Abstract
The apostle Paul says little in his letters about physical health or healing, whether for himself or his congregations. This is surprising in view of the vital importance of healing in other religious cults of the time and the gospels’ depiction of Jesus as a healing deity. Sickness was endemic in Greco-Roman antiquity, and people sought cures from various types of practitioners who offered medical, religious and ‘magical’ modes of treatment. A number of explanations can be posited for Paul’s relative silence about health and healing in his letters, but none is wholly convincing. The issues involved were so pressing that Paul must have addressed the topic in some form, even if it does not appear in his letters. His treatment of ‘idol meat’ in 1 Cor. 8 and 10 could provide an analogy for reconstructing what he might have said to his congregations on the subject.
Framing the Problem
For a man who endured so much bodily suffering during the course of his ministry (1 Cor. 4.11-13; 2 Cor. 4.7-12; 11.23-29; 12.7-10; Gal. 4.13-14; Phil. 4.11-13), the apostle Paul has surprisingly little to say about health, medical care or healing in his letters. Forms of the Greek verb ἰάομαι appear only three times in the assuredly Pauline materials, all in 1 Cor. 12 where Paul speaks rather vaguely about ‘gifts of healings’ as one of the χαρίσματα that the Spirit has distributed among the Christ-followers in Corinth. 1 The verb θεραπεύω and its cognates are entirely absent from Paul’s letters, while forms of the verb σώζω appear often but never in the sense of ‘healing’ as we see in the gospels.
The same is true for words relating to sickness. The common Greek noun νόσος appears nowhere in Paul’s letters, while the partial synonym ἀσθένεια and its cognates, which appear some 40 times, are generally understood as references to (literal or metaphorical) ‘weakness’ rather than ‘illness’. The only clear exceptions are Gal. 4.13 (δι’ ἀσθένειαν τῆς σαρκὸς), Phil. 2.26-27 (καὶ γὰρ ἠσθένησεν παραπλήσιον θανάτῳ) and 1 Cor. 11.30 (διά τοῦτο ἐν ὑμῖν πολλοὶ ἀσθενεῖς καὶ ἄρρωστοι καὶ κοιμῶνται ἱκανοί) in the assured letters, and 1 Tim. 5.23 (καὶ τὰς πυκνάς σου ἀσθενέιας), and 2 Tim. 4.20 (Τρόϕιμον δὲ ἀπέλιπον ἐν Μιλήτῳ ἀσθενοῦντα) in the Pastorals. Other verses where physical illness might conceivably be in view include Rom. 8.26, 1 Cor. 2.3, 4.10, 2 Cor. 10.10, 11.29, 12.9-10 and 1 Thess. 5.14, but most interpreters have understood these texts to be referring to ‘weakness’ not illness. Only once does Paul speak of a sick person being restored to health (Epaphroditus in Phil. 2.26-27), and he says nothing about how it transpired (i.e., by ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’ means). The illness was apparently serious, since he mentions death as a real possibility.
Such observations are unremarkable to modern Western readers, who are accustomed to viewing illness as a problem to be addressed through ‘secular’ channels (physicians, hospitals, medications etc.) and not by religious leaders. Even among the devout, the role of religion is generally limited to asking God to guide the hands of medical professionals and comfort those who are suffering. Few see physical healing as a primary concern of religion, and even fewer (with the possible exception of Pentecostals and charismatics) have any real expectation that God might effect a miraculous cure in cases deemed hopeless by the medical profession. In short, most contemporary readers would not expect a religious figure like Paul to have anything meaningful to say about sickness or healing, except perhaps to pray and endure.
In Paul’s day, on the other hand, religion and medicine were intricately intertwined. Hippocratic physicians worshipped Asklepios as their patron deity, encouraged their patients to pray for healing, and gave due credit to the gods for their successes, while priests and doctors worked hand in hand at healing shrines across the Greco-Roman world. Folk healers, sorcerers, root-cutters, exorcists and other quasi-medical practitioners straddled the boundaries between what Western traditions regard as ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ modes of treatment. Reports of miraculous cures were fairly common, while the number of people who discounted such stories and sought healing without reference to the gods was small. In a world where disease was pervasive, treatments were unsystematic, and outcomes were unpredictable, people at all levels of society used every means at their disposal to preserve or restore their health.
Deities who were believed to have healing powers were especially popular in the areas where Paul plied his ministry. Every city that Paul visited would have had its temple to Asklepios where local residents could present prayers and offerings for the sick and even spend the night in the hope of receiving medical advice or a miraculous cure from the deity while sleeping. Indigenous deities and foreign gods (especially from Egypt) served the same purpose. Regional centers were available for those who lived outside the cities or who were dissatisfied with the results that they received from local physicians and/or religious personnel. 2 ‘Medical tourism’ was popular among the elites, who visited hot springs like those at Hierapolis and Carura in western Asia Minor or submitted to more rigorous systems of religio-medical treatment at Asklepian sanctuaries such as Pergamon and Epidaurus. Gods and cults that made no provision for treating illness stood at a competitive disadvantage with those who offered such services, unless the latter promised other benefits deemed equally important.
Given these realities, how do we explain the fact that Paul’s letters say nothing about Jesus as a healing deity? It is hard to see how he could have been unaware of this important element of the Jesus traditions in view of his contacts with Peter and others from the Jerusalem community (Gal. 1.18-19; 2.1-10; 1 Cor. 9.5-6; cf. Rom. 15.25; 15.31) and the evident link between the Christ-followers in Antioch and Jerusalem (Gal. 2.1-14; cf. Acts 11.19-30; 15.1-35). It is equally improbable that Luke created from whole cloth all of the healings and other miraculous activities narrated in the book of Acts, where instantaneous cures ‘in the name of Jesus’ are common. Luke’s depiction of Paul as a healer (14.8-10; 19.11-12; 28.7-9), exorcist (16.16-18) and wonder-worker (20.7-12; 28.1-6), whose acts of power cause him to be feted as a god (14.11-13; 28.6), only compounds the problem.
What are we to make of these data? The easiest (and most common) solution is to reject Luke’s wonder-working Paul in favor of the ‘theological’ Paul of the letters. But we still have the problem of why Paul might have chosen to distance himself from the ‘miraculous’ elements of both the Jesus traditions and the earliest Christian community, unless we take all of Luke’s miracle stories as pious fictions. And we are still left with the pesky question of what Paul meant when he referred to ‘signs and wonders’ (Rom. 15.18-19; 2 Cor. 12.12) and works of ‘power’ (Gal. 3.5; 1 Cor. 2.4-5; 1 Thess. 1.5; cf. 1 Cor. 4.20; 2 Cor. 6.7) that accompanied his missionary preaching. 3 Whether these texts relate to miraculous healings or any of the other wonders that Paul performs in Acts is difficult to say, but his language clearly poses problems for attempts to frame a ‘non-miraculous’ Paul.
Of course, none of these problems is new. Over a century ago von Harnack described the early Christian movement as a ‘religion of healing’ (‘Religion der Heilung’), 4 and recently Graham Twelftree published a thorough analysis of ‘Paul and the miraculous’ that highlighted this neglected dimension of Paul’s writings and experience. 5 But comparatively little attention has been given to the question of how Paul’s teaching and practices regarding physical health and healing might have affected the success of his mission. Did Paul perform acts that were perceived as ‘miraculous’ as a means of attracting converts and advancing his mission, or is this a Lukan construct? Did he present Jesus as a healing god whom people could approach for cures, or did he downplay or ignore this aspect of the Jesus traditions? Did the ‘gifts of healings’ that Paul mentions in 1 Cor. 12 play any role in the evangelistic outreach of Paul and his congregations, or did they serve only members? Did these ‘gifts’ involve extraordinary acts that could have served to authenticate the Christian message, or was Paul referring to the Spirit-guided use of human healing skills, like the gifts of ‘wisdom’ or ‘knowledge’ in the same chapter? In short, did Paul or the members of his congregations employ the promise of physical healing as an evangelistic tool? If not, how did their failure to address this need affect the success of their mission by comparison with gods who did offer such services?
Similar questions can be raised about Paul’s attitudes toward the various types of health-care activities that took place outside the church. Most of Paul’s converts were ‘Gentiles’ who were accustomed to utilizing the normal healing practices of the Greco-Roman world, including consulting a local physician; presenting offerings and/or vows to a deity either at home or in a local temple; visiting a folk-healer, midwife, or ‘sorcerer’ in search of an amulet, medication or incantation that would remove the illness or demon that was causing it; or travelling to a regional healing sanctuary in hopes of receiving a sacred dream, a miraculous cure or a course of treatment through the intervention of a priest or physician. Similar means would have been used to prevent illness from occurring in the first place.
