teaching, expressed his reluctance to heal. The whole pericope functions as an intentional demonstration that Jesus did expand his ministry to a Gentile patient.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.