My first encounter with professional societies in the field of religion was at Union Seminary, New York, in December of 1962. I was representing Fortress Press, newly minted by bringing under one roof the publishing arms of two Lutheran denominations that had merged. I had come on as one of two editors hired by the new press in September of that year.

The other new editor, Norman Hjelm (later Director of Fortress Press), and I had both graduated from university and seminary, had done some graduate work, and had been working as pastors. And we were white and male. In my case, it had been employment as a pastor in Princeton, after two years as a translator and editor at the Lutheran World Federation in Geneva following a year on a Fulbright in Göttingen. In these respects we were fairly typical of the students I surveyed in 1969–70 for the chapter on graduate students in religion for Claude Welch's Graduate Education in Religion: A Critical Appraisal (1971: 203–19): religious background and often religious commitment; college or university; ministerial training in a professional school; graduate study in a divinity school institution and/or a university often connected with such; and (not least) white and male.

Our backgrounds were also similar to those of the members of the National Association of Biblical Instructors (NABI) and the Society of Biblical Literature meetings that December at Union. But changes were in the wings. Welch's groundbreaking book spelled out those changes and why they were occurring.

In all four New Testament gospels, as we have seen, Jesus sends his followers out to heal. However, only the Gospel of Luke has a direct sequel - the Acts of the Apostles - that shows them doing so. But there are numerous other Christian sources, beginning with the letters of Paul and continuing on into the Middle Ages, that constitute indirect sequels to Jesus’ healings in the New Testament gospels - responses, as it were, to the charge given to his earliest followers. These various sources make clear that early Christians viewed his healings as set forth in the gospels not as once-for-all manifestations of God's power and life, but as something continuing, and to be continued. In the ancient Mediterranean world where, as we observed in chapter 1, life was precarious and good health highly prized, persons offering healing would be welcomed by many.

In his book Christianizing the Roman Empire (1984), Yale University historian Ramsay MacMullen contends that it was in fact Christian miracles, including healings, more than any other factor that won converts. Especially crucial, according to early Christian testimony, was the expulsion of demons, or as moderns might be inclined to say, the healing of mental illness, which in ancient paganism ranked much lower on the healing scale than did bodily ailments. For Jesus’ followers, however, the driving out of demons was a dramatic demonstration of the superiority of the Christian God over the demons and deities of paganism. Various early Christian writers tout it as a distinctive mark of Christianity and as a means of winning converts. Thus, around the middle of the second century CE Justin Martyr boasts that Christians cast out demons by reciting a little credo about Jesus’ crucifixion (2 Apology 6.6; similarly, Justin's Dialogue with Trypho 30.3; 76.7; 85.2-3) - an interesting early example of how the story of the powerless healer begins to be used as a power for healing in his name. A few decades later, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons, reports that those from whom demons have been expelled are frequently won to Christ [Against Heresies 2.33.4). Tertullian, a couple of decades further still (197 CE), asserts that evil spirits inhabiting humans or masquerading as deities reveal their true identities when a follower of Christ orders them to speak [Apol 23.4).

Jesus as Healer: Prologue

1. What is “health”? “sickness”? “healing”?

2. What roles are played in healing by physicians and other health care workers? By relatives and friends of the sick person? By the sick person?

3. What differences do you see between attitudes to sickness, health, and healing in Jesus’ day and today? In the treatment of sickness then and today? Why the differences? What are the pros and cons of the differences?

4. Have you ever turned to “alternative medicine” for help, or do you know persons who have? What were the reasons - and the results?

5. What is your experience with “home remedies”? How do they compare with home remedies in Jesus’ day?

6. What is your perception of medical treatment of women as compared to that of men?

Jesus as Healer: The Gospel of Mark

1. What are the similarities and differences between “leprosy” today and the “leprosy” referred to in the New Testament, or in the Bible generally (cf. Lev. 12, 14; Num. 12:15; 2 Kings 5 and 7:3-4) and in the attitudes to persons afflicted with it?

2. Compare and contrast biblical reports of “possession by demons” and modern diagnoses of “mental illnesses” and attitudes to such afflictions then and now.

3. What comparisons and contrasts do you see in belief in the power of words and names in Jesus’ day and today? How are “words” used in treating mental illness today?

4. How were material means used by healers in Jesus’ day? How are they used in treating mental illness today?

5. How important is “touch” in healing? In life generally?

6. What connection - if any - do you see between sickness and “sin”?

7. If you had been living in Jesus’ day, do you think you might have been found among his supporters or his opponents?

8. How do power and powerlessness figure into the story of Jesus in Mark? Do you see any implications for today?

9. Does the question of Jesus in Mark (and other New Testament gospels), “Who do you say that I am?/” seem important (and challenging), or remote and antiquarian, today?

