Jairus’s Daughter and the Female Body in Mark demonstrates that ubiquitous and significant depictions of children in the literature and material culture of the first century CE shaped the mindsets of the Gospel of Mark’s original audience. Through a detailed analysis of the story of Jairus’s daughter in Mark 5 and of the archaeological remains depicting female children, Janine E. Luttick reveals how ancient hearers of this story encountered an image of a female child that communicated ideas of hope to Jesus’s followers and in turn how readers today can understand the authority of Jesus, the domestic structures of early Christianity, and the suffering and loss experienced by some early Christians.

Janine E. Luttick is a lecturer in biblical studies in the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at Australian Catholic University. She has published in the areas of the Gospel of Mark and contemporary biblical hermeneutics.