These days, most people read the bible—or, at least, most people experience it—as a collection of passages or stories, each abstracted from the rest, showing up as quotations, citations, or readings in a liturgical setting. We hear a few verses at a time, or we read a story here or there, but less often do we experience whole books of the bible, or collections of books that share things in common with each other. It’s rarely read as literature, cover to cover, start to finish, in a way that would let us experience the ways the biblical text is constructed, stitched together, or following a thread of logic or theme from one place to another.
There are things to be said in favor of this one-piece-at-a-time approach; not too many people have the time to read such voluminous books as a whole, and even fewer have the liberty to read the whole thing. And anyway, the bible does not always tell clean or satisfying stories; it can be choppy, wander off-topic, get lost in archaic language, and otherwise alienate the reader. For most folks, experiencing the bible as a series of cherry-picked passages makes a lot of sense.
But that approach can leave us without a strong sense of the constructed-ness of the biblical text—the way it has been put together, intentionally, as a literary work, with all of the artfulness and craft that comparable texts would have. We don’t always get a sense of the author’s or editor’s presence in the text—the way those people are working behind the scenes to make the text move and flow as a story, from one moment to the next. One of the places where this editorial or authorial hand is most visible, within the gospels anyway, is in the gospel passage from this week’s lectionary, and specifically, the second half of it, Matthew 9:18-26. While it’s easy to read the gospels as a series of “this happened and then that happened” events in a row, this passage shows how important storytelling was to the people behind our bibles.
This passage orbits around two figures: a young girl who has just died, and a woman with a hemorrhagic illness. Both people are necessary for the story; neither story can really be told without the other. The woman’s story is embedded within the girl’s story, with an A-B-A story structure, so that the passage begins and ends with the girl’s story while taking a detour through the woman’s story.
One of the interesting things about this passage is the high degree of variation that it experiences across the synoptic gospels. Matthew’s story, the one in the lectionary this week, is actually the simplest and most straightforward of the three, with the shortest length and the sparsest details. Mark’s passage might be my favorite, with its details about Jesus’ perception of the woman’s touch, and a more dramatic telling of the girl’s story. Luke and Mark add details like the father’s name; Luke in particular is always citing the names for things and people. Both Luke and Mark tell us that the girl is twelve years old, which is a detail that Matthew leaves out. Passages like this one make it hard for all the gospels scholars to agree on an order in which the books were composed; for a long time the majority of scholars have thought that Mark was composed first and that Luke and Matthew came afterward, but why would Matthew have removed so many details from Mark’s account? Probably we will never know the full truth of things, and in any event the full truth is likely more complicated than we have imagined—less like a tree of life showing descent of one gospel from another, and more like a tangled thicket of influences and borrowings.
In all three gospels, though, the girl’s story and the woman’s story are intertwined. The one is sandwiched inside the other, of course, but there are other factors, like a shared gender and the number twelve, that are flashing neon signs that we should pay attention to them as a single unit, and read them together.
It’s possible, of course, that this is simply the way that things happened, on whatever day in the life of Jesus these passages are describing. Perhaps he was going somewhere, was approached by the girl’s father, set off to see her, and was waylayed by the woman, before finally getting to the girl. But even if that’s true, there’s no obligation to tell the story together the way the gospels do. They could have related the two people’s stories as discrete tales. But they appear together, suggesting a narrative purpose for them together, and asking readers to think about them as a pair. When we do that, we start to ask different questions of them together than we would have asked of them apart. Are the two women related? Is there something beneath the surface here about gender? Is the woman’s bleeding the result of childbirth, which would have coincided with the girl’s birth twelve years ago? Is there a commentary on status happening here, since the girl seems to have high status (she was the daughter of a “ruler” in Matthew, and the daughter of a synagogue leader named Jairus in the other two), and the woman likely would have faced some ostracization because of her illness?
The sum of the two stories is greater than their two parts. They mean more, and differently, together, than they do apart. There are dozens of healing stories in the gospels, but these are set apart because of the way they orbit each other, and talk to each other. Whether the gospel writers put them together or left them together, there’s literary artifice in the way the story is told, with new meanings surfacing because of the way they talk to each other.
As an aside, one of my favorite academic articles is about these stories, and specifically the passage as it appears in Mark. Candida Moss, who is always reliable as a learned and erudite commentator (her work is great, and I encourage you to check it out!), has an article titled The Man with the Flow of Power: Porous Bodies in Mark 5:25-34. The title is a play on the way the woman is usually described, as “the woman with the flow of blood.” In the article, she compares not the woman and the girl, but the woman and the man—Jesus—and the ways both of them have “leaky” bodies that they don’t seem to be able to control. The woman’s bleeding is beyond her control, which is what provokes her to reach for Jesus’ garment, but Jesus’ power is also beyond his control, leaving his body without his consent. (He’s surprised by this in Mark and Luke, while in Matthew it’s not as clear). It’s a fascinating article for the ways it helps us think about how bodies are portrayed, and how gender plays into those portrayals, and how Jesus is written in surprisingly nimble and sensitive ways.