By the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark Jesus’ reputation as a healer is firmly established by the author. Amid throngs of people, he is sought out by the sick. In one such scene, a man named Jairus, a leader of a Jewish synagogue, approaches Jesus and begs him to come and heal his daughter (5:22-23).

On the way to Jairus’ house, however, there is an interruption (5:25-34). A woman approaches Jesus from behind, touches his cloak, and is immediately healed of the hemorrhage that has long plagued her. Jesus, perceiving “that power had gone forth from him,” stops and asks who touched his cloak, whereupon the woman comes forth and tells her story.

It is a story typical of many, not only in the ancient world but in our own day as well. For a dozen years the woman has consulted physicians about her problem, exhausting her financial resources in the process - all to no avail. In her desperation she turns, as do many in our day, to a person who would today probably be labeled a “faith healer.” She has already likely exhausted what we today commonly call “home remedies” and “alternative medicine.” One third of Americans, it is reported, turn to alternative medicine every year - this despite the annual expenditure of billions on conventional medicine in the health-care industry. Incurable, chronic illnesses account for much of this, especially of the sixty percent of those Americans over sixty-five who turn to “unproven therapies.” But poverty, or the fear of being impoverished by conventional medical treatment, as the woman was, also has something to do with this phenomenon.

The cost of health care today drives debates on the subject, not only in the United States, but in other countries as well. There is a crucial difference between the woman's world and ours, however. For a person laid low by sickness in her day there were no medical “safety nets,” as there are in most of the so-called developed world today. Debilitating illness, or disability resulting from an accident while working, could mean descent into poverty and an untimely death. It was a world in which health was prized as the ultimate good. In the words of Aelius

In the pages that follow the symbols // are used to indicate parallel passages in the New Testament gospels, for example, Mark 2:13-17//Matt. 9:9-13, Luke 5:27-32. Unless otherwise noted, the scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA) and are used by permission with all rights reserved. Translations of other ancient writings are my own.

Dates in the ancient world are indicated by “BCE” (Before the Common Era) and “CE” (Common Era), for example, 136 BCE and 30 CE.

I treat Mark as the first New Testament gospel, and the authors of Matthew and Luke as working from Mark, though not necessarily our version of Mark. Some scholars place Matthew first chronologically, with the author of Mark shortening Matthew to give us what we know as the Gospel of Mark, and the author of Luke employing both Matthew and Mark in composing the gospel of Luke. Regardless of theories of origin, the distinctive natures of each of these three gospels, as pointed out in chapters 2 through 4, remain.

The word “pagan/7 commonly used in a negative sense in current usage, I employ in a neutral sense to mean, simply, non-Jewish and non-Christian.

The “Suggestions for further reading” at the end of the book offer information on how to find the various ancient writings and modern studies referred to in the book; other titles that may prove helpful in pursuing a particular subject are also included. The “Questions for further thought and discussion” may prove helpful in reflecting on the various chapters of the book.

I want to thank my one-time teacher, Howard Clark Kee, the invitation to write this book, which accords with various long-standing academic and personal interests of mine.

To Catherine Huggins, Administrative Assistant in the Department of Religion and Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, I owe a large debt of gratitude for translating my sometimes barely decipherable script into laserprint. My colleagues in the Department and in the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies are also owed my thanks for encouragement and inspiration over the years of what might be termed the gestation of this little volume.

“Luke, the beloved physician.” Thanks to these few words in the Letter to the Colossians (4.14) an early Christian named Luke became in ancient times the patron saint of physicians and surgeons. In our time a society formed some decades ago to foster healing ministry, originally in the Anglican/Episcopal church, took the name the Order of St. Luke, and at various times writers of fiction have taken pen in hand to provide “the beloved physician” fuller treatment than the New Testament writers did. Around these same few words as well as other New Testament references to “Luke” (Philemon 24; 2 Tim. 4:11) clusters a considerable body of scholarly literature debating whether “Luke” was the author of a full quarter of the New Testament - the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles - and, if so, whether he was indeed a physician.

No author is named in the Acts. The “we” passages (Acts 16:10-17; 20:5-8, 13-15; 21:1-18; 27:11-28:16) are no exception; they tell us little except that the author, following literary convention, wants readers to know he had experienced the kind of sea travel described in those passages. Nor is any author named in the Gospel of Luke, a trait it shares with the other three New Testament gospels. The superscriptions of all four - “The Gospel According to … ” - are all later additions. Ultimately, the authors of all four remain anonymous, like so many of the early Christians (cf. 2 Cor. 8:18-19). Reading between the lines of the gospels, however, one can learn a fair bit about the evangelists, virtually none of it undisputed, however.