What advice or instruction might Paul have given regarding the use of such techniques? Would he have condemned them as idolatrous practices that should be avoided by Christ-followers? Would he have rejected those that required interaction with other gods while permitting the use of more ‘secular’ regimens? What would he have said about prescriptions that Westerners generally disdain as ‘magical’, such as amulets and incantations? If he regarded any or all of these practices as problematic, why did he not address them in his letters?
To explore all of these questions would require a monograph. 6 The aim of the present article is more modest: to highlight some of the literary and historical data that must be taken into account in such an investigation and to identify some of the major options for understanding Paul’s approach to physical illness. My analysis will proceed in three stages. First, I will provide a brief overview of what is known about sickness and disease in Greco-Roman antiquity in an effort to identify the kinds of ailments for which Paul’s potential converts might have sought healing. Next, I will present an equally brief survey of the principal modes of treatment that were available to Paul’s audiences for maintaining health and treating sickness so that we can better understand Paul’s competition. Finally, I will lay out a range of options for understanding Paul’s relative silence about matters of physical health and his own attitudes and actions relating to physical healing. I will close my analysis with some observations about the potential consequences of my findings for the success of Paul’s mission.
One question that I do not intend to address is what ‘really happened’ in the many accounts of healing that we find in the New Testament and contemporary literature, since the answer is irrelevant to my purposes. As long as people in Paul’s day believed that such events were not only possible but in fact occurred in the world around them, we can assess the potential impact of their occurrence or absence on the success of the early Christian mission, including Paul’s evangelistic efforts. When, therefore, I refer without comment to accounts of physical healing that most Western readers would regard as either impossible (and therefore fictitious) or ‘miraculous’, I am not implying any judgment regarding the facticity of the stories; I am merely accepting the viewpoints of the participants for the sake of my analysis.
Sickness in the Greco-Roman World
The identification and labeling of ancient diseases is an uncertain enterprise. According to medical anthropologists, ‘disease’ is a social construction of reality that varies from culture to culture. 7 The modern concept of disease is rooted in a medical paradigm that categorizes bodily ailments according to an evidence-based, theoretically grounded understanding of biological symptoms and causes. Ancient writers, even those trained as physicians, had at best a limited understanding of such matters. As a result, their ideas about what constitutes a ‘disease’ do not always correlate well with modern scientific labels. In some cases ancient authors describe the symptoms of an ailment with enough detail and accuracy that modern interpreters can associate them with a particular disease known to modern medicine. In other cases the description overlaps with modern categories in such a way that multiple interpretations are possible. In still others the evidence is too vague or general for a reliable identification to be made.
Fortunately, medical historians have many types of evidence at their disposal to help them narrow down the options, including literary texts (medical treatises, letters, stories, etc.) and non-literary materials such as tombstones, statues, mosaics, paintings, medical implements, excavations of treatment centers, biological traces of drugs and medicines, votive offerings and the physical remains of plants, animals and humans (Grmek 1989: 2; Jackson 1988: 7). Their investigations have identified the following ailments as recurring problems in the world of Paul. 8
Of these conditions, the most common appear to have been tuberculosis (described by Mirko Grmek [1989: 193] as ‘a serious but not necessarily mortal disease that is banal, ubiquitous, and well known’), malaria, rheumatic fever, cancerous tumors, gout, various infections and fevers, anemias, ophthalmia, bladder stones, osteoarthritis and broken bones. Epilepsy is also mentioned often, but this is probably because of its unusual symptoms rather than its frequency of occurrence. Surprisingly, a number of common modern diseases are not documented in the records and may not have existed in the Greco-Roman world, including measles, chickenpox, rubella, scarlet fever, syphilis, gonorrhea, rheumatoid arthritis and polio.
In the absence of modern medical knowledge and treatments, many of these conditions would have been painful, debilitating and even fatal. Those that were chronic in nature would have left their victims with periodic or ongoing bouts of sickness that hindered their ability to perform normal bodily functions and thus to maintain their livelihoods. Even minor infections could lead to lymphatic problems, peritonitis, necrosis and eventually death. Most congenital problems were considered to be untreatable, forcing those with severe conditions to rely on the aid of family members or to beg for a living. Early deaths were common, and relatively few people made it to old age: bone studies show that the average age of death actually declined from 42.4 years for men and 36.5 for women at the beginning of the early Hellenistic period to 40.2 for men and 34.6 for women in the Roman imperial era (Grmek 1989: 104).
Given the human proclivity for avoiding or eliminating pain and suffering and the necessity of physical exertion for all but the elites to eke out a meager living, maintaining physical health would have been a paramount concern for everyone in the ancient world. When illness struck, every effort would have been made to remove it. Various modes of treatment were available to address these needs.
The Quest for Healing
Historians have identified three overlapping systems for dealing with illness and injury in the Greco-Roman world: the religious, the medical and the magical. 11 None was a self-contained system; each derived elements from the others, and sufferers frequently resorted to all three at the same time. Ido Israelowich speaks of ‘an open medical marketplace made up of a variety of religious, magical, empirical, and medical practitioners’ (2015: 32). But each system also had its distinctive principles, practitioners and modes of operation that make it possible for us to distinguish them in theory, even if it was not always easy to do so in practice. A brief summary will demonstrate the treatment options that were available to sick people in Paul’s day.
Religious modes of treatment, together with various modes of self-help that will be discussed later, were undoubtedly the most ancient means of dealing with illness. In this system, sickness was commonly (though not universally) regarded as an affliction from the gods, and the usual modes of treatment involved prayers, sacrifices, vows and various forms of purification.
Virtually any god could be approached for healing, but the healing deity par excellence in Paul’s day was Asklepios (known to the Romans as ‘Aesculapius’), who was assisted in his work by his daughter Hygeia and less often by other members of his family. 12 Asklepios was known everywhere as a benefactor and savior to humanity, unlike other gods who sent both weal and woe. Consequently, he inspired a level of devotion that few gods in Paul’s day could match. Every city or town of any size had its temple of Asklepios that ordinary people could visit to seek cures for their ailments, while larger regional sanctuaries served those whose needs were not met by the local shrines. 13 People came to these centers not only to participate in the usual prayers, offerings and cleansing rituals, but also to sleep in the sacred precincts in hopes of being visited by the god in a dream and receiving either a miraculous cure or a treatment regimen that would effect their restoration (a practice called ‘incubation’). 14 Testimonies to the efficacy of these visits (including miraculous healings) and the personal devotion that they inspired are preserved in inscribed pillars, votive offerings and literary works. 15
Religious treatment was also popular among the Jews of Paul’s day due to the biblical tradition that depicted Yahweh as the ultimate source of both sickness and healing. The Hebrew Bible has almost nothing to say about human physicians, and the few references that it does contain are mostly negative. 16 Religious modes of treatment, by contrast, are ubiquitous, including several accounts of miraculous healing (especially by the hands of prophets) and frequent prayers for divine intervention, especially in the Psalms. 17 By the time of Paul, the value of physicians was widely recognized by Jews, especially among the elites, but prayers and sacrifices continued to play a vital role in Jewish health-care practices.
Medical modes of treatment centered on the work of physicians, who derived at least some of their remedies from traditional modes of self-help, including diet, exercise, herbal remedies and rest. Traditional remedies remained the norm in the countryside, where doctors were not readily available, and virtually everyone would have turned to them as their first resort except in the most acute cases. 18
The medical approach to sickness has its roots in classical Greek philosophy, from which it acquired much of its understanding of the human body and how it should be treated, including the composition of the universe (and the human body) out of four basic elements (fire, air, water and earth), the belief in universal flux and the related necessity of maintaining balance among the four elements, the vital role of ‘humors’ and ‘pneuma’ in the operation of the human body, and the concept that like attracts like. 19 These and other ideas were formalized into a system traditionally credited to Hippocrates, who plied his trade on the island of Kos (off the southwestern coast of Turkey) in the fifth to fourth century bce. The corpus of some 60 texts that bears his name was compiled from the writings of a series of medical practitioners whose lives spanned three or more centuries, receiving its final form around the first century bce. 20
By the time of Paul, the practice of medicine had coalesced into at least three ‘schools’ marked by differing beliefs about the nature of illness and how it should be treated. 21 The Hippocratic approach was carried on by the Dogmatic or Rationalist school, which used reason and experience to figure out the causes of diseases and the best ways to treat each condition. Their view of causality, which focused on environmental conditions and imbalances among the four bodily ‘humors’, removed the gods from direct involvement in causing disease, though they retained the idea that the gods worked through the forces of nature, which they saw as divine. The Empiricist school, which arose in opposition to the Dogmatists, insisted that discerning the causes of disease was an unnecessary distraction. In their view, the physician should figure out by empirical observation which treatments work best for which illnesses and regulate his prescriptions accordingly. The Methodist school, which gained popularity around the time of Paul, asserted that the complex variety of sicknesses could be traced to a few simple causes (constriction, dilation or a combination of the two) and that proper treatment involved applying the opposite force in order to restore balance. All three schools, together with lesser movements such as the Pneumatists and the Eclectics, agreed in seeing illness as a natural phenomenon that can be treated by natural means, though they also left room for divine cures.
