Abstract
Douglas Ellory Pett died ten years ago aged 81 having published several books on gardening but leaving only a manuscript on healing in the New Testament. Thanks to his widow, this manuscript has at last been turned into a book. But I feared that this might be a book by a well-meaning former hospital chaplain that has little relevance for the healing ministry today.
I was wrong! Dr Pett obviously spent his retirement working carefully through the Gospel healing stories, unravelling the various strata in chronological order and reaching conclusions that are often original and immensely challenging. I wish I had had this book to hand when I was working on my own Health Care and Christian Ethics (2006). I can think of nothing quite like it. He is particularly helpful on the theological differences on healing between each of the three Synoptic Gospels and between them and the Fourth Gospel, while pointing out that Paul, presumably writing earlier than any of them, had little or no interest in physical healing. In the process he makes many assumptions, for example about the dating of John or the existence of Q, that can and will be endlessly debated. Yet, despite writing with only minimal scholarly references, he clearly had a good working knowledge of the previous generation’s critical New Testament scholarship.
By focusing specifically upon the healing tradition in its various redactions, he has genuinely new and provocative insights to offer, especially to those who either dismiss the Gospel healing stories as irrelevant to modern medicine or adopt them as means of bypassing modern medicine altogether. Instead he encourages us to think critically and constructively about the different layers of this tradition. He is particularly disturbed about an uncritical appropriation of some of Matthew and Luke’s revisions of, and Luke’s additions to, Mark on healing – believing them to have been deeply misleading for the later Church. He argues that Matthew retained but pruned Mark’s healing stories so much that they lose their nuance and appear to represent any healing as possible for Jesus. (How many earnest sermons have I heard about legs miraculously re-growing?) In addition, he maintains that Luke’s added response of Jesus to the woman with a haemorrhage touching his garment – ‘Some one touched me; for I perceive that power has gone forth from me’ (Luke 8.46) – introduces a magical element that is absent from Mark and Matthew. And it is Luke who adds a story about the unambiguous resuscitation to physical life of a dead corpse (the widow of Nain’s son) without any of the ambiguity of him just being asleep (as in the Synoptic story of Jairus’ daughter or of Lazarus in the Fourth Gospel). Interestingly, on a different pastoral issue altogether, it is Luke alone who adds the impossible demand for the rich young man to give away all his possessions. Nevertheless, Douglas Pett is also quick to point out that it is of course Luke alone who gives us two of the most important pastoral parables: the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.
This is a book to explore and relish but not to adopt uncritically. Some, for example, will be less convinced than me by his suggestion that Gospel healing stories of the paralysed, mute and disfigured may depend especially upon psychosomatic causation. Although I never met him, I suspect that he would have been the first to admit that a study of the New Testament is never complete for any of us. Like his (and my) mentor C. F. Evans, Douglas Pett obviously continued this study undaunted to the end and with impressive results.