Medical terminology

From the medical terminology in the Gospel of Luke, W. K. Hobart [The Medical Language of St. Luke [1892]) concluded that the author must have been a physician - a view supported by the distinguished historian of ancient Christianity, Adolf von Harnack (Lukas der Arzt, English translation, Luke the Physician [1907]), as well as other scholars. In 1920, however, Henry J. Cadbury of Harvard Divinity School showed that the supposedly technical medical language of the author was the common property of many authors who were definitely not physicians, even as today, thanks to increasingly sophisticated journalism and the health newsletters published by various medical schools, medical terms such as ebola, AIDS, HDL and LDL, amniocentesis, or in vitro come up regularly in ordinary discourse.

Posing the questions

Persons in the Western world who have never picked up a Bible are nonetheless apt to have at least a nodding acquaintance with various stories from the Bible - Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark, David and Goliath, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son. Children used to grow up with Bible story books; those stories are still the staple of much Sunday school instruction. The spells stories cast is not limited to children. How many adults can resist the line, “Once upon a time,” or the standup comic's “On the way over here I ran into …,” or “Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man”? Had most of what we know about Jesus as healer come in the form of sermon or learned treatise, it is unlikely that the image of him as caring and compassionate - and healing - would have exercised the influence it has upon subsequent generations.

Those stories are, however, parts of larger stories, the New Testament gospels. These, too, have had a profound influence, not only in the Western world (one thinks of Gandhi, for example) and not only on believers, for whom these stories were “good news/” but also on persons who had little time for Christianity but yet found much to admire in the gospels’ portraits of Jesus. In the modern period, however, many believers and non-believers alike began to ask whether those portraits were trustworthy. For well over two centuries now scholars have been sifting through the Jesus traditions in the New Testament gospels and other early Christian writings in an attempt to discern there “the historical Jesus”: Jesus as a modern historian might describe him using the canons and criteria of history the way it began to be written in the modern period and especially in the nineteenth century. This investigation has intensified in recent years as scholars have refined historical method, drawing upon scholarship in fields such as sociology and anthropology. The “quest for the historical Jesus” (as it came to be called) went hand in hand with efforts to discover how the gospels came to be, whether one gospel writer used the other(s), what other sources each might have employed. The evangelists were seen as collectors and assemblers of traditions, “scissors-and-paste” people, so to speak.

The story of the healing of the hemorrhaging woman referred to several times in the preceding chapter is presented in greatest detail in the gospel thought by most scholars to be the first written, the Gospel of Mark. Chronological priority is one reason for beginning a study of Jesus as healer in early Christian writings with the Gospel of Mark. Whether or not it was indeed the first gospel (some scholars dispute that), there are other factors that recommend it as a starting point: its brevity, permitting a ready overview of the whole, and the fact that, in comparison with the other New Testament gospels, it devotes less space to Jesus as teacher and more to what he does, including a good number of healings. The author generally presents these in more detail and more graphically than do the other evangelists. Once one has some understanding of Jesus as healer in Mark, then in subsequent chapters comparisons can more readily be drawn with the other three New Testament gospels.

Jesus as healer

The healing stories, along with other miracle accounts, make up much of the first nine chapters of the Gospel of Mark. There emerges a Jesus who fulfills John the Baptist's proclamation that one mightier than he is yet to come (1:7): the miracles signal that the reign of God that Jesus has announced is near at hand (1:15). In the power of the Spirit that has descended on him at his baptism (1:10), Jesus, through these displays of power, demonstrates that God's reign is unfolding. He wondrously feeds multitudes of hungry people (6:30-44; 8:1-9), walks on water and stills wind and wave (6:45-51), and causes a fig tree to wither to its roots (11:14, 20-21). These wonders are outnumbered, however - indeed, overshadowed, one might say - by the many accounts of healings and expulsions of demons that occur in every one of the first ten chapters except chapter four, a collection of parables.

In several places the evangelist simply uses general terms or idioms to designate the many who come to Jesus for healing.

sThe Gospel of John concludes with the observation that Jesus did many things not recorded in the gospel and that, if they were, probably “the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (21:25). The New Testament gospels represent only a small selection of the many gospels and other writings produced by early Christians subsequent, in most cases, to the composition of the New Testament writings. These later works are called non-canonical (because they were not included in the New Testament canon) or apocryphal, which means “secret” or “hidden” but came to be used to designate writings excluded from the Bible. They demonstrate that the portraits of Jesus as healer in the New Testament are part of a larger early Christian picture of Jesus as healer, as a few examples will show.

