She was cured the instant she touched Jesus's robe.
A woman having an issue of blood twelve years ... touched the border of his garment ... And straightway the fountain of her blood was dried up ... And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes? Mark 5:25-29 A woman having an issue of blood twelve years ... Came behind him, and touched the border of his garment: and immediately her issue of blood stanched. And Jesus said, Who touched me? ... Jesus said, Somebody hath touched me: for I perceive that virtue is gone out of me. Luke 8:43-45
Cited passages
A certain woman, who had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and had suffered many things by many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better, but rather grew worse, having heard the things concerning Jesus, came up behind him in the crowd, and touched his clothes. For she said, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately the flow of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction.
A woman who had a flow of blood for twelve years, who had spent all her living on physicians and could not be healed by any came behind him, and touched the fringe of his cloak. Immediately the flow of her blood stopped. Jesus said, “Who touched me?” When all denied it, Peter and those with him said, “Master, the multitudes press and jostle you, and you say, ‘Who touched me?’”
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The contradiction about the moment of the hemorrhaging woman's cure lives in the Greek and in the narrative sequence each evangelist chose. Mark, the source on the priority hypothesis, is unambiguous: the woman touches Jesus' garment, "and immediately (euthys) the fountain of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague" (Mark 5:29). The cure is complete at the instant of contact, before any word is exchanged. Only afterward does Jesus, "immediately knowing in himself that power (dynamis) had gone out of him," turn and ask who touched him (Mark 5:30). Mark's whole conception is of an automatic transfer of healing power through physical contact, independent of and prior to any verbal act; the conversation that follows merely brings the already-healed woman into the open. Luke 8:44 reproduces this exactly, using his characteristic adverb parachrēma ("instantly"): "immediately her issue of blood stanched," again before Jesus speaks.
Matthew tells it differently. He omits the power-transfer entirely and reverses the order. Jesus turns, sees the woman, and says, "Daughter, be of good comfort; your faith has made you whole," and only then does the narrator report, "and the woman was made whole from that hour (apo tēs hōras ekeinēs)" (Matt 9:22). In Matthew the healing follows the word; the touch alone does not cure. Where Mark and Luke have a contact-cure operating through impersonal dynamis, Matthew has a word-cure operating through the personal authority of Jesus' speech and the woman's faith.
The apologetic response (Blomberg; Carson) typically runs along two lines. The first holds that Matthew is merely noting that the cure was "confirmed" or "publicly ratified" by Jesus' word, while the actual healing still occurred at the moment of contact. This is special pleading: Matthew has deliberately removed the contact-cure language (he has no euthys at the touch and no power-transfer) and placed the healing notice after the speech precisely to make the word the operative cause. The second line argues that apo tēs hōras ekeinēs is a loose idiom that does not fix a precise instant. But this founders on Matthew's own usage. The identical formula appears at Matt 15:28 (the Canaanite woman's daughter healed "from that very hour") and Matt 17:18 (the epileptic boy cured "from that hour"), and in both the healing demonstrably follows and results from Jesus' authoritative utterance. Matthew uses the phrase consistently to mark a cure effected by the spoken word, which is exactly the opposite of Mark's pre-verbal contact-cure.
Mainstream critical scholarship (Davies and Allison; Luz; Hagner; Marcus; Fitzmyer) accordingly reads the divergence as a Matthean theological edit. Matthew systematically downplays the quasi-magical, automatic transfer of power that pervades Mark's miracle stories and reframes the cures as acts of Jesus' sovereign word eliciting faith. This pattern is visible across Matthew's redaction of Markan healings, and the relocation of the cure-notice in 9:22 is a small but characteristic instance of it. The result is a genuine inconsistency at the level of when and how the woman was healed: Mark and Luke have her cured the instant she touched the hem, before Jesus said anything; Matthew has her cured only after — and because of — his word. The disagreement is minor in narrative consequence but it is real and it is grounded in the source-text grammar and sequence.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction produced by Matthean theological redaction of Mark.
Sources for this reading