Despite their differences, most of the treatments prescribed by the three schools were similar. Diet and exercise were vital to all forms of medical healing, including a wide array of prescriptions and prohibitions in both areas. 22 The use of medicinal herbs and other medications was also quite common, 23 along with purging (via emetics and laxatives or enemas) and blood-letting. Heating and cooling of the body were often prescribed to offset imbalances in the bodily humors, and visits to hot springs that were thought to have curative properties were also popular, especially among the elites. 24 Massages and other forms of bodily stimulation were used to promote circulation and to eliminate concentrations of bile from the tissues. Similar methods were used to treat mental disturbances, though more severe treatments were prescribed for intractable cases, including starvation, fetters and flogging. 25 Physical deformities were generally viewed as beyond the skills of the physician, though clubfoot was treated with some success by physiotherapy, tight bandages and corrective shoes (van der Eijk 2013: 124-25). Surgery was limited to sealing wounds and setting broken bones; opening the chest or abdomen was a sure path to death in an era before antiseptics. Most physicians refused to treat conditions that they believed were incurable, referring people to the gods instead. 26
Magical healing involves ‘the employment of amulets, incantations, and occult objects, such as herbs and gems that manipulate hidden preternatural forces within nature but outside its normal course’. 27 Similar practices can be found in many cultures. 28 For many people it was the treatment of choice, whether because they believed in its efficacy or because its practitioners were readily available, charged lower fees than the physicians (or none at all) or promised quick cures that would enable them to return to work. For others it was a last resort to be used when all other methods had failed. 29 Gender may also have played a role in people’s decisions about whom to consult: female physicians were uncommon, while ‘wise women’ played a vital role in traditional healing systems. 30
At least five different types of traditional healers whose methods might be defined as ‘magical’ can be discerned in the literature: (a) diviner-healers, who used divinatory techniques to find the causes of illness and prescribe cures; (b) root-cutters, who sought to capture and deploy the healing powers of various types of plants; (c) purifiers, who traced sickness to diverse forms of pollution that they sought to remove by special rituals; (d) exorcists, who used sacred formulae to drive away the evil spirits that were believed to cause many diseases; and (e) sorcerers, who used charms, spells and incantations to eliminate sickness and restore health. 31 Each type had its own particular set of practices that were passed on within families or among close associates. Most operated ‘below the radar’ as traditional healers in cities, towns and villages where similar practitioners had plied their trade for centuries.
Common to all such practitioners was the use of sacred rituals and words to harness the powers of the hidden world, though the details of their practices are murky due to the secrecy that many believed was vital to their efficacy. Much of what is known comes from the pens of elite outsiders who focused on acts that they viewed as peculiar, though whether or how often these techniques were actually used is an open question. 32 Practices that caught their attention include using ritualized procedures for the collection of healing plants, applying spittle and other bodily fluids to the sick person, chanting nonsensical syllables to obtain authority over a disease or elicit supra-human powers to drive it out, and forcing the patient to eat or drink unusual or offensive substances. In reality, most of the techniques used by ‘magical’ healers were culturally unremarkable, and many resembled those employed by physicians.
One underlying feature that distinguished the work of magical healers from that of physicians was their belief in demonic causality. The medical approach, as Dale Martin observes, held that ‘the gods are relatively benign beings with whom any sensible person can get along, and disease-daimons exist only in the imaginations of the uneducated’ (1995: 160). Magical healers, by contrast, took very seriously the presence and power of supra-human beings to cause and cure illness. Not all diseases were thought to be caused by demons, but many were. Magic offered an effective system for controlling or removing them. 33 Common treatments included incantations, fumigations, ritualized movements and the application or ingestion of substances believed to be offensive to the demons. In some cases it included rituals designed to imbue the healer with powers from the realm of the divine or the dead. 34 Such ideas and treatments were foreign to the world of physicians.
Overlapping Systems
While these three approaches to medical care – the religious, the medical and the magical – can be distinguished for the sake of analysis, substantial overlaps among them made the distinctions less obvious for ancient audiences. This was especially true in rural areas, where traditional healers provided the bulk of the medical care through a mixture of diet, herbal remedies, prayers, incantations, charms, amulets and various forms of divination (Jackson 1988: 10-11; Nutton 1992: 37). Similar combinations were also employed by practitioners who provided more ‘professional’ types of care.
On the religious side, Asklepian healing centers were increasingly ‘medicalized’ over time. Not only were physicians present to treat the visitors, but even the dreams that people received took on a medical tone as the god began employing medical techniques (including otherwise impossible surgeries) to cure people in their sleep or prescribed common medical treatments (diet, exercise, baths, purging, ointments, etc.) for them to pursue once they were awake (King 1999: 281). Priests worked as physicians and vice versa, and both used similar methods of consultation and diagnosis (Nissen 2009: 227; Israelowich 2015: 57-66). The larger healing sanctuaries included bath complexes and gymnastic facilities where patients followed the same regimens that a doctor might have prescribed for them in their home city. Jews did not (as far as we know) visit these facilities due to their association with ‘pagan’ gods, but both Jewish and non-Jewish sources indicate that Jews were trained as physicians, and the Hellenized Jewish elites seem to have relied on their services as a matter of course, viewing them as human instruments through whom God exhibited his healing power. 35
Religious practitioners also used healing techniques commonly associated with ‘magicians’. 36 Both approaches relied on prayers and rituals to induce the gods to turn away illness and restore health, and both prescribed various forms of ritual purification for healers and the sufferer. Both employed sacred objects and substances as part of their healing regimen, and many of the cures that the gods recommended in dreams included elements commonly associated with magic (e.g., applying an eye lotion made from the blood of a white cock; Nissen 2009: 240). Both also claimed to effect miraculous cures through their methods. Even Jews were not exempt from the influence of magic; many texts testify to their use of amulets, charms, incantations, exorcisms and other ‘magical’ modes of healing, with some citing King Solomon as their model and patron. 37
On the medical side, Hippocratic physicians regularly honored the healing god Asklepios as their divine patron. Numerous inscriptions show them making benefactions to Asklepian temples and bringing sacrifices and votive offerings to Asklepios, his father Apollo,and his daughter Hygeia for themselves and those whom they had cured. 38 All of the major Asklepian sanctuaries had doctors on staff who worked closely with the priests to interpret patients’ dreams and carry out the treatments prescribed by the god. In fact, the entire fourth book of the Hippocratic treatise On Regimen is about how to use dreams as a diagnostic tool (Edelstein 1967: 241; Lloyd 2004: 56). The treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places explains that all diseases are both divinely caused (as the products of a divine universe) and divinely cured (by the application of healing techniques and substances revealed by the gods, and occasionally through miracles). 39 Physicians routinely prescribed prayer along with their treatments, and cases that were deemed incurable were commended entirely to the will and power of the gods.
Similar overlaps can be seen between the realms of medicine and magic, though tensions existed as well. The medical literature repeatedly denounces ‘magical’ healers as charlatans and quacks who prey on people’s superstitions. 40 From the patients’ side, however, the distinction was by no means clear. Physicians made regular use of music and amulets in their cures, while magical practitioners used diagnostic tools and dietary regimens derived from physicians (Edelstein 1967: 232-39; Nissen 2009: 33). Similar herbal remedies, many of which had been discovered by traditional healers, were prescribed by both schools. Pliny the Elder is typical of many elite supporters of medicine in vilifying magic as ‘frivolous and lying’ while at the same time citing various ‘magical’ healing practices as potentially useful. 41 Even the great physician Galen acknowledged the efficacy of amulets and approved of astrology and bird divination as techniques for anticipating changes in weather patterns that affected the bodily humors (Nutton 1995b: 55).