Recapitulations

Some of the apocryphal writings add little to the New Testament picture of Jesus as healer. They recapitulate, with some differences, what is found in the New Testament. For example, the very fragmentary gospel (some two papyrus leaves) known as the Egerton Papyrus and dated to the early second century CE offers another version of the Synoptic account of a healing of a leper (Mark l:40-45//Matt. 8:1-4, Luke 5:12-16). A leper approaches Jesus, tells him he has become infected by eating with lepers in an inn, and asks to be cleansed; Jesus heals him and tells him to show himself to the priests. While there is some evidence that the papyrus records early tradition, this passage shows ignorance of the Holy Land in the first-century. Lepers did not stay in inns; they were kept at a distance because they were considered “unclean” (see Num. 12:15; 2 Kings 7:3-4). Moreover, a cleansed leper went to a priest, not to “the priests,” to obtain certification of the cleansing.

“the priests,” to obtain certification of the cleansing. The Epistle of the Apostles, a second-century CE writing that purports to be a letter from the eleven remaining apostles, mentions several of Jesus’ healing miracles and gives shortened versions of the healing of the Gadarene/Gerasene demoniac and of the hemorrhaging woman. In the Acts of Pilate (likely dateable as early as the second century CE) the same woman emerges from the anonymity of the New Testament account, and we learn her name is Bernice or Veronica [Acts of Pilate 7).

Readers who come to Matthew from Mark will recognize much of the terrain but will also find much new territory to explore. Most of what is found in the Gospel of Mark will be found in Matthew as well, including most of the healing stories. Missing are only the casting out of an unclean spirit (Mark 1:23-28), the healing of the deaf man (7:32-37), and the restoration of the sight of the blind man of Bethsaida (8:22-26). However, as if by way of compensation, the author has included other, similar healing accounts or summaries.

Jesus restores the sight of two blind men (Matt. 9:27-31) and casts a demon out of a mute (9:32-33), which leads into a charge that Jesus casts out demons by the ruler of the demons (9:34). In the actual Matthean parallel to the Markan version of the Beezebul controversy, two very similar healings lead into the controversy, but they now happen to one man, who is both blind and mute (12:22-24), rather than to three with these afflictions as in Matthew, chapter nine. The Markan account (10:46-52) of a blind man named Bartimaeus whom Jesus heals as he leaves Jericho appears in Matthew as the healing of two blind men, both unnamed (20:29-34). (The two very similar healings of two blind men [9:27-31; 20:29-34], the first a retelling of the second based on Mark, are what scholars call a doublet. Both versions will be considered later.) The summary account of healings in Matthew 15:29-31 appears where the story of the healing of the deaf man does in Mark (7:31-37) and offers a heightened parallel to it. Moreover, the author of Matthew rearranges certain of the healing accounts found in Mark, grouping them with other miracle stories in chapters eight and nine. Both the author of Matthew and the author of Luke also drew on source material that scholars call “Q” (from the German word Quelle, “source”), which includes healing accounts (Matt. 8:5-13//Luke 7:1-10; Matt. 12:22//Luke 11:14) and material pertaining to healing (Matt. ll:2-6//Luke 7:18-23; Matt. 12:43-45//Luke 11:24-26).

In comparing the various ways in which the New Testament gospels portray Jesus as healer, scarcely any reference has been made so far to the Gospel of John. There are good reasons for this. While the figure of Jesus as healer in the first three gospels is distinct in each, it is clear that the authors nonetheless drew on common sources. Even when they turn to other Jesus traditions, as do the authors of Matthew and Luke, these traditions are generally similar to one another. The result is three writings that are closely related, often very closely, in language and structure, as becomes evident when they are laid out side by side in what is called a “synopsis” (literally a “together view,” for which reason scholars refer to them as “the Synoptic gospels” or, simply, “the Synoptics”).

Turning to the Gospel of John, one sees that, at its most basic, the portrait of Jesus as healer is, to be sure, the same as in the Synoptic gospels: Jesus the powerful one meets death as Jesus the powerless crucified one. Beyond that, however, even a cursory reading of John reveals how significantly it differs from the Synoptics. The sentences flow easily, and the language is uncomplicated (students learning New Testament Greek commonly begin their reading of the New Testament with John, once they have acquired the rudiments of the language). The apparent simplicity dissipates, however, the more one delves into the gospel. As someone aptly put it, the Gospel of John is shallow enough to wade through and deep enough to drown in.

Some problems in interpretation are quite obvious. For example, the author places Jesus’ cleansing of the Jerusalem temple at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry (John 2:13-22) rather than at the end, where the Synoptics have it. Whereas the other three evangelists show Jesus moving in his ministry from Galilee to Jerusalem within the space of a year, the author of John has him moving back and forth between Galilee and Judea over the course of three years.