Rigidity, Gateway Drugs, and Jairus

What did Jairus say about his daughter when he came to Jesus? Did he tell him that his daughter had died or that she was dying? This relatively minor question has fueled many-a conversion to the acceptance of fact-changing literary devices. This is why I call it a "gateway drug" to fact-changing by the evangelists. A reasonable approach to this difference is to attribute it to the normal variation of witness testimony. Perhaps different people heard what Jairus said slightly differently, even though he only said one or the other of these things. Or perhaps they remembered it slightly differently later on. Or perhaps, in his agitation, and knowing that his daughter was barely holding on to life when he left the house, Jairus actually said both things, the second based on his guess that she might have died by the time he was speaking to Jesus. The insistence that we not use our real-world imagination in these ways arises from the rigid rule of all-or-nothing factual dependence and independence, which I discussed last week. Be sure to like and subscribe! Thumbnail courtesy of freebibleimages.org