Home
EE's HMC Home Page
ABSTRACTS
Summary
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
CHAPTER NINE - HEALERS, MAGICIANS AND SPIRITS
Whereas the social sciences cannot be used to supply gaps in the historical data, the insights from social anthropology may usefully suggest some alternative perspectives. The work of medical anthropologists such as Arthur Kleinman suggest that Jesus' healing activity should be located in the folk sector, and the model developed by Octavio Romano in relation to the Mexican-American folk-healer Pedrito Jaramillo provides an interesting parallel to Jesus in showing how single-minded devotion to the healing role can propel a folk-healer up the healing hierarchy to a folk-saint about whom a cycle of miracle stories quickly comes to be narrated. There has been much social-scientific discussion about the distinction between magic and miracle. An article by Karen Jolly argues that in Anglo-Saxon England the distinction between magic and scientia was based simply on whether the source of knowledge or power was God or the devil, and there are good grounds (e.g. the Beelzebul controversy and Josephus' account of Moses and the Egyptian magicians before Pharaoh) for assuming that a similar distinction held among first-century Jews. It is not clear what Jesus understood to be the cause of the sicknesses he combated, in particular there is nothing to suggest he saw himself to be combating sorcery. It is possible that he saw sicknesses as having either demonic or natural causes; he seems to have rejected the notion that they were divine punishments. Anthropological work on spirit possession shows that this is a widely-spread phenomenon that should not automatically be assimilated to mental illness, even when it is regarded as demonic. The evidence is at least consistent with seeing Jesus as a spirit-filled prophet-healer combating mainly spirit-induced illnesses. It is dangerous, however, to press the Gospel evidence too far in interpreting the exorcism stories in terms of a particular sociological or psychological theory.
