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Bible Dictionaries
Cures
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or CURES.—The details of medical knowledge possessed by the Jews of our Lord’s time and of current medical practice can only be gathered piecemeal from various sources, and relate largely to what is known of these in OT and in post-Biblical times. It is not unreasonable to believe that from these sources one can with fair accuracy gather what was the knowledge and practice of our Lord’s own generation. In the NT references are made to physicians in Matthew 5:26, Luke 8:43. The value of diet and the use of oil and wine in cases of bodily injury are indirectly referred to in Luke 8:55; Luke 10:34. Visitation of the sick is a Christian virtue, and was warmly commended by Jesus (Matthew 25:36; Matthew 25:43), in terms implying that it was practised; but the Talmud, which also recognizes the virtue, makes an exception in cases where visitation might aggravate the disorder. The balm of Gilead had an ancient reputation for healing virtue, and the Pools of Siloam and Bethesda and the springs at Tiberias and Callirrhoë were reputed to be curative. Medical theory among the Jews was almost entirely borrowed empirically, and no system of medical training and education existed in Palestine in Bible times. Prevention of disease by sanitary precautions was more emphasized, and it has even been suggested that the whole Levitical legislation was based upon hygienic considerations, so far as these were understood. The priestly class were the depositaries of such medical knowledge as was possessed, although Solomon is said to have known about the use of drugs, and various references in the Talmud attribute to him a book of cures which was said to have been withdrawn from the people by Hezekiah.
In the time of Jesus medical practitioners would be in possession of such medical lore as was held and practised in former generations, and would therefore be familiar with the art of midwifery, and possibly had attained to considerable skill in its practice, though there are few references to surgical operations. Probably an aversion existed to surgery, as to the practice of bleeding, on account of the national belief concerning the blood; but later this aversion was overcome, and Jewish physicians fell into line with the leading classical schools, which freely employed bleeding as a remedy. The Talmud (e.g. Bekhoroth, 45a; Nazir, 32b) bears witness to some anatomical knowledge possessed by post-Biblical practitioners, and from this and other Rabbinical sources the common maxims of the physicians, and indications of their principles and methods, may be not obscurely learned. The Talmud mentions myrrh, aloes, cassia, frankincense, cinnamon, spikenard, and camphire as having medicinal properties. Dietetic rules and sanitary regulations were also carefully enjoined, and many bodily disorders were treated by homely remedies. Wunderbar (l.c. infra) gives examples of the application of drugs and the like to various ailments, but also plainly shows that occult methods, involving astrology, and the wearing of parchment amulets or charms, were with more confidence prescribed. Various incantations were in use to prevent miscarriage, and to ward off the machinations of evil spirits from the cradle of the newborn. Drugs and magic were, in fact, generally employed, the chief reliance being placed on the latter.
With these methods our Lord’s action in the healing of disease had no affinity. Necromantic or superstitious observances were entirely foreign to His spirit. He never taught that sicknesses were the result of the action of evil spirits [on Luke 11:13 ff. see below, and art. Impotence]. And it is equally clear that He had no recourse to such medical knowledge as was familiar to the physicians of His time, and that He was not endowed with knowledge of disease and of the curative art in advance of His own generation. In the cures recorded in the Gospels He employs nothing beyond His word, addressed either to the patient or to a parent or friend, and sometimes a touch. For use of saliva, see art. Sight. The method of Jesus must be sought on an entirely different line.
In every process of healing, whether in the time of Jesus or in our own day, there are two elements: the physical, and the mental or psychical. On the one hand, the disturbing and enfeebling causes, functional or organic, in the bodily tissues and organs, are gradually removed by the action of drugs or other medical treatment. On the other, a new tone and vigour are restored to the unseen and intangible but essentially real ‘life’ of the patient. The two are most intimately and vitally connected with each other, and neither element can be ignored. Mind and body are mutually interpenetrative, and although the relations between them are in many respects still profoundly obscure, yet advancing knowledge only makes more certain what is already firmly established, that this interdependence and mutual influence are of the closest character. The uncertain and incalculable element in every sickness or feebleness, passing beyond all power to adequately diagnose, is the psychical. The physical condition may clearly point to a particular issue of the infirmity—recovery or death—and, so far as the physical goes, this might be determined with considerable accuracy; but the action of the incalculable element remains, cannot be predicted, and may produce most surprising results. These are matters of common knowledge, and amount to commonplaces. But they must be steadily borne in mind when cases of restoration—those in process to-day, and those recorded in the Gospels—are considered.
