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Bible Dictionaries
Disease
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or DISEASE
i. Current preconceptions prevalent in time of Christ.
ii. References to sickness and disease in the Gospels.
1. Diseases resulting in physical defect or incapacity.
2. Fever and allied diseases.
3. Cutaneous affections.
4. Dropsy.
5. Nervous diseases.
6. Nervous and psychical disorders.
Literature.
i. Current preconceptions in time of Christ.—Two ideas respecting disease had a powerful influence on conceptions current in our Lord’s day: (1) The belief that all sickness and physical disease and pain were penalties imposed as the result of sin; (2) the idea that demonic agency was concerned with all human suffering. These kindred and allied ideas have been common among ancient peoples, and were strongly developed among the Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks.
Sayce, in his Hibbert Lectures (310, 334–5), gives evidence of the ancient Akkadian belief that disease and sickness were caused by specific malevolent spirits which possessed the person. The demons had been eaten with the food, drunk with the water, or inbreathed from the air; and until the evil power had been expelled the victim had no chance of recovery. Exorcism was effected by the sorcerer-priest, the intermediary between mankind and the spiritual world, using magic spells consisting of the names of deities, the name signifying the personality of the god, who was compelled by this use of the name to attend to the exorcist.
Among the Semites any mysterious natural object or occurrence appealing strongly to the imagination or exciting sentiments of awe and reverence was readily taken as a manifestation either of Divine or of demonic life (W. R. Smith, RS [Note: S Religion of the Semites.] 119 ff.). The demons, if offended, avenged themselves by sending various forms of disease. Indications are found in the Gospels that such ideas were not extinct in the time of Christ. The old Semitic strain of conception was modified and quickened by contact with Babylonian, Persian, and Grecian peoples, and prevailed with considerable force in the later Judaism. The NT reflects the ideas of a time when the older conceptions were breaking up, but had not yet disappeared.
Our Lord gives no sanction to any such thought of disease, and when the disciples betrayed their mode of thought (John 9:2) He took occasion to combat the ancient superstition. Although He did frequently mark sin as the cause of much physical weakness and disease (see art. Impotence), yet He denies that all sickness was penal in character. Other ends were in the Divine purview besides the punishment of personal sin (John 9:3). In St. Luke’s Gospel high fever seems to be attributed by implication to an evil agency, and Jesus is said to have rebuked (ἐπετίμησεν) the fever (Luke 4:38-39); but probably this must be explained as a reflexion of the current preconceptions. In Luke 13:16 no reference is necessarily made to sin having given power to Satan to afflict the woman. Demons were associated with disordered conditions of human life, as disease and infirmity: with dumbness (Mark 9:17, Luke 9:39), with deafness and dumbness (Mark 9:25), with blindness and dumbness (Matthew 12:22), and with epilepsy (Mark 1:26; Mark 9:20, Luke 9:39). These physical defects are not necessarily manifestations of demonic influence, but are regarded as in close alliance with them. In St. Luke’s Gospel, also, it is noteworthy that a distinction is recorded as made by Jesus between the exorcism of demons and ordinary cures (ἐκβάλλω δαιμόνια καὶ ἰάσεις ἀποτελῶ, Luke 13:32).* [Note: Hobart (Medical Language of St. Luke) and other writers claim to trace in the writings of the Third Evangelist the influence of a medical training. But the argument may be easily pressed beyond the truth. St. Luke’s style and vocabulary have many affinities with classical Greek, and many of the medical expressions he uses occur in the LXX, and may have come to the Evangelist from that source. The varied terms applied to the lunatic (or epileptic) and the demonized, which give a plausibility to the suggestion that the Evangelist distinguished between these ailments, are found not in Luke, but in Matthew (see art. Lunatic).] See, further, art. Demon.
ii. References in the Gospels to sickness and disease.
The terms employed by the Evangelists to denote bodily ailments are—
(1) ἀσθένεια, literally want of strength (α priv. and σθένος), primarily denoting weakness, and usually ‘infirmity’ or ‘infirmities’; in Acts 28:9 translation ‘diseases’ (ἔχοντες ἀσθενείας); in Matthew 8:17 translation ‘infirmities,’ and associated with νόσος; in John 11:4 Authorized Version and Revised Version NT 1881, OT 1885 ‘sickness’; elsewhere [Luke 5:15; Luke 8:2; Luke 13:11-12, John 5:5] ‘infirmity’; associated with νόσος in Luke 4:40.
(2) μαλακία (μαλάσσω, ‘soften’) denotes:
(a) softness or effeminacy, as well as sickness; (b) periodic and chronic sickness and consequent languor of body. The word is used in Matthew 4:23-24; Matthew 9:35; Matthew 10:1, where it is associated with νόσος. The first named passage is one in which the various ailments that our Lord healed are enumerated and apparently discriminated (cf. Authorized Version and Revised Version NT 1881, OT 1885).