In short, the health-care system that was available to the members of Paul’s congregations both before and after they joined the Christ-movement was varied and complex. Vivian Nutton speaks rightly about ‘the pluralism of Greek medicine’ (1995a: 16) in which religious, medical and magical modes of healing coexisted and borrowed from one another in a sometimes uneasy peace that included periodic bouts of rancor. To pursue one of these options to the exclusion of the others would have been virtually impossible due to their deep and mutual imbrication. Plinio Prioreschi’s warning to modern interpreters is apt: We must not imagine … that there was a distinction between a more or less official medicine (i.e., the Hippocratic medicine) practiced by ‘doctors’ and the healing activities of others similar to the distinction that we make today between ‘medicine’, meaning by this term the officially recognized practice, and the so-called alternative medicine … Besides the iatroi (physicians) and the priests of Aesculapius who practiced medicine in the shrines of the god, there were root-sellers (rizotomoi – root-cutters), drug-sellers (pharmacopolai), itinerant sellers of charms and purifications, midwives (maiai – whose activities may not have been confined to what we call midwifery), lithotomists (as mentioned in the Oath), gymnastic trainers, and, finally, magicians and other charlatans. How distinct in the mind of everybody were the iatroi from the others is not clear. (Prioreschi 1994: 639-40)
Paul and Healing
With this sociocultural background in mind, we can now turn our attention to examining Paul’s beliefs and practices regarding physical healing insofar as they can be discerned from his letters. As we observed earlier, Paul rarely mentions physical healing in his letters, though he does advert to ‘signs and wonders’ (Rom. 15.18-19; 2 Cor. 12.12) and works of ‘power’ (Gal. 3.5; 1 Cor. 2.4-5; 1 Thess. 1.5; cf. 1 Cor. 4.20; 2 Cor. 6.7) that accompanied his initial visits to some of his churches. He also speaks of ‘gifts of healings’ that the Spirit has distributed to some of the members of his congregations (1 Cor. 12.9, 28, 30), though he himself seems not to have benefitted from those gifts (Gal. 4.13-15; 2 Cor. 10.10; 12.7-9). Apart from this, he says nothing about his views or experiences with bodily healing, whether religious, medical or magical.
Such an omission is surprising when we consider how common it was for people in Paul’s day to become sick and how normal it would have been for them to resort to local healers to find a cure. Given the close association of all forms of healing with ‘pagan’ gods and the possible availability of a ‘Spirit-empowered’ healing program within the churches (1 Cor. 12), it is hard to believe that no one ever asked Paul about the propriety of consulting outside practitioners. The underlying question is similar in many ways to the eating of ‘idol meat’ (1 Cor. 8 and 10) or the use of local courts (1 Cor. 6) that led to so much controversy in Corinth. Given Paul’s handling of these and similar issues relating to the involvement of Christ-followers in civic life, we might expect that he would have offered at least minimal prophylactic advice on such a common matter. Yet he says not a word.
What are we to make of Paul’s reticence regarding sickness and healing? Did he address these issues in letters that are lost to us? Had he explained his views so clearly in person that no controversies ever arose? If so, what were his views? Did he limit his followers to the religious modes of treatment that he mentions in his letters (prayer and spiritual healing), or did he accept the use of physicians or ‘magical’ healers? Did he consult such people to treat his own illnesses when his prayers proved unavailing, or did he simply accept his condition as the will of God? If he did resort to healers, did he limit himself to Jews and Christ-followers, or did he visit ‘pagan’ practitioners also? Would he have accepted their recommendations to follow a special dietary regimen or submit to blood-letting? What if they told him to wear an amulet or recite an incantation? Would it matter if the practitioner worked out of an Asklepian temple or a healing center? What did he think of the miraculous cures that Asklepios was reputed to perform at such places?
Answering all of these questions is beyond the scope of a single essay, but we can at least examine some of the major options for understanding Paul’s views. Below are eight possible reconstructions of Paul’s beliefs and practices regarding physical healing. Some are mutually exclusive while others are not. Some are more credible or complete than others, and all involve elements of speculation. Even those that are less likely to be true reflect ideas that have been held by scholars at one time or another, and several of them raise important issues that need to be kept in mind in any effort to make sense of Paul’s views.
Paul was a Jew, and Jews in his day did not involve themselves with magical or supra-human modes of healing. While it is true that we see a reaction against reliance on miracles in certain rabbinic texts, there is ample evidence that this was not the norm in Paul’s day. No one in the gospels objects to the possibility of Jesus doing miraculous cures; their complaints relate to the location or timing of his healings, or the source of his power. Josephus describes a number of miraculous events in his narratives, including a series of omens that foretold the fall of Jerusalem and his own prophecy of Vespasian’s accession to the imperial throne. Not once does he evince any embarrassment regarding the ‘supernatural’ qualities of these events. Several Qumran texts reveal an interest in healing and exorcisms, and even the rabbinic literature contains stories of men like Honi the circle-drawer and Hanina ben Dosa who are said to have performed miraculous cures and exorcisms around the time of Jesus. As for ‘magical’ techniques, we have noted the existence of ample evidence for Jewish exorcists and magicians around the time of Paul despite the biblically questionable nature of such practices. 42 In short, the fact that Paul was a Jew would not have biased him against miraculous or magical forms of healing. 43
Paul was a rational theologian who wanted his followers to focus on right beliefs and right living rather than pursuing divine favors. This view of Paul has a long pedigree in post-Enlightenment academic scholarship, which has focused on explicating Paul’s theology to the neglect of his religious experience (with the possible exception of his ‘conversion’). 44 Texts where Paul speaks about ‘signs and wonders’ and works of ‘power’ accompanying his ministry or about Spirit-given charismata in his churches are either explained away or ignored in these studies. Scholars who defend this approach insist that Paul’s aim was not to promote mystical experiences but to evoke faith in the gospel message and teach his followers how to live out that faith. This interpretation is undoubtedly correct in giving preeminence to Paul’s message about the Christ-event and its implications, but it is also reductionistic in so far as it restricts Paul’s concern to these issues. Paul was a theologian, but he was also in some sense a mystic, a man who not only valued prayer, but also claimed to receive visions and revelations from God, ‘spoke in tongues’ on a regular basis, believed that the spirit of God (or Christ himself) lived in and through him, and experienced ‘signs and wonders’ in connection with his preaching. Questions remain about the nature of these ‘signs and wonders’, but however they are to be understood, they pose serious problems for any claim that Paul was not interested in or tried to minimize the importance of miraculous activity in his churches, including divine healing.
Paul was concerned about the spiritual health of his followers, not their bodily health. This view rests on a reading of Paul’s letters that sees him devaluing the physical world in favor of the spiritual. One variation holds that Paul’s theology is fundamentally Platonic and anti-material, while another highlights the apocalyptic dimension of Paul’s theology, which discourages entanglements with the social and material world (1 Cor. 7; 2 Cor. 6.14–7.1) in view of the imminent end of the present order (1 Cor. 15). 45 Under this reading, the ‘signs and wonders’ that Paul mentions in his letters can be understood as inner transformations of the spirit rather than acts of bodily healing, while the ‘gifts of healings’ in 1 Cor. 12 can be taken as referring to the Spirit-led application of natural healing methods rather than as miraculous cures. This explanation can account for much of the limited data in Paul’s letters, but it fails to address the question of what Paul might have told his followers about how to treat physical ailments (including whether it is acceptable to consult ‘pagan’ health practitioners), not to mention how he handled his own sickness. It is certainly possible that Paul’s anti-material or apocalyptic theology left him uninterested in such questions, but one would think that some of his followers might have pressed him on these points. More significantly, it is hard to see how this solution accords with Paul’s lengthy discussion of the equally physical question of whether it is appropriate to eat meat that has been ritually sacrificed to a non-Christian deity (1 Cor. 8 and 10), especially when the author of the deeply apocalyptic book of Revelation takes a different view on the issue (Rev. 2.14, 20).
Paul said little about healing because he struggled with it in his own life. While he insists that the Spirit of God bestows ‘gifts of healings’ upon members of the ekklesia for the benefit of others, Paul gives no evidence that either he or his co-workers benefitted from these curative powers. When describing his initial visit to the Galatians δι’ ἀσθένειαν τῆς σαρκὸς, for example, he says nothing about anyone attempting to use charismatic gifts to heal him. His statement that his illness was a ‘trial’ to the Galatians (4.14) implies that his recovery was long and slow. Most likely he received treatments from a physician during this time, but we have no way of knowing whether that person was Christian, Jewish or ‘pagan’. 46 Similar points can be made about Epaphroditus in Phil. 2.25-30. He eventually recovered from his near-fatal illness, but Paul says nothing about how it happened. The most probable explanation is that he experienced a normal recuperation under the care of a medical practitioner of some sort. Yet another instance where divine healing failed to occur involves those in Corinth who suffered illness and death after what Paul regards as ‘unworthy’ participation in the communion ritual (1 Cor. 11.29-30). The fact that some of their fellow congregants possessed ‘gifts of healings’ seems to have made no difference in their case. Paul’s retrospective attribution of their fate to sinful conduct cannot hide the likelihood that at least some of the Corinthians had prayed unsuccessfully for their healing.