The action of Jesus was upon the complex personality, body and spirit, but upon the body through the spirit. His power went directly to the central life, to the man, the living person, and this may be traced in all His dealing with disease and infirmity both of body and of mind (See Lunatic). The Divine power was, through His life, at one with itself, brought to bear with living energy on the unseen springs of the being. Consideration of the actual phenomena of our Lord’s working in the restoring of the sick will make these facts more manifest.
1. Our Lord’s own dependence upon the Divine power.—Not only did He declare this close, trustful dependence (John 5:19; John 5:30; John 8:28; John 10:25; John 10:32; John 10:37-38; John 14:10), but it is evinced spontaneously in His action (Mark 7:34, John 11:41-42). The customary association of prayer with His works of healing was proof of His uttermost dependence upon God. The power of prayer, which He marked as the condition of all human victory, He indicates as vital also to His own action (Mark 9:29). The prayer He desiderates is no slack and formal petitioning of a far-distant Deity, but a close absorption of life in a very-present Helper. And this was the quality of our Lord’s own dependence upon God. He cherished the largest expectations from the power of the Living God, of which He was so conscious. He felt the throbbing in His own life of that Mighty Will and Love which animated all being, and therefore He intimated that the true value of prayer, for Himself and for mankind, was that it established in man a close sympathy with, and an absolute dependence upon, the Source of all healing and life.
2. His healings were an expression of intensest sympathy with suffering humanity. Compassion was the moving cause of many of His beneficent actions (Matthew 15:32; Matthew 20:34, Mark 8:2, Luke 7:13). True sympathy is a mighty human energy in which the Divine power is at work, and even on the lower levels of our feeble personal force it has a continuous tendency towards healing. Experience multiplies the evidence of this fact as the years pass. And we are led to conceive in some measure the vast resources of power in the full compassion of Him who was morally one with the Source of all love and pity. His sympathy was never vitiated or weakened by personal imperfection, and so it possessed the power of self-identification with God and man. The healing of the Issue of Blood (see article) shows that this sympathy with distressed humanity worked even apart from His direct will.
3. His conviction that disease and suffering were not part of the right and natural order of things. This feature is seen in all His actions, but found its clearest expression in the case of the woman who could in no wise lift up herself (Luke 13:11-17) (See Impotence). ‘Ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound, lo these eighteen years, to have been loosed from this bond on the day of the Sabbath?’ In addition to our Lord’s antagonism to the pedantry and inhumanity of His critics, the underlying note is heard that humanity ought not to be held in bonds of sickness and infirmity. Disease and suffering and untimely death are not part of the natural, i.e. the right and Divine, order of things. And all the power of right is on the side of those who labour to set man free and to enable him to stand erect in body, mind, and soul before God and his fellows.
4. A clear feature in our Lord’s healings was His sense of the need of dealing with the sin which often lay at the root of the sickness and infirmity. Jesus very carefully guards against the unwarranted assumption made by the friends of Job, and by the disciples (John 9:2), that sin was the secret cause of all suffering and pain. Other and Diviner reasons might account for much of the deprivation and trouble of man (John 9:3). But in two cases (Mark 2:5-10, John 5:14) He not obscurely marks the sin as the deepest cause of the weakness (see artt. Paralysis and Impotence). Sin is the violation of the whole nature of man, body, mind, soul, as well as disobedience to the Holy Will of God. It depresses the springs of personal vitality, and therefore continually makes for sickness and feebleness of body.
