Umeå universitets logga

This thesis is a study that has its beginning in Jan Grimells book När identiteter förändras. Grimell uses a method that is called “psychological exegesis”, to find out something about the human identities in biblical stories. This thesis tries this method on female characters in the Gospel of Luke to find out if the method can show us something new about these characters.In addition to the method, this thesis also uses the theory “Dialogical Self Theory”, which is the same theory as Grimell uses. The theory is focused on how a person’s identity operates, and suggest that a person is a collection of “I-positions” that create a me-community, which is the self or the persons identity. An “I-position” is something that a person is, or something that an externally factor makes a person; for example: me as someone who is stressed, me as a mom, or me as a car owner. A person can be all of these things and it is the dialog between the positions that create the identity.The thesis focuses on the Gospel of Luke and especially on two narratives about women; the haemorrhaging woman in Luke 8:40-48 and the woman who anoints Jesus in Luke 7: 36-50. It is on these to characters that the psychological exegesis is made, and the I-positions are analysed and discussed from the theory Dialogical Self Theory. In addition to the Dialogical Self Theory, these women and their I-positions are discussed from a gender, masculinity and intersectionality perspective to find out the women’s contexts and how they affect their I-positions.The aim in this thesis is to see if this way of doing exegesis may help us find new things abouts these characters in the Gospel of Luke, and the discussion concludes that the method and the theory requires a lot from the reader or the interpreter. It also requires making a lot of assumptions, and it is hard to know if they are correct or not. But it also concludes with the help from theories about the world around the text and its context, you may come closer to the characters and the meaning of their stories.