In short, this view suggests that Paul said little about physical healing because his own experience had led him to think that he had nothing useful to say on the subject. The fact that he refers to ‘signs and wonders’ and acts of ‘power’ accompanying his ministry does not undermine this proposal, since Paul never says that these acts included healing. Whether such an interpretation makes sense on psychological and historical grounds, on the other hand, is open to question. Paul undoubtedly would have heard stories of Jesus doing miraculous cures not only during his lifetime, but also (if Acts is to be believed) among the Christ-followers of his own day. 47 If his views on healing were so heavily rooted in his experience, it seems likely that his continued suffering would have caused him to question his own claims about being an apostle of Christ and having Christ living in him. In fact, the opposite is the case: he insists that his sufferings serve as a mark of his apostleship (1 Cor. 4.9-13; 2 Cor. 4.7-12; 11.22-28).
Such an interpretation also fails to explain why Paul says nothing in his letters about the proper or improper use of ordinary channels of healing. If his theology was rooted in his experience and he himself resorted to physicians, why does he offer no guidance concerning which kinds of healers and treatments are acceptable for Christ-followers and which should be avoided? Surely he would have had to wrestle with these questions himself, and we can be equally sure that people in his congregations would have pressed him on this point. In short, while this interpretation has its attractions, it leaves unanswered several important questions relating to Paul’s beliefs and practices regarding physical sickness and healing.
5. Paul as a Christ-follower rejected all extra-ecclesial forms of healing. This solution is based on the premise that Paul was a sectarian who sought to maintain sharp boundaries between his followers and people outside the Christ-movement. Just as he insisted that disputes should be handled within the community and not by outsiders (1 Cor. 6.1-8), so also he would have recommended that illness be treated by fellow Christ-followers and not by people outside the church. What matters is not which healing techniques are used, but who performs them. Thus a Hippocratic physician who joined the Christ-movement would be free to treat those within the ekklesia, but they should avoid consulting a similar physician who was not a Christ-follower. Whether the same rule would have applied to ‘magical’ healers is less certain; perhaps practices that involved calling on ‘pagan’ deities would have been outlawed, while those that were less explicitly ‘religious’ in character (e.g., root-cutting) or that could be adapted to a Christian context (e.g., exorcism) might be permitted. Amulets and other aversive practices might also be allowed if they were understood to channel the power of Israel’s God against demonic forces.
Implicit in this model is the presumption that outsiders are either incompetent or dangerous due to their association with ‘pagan’ deities and/or ‘the god of this αἰών’ (i.e., Satan, 2 Cor. 4.4). In cases where no ‘Christian’ healers were available, the model suggests that Paul might have advised his followers to apply standard methods of self-care and/or rely on ‘spiritual’ modes of treatment such as prayers or charismatic gifts, though it is possible that Jewish physicians might also have been deemed acceptable as servants of the biblical God. Such a reconstruction of Paul’s thinking is consistent with his apocalyptic tendency to draw sharp lines between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ (Rom. 9.22-33; 1 Cor. 2.12-16; 5.9-13; 10.14-21; 2 Cor. 4.3-4; 6.14-7.1, etc.), and it also takes seriously the likelihood that he would have felt obligated to offer some sort of guidance to his followers regarding what they could and could not do to treat illness. But the fact that Paul never actually says any of these things leaves the proposal squarely in the realm of speculation.
6. Paul valued, practiced and encouraged the pursuit of divine healing and other ‘miracles’ but had few occasions to mention such activities in his letters. This solution stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from the others that we have considered thus far. Rather than taking Paul’s reticence about physical healing as evidence that he was disinterested in such matters or held negative views of healers, this approach argues that such interpretations represent misreadings of Paul’s letters. A proper view must begin with Paul’s references to ‘signs and wonders’ and acts of ‘power’ that accompanied his apostolic ministry, since these texts show clearly that Paul both approved and engaged in activities that he and others regarded as ‘miraculous’. They also indicate that he and his audiences regarded these activities as proofs of both his apostleship and the truth of his message. In short, miraculous deeds were central to the success of Paul’s mission, since they signified the inbreaking of the apocalyptic kingdom of God. 48
Whether these deeds included healing, however, is unclear. The Greek phrase σημεία και τέρατα appears 23 times in the LXX, where it refers to various types of supra-human activity performed by Moses and other prophets. It also appears 16 times in the NT, where it describes similar actions by Jesus, Paul and others (McCasland 1957: 149-52). Several interpreters have argued that ‘signs’ refers to physical healings in Paul’s usage and ‘wonders’ to exorcisms, but little evidence is offered to support this view (McCasland 1957: 151; Remus 1997: 98; Twelftree 2013: 208-17). The fact that the term is never used for either practice in the LXX renders this argument doubtful (noted in Kee 1986: 11). At the same time, the matter-of-fact way in which Paul speaks about performing miraculous deeds poses serious difficulties for any approach that suggests that Paul did not believe in or practice Spirit-empowered healing. Perhaps then his reticence on the subject might be explained by the occasional nature of his letters. The fact that we know anything at all about the role of charismata in Paul’s congregations and his qualified approval of them is due to the conflicts in Corinth. If 1 Corinthians had not been preserved, or if the proper use of charismata had not become a source of controversy among the Corinthian Christ-followers, modern interpreters would know nothing about them and would therefore labor under a faulty understanding of the religious life of the early Christians. The argument from silence would in this case have led interpreters astray.
Even if the broad contours of this reading should be accepted, however, it tells us nothing about what Paul believed and taught concerning other types of healing that his followers might have used before and after joining the Christ-movement. If the argument from silence is fallacious when applied to Paul’s views of Spirit-empowered healing, the same must be said for his ideas regarding medical and magical forms of healing: Paul might have approved (or disapproved) the use of these other modes of healing alongside ‘charismatic’ practices while never having occasion to mention it in his letters. More information is needed to settle this question.
7. Paul valued and practiced divine healing and other ‘miraculous’ activities, but played them down in his letters in order to avoid controversy. This interpretation begins with the same data as the previous one but offers a different explanation for Paul’s reticence regarding miraculous activities in his own ministry and the life of his churches. Where the other solution argues that Paul regarded ‘signs and wonders’ as a vital form of validation for his ministry and message, this approach argues that Paul played down their importance. Support for this interpretation can be found in 2 Cor. 10–12, where Paul acknowledges that the ‘super-apostles’ perform ‘signs and wonders’ (12.11-12) and yet derides them as ‘false apostles’ who ‘masquerade as apostles of Christ’ when they are in fact serving Satan (11.13-15). A similar idea can be seen in 2 Thess. 2.9, where ‘the lawless one’ performs ‘false signs and wonders’ that are in fact the works of Satan. Put simply, works of ‘power’ can be deceptive and cannot therefore be trusted as evidence of divine approval. 49
A different explanation that leads to the same result is that Paul said little about healing because he wanted to avoid the social stigma that often attached to magicians and other wonder-workers so as not to prejudice people against his message. 50 The fact that Paul was educated shows that he grew up in elite (Jewish) circles, and it is only natural that he would have shared his peers’ negative evaluations of such people. Thus Paul was hesitant (and perhaps even embarrassed) to speak about his own works of power (cf. 2 Cor. 12.1-6), citing them only when required for his argument. Far from encouraging such activities, he actively sought to constrain their use (1 Cor. 14).
These explanations certainly raise questions that deserve to be answered, but it is hard to discern any reticence in the passages where Paul refers to miraculous events that attended his preaching. In fact, he sounds more proud than embarrassed. The second option also presupposes that Paul held negative views of magical practitioners, a thesis that is not supported by anything in his letters. More will be said on this point below.
