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Steve Wells, Cassandra Blake, and Yark Hutprancer ~

SW: "Was Jairus' daughter alive when Jesus was approached?"

By modern standards, yes; she was alive. She was dying, but her brain waves had not yet irreversibly ceased.

Cassandra Blake: "Why are the gymnastics necessary?"

If by "gymnastics" you mean "interpretations," well, that's not too hard: the Bible is an ancient text, and its individual books were written in culture that you and I will never experience. We experience /our/ culture and we tend to approach the text with assumptions which our cultural environment has transferred to us.

For instance, in the case at hand, we define, nowadays, "dying" and "dead" as two different stages, but it's possible that in the first century, a person could honestly describe a dead person as "dying," and a dying person as "dead," depending on how the individual viewed death and the process of the departure of the soul.

And, nowadays, we tend to expect historical records of events to be strictly sequential, not condensed or arranged in some non-chronological format. But in the first century this was not a given, especially where the background details serve primarily as a frame for the actions of the protagonist.

Cassandra Blake: "If this is really the inerrant word of god, to be a guide on how to live our lives, and to save us from eternal damnation, couldn't it be a little more clear?"

Clarity is, to an extent, in the eye of the beholder. To me, the basic message of the Bible is not unclear or difficult to discover. At the same time, the closer one looks at any text -- or anything -- the more details one finds to contemplate. A beautiful, tranquil butterfly is a beautiful, tranquil butterfly and at the same time its body is a spectacularly complicated and exquisitely engineered flying machine. If you want to know the details about /anything/, then get ready to experience a greater level of exposure to complexity than you got at a mere surface-level, because just about everything appears more complex as one looks at it more and more closely.

Yark: ... "What's he going to do if it isn't the word of god?"

What are you going to do if it is?

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock