RE-PRESENTING BIBLICAL WOMEN: FICTION AS FEMINIST CRITICISM RE-PRESENTING BIBLICAL WOMEN: FICTIONAL RE-VISION AS FEMINIST CRITICISM By

Using Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, India Edghill's Queenmaker Margaret George's Mary, Called Magdalene, whose texts recreate/re-envision the lives of Dinah, Michal, and Mary Magdalene respectively, this project focuses on fictional portraits of biblical women who are either silent or whose histories are relayed, possibly inaccurately, in the original biblical accounts. The development of this popular sub genre of historical fiction can be viewed as part of the tradition of feminist biblical scholarship, which focuses on the examination of biblical women and their experiences and identities, the omission of women as narrators in the Bible canon, and the subsequent position of women in the church and in other social structures. My research indicates that there exist two opposing bodies of feminist biblical critics: on one side there are the 'rejectionist ' feminists who argue that the Bible is the handbook of patriarchy and that, consequently, its theological traditions must be rejected by women. On the other side there are the 'reinterpretationist ' feminists who refuse to give up on the authoritarian and liberating power of the Scriptures and insist that, throug