8. Paul regarded all forms of healing with equanimity and allowed his followers to use whatever means lay at hand. This solution reads Paul’s relative silence on the issue of healing through a permissive rather than a restrictive lens. Clearly the question of whether it was appropriate for Christ-followers to use the commonly accepted modes of healing must have come up due to their (explicit or implicit) associations with other gods, so the fact that Paul says nothing about either practice could be taken to indicate that neither he nor his followers saw any reason to refrain from these services. Support for this reading might be found in Paul’s handling of the ‘idol meat’ question, where he affirms that eating meat from animals sacrificed to other gods is permissible unless it leads a fellow believer to violate his conscience regarding the worship of such gods (1 Cor. 8.7-13). Later he says that they should eat whatever is put before them and not ask questions about its origins (1 Cor. 10.25-27). Applying this same mindset to healing practices, Paul might have advised his followers to use whatever means of treatment lay at hand without inquiring into the practitioner’s relation to other deities.
While it is clearly possible to read Paul’s relative silence as a sign of permission, this solution raises as many questions as it answers. How did Paul understand the relation between ecclesial and extra-ecclesial methods of healing? Did he place them on the same level, treating the ‘gifts of healings’ that he mentions in 1 Cor. 12 as one of many modes of treatment, or did he give pride of place to the charismata? Did the charisma of healing really involve miraculous activity, or was this Paul’s way of describing the Spirit-guided application of ordinary healing techniques? Would all forms of extra-ecclesial treatment be equally permissible? Could a Christ-follower visit an Asklepian temple in search of a healing dream? Could he or she bring a sacrificial animal to the shrine in order to gain access to its healing practices, knowing that the god had no real existence? Or would this violate Paul’s strictures against idolatry and constitute communion with demons (1 Cor. 10.19-22)?
Implications for Paul’s Mission
More than a century ago Adolf von Harnack argued that Christianity had succeeded in the Roman world in part because it was a religion of healing (von Harnack 2005: 101-24). What he had in mind, however, was not the provision of cures for physical ailments, but the healing and cleansing of the soul that came through faith in Christ. The fact that Christians were so adept at caring for the sick also attracted many people to the movement. This placed them in direct competition with Asklepios, whom they eventually overcame by the superior nature of the healing and salvation that the church provided.
Others after Harnack took his argument in a more literal direction. Shirley Jackson Case agreed with Harnack regarding the importance of healing in the Greco-Roman world and pointed to the many accounts of miracles in the NT (especially exorcisms) as evidence that the early church had addressed this need head-on by providing physical cures (Case 1923). More recently, Ramsay Macmullen has offered a similar assessment, arguing that the perception that Christians performed miracles, including healings and exorcisms, played a key role in convincing people of the superiority of the Christian God (1984: 21-29, 38-41).
Neither Jackson nor Macmullen, however, offered any sustained explanation of how this might have happened. That gap has been filled in recent years by a number of notable studies. Bernd Kollman has pointed to evidence for a movement of wandering charismatic preachers who used healing, exorcism and other miraculous activities to lend credence to their message about Jesus, the mighty wonder-worker, and the power of the risen Christ. Offering their services for free, they attracted people who could not afford the fees charged by local physicians or the priests of Asklepios (Kollman 1996). Hector Avalos draws on the cross-cultural insights of medical anthropology to show how the early Christians provided a health-care system that met the needs of the sick (especially the chronically ill) more effectively than the competition by giving them access to a single, all-powerful God who charged no fees and incorporating them into a social group where they were cared for and accepted rather than being rejected as unclean. 51 Elaine Wainwright carries this argument still further, arguing that the practice of healing played such a vital role in the outreach of early Christianity that it can be rightly described as ‘a healing movement’ (2006: 100).
Gary Ferngren, on the other hand, has challenged those who see physical healing as a major part of the appeal of early Christianity (1992). In his reading, the healing miracles of the gospels and Acts serve as signs of the Kingdom of God and confirmations of the ministries of Jesus and the apostles, not as ends in themselves. The fact that the epistles contain almost no references to healing or exorcism indicates that such activities were not in fact vital to the movement. A similar pattern can be seen in the second century, when reports of miraculous healing are uncommon and appeals to their validating effects rare, except on the fringe of the Christian movement. Not until the third and fourth centuries do we see an upsurge of interest in divine healing and exorcism, a change that Ferngren attributes to ‘the credulity of the age, found in pagan and Christian alike, which lessened the appeal of rational medicine and encouraged frequent resort to exorcism and other forms of supernatural healing’ (1992: 10). Only then can Christianity truly be called a ‘religion of healing’.
Given the importance of the apostle Paul in the early spread of Christianity, a reliable portrait of his beliefs and practices regarding physical healing would be helpful for assessing the validity of these different positions. If we take the book of Acts as our guide, the answer is simple: Paul, like Jesus, performed healings and exorcisms as part of his strategy for gaining converts. If we restrict ourselves to Paul’s letters, however, the picture grows murky. We simply do not know whether healing was one of the ‘signs and wonders’ that Paul says accompanied his missionary preaching, nor whether the ‘gifts of healings’ referenced in 1 Cor. 12 played any role in the evangelistic outreach of Paul’s followers. Given Paul’s own lack of success with divine healing, it is tempting to assert that bodily healing played no role in his mission to the Gentiles. But that, too, would be straining the evidence, since there might well have been instances of healing in his own life or the lives of others that advanced his mission even though he never mentions the fact. It is also hard to believe that claims of miraculous healing in the Christian house-church meetings would have escaped the notice of people outside the movement who were ill.
Thus we are left to ponder what role (if any) stories of divine healing might have played in Paul’s evangelistic mission. Similar uncertainties surround his attitudes toward other forms of health care. The fact that he never says a word about any of the common modes of treatment seems odd in view of the universality of illness and injury, the ready availability of healers, and the close association of these other practitioners with deities that Paul derides as ‘idols’. Had Paul thought that such extra-ecclesial healing practices somehow endangered his followers’ devotion to the one true God, one would think that he would have said so. It is of course possible that he had no occasion to mention the subject in his letters because he had addressed it along with other questions pertaining to idolatry when setting up a congregation. But this argument presumes what it needs to prove, i.e., that Paul viewed the consultation of ‘pagan’ healers as a potential form of idolatry. It is also hard to believe that his teaching on this point was so effective that he never again had occasion to mention it in any of his correspondence with his churches. Such a solution carries as much (or as little) weight as any argument from silence.
Could Paul’s treatment of ‘idol meat’ in 1 Cor. 8 and 10 offer us a path through this thicket? Of all the issues that Paul addresses in his letters, this one provides the closest analogy to the question of whether it is proper for a Christ-follower to consult ‘pagan’ healers. In both cases the issue is whether an act that in itself carries no religious significance (eating meat, tending an illness) takes on a religious valence when it is linked to rituals involving non-Christian deities. The link is admittedly more immediate in the case of eating meat carved from a sacrificial animal, but we have already seen how all three models of healing in Greco-Roman antiquity – religious, medical and magical – were so deeply intertwined that it would have been impossible to view any of them as purely ‘secular’ and thus devoid of potential religious implications.
The essence of Paul’s answer to the ‘idol meat’ question is that under ordinary circumstances there is nothing wrong with eating meat from animals that have been sacrificed to other gods. Christ-followers should eat whatever is available to them, whether in the meat market or at the home of a friend or patron, and not ask questions about its origins. If, however, they are warned that such meat comes from a sacrificial animal, they should avoid it. Otherwise their actions might be interpreted as condoning the worship of other gods, a practice that Paul forcefully and repeatedly rejects.
If we apply similar logic to the issue of medical treatment, we can speculate that Paul might have advised his followers to accept any treatment that is presented to them unless they are explicitly told that it will involve direct interaction with a deity other than Yahweh. Such an approach would leave Christ-followers free to pursue a wide range of common healing practices: eating or not eating various foods (including those prepared by ‘magical’ practitioners), ingesting medications (even those prescribed by Asklepian physicians), visiting healing springs (and being treated there by ‘pagan’ doctors), engaging in purges and cleansings (even when they claimed to purify the soul as well as the body), wearing protective amulets (regardless of the rituals used in their preparation), and reciting incantations to remove the source of an illness (as long as it did not involve explicit prayers to other gods). They could also seek help from any of the myriad healers that plied their craft in the towns and cities, including diviners, astrologers, drug-makers, exorcists, root-cutters, purifiers, midwives, bone-setters, surgeons, gymnastic trainers and, of course, physicians. 52 If they wished, they could create their own versions of these and other ‘pagan’ practices, including dream incubation. 53 But they could not travel to an Asklepian sanctuary in hopes of being cured by the god in a dream, recite the names of other gods in a protective charm, conjure daimones or spirits of the dead, or present prayers, vows or sacrifices to Greek, Roman or native deities. Whether a treatment was deemed acceptable would depend not on where it originated (i.e., in religious, medical or magical circles), but whether it relied on a deity other than the God of Israel to perform the healing. 54
What then of prayers and charismatic ‘gifts of healings’? These, too, would have had their place in the treatment regimen of Christ-followers, though not to the exclusion of other modes of healing. In all likelihood Paul himself tried different treatments when he was sick and found some more useful than others. In at least one case, his ‘thorn in the flesh’, he found no effective means of healing, a result that led to his well-known recognition that his weakness (or ‘sickness’) made him a more suitable receptacle for the power of the risen Christ (2 Cor. 12.8-10). This experience not only taught him how to cope more effectively with his own illness, but also led him to promote the same attitude in others, assuring them that God was doing a good work in them through their sufferings (Rom. 5.3-5; 8.17-18; 2 Cor. 1.5-7). Whether his followers found this advice helpful is beyond our knowledge, but it is worth noting that modern psychology has confirmed the beneficent effects of maintaining a positive attitude in the face of sickness.
