Disability and New Testament Studies: Reflections, Trajectories, and Possibilities

Abstract

This article offers a survey and assessment of the state of New Testament scholarship and disability studies. It provides some critical reflections on the current trends and trajectories of the field and potential futures for it to progress further. While some work has been done on the Catholic Epistles, Revelation, and Paul, the majority of focus has been on the canonical Gospels. Studies often encompass meta-critical, historical, literary, or theological focuses. A number of problems have been raised, such as the question of lived disabled experience in antiquity, anachronism, and ableism within the field itself. Still, there are a number of potential futures for the field, especially in dialogue with adjacent fields to biblical studies like second temple Jewish studies and classics.

Keywords:

• disability studies
• Gospels
• New Testament studies
• Paul

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the incisive comments and critiques of Candida Moss and Grace Emmett that have vastly improved this piece. Thanks is also due to Anna Rebecca Solevåg and Kylie Crabbe for sending me copies of their work.

Notes

1 Readers should note that the bibliography in this article is not exhaustive. While I have tried to engage as much non-Anglophone scholarship as I can, there may be literature unknown to me. Additionally, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, my access to literature has been severely limited. An omission from the notes here is not based on a judgment about quality of scholarship but because of the limitations of what was and is an unreasonable season for academic productivity.

2 Cf. other taxonomies in Avalos 2007; Solevåg 2020a, 215–17.

3 https://remedhe.com.

4 On this see the recent work of Young (2020, pp. 554–7).

5 This author has recently submitted a PhD thesis on disability and the letters of Paul: Soon 2021a.

6 The social model of disability understands physical impairment not to be an individual’s problem (as presumed by the medical model of disability) or as a result of sin (i.e. the so-called “religious model” of disability, cf. Marx & Upson-Saia 2015, 265) but a condition exacerbated by social systems which de-normalise and liminalise disabled bodies. Some scholars still retain aspects of the medical model in their work (e.g. Tilly 2012; Albl 2017, 428). The limits model approaches disability by problematising the inherent binary between labelling some physical conditions “able” and others “disabled,” recognising the fluidity of disability and that conditions can be “more” or “less disabled” depending on the situation. The cultural model of disability focuses on the agency of people with disabilities, conceiving them not just as people on whom society acts, but who actually influence, shape, and order the world they live in (see Waldschmidt 2017).

7 Similarly, scholars assume that the description of Paul’s body in the Acts of Thecla could not be historically accurate because Paul could not have been short, bowed-legged, or have a monobrow. On this see my forthcoming article Soon 2021b.

8 The fruit of such comparative analysis can be seen in the work of Crabbe 2021.