Jairus's Family Revisited: A Collaborative Model of Parenting (Mark 5:21–24, 35–43)

Abstract:The present study proposes parentist criticism as a new approach to reading the biblical text. As a test case, we revisit the healing of Jairus's daughter (Mark 5:21–24, 35–43) to reconfigure family dynamics with a focus on the role of each parent and their collaboration for the sake of their child. A review of recent scholarship reveals that the roles of Jairus and his wife as parents are treated in isolation from one another, when considered at all—thus, failing to address the larger picture of family dynamics. We, therefore, propose parentist criticism as a more holistic alternative. This criticism takes shape in three stages. Firstly, we examine the gendered roles of Jairus and his wife as they intersect with parental duties within the first-century patriarchal cultural codes. Secondly, we scrutinise the gendered parental roles of Jairus and his wife in light of their crossings of these roles as it pertains to the care of their daughter. Finally, we reconsider the family dynamics in this text as read through a lens of collaborative parenting. Taken together, we propose reading this text with a parentist approach in order to highlight the text's potential to break down gendered household hierarchies through shared parental concern and action, oriented towards the well-being of the child(ren).