Healing in the Synoptic Gospels

Abstract

The most obvious and most abundant theological resource on healing is the stories in the Synoptic Gospels. Mark's Gospel alone contains thirteen healing stories (most with parallels in Matthew and/or Luke) together with four general summaries of healings. There are also two further healing stories contained in the joint material in Matthew and Luke, five in Luke alone and three in Matthew alone. Healing stories are also recounted in John and Acts, but they are less frequent. Given the sheer abundance of the Synoptic healing stories there can be little doubt that, whatever the difficulties there are in establishing other incontestable data about the historical ministry of Jesus, it was much concerned with healing. There is a rare point of agreement here among recent biblical scholars. To give just three examples, Howard Clark Kee, Gerd Theissen and Bruce J. Malina – all scholars who have made a major contribution to understanding the social world of the New Testament – agree that the Synoptic healing stories really do reflect Jesus' historical ministry. Howard Clark Kee concludes in his Medicine, Miracle and Magic in New Testament Times : The phenomenon of healing in the gospels and elsewhere in the New Testament is a central factor in primitive Christianity, and was so from the beginning of the movement. It is not a later addendum to the tradition, introduced in order to make Jesus more appealing to the Hellenistic world, but was a major feature of the Jesus tradition from the outset. Indeed, it is almost certainly a part of the historical core of that tradition, even though it is likely to have been embellished in the process of transmission. The performance of miracles in first-century Judaism is adequately attested even though the significance given to it in the Jesus tradition – signs of the inbreaking of the New Age – is a distinctive development of the apocalyptic tradition, especially as we see it in Daniel. As the gospels attest, and as the evidence of the Hellenistic healing cults suggests, the performance of healings and exorcisms by Jesus was seen as a central factor in the rapidly developed movement that Jesus called forth in Palestine and Syria, as well as in the astonishing spread of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean world.