1. There are three accounts of Jesus raising the dead. One is the widow's son (Lk 7:11-17). Another is the daughter of Jairus (Mk 5:21–43, Mt 9:18–26, Lk 8:40–56). Then there's Lazarus (Jn 11). Suppose a skeptic said that due to the lack of medical technology back then, they may only have appeared to be dead?
2. One issue is that Matthew reports the father of Jairus telling Jesus his daughter is already dead whereas Mark and Luke report him telling Jesus that she's dying/at the point of death. There are different explanations:
i) One standard explanation is that Matthew has a simplified account. Since, in Mark/Luke, after Jairus leaves home to find Jesus, someone is dispatched to tell him that his daughter has died, so the quest is moot. Due to narrative compression, Matthew cuts to the chase by having Jairus say his daughter is dead, since, by the time he found Jesus, she was gone. And I think that's a plausible explanation. Matthew paraphrases his statement.
ii) Of course, it's quite possible that Jairus said more than one thing. Did people only speak to Jesus in one-liners?
iii) Also, there's a couple of dilemmas. To begin with, what parent wants to leave their child's deathbed? There's the anxiety that their child will pass away while they were absent. Parents wish to be there at the moment of death to comfort their child right up to the bitter end. They'd kick themselves if they weren't there when it happened.
So what is Jairus to do? On the one hand, he might think it's better to risk leaving her bedside while she's still hanging on to go find Jesus. If he waits until she's dead, that may be too late.
On the other hand, he might think it's better to see if she dies, then go find Jesus. That way he won't risk missing the moment of death.
Agonizing calculations in both directions. I expect he was torn.
It could be that she already expired when he left to find Jesus. But that presents another dilemma. If he tells Jesus that his daughter has died, he doesn't know if Jesus will say it's futile to go to his house. The reader knows that even if she's dead, the situation isn't hopeless, yet that's because we know how the story ends. But Jairus is in the thick of things, having to make snap judgments in a state of desperation and emotional turmoil. So maybe Jairus is stretching the truth to make it worthwhile for Jesus to go there. That's psychologically realistic.
3. Consider how much time it would take for Jairus to track down Jesus, then how much time it would take for Jesus to follow him back home. That's a round trip.
To my knowledge, the ancient way of determining death was cessation of breathing. But if somebody stops breathing, it's generally a matter of few minutes before the brain begins to die.
So even in the time it took for Jairus to leave home, locate Jesus, elbow his way through the crowd, explain the situation to Jesus, then double back, if the daughter had ceased breathing for that duration, she'd be truly dead. And minimally, it would be several hours before the widow's son was buried. So even without medical equipment/diagnostic techniques, they'd surely be dead if they permanently stopped breathing for that long an interval.
This won't fly for readers who think the Gospels are fiction, but my post isn't addressing that mindset. I'm considering a different potential objection.
//Agonizing calculations in both directions. I expect he was torn. //
ReplyDeleteI can imagine! Another possibility is that the child was so sick that she was effectively in a coma. In which case Jairus may have been willing to leave knowing it would hurt him for her to die with him away, but it wouldn't affect her psychologically, while at the same time possibly saving her life by appealing to Jesus.
//But Jairus is in the thick of things, having to make snap judgments in a state of desperation and emotional turmoil. So maybe Jairus is stretching the truth to make it worthwhile for Jesus to go there. That's psychologically realistic. //
I suspect something similar happened in the case of the Shunammite and Elisha.
25 So she set out and came to the man of God at Mount Carmel.When the man of God saw her coming, he said to Gehazi his servant, "Look, there is the Shunammite.
26 Run at once to meet her and say to her, 'Is all well with you? Is all well with your husband? Is all well with the child?'" And she answered, "All is well."
27 And when she came to the mountain to the man of God, she caught hold of his feet. And Gehazi came to push her away. But the man of God said, "Leave her alone, for she is in bitter distress, and the LORD has hidden it from me and has not told me."- 2 Kings 4:25-27
She probably feared that if she told the absolute truth to Gehazi that he would prevent her from seeing Elisha. Thinking Gehazi would shield his master from the problem. Sure, Elijah was able to raise the dead, but could his master Elisha do it on command/demand too? It'd be pretty embarrassing if he couldn't. The man who is supposed to have a double portion of Elijah's spirit.
// 3. Consider how much time it would take for Jairus to track down Jesus, then how much time it would take for Jesus to follow him back home. That's a round trip.//
CONT.
I think narrative compression is sufficient to solve the apparent contradiction. In conjunction with that, Jairus may have known that the child was not only on the verge of death when he left but that by the time he reached Jesus he might have suspected that by then she had possibly/probably died. So, it's not impossible that Jairus said both. That she was on the verge of dying and that she was probably dead by now, or virtually or in effect dead. Or would be dead by the time they all (including Jesus) got back to her. In a similar situation a modern person might say, "She's a *'goner'*, if you don't come and heal her". Then when the people from his house arrived, they confirmed his suspicion that she had died.
Delete18 While he was saying these things to them, behold, a ruler came in and knelt before him, saying, "My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live."- Matt. 9:18 ESV
I don't think Matt. 9:18 contradicts the possible scenarios I or Steve offered. Maybe Jairus really believed, out of dreadful fear of the worst actually happening, that she had just died, and said so as if it were a fact. Psychologically, sometimes we state things in their worst case to protect ourselves from shock and disappointment. Then upon further, more rational thinking, Jairus may have been more precise and said she was actually near death, but likely dead by now or will be by the time they reach her. Basically, there are many ways to resolve this apparent contradiction by appealing to the psychology of Jairus, the epistemic limitations of Jairus in conjunction with the passage of time and the progression of sickness, the nature of communication [prolepsis, grammar, figures of speech, hyperbole etc.], the constraints of story telling, and the limited size of a scroll that you want to cram everything important into which necessitates narritive compression. It's not surprising that GMark, which is substantially smaller than GMatthew and GLuke, elaborates more on the stories it has in common with both Matthew and Luke. Likely because he had more room on the scroll to do so with the amount of information he had (and his purpose of providing a succinct bio of Jesus' life).