In the end, there is much that we will never know about Paul’s beliefs and practices regarding physical health and healing. This is surprising in view of the many sufferings that he endured during his life (1 Cor. 4.9-13; 2 Cor. 6.4-10; 11.23-29; 12.7-8; Gal. 4.13-14), some of which would have caused injuries serious enough to require some sort of medical attention to stave off permanent debility or death. Several verses suggest that he might also have suffered from a chronic illness (2 Cor. 4.10-12, 16-17; 10.11; 12.8-10; Gal. 6.11, 16), perhaps brought on by the deprivation that he experienced from time to time. Paul gives no indication that he was miraculously cured from any of these conditions, so we must presume that he sought (and benefitted from) ordinary modes of treatments under the care of some sort of healer, whether Christian, Jewish or ‘pagan’. Perhaps he even wore an amulet to protect him from the evil eye and other forces of darkness. 55
But Paul was also supremely devoted to the God of Israel, so we can also be sure that some forms of healing – those that involved direct engagement with other deities – would have been out of bounds for him. Paul was also a man of prayer who would have appealed to this same divine being to restore his health and given him due homage for any healing that occurred, regardless of the hands that tended him. While waiting for a cure, he would have labored to maintain a positive attitude and soldiered on in spite of his weakness, confident that God was with him and would soon transform his frail body into a glorious, heavenly body that would never again suffer illness. For a man who endured as much bodily suffering as Paul did, such a hope would have sounded sweet indeed.
Footnotes
1.
The only other use anywhere in the Pauline correspondence is Col. 4.14, where Luke is described as an ἰατρός.
2.
3.
4.
von Harnack 2005: 81 (ET of 1906: 104). While it would be natural to presume from this turn of phrase and the title of his book that von Harnack highlighted the role of bodily healing (whether natural or divine) in the ‘mission and expansion’ of early Christianity, he in fact has virtually nothing to say on this subject. The ‘healing’ about which he speaks is an internal healing of the soul from the effects of sin (
: 69-80). Only in the case of Jesus does he acknowledge that bodily healing played a role in the success of the Christian mission (2005: 70-71); after his time, it is the church’s compassionate care for the sick that attracted new followers, not any power to remove sickness (2005: 81-83, 105-106).
5.
6.
The present article is in fact part of a larger monograph project.
7.
Hector Avalos (1999) and have led the way in applying the language and insights of medical anthropology to the field of NT studies, focusing primarily on Jesus and the gospels. Briefly stated, anthropologists draw a distinction between ‘disease’, a biomedical term describing a pathological disorder of the body; ‘illness’, which refers to the sufferer’s subjective (and socially conditioned) perception of being unwell; and ‘sickness’, which encompasses the sense of meaning that others give to the person’s complaint and the roles that the sufferer is expected to perform within a given social context. A similar distinction is made between the terms ‘cure’, which means to correct successfully the sufferer’s bodily malfunction, and ‘heal’, which involves the reduction or elimination of the socially disvalued states of ‘illness’ and ‘sickness’ and the restoration of the person to the normal social order. Such distinctions can be important when assessing the historical realities behind ancient healing stories, but they unnecessarily complicate studies such as this one where historical veracity is not under discussion. I will accordingly use terms like ‘disease’, ‘illness’, and ‘sickness’ interchangeably in my analysis. The same is true for the terms ‘curing’ and ‘healing’.
8.
Compiled from Grmek 1989: 36-48, 57-89, 122-71, 183-96, 254-81, 334-55; Penso 1984: 245-512; Jackson 1988: 23-24; Nutton 1995b: 23-24; Retief and Cilliers 2005: 200-12; Garland 2010: 123-38; : 98-118. Among the ancient sources, Hippocrates’ Aphorisms is a particularly rich source of data regarding the various maladies encountered by ancient physicians.
9.
According to Thumiger (2013), nearly 50 different words are used in various Hippocratic treatises to describe forms of mental illness, but only the ones listed here appear to have any settled meaning except for ‘phrenitis’, whose symptoms she never describes. reaches a similar conclusion.
10.
Fever was seen as a disease in antiquity and not as a symptom of other conditions; see Hippocrates, Epidemics 1.18-21.
11.
The use of the term ‘magical’ is controversial in the field. Jonathan Z. Smith reflects the views of many when he states, ‘I see little merit in continuing the use of the substantive term “magic” in second-order, theoretical, academic discourse … For any culture I am familiar with, we can trade places between the corpus of material commonly labeled “magical” and corpora designated by other generic terms (e.g., healing, divining, execrative) with no cognitive loss’ (1995: 16). The English word ‘magic’ is derived from the Greek word mageia, which originally referred to the practices of a magos, or Persian fire-priest. Its association with the Persian enemy led educated Greeks to use it as a term of disparagement for practices that they viewed as suspect. (For more on the history of the term, see Graf 1995 and .) It is retained here as a way of distinguishing various traditional healers from physicians who followed the Hippocratic medical tradition, which developed its own relatively consistent and self-contained body of thought and practice.
12.
For overviews of the myths of Asklepios and his family, see Hart 2000: 1-40; Israelowich 2012: 147-54; and especially : II, 1-76 (primary source material in I, 1-178).
13.
Information about the extent and availability of Asklepian temples in the Roman Empire is summarized in Hart 2000: 165-82. According to Ferngren (2014: 67), Asklepios was worshipped alone or with other gods at 670 temples and shrines across the Mediterranean world by the second century ce. Primary sources on many of these centers are available in : I, 370-452.
14.
15.
For more on ritual and medical practices at the Asklepian temples, see Israelowich 2015: 49-66, 116-21; Jackson 1988: 144-49; Avalos 1995: 37-98; Edelstein and Edelstein 1998: II, 181-257; Hart 2000: 41-107. The most famous miracle inscriptions come from the sanctuary at Epidauros in the Greek Peloponnese; translations and commentary are available in .
16.
Kee 1986: 17 points to 2 Chron. 16.11-12; Job 13.4; Jer. 8.22; 30.12-13; 46.11; 51.8. Yet Gary Ferngren is surely correct in his assertion that ‘it is inconceivable that at any time the Israelites lacked knowledge of the rudimentary treatment of wounds and uses of herbs for various ailments in which natural causality was evident’, despite the lack of evidence for any systematic form of health care (2014: 29). Hector Avalos (1995: 251-52) mentions several biblical texts that suggest that medical care occurred primarily in the home (1 Sam. 16.14-23; 19.11-16; 2 Sam. 12.15-18; 13.1-10; 2 Kgs 4.8-37; 20.1-7), though he also notes a few passages where the temple/tabernacle plays a vital role (Lev. 13-14; 1 Sam. 1.1-18; 1 Kgs 8.37-39; 2 Kgs 18.4) (: 337-59).
17.
18.
For more on self-help traditions, see Nutton 1995b: 39; : 17.
19.
Jackson 1988: 17-19; : 22-24. The link between medicine and philosophy was never lost; the famous physician Galen, writing in the second century ce, asserts that medicine resembles philosophy in leading its practitioners to a better understanding of the universe and promoting moral behavior (Nutton 1992: 48).
20.
Jackson 1988: 20-22; Grmek 1989: 17; : 41-52.
22.
For more on ancient diagnostic and treatment methods, see Jackson 1988: 22-23, 70-85; Nutton 1995a: 26-28; and especially : 415-91.
23.
25.
Garland 2010: 137-38; Nutton 2013: 119-27; : 307-38.
26.