5. Faith was required on the part of the one to be healed. Faith must be clearly distinguished from mental assent and from credulity, which vainly arrogate to themselves that august word. Faith, as Jesus conceived it, was the noblest activity of man’s being, the triumphant assertion of the essential and Divine part of his nature against all that dwarfs, disfigures, and oppresses it, and this faith our Lord most keenly desired to see. The absence of it, even the fear of its absence, chilled and dismayed His spirit (John 4:48, Mark 9:22-23 Revised Version NT 1881, OT 1885). He marks faith as the truly favourable condition for His healing power to be efficacious (Matthew 9:29, Mark 10:52, Luke 17:19; Luke 18:42, John 5:6). Apparent exceptions to this connexion between healing and faith may be traced in Matthew 9:1-8; Matthew 12:9-13, Luke 13:11-17; Luke 14:1-6; Luke 22:50-51, but in all these cases the details are not reported, the fact of the healing being in these instances less prominent than other features of the narrative, such as the controversy of Jesus with the cold critics in the synagogue, and the personal characteristics of the Saviour in His beneficent action with respect to Malchus. It has also been thought that demoniacs as such were incapacitated from the exercise of faith in Jesus. But while this is in part true, it is significant that our Lord does in these instances seek to gain access to the true personality and to set it free from the oppression of all alien powers (See Lunatic).
6. Jesus laboured to produce this faith.—Not only does He ask for it as a condition of healing, but He spends Himself in the effort to evoke it. His careful treatment of the blind man (Mark 8:22-26), the deaf and dumb (Mark 7:31-37), the blind and impotent (John 9:1-7; John 5:6) is best understood as the effort of our Lord to produce the essential conditions of receiving His healing virtue. In each case the means used, as well as the words spoken, are adapted to the particular case. We have not one set of means used indiscriminately. The ears and the tongue of the deaf-mute are touched, the blind man in one case is led out of the town, saliva is applied to his eyes, and the touch of the Lord’s hand; in the other the eyes are anointed and the patient is sent to a distant pool in the exercise of faith. The labour is to set free the patient from all unnatural conditions of mind and spirit and from hopelessness, which is the most unnatural of all to men to whom God is so near.
This effort in Jesus produced weariness. It involved a deep expenditure of nervous, physical, and spiritual energy, and often in the Gospels we read of the spent, tired worker seeking refreshment in rest and in solitude, and most of all in fellowship with God. ‘He went out into the mountain to pray’ (Matthew 14:23, Mark 6:46, Luke 6:12).
7. Several of our Lord’s cures were wrought while He was at a distance from the patient: the Syro-Phœnician’s daughter (Matthew 15:21-28, Mark 7:24-30), the nobleman’s son (John 4:46-53), and the centurion’s servant (Matthew 8:5-13, Luke 7:1-10). Difficulty is felt by many on the ground that the power of a unique personality which they acknowledge in Jesus could not be active in these cases. Dr. Abbott discusses the third instance (Kernel and Husk, Letter 18), and, excluding any ‘bonâ fide miracle,’ he inclines to regard the story as due to an exaggeration or to the influence of the knowledge of his friend’s intercession with Jesus, ‘with a sentimental reserve in favour of brain-wave sympathy.’ Since the time Dr. Abbott wrote, telepathy has become a recognized fact in psychical research, and we have no need to deny its possible action in these cases. But the explanation given of all His works by our Lord goes beneath all such conjectures and hypotheses. He ascribed His healing to the Divine power with which He was able to bring men into living communication. That Divine all-pervading Life which informed His humanity was not at a distance from any human life. Space and Time are to the Infinite Power non-existent, and only our bondage to the limited human ideas can present any difficulty.
8. In the three above cases and in the case of the demoniac boy (Matthew 17:14-21, Mark 9:14-29, Luke 9:37-43) our Lord significantly seeks the co-operation of parent and friend in the work of healing; and the fact is most significant of the closeness of human sympathy, and most of all of that most vital and mysterious sympathy lying in the life-bond between parent and child, and the intimate dependence of these ties upon the life-giving power of the Almighty. These deep-lying sympathies that bind parents to their own offspring are essentially allied to the Divine power. They ‘consist’ by its indwelling, and Jesus desires this power to be informed by a living faith, and so be at once at its highest point of energy and also in living union with God.
9. In some of the cures effected by Jesus a process is observable in the recovery. The nobleman’s son was first set free from the fever, and from that decisive time began ‘to amend.’ The crisis was safely passed, and the rest was left to nature’s gentle action. The Syro-Phœnician’s daughter was delivered from her besetment and left ‘thrown upon the bed,’ physically prostrate, and requiring rest and care. The daughter of Jairus was ordered rest and food, and the blind man at Bethsaida was only by degrees restored to perfect sight. These indications, casually given, and probably not understood by the narrators, lead us to think that a similar process would be manifest in the other cures were they fully and adequately reported, and it is always a salutary reminder that our Gospels are only most fragmentary. It was a principle of Jesus not to do anything by extraordinary which could be accomplished by ordinary means.
