Let's consider some objections to my post earlier this week about whether Jesus and Peter offered support for praying to the deceased when they spoke to people they raised from the dead in the gospels and Acts. Probably the two best passages that could be cited in support of interpreting this material in a way that supports prayers to the deceased are Luke 8:55 and Acts 9:40. Luke 8 mentions the return of the girl's spirit to her body after mentioning Jesus' comment to her. Acts 9:40 says that Peter turned to the woman's body just before speaking to her, and we don't normally refer to a living person with a phrase like "the body". Rather, it's more common to use that language when referring to a corpse. Shouldn't we conclude, then, that Jesus and Peter were speaking to the dead in these passages, which offers support for praying to the deceased?
There are some contextual factors that need to be taken into account here, and I only mentioned some of them in my previous post and the other one linked within it. So, I want to go into more depth here to supplement what I wrote in those earlier posts.
I cited several resurrection passages across both the Old and New Testaments. The resurrections often, but not always, occur through touching (1 Kings 17:21-23, 2 Kings 4:34-37, 13:21, Acts 20:10) or occur in passages that mention touching in a way that possibly or probably was instrumental to the raising of the dead person (Matthew 9:25, Mark 5:41-42, Luke 7:14-15, 8:54-55). Notice that the two passages cited in the title of this post are in Luke's writings and that a few of the passages just cited in this paragraph are from his writings. So, Luke is one of the sources who often associates touching with the raising of the dead.
In addition to that larger context related to resurrections and touching, notice that all three of the versions of the Luke 8 resurrection (found in each of the Synoptics) involve touching. In fact, Matthew's account mentions the touching without mentioning Jesus' comment to the girl. Since the touching is the common denominator in all three of these Synoptic passages, whereas Jesus' comment isn't even mentioned in Matthew's account, the touching seems to be the most plausible candidate for the means by which the resurrection was brought about. And Mark and Luke mention the touching before mentioning Jesus' comment, which suggests that the girl came back to life before Jesus spoke to her. Matthew's account has Jairus saying that Jesus can resurrect his daughter by touch, saying, "lay your hand on her, and she will live" (9:18). That's probably why Matthew only mentions the touching, without saying anything about Jesus' comment to the girl. It was the touch that raised her from the dead.
Further support for that reading is found in the healing that's narrated just before this resurrection in every one of the Synoptics. Jesus heals a woman with a hemorrhage when she touches his cloak. It would make sense for two miracles brought about through touching to be grouped together in each of the Synoptics. The fact that each of the Synoptic accounts in question is preceded by an account of healing through touch increases the likelihood that the touching is the means of the resurrection mentioned in the next account.
Why, then, does Luke 8:55 mention the return of the girl's spirit after Jesus' comment to the girl? Probably because Luke isn't mentioning things in chronological order. People often write chronologically, but not always. Go on to verse 56. It mentions that the girl's parents were amazed. Did their amazement not begin until after the events of verse 55? No, they surely were amazed as soon as they saw their daughter's body moving. They wouldn't have waited until after she had gotten up and started walking to be amazed. They would have been amazed as soon as she even started to get up, if not sooner (e.g., seeing her breathing, seeing her eyes open). What Luke is doing is focusing on some events centered around Jesus (verse 54), then focusing on events centered around the girl (verse 55), then focusing on events centered around the parents (verse 56). It doesn't follow that the events of each of the latter two verses happened after what's mentioned in the previous verse(s). There could be some overlap in the chronology involved. Maybe an analogy would help here. Let's say I'm describing what a man and his wife did one day. I mention the man's activities in chronological order: going to work, going to the bank after work to deposit a check, etc. And I mention his wife's activities in chronological order: doing some shopping, making dinner, etc. Since I mentioned the wife's activities after her husband's, does it follow that everything the wife did occurred after everything the husband did? If the last activity I mentioned in the man's life was going to bed, and the first activity I mentioned in the woman's life was getting out of bed, does it follow that she got out of bed, went shopping, etc. after her husband went to bed? Of course not. Rather, their activities overlapped. She was shopping while her husband was at work, she was making dinner while he was going to the bank, and so on. I shifted my focus from the man's activities to the woman's without intending to suggest that the woman's activities occurred later. Given the totality of the evidence, as discussed in this post and my previous two, Luke seems to be doing the same kind of thing in Luke 8.
Let's review some of the problems with seeing Luke 8:55 as offering support for praying to the deceased:
- There are multiple lines of evidence, discussed above, that suggest that the girl was brought back to life by means of touch prior to Jesus' comment to her.
- Prayer to God is mentioned explicitly and frequently from Genesis onward. The lack of references to praying to the deceased is best explained by a lack of the practice, including in the timeframe leading up to and just after the Luke 8 passage.
- The Old Testament prohibitions of attempting to contact the deceased include references to consulting mediums and such, but also use language broad enough to include praying to the deceased. I've discussed those passages elsewhere, and they suggest that Jesus wouldn't have prayed to the dead or intended his comments in these resurrection passages to be taken as warrant for praying to the deceased.