As was noted earlier, this was not entirely an act of desperation; votive tablets from Epidauros and other ancient texts claim that Asklepios had cured people from blindness, deafness and muteness, as well as cancers and other internal pathologies.
27.
Ferngren 2014: 10. Healing was only one element in a broader panoply of benefits that the practitioners of ‘magic’ claimed to offer. Others included good looks, wealth, success in business, and especially love. Magic was also used to inflict harm on competitors and enemies, a fact that played a major role in its negative reputation in the eyes of many. See Luck 1985: 16; : 73-75, 128-34, 142-68.
29.
A well-known saying recorded in Diodorus frag 30.43 runs, ‘When the art of the physician fails, everyone turns to incantations’. A similar view is found in Plutarch, De Faciae 920b: ‘Those who are ill with chronic diseases and do not succeed by the usual remedies and the customary diet turn to purifications and amulets and dreams’. References taken from Edelstein 1967: 245. On the economic consequences of sickness and the importance of a quick cure, see : 26, 29-30, 91-95.
30.
On the evidence for women as both physicians and purveyors of ‘magical’ cures, see Dickie 2001: 108, 112-14, 159, 162-68, 175-91; : 39, 45-62, 75-91.
32.
Numerous examples can be found in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History and Plutarch’s On Superstition. Apuleius’s Golden Ass purports to recount the experience of an elite outsider who becomes entangled in the world of magic, but the fictional nature of the work makes it hard to assess whether he had experience with real practitioners or worked from hearsay.
33.
The word ‘demon’ is derived from the Greek word daimon, which originally referred to a class of supra-human beings who stood midway between humans and the gods. Daimones were not associated with evil, though their power commanded respect and sometimes fear. On the role of daimones in magical practices, see Delatte 1961: 118-24, 199; Luck 1985: 137-38, 163-65; : 32-44.
35.
Ferngren 2014: 34-35. Elite Jewish opinion seems to have been divided. Sir. 38.1-15 praises God for the services of physicians and the healing properties of medicines, both of which are credited to God, while also commending the efficacy of prayers and sacrifice in times of sickness. The physicians that he has in mind appear to be Jewish, since he indicates that ‘they too will pray to the Lord that he should grant them success in diagnosis and in healing, for the sake of preserving life’ (v. 14). Philo holds a similar view (see Alleg. Interp. 3.178), but he also complains that some of his acquaintances give too much credence to physicians and only turn to God as a last resort (Sacr. 19.70-71). From a later period, the Talmud recommends that every Jewish community should have a surgeon (b. Sanh. 17b) and advises that a physician should be present at the Jerusalem temple to treat priests (b. Šeqal. 1-2; Ferngren 2014: 35). For more on Jewish physicians, see Avalos 1999: 78-79; Twelftree 2013: 35-60; and especially : 118-73.
36.
37.
Wis. 7.17-21; Tobit passim; 11QapPsa; Josephus, Ant. 8.2.5, 20.142; Testament of Solomon passim; Acts 13.5-12; 19.11-20. For a careful and thorough sifting of the literary and material evidence for Jewish magic in the Second Temple era, see : 70-142. Jewish magicians are mentioned by Pliny (NH 30.11), Posidonius, Celsus and Chrysostom, and Jewish names (including variations on the divine name), objects and phrases appear often in Greek magical papyri (Janowitz 2001: 25-26). Such practices would appear to contravene the many biblical texts that condemn the practice of magic and sorcery (Gen. 41.1-8; Exod. 8.18-19; Lev. 19.26-28; Deut. 18.10-14; Num. 23.22-3; 1 Sam. 6.2; 1 Sam. 28; 2 Kgs 17.16-18; 21.6, 9-15; 2 Chron. 33.1-13; Isa. 2.6; 3.3; Jer. 14.4; 27.9; Ezek. 13.17-18; 13.23; Mal. 3.1-5) (Kee 1986: 17-19). Bohak argues that these texts do not in fact outlaw any particular practices but rather prohibit Jews from resorting to certain types of practitioners (i.e., those associated with other gods). As he sees it, their wording is so ambiguous that the Jews of Paul’s day would have perceived in them ‘no clear-cut biblical prohibition of magic or divination’ (2008: 18), particularly when read alongside other texts that show biblical characters using techniques that recall those used by magicians (e.g., Gen. 30.14-18; Num. 5.11-31; 21.7-9; 2 Kgs 1.1-4; Bohak 2008: 10-34).
38.
Nutton 1992: 34; Bohak 2008: 46-51; : 270-81. This devotion to the healing deities is encapsulated in the opening words of the Hippocratic Oath: ‘I swear by Apollo the Healer, by Asclepius, by Hygieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath and this indenture’.
39.
On physicians and divine causality, see : 208-17, 226-32; Lloyd 2004: 46-50; Israelowich 2015: 34. By contrast, medical authors have little room for causation by demons, which they link to the quackery of magic (Edelstein 1967: 219).
40.
41.
Kee 1986: 101-105; : 9-10. The quotation is from NH 30.6.
43.
45.
46.
Some have suggested that Luke ‘the beloved physician’ (Col. 4.14) served Paul in this capacity, but this depends (among other things) on what one believes about the authorship of Colossians.
47.
The reading proposed here clearly poses problems for the depiction of Paul in the book of Acts, where he himself performs acts of healing and other miracles (14.8-10; 16.16-18; 19.11-12; 20.7-12; 28.1-9).
48.
has made a forceful case for this view, though his argument is not without its problems. He and others have underlined how the phrase ‘signs and wonders’ echoes the language of the LXX, where it refers especially to the miraculous deeds of Moses in the Exodus story, which Paul regards as a prototype for his own ministry (e.g., 2 Cor. 3.7-18).
49.
50.
On negative views of magicians, see Edelstein 1967: 219-25; Penso 1984: 63-67; Graf 1997: 21-56; Dickie 2001: 20-40, 69-70, 130-60; Janowitz 2001: 9-24; Nissen 2009: 35-37. On the disparaging of physicians, see Prioreschi 1994: 647-52; : 234.
51.
Avalos 1999. likewise calls attention to anxieties over health as a vital human concern that was addressed by the early Christian healthcare system, but he focuses more on the psychological and social benefits of healing than the bodily effects. He also talks mostly about the ministry of Jesus, not what happened after him.
52.
Whether Paul would have regarded any of these practitioners as falling under the biblical prohibition against consulting ‘diviners’ or ‘sorcerers’ is unclear since he never addresses the subject (cf. Acts 8.9; 13.6, 18; Rev. 9.21; 18.23; 21.8). The fact that some of these practices were later condemned by various church fathers does not necessarily mean that they would have been perceived as dangerous in Paul’s day; some of the church fathers held similar views of drugs and physicians. Evidence for later Christian opinions (both positive and negative) toward various forms of healing can be found in Frost 1949: 96-108; Amundsen 1982; Temkin 1991: 112-58; Ferngren 1992: 6-13; .
54.
Lest anyone should object to the inclusion of ‘magical’ practices in this list (cf. Acts 19.19), it is worth noting that a number of commentators have identified ideas and language in Paul’s letters that might have struck ancient audiences as ‘magical’, including his belief that his body was inhabited and empowered by a supra-human spirit (the parhedros of magical lore); his claim that he communicated regularly with a dead man (necromancy); his practice of pronouncing curses to inflict harm on others (1 Cor. 5.3-5; 16.22; Gal. 1.8-9); his assertions that ingesting a sacralized substance could bring one into communion with daimones (1 Cor. 10.19-21) or cause any who were not properly prepared to grow sick or die (1 Cor. 11.27-30); and his insistence that participating in a ritual could change a person’s essential nature (baptism in Rom. 6.3-10). Paul also engaged in other practices commonly associated with magicians: traveling from city to city hawking a set of arcane beliefs and practices, pronouncing oracles from a sacred book, doing miraculous deeds, and initiating people into sacred mysteries. Such practices may well have contributed to his being regarded as dangerous by civic authorities and to his expulsion from several cities (see Dickie 2001: 66-75, for comparative data). This is not to say that Paul derived any of his ideas or practices directly from contact with magicians, but rather that what we might call a ‘magical’ view of reality was shared by virtually all forms of religion in Paul’s day, including Judaism and Christianity. As Georg Luck cogently observed when explaining the difficulty of drawing a clear line between the two, ‘One person’s religion may be another person’s magic’ (: 135).
55.
Ample evidence exists of both Jews and Christians wearing amulets; see Luck 1985: 19; Kotansky 1995: 243-45; Ferngren and Amundsen 1996: 2968; Janowitz 2001: 57; : 81.