Luke 8:41

καὶ ἰδού. St Matthew places this message of Jairus after the farewell feast which he gave to his friends before abandoning for ever his office of tax-gatherer. At that feast arose the question about fasting, and St Matthew (Matthew 9:18) says that Jairus came ‘while Jesus was yet speaking these things,’ and in so definite a note of time, on a day to him so memorable, he could hardly be inexact. On the other hand, St Mark says, and St Luke implies, that the message reached Jesus as He disembarked on the seashore. Hence it has been supposed that Jesus heard the first entreaty from Jairus on the shore when his daughter was dying (Luke 8:42; Mark 5:23), but instead of going straight to the house of Jairus went first to Matthew’s feast; and that Jairus then came to the feast in agony to say that she was just dead (Matthew 9:18). The very small discrepancies are however quite easily explicable without this conjecture, and it was wholly unlike the method of Jesus to interpose a feast between the request of an agonised father and His act of mercy.

Ἰάειρος. ‘Jair,’ Judges 10:3. He is one of the few recipients of miracles whose name is recorded.

ἄρχων τῆς συναγωγῆς. The synagogues had no clergy, but were managed by laymen, at the head of whom was the “ruler,” whose title of Rosh hakkenéseth was as familiar to the Jews as that of Rabbi. His functions resembled those of a leading elder. The appeal of such a functionary shews the estimation in which our Lord was still held among the Galileans.

εἰσελθεῖν. Jair had not the faith of the heathen centurion.