10. The healing power of Jesus went out freely among the suffering multitude (Matthew 8:16-17; Matthew 14:34-36; Matthew 15:30-31, Mark 1:32-34; Mark 6:53-56, Luke 4:40-41; Luke 9:11). The contagions influence of a multitude, in producing an atmosphere in which remarkable psychical phenomena are manifest and the result is seen in healing of the sick, is not uncommonly recognized in modern times. In this way are explained the miracles of which some genuine cases undoubtedly happened around the tomb of Becket, the healings that are associated with Lourdes, and many of the similar results that we may believe were gathered round famous saints like St. Francis of Assisi and St. Theresa. A contagion of expectation is initiated and spreads rapidly through a whole countryside, and this condition of expectation and hope is one which the most prosaic science recognizes as favourable to the production of real cures, especially of ailments a large element of which is nervous. We have seen that the working of Jesus did not disdain to utilize these and all other forces in human nature which make for healing; and by reason of His unique and perfect alliance with the Divine Source of all life and health, He was able to bring instantaneous and permanent relief and restoration to whole companies of sufferers.
11. Our Lord’s method has considerable affinity with modern medical science. The power of the mind over bodily ailments, in the maintenance and restoration of health, is being increasingly acknowledged. Dr. Schofield says truly that most remedies, if not all, are partly psychical in their operation. Not only such prescriptions as change of occupation, environment, and climate, physical and mental shocks and emotional incentives, ethical and religious influences, travel, study, ambition and social influences, but also drugs, changes of diet, baths and waters, minor operations, depend much for their efficacy on their psychical action; while the personality of the doctor—in some cases the unintelligibility of his prescription and the magnitude of his fee—are valuable therapeutic agents. In this way full recognition is given to the influence of any power which can set free the mind from its hopeless condition, its lethargy and depression, as a most potent force in the work of healing. Schmiedel (art. ‘Gospels’ in Encyc. Bibl.) says of our Lord’s miracles: ‘It is only permissible to regard as historical that class of healings which present-day physicians are able to effect by psychical methods.’ But he overlooks the influence of mental action in the cure of all kinds of disease, and not only of mental diseases to which the above observations point.
Psychical methods, intelligently and of set purpose applied to the cure of bodily ailments, are as yet in their preliminary stages. On the same line, if on no other, much greater possibilities remain for human knowledge and power to achieve. No limit can be laid down beyond which the occult forces of human life may not be taken advantage of for the healing not of nervous diseases only, but of purely physical. Dr. Osgood Mason gives abundant evidence, from his own knowledge and practice, of the influence of suggestion, with or without hypnosis, in the healing of many physical ailments. And the Christian faith, based upon the suggestions found in the Gospels as they describe, without at all understanding them, our Lord’s methods, is that Jesus Christ, by His commanding action upon the human mind and spirit, and by the Divine power dwelling in Himself, was able to control physical and physiological processes in the human body so as to produce curative effects of a permanent character.
Literature.—For ancient Jewish cures, see art. ‘Medicine’ (by Macalister) in Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible; Wunderbar, Biblisch-Talmudische Medicin, 1850–60; art. ‘Krankheiten und Heilkunde der Israeliten’ in Herzog’s PRE [Note: RE Real-Encyklopädie fur protest. Theologic und Kirche.] 3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] . For detailed accounts of individual cures wrought by Jesus, see the Lives of Christ and Comm. on Gospels, e.g. Gould on ‘Mark,’ Plummer on ‘Luke’ in Internat. Crit. Commentary; Trench, Miracles; Laidlaw, Miracles of our Lord; Belcher, Miracles. For valuable information and suggestion respecting psycho-therapeutics, consult artt. by Dr. Tuke on ‘Influence of the Mind over the Body’ in Dict. of Psychol. Medicine; Dr. Lloyd Tucker on ‘Psychotherapeutics,’ ib.; Dr. Osgood Mason on ‘Hypnotism and Suggestion,’ ib. 1901; and recent popular medical works by Dr. A. T. Schofield on The Force of Mind, and Unconscious Therapeutics (Churchill, London).
T. H. Wright.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Cures'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/c/cures.html. 1906-1918.
