Jesus and Jairus' daughter

 What the story is about:

The story of the woman with prolonged menstruation is situated within the story of the daughter of Jairus, whom Jesus raised from the dead. Both women were, in a way, dead. The daughter of Jairus was physically dead.  The woman with prolonged menstruation had suffered for twelve years from her illness and from being ritually unclean. She had been unable to live a normal life, and therefore in a sense had been dead to herself and the people around her. Jesus returned both of them to life.  

The story occurs in one episode. It is described in each of the Synoptic gospels:
    Mark 5:24-34
    Luke 8:43-48
    Matthew 9:20-22.
Matthew’s coverage of the story is minimal. Mark and Luke give fuller details.  

Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years; and though she had spent all she had on physicians, no one could cure her. She came up behind Jesus and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped. The Jesus asked “Who touched me?” When all denied it, Peter said “Master, the crowds surround you and press in on you”. But Jesus said “Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out from me”. When the woman saw that she could not remain hidden, she came trembling; and falling down before him, she declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. He said to her “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace”.  

THE WOMAN APPROACHES JESUS

 The story occurred in Capernaum, where Jesus was living at the time. Capernaum (the village of Nahum) was on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, on a main highway. It was probably only a small settlement at the time, with several rows of houses along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. The apostle Peter had a house there.

The town was well situated as a headquarters for someone like Jesus. It was on a main highway, and had access to the water for travel by boat. It probably also had a tax or toll office, and a small garrison of soldiers. In the story, Jesus was making his way towards the house of one of the leaders of the local synagogue. He was surrounded by a large crowd of people, among whom was a woman who had been suffering with a prolonged menstrual flow.

She had endured this for twelve years. Strictly speaking, she should not have been among other people. According to the laws of ritual purity, she should have been at home during her menstrual period, living quietly (see Leviticus 15:19-31). These laws worked very well for healthy women who had a menstrual period of five – seven days. It was a time out for them, when they were relieved of their normal duties and could rest.  

 
Wall painting from Pompeii, showing a doctor treating a patient

But the woman in this story was not healthy. Her menstrual flow had lasted twelve years, so the purity laws had become an impossible burden for her. She could not go out, she could not touch members of her family, she could not enjoy a normal life, and she was constantly debilitated. It is not surprising that she had used up all her money on doctors, or that she was prepared to flout the Law when she heard that a wonder-worker called Jesus was in the street outside her house.

Doctors in 1st century Palestine used a wide range of herbal cures to help their patients. Many of these were effective, and gave relief to the sufferer. Surgery was only ever used as a last resort, because the patient often died of shock during the operation, which was performed without anesthetic. But the woman hoped that Jesus could do what the doctors could not.

THE WOMAN IS CURED

The woman felt an immediate transformation within her body, and knew that she was cured. At the same moment, Jesus felt power go out from himself. He looked around, and asked who had touched him. Peter pointed out to him that he was so closely surrounded by people that he was constantly being touched by them, but that was not what Jesus meant. He looked around at the people near him.  

The woman was terrified, because she had broken the purity laws and, in touching Jesus, had made him ritually unclean as well - no small thing for a respected rabbi like Jesus. Any person she had touched in the crowd was also ritually unclean. Each of them would have to go through a process of ritual cleansing which involved bathing, changing their clothes and being alone until the evening.

ATTITUDES TO WOMEN AT THAT TIME

Gospel stories are often discussed as if they happened in isolation, outside the real world. But in fact they occurred within a historical context, against a cultural background quite different to our own. Knowing about the world of the gospel gives the reader a better understanding of the stories.

Greek philosophy was greatly admired at the time in the Mediterranean world, and it had a profound impact on the way that people saw their world. One of the greatest philosophers, Plato, proposed the theory of dualism, suggesting that everything in the cosmos had an equal and opposite other. This theory had a profound impact on the way that women were viewed, and it was not to women's advantage. 'Woman' was placed in a category containing elements that were viewed as negative:

   Man   -                 Woman
   Civilization   -      Nature
   Reason/logic   -  Emotion
   Good   -               Evil
   Light   -                Darkness

Keep in mind that
    Civilization was the ideal; Nature was mistrusted and potentially dangerous
    Logic and reason were admired, and emotion was to be subordinated.
    Goodness was always preferable to evil.
    Light, especially in the pre-industrial world, was preferred to darkness.

'Sin', Franz Stuck

These are examples only, but they show that Platonic dualism placed women in a negative category. They were seen as closer to the natural/animal world than men. By nature they were irrational and untrustworthy, and therefore unfit to make their own decisions and govern their own lives. They had to be looked after and controlled, never treated as equals.

This differed from the traditional Jewish way of looking at the world, which saw all things in creation as integrated and complementary, rather than as opposites of each other. An example of this is the creation story of Eve, which relates that the first woman was created from a rib taken by God from Adam's side, thereby suggesting that a man could never be fully complete unless he was in partnership with a woman.

Jewish and Jewish/Christian women resisted the ideas of Platonic dualism, which patronized them and diminished their status. While Christianity remained a Jewish sect, the status of  women within the Christian communities was high.

But as the ideas of Christianity moved out into the Gentile, Hellenised world, the first Christians found they had to use the Greek philosophical framework to explain their beliefs and be accepted. So Jesus' original ideal of mutual respect between the sexes was watered down and changed. Women found they were given roles that were acceptable in the outside, Hellenistic culture. In doing so, the Christian church stepped back from the radical ideals of the first Jewish/Christians.

Women were still powerful in the private sphere, but were shunted to the side in the public arena. This shows up, for example, in 1st and 2nd century re-tellings of the biblical stories. Where these stories had often had women as central characters, they now focused on men and male activities.

  An example of this is the story of Moses’ birth in Josephus’ Antiquities (Josephus was a Jewish writer and historian of the 1st century BC).
In the original biblical telling of the story (in Exodus 1 and 2) the baby Moses is saved by the two midwives, by his mother, by his sister, and by Pharaoh’s daughter – all, obviously, women.

In Josephus’ retelling of the story written in about 94AD, the focus is largely on Moses’ father Amram. He performs many of the actions previously attributed to the women. Female characters in the story are changed. The mid-wives in Josephus’ retelling
    are Egyptian, not Hebrew
    are unnamed
    are not present at Moses' birth
    kill Hebrew babies, not save them.
The basic story of Moses’ birth remains the same, but the female dimension has been lost.

There were reasons for the changes Josephus made to the story. He was trying to counter the anti-Semitism that existed in Rome at the time, so he wrote about Jewish women who behaved like decent Roman matrons! This ideal of Roman womanhood had been vigorously promoted in a ‘back to basics’ program by the emperor Augustus and the Roman authorities.

 The ideal Roman woman, they said, was a mother of many children, content with her household duties. She kept to her traditional role, in the home, and did not speak assertively to the men in her family. She did not enter the public world.

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