- The evidence against prayer to the dead among the earlier sources of the patristic era, which I've discussed elsewhere and will expand upon later this year, likewise makes less sense if material like we find in Luke 8 was intended to support praying to the dead.
What about Acts 9? Again, it's helpful to consider the larger context.
The pattern I've discussed involving how Jesus handled situations like Peter's is relevant. Peter probably was imitating Jesus in how he handled such situations, which helps explain the parallels between Peter's actions and those of Jesus in similar contexts. Since Jesus wasn't speaking to the dead or intending to offer support for praying to the deceased, Peter probably wasn't either.
As with Luke 8, it's helpful to look at the account that's just before the one in question in Acts 9. In the healing that occurs just before the resurrection in Acts 9, Peter says, "Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you; get up and make your bed." (verse 34) The verse then says the man got up, as instructed. Obviously, the man couldn't get up and make his bed while he was paralyzed. Rather, Peter is arranging for a demonstration that a healing has already occurred. The same is likely occurring in the next account, the one we're focused on here. Tabitha is being told to arise in the sense of moving her body to demonstrate that she's already been raised from the dead. She's described as doing so in verse 40 ("she sat up"), after which Peter "raised her up" (verse 41). In one of my previous posts, I cited the example of Lazarus in John 11:43-44, who's told to "come forth", then is described as coming forth from the tomb. He wasn't being told to come forth from death. Rather, he was being told to come forth from the tomb after a resurrection that occurred earlier (probably what Jesus was referring to when he thanked the Father for having heard him in verse 41, meaning that the resurrection had already occurred before Jesus said "come forth"). That seems to be what's going on in all of these resurrection passages.
So, why does Acts 9:40 refer to how Peter turned to "the body", as if the woman was still dead? Luke referred to the resurrected son of the widow of Nain as "the dead man" after he had come back to life, in the process of describing his sitting up and speaking (Luke 7:15). Maybe Luke did that to highlight the significance of the fact that a person who had died was involved. Luke may be doing the same thing in Acts 9:40. That would be unusual, which is problematic, but the alternative under consideration here is of an unusual, problematic nature as well. If Tabitha was still dead when Peter spoke to her, then his turning to her is unusual, since we usually don't turn to a body to speak to somebody whose spirit has left her body. It would be like turning to your left to speak to somebody standing at your right. Either scenario under consideration here is unusual and, therefore, problematic to some extent. It's not as though a scenario in which Tabitha is alive when Peter turns to her body is the only one that involves any such unusualness.
More importantly, though, the view that Tabitha was alive when Peter spoke to her doesn't require that she was alive when the reference is made to "the body". She could have returned to life between Peter's turning and the start of his comment to Tabitha or at the same time that he spoke to her. Either of those scenarios would simultaneously avoid an unusual use of the phrase "the body" and avoid the problems involved in Peter's speaking to a dead woman. One possible scenario is that Peter had, by whatever means, discerned that God had granted his prayer request that Tabitha be resurrected, after which he turned to the body to look for an indication that she had returned to life (by seeing her breathing again, for example), at which point he spoke to her. Or maybe God had revealed to Peter that she would return to life as he spoke to her, meaning that the return to life and the start of the speaking were simultaneous. I see no way to demonstrate that the resurrection didn't occur until after Peter spoke or began to speak.
In addition to what I've just said about the view of Acts 9 that I'm criticizing, that view has some of the same problems that I addressed earlier when discussing Luke 8. See the hyphenated section at the conclusion of my comments on the Luke 8 passage.
But what if, for the sake of argument, we granted the view that Jesus and Peter spoke to deceased individuals in these passages? What would follow? We'd still have to explain the problems with praying to the dead that I outlined in my discussion of Luke 8. One potential way of addressing those problems would be to propose that Jesus and Peter held the common ancient Jewish view that spirits of the deceased remain near their body for some number of days after death (Francois Bovon, Luke 1 [Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 2002], 340). That could mean that the deceased individuals were viewed as still being part of life on earth, sort of like Samuel's return to earthly life in 1 Samuel 28 and the return of Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration. That would allow a window of opportunity for people like Jesus and Peter to speak to the dead under the circumstances in question while simultaneously offering somewhat of an explanation of the lack of references to praying to the dead elsewhere. There would still be problems left unresolved under such a scenario, and I think my approach that I argued for prior to this paragraph is better. But the scenario I'm referring to here illustrates how something like the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox practice of praying to the saints wouldn't follow even if we were (wrongly) convinced that Jesus and Peter spoke to the dead in these resurrection passages.
Another possibility - for those who think that Jesus probably spoke to the dead in one or more of the relevant passages, but that Peter probably didn't (or are agnostic about the passage involving Peter) - is that Jesus' deity allowed him to do what the rest of us can't. That would explain Jesus' behavior in the passage(s) in question while simultaneously being consistent with the evidence against prayers to the dead in other contexts.
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