(3) νόσος (from νη- ‘not,’ and σὁος ‘sound’ [?]) is employed to indicate more acute and violent seizures than μαλακια; found in Matthew 4:23-24; Matthew 8:17; Matthew 9:35; Matthew 10:1, Mark 1:3-4; Mark 3:15, Luke 4:40; Luke 6:17; Luke 7:21; Luke 9:1. In the Markan and Lukan (exc. Luke 4:40) passages the diseased are distinguished from the demonized.
(4) νὁσημα, a disease or sickness, John 5:4 (only).
(5) τοὺς κακῶς ἑχοντας is a frequent expression for those that were sick, and in Mark 1:34 we have the fuller expression τολλοὺς κακῶς ἔχοντκς σοικίλαις νόσοις.
Of the presence of specific diseases much fuller indications are more or less distinctly given in the OT than in the NT. Instances of these may he understood as included in the miscellaneous cases of sickness and disease which our Lord repeatedly dealt with. Among them are various forms of skin disease, which were and are very common in the East; also of fever and allied disorders, extending to plague and pestilence; diseases of the digestive organs; infantile and senile diseases; affections of the brain or other parts of the nervous system; and disordered conditions of the psychical side of human nature. All of these are referred to in the OT with some amount of definiteness as to symptoms.
The diseases mentioned in the Gospels, and dealt with in direct and Divine fashion by Jesus (see art. Cures), include cases of physical defect; fevers and kindred diseases; skin diseases, notably that of leprosy; a solitary case of dropsy; ailments and infirmities that were nervous in character; and others which were a combination of nervous and psychical disorder. These various afflictions are not always to be certainly identified with particular forms of disease with which modern medical science is familiar. The description of the cases is, for the most part, far removed from being scientific, but yet enables us to broadly distinguish them from one another and to classify them with fair exactitude.
1. Diseases resulting in physical defect, or incapacity
(1) Defect in the organs of speech.—The case of the dumb man recorded in Matthew 9:32-33 was associated with features of mental disturbance leading the people to attribute the dumbness to demonic possession. ‘When the demon was cast out, the dumb spake,’ as though no physical defect existed apart from the psychical disturbance. Interesting cases are known in which mental derangement has been manifested in an inhibition of one of the senses. Ray (Factors of an Unsound Mind) gives an instance in which the patient was unable to see the Column in the Place Vendôme in Paris, and believed it to have been removed. A similar inhibition, resulting from psychical rather than physical causes, might be applied to the organs of speech.
(2) Defect in the organs of sense.—Among defects notably common in the East is that of blindness (see art. Sight, B). Deafness is usually accompanied by dumbness, being indeed often the main cause of it—the term deaf-mute thus accurately describing the limitation. See Deaf and Dumb.
(3) Defects in the organs both of sense and speech.—In Matthew 12:22 blindness and dumbness are combined, together with mental disturbance. In this case the restoration is not spoken of as a casting out of the demon, but as a healing (ἐθεράπευσεν), indicating that there was serious physical defect to be remedied. Matthew 17:14-20 = Mark 9:17 ff. = Luke 9:37-43 records in case in which both deafness and dumbness were found along with epilepsy and periodical mental derangement. Mt. and Lk. do not give the features of deafness and dumbness, but confine themselves to the mental features, which they do not describe so fully as Mark. Mark 7:32-37 is a peculiarly interesting instance of deafness combined with incapacity of speech. The description is κωφὸν καὶ μογιλάλον. The deafness might give rise to the stammering, and the fact that total dumbness had not resulted rather points to a comparatively early stage of the affliction. The signs employed by Jesus in the healing are exactly adapted to reach the intelligence of such a defect-bound soul (see art. Cures).
2. Fever and allied diseases.—Various diseases of a kindred nature to fever were common in the East and from the earliest times, and were probably not very rigorously distinguished from each other: fever, ague, and a wasting disease resembling Mediterranean fever. The NT speaks of πυρετός, ‘fever,’ in Luke 4:38 and John 4:52. The term in Matthew 8:14 and Mark 1:30 is πυρέσσουσα; while in Luke 4:38 the illness of Peter’s wife’s mother is spoken of (possibly with a reference to the division made by the Greeks into greater and lesser fevers) as one in which the patient was συνεχομένη πυρετῷ μεγάλῳ, indicating a continued and probably malignant fever, rather than an intermittent feverish attack such as characterizes ague. The super-normal feature of the healing consisted in the immediacy of the recovery without the regular debility following the disease. The ailment described in the Gospels was probably a form of malarial fever which prevailed in the valleys of Palestine and round the Sea of Galilee.
3. Skin diseases.—The OT bears witness to the prevalence in Palestine of many forms of cutaneous disease, and the writings of travellers and eye-witnesses testify to the fact that these are still fearfully common, being perhaps the most characteristic malady of the East. These varieties of skin disease are not referred to in the NT, the only one in evidence there being that most dreaded affection of the skin, which was also in the worse forms a serious constitutional malady affecting the whole organism, which bears the name Leprosy (wh. see).
4. A solitary case of dropsy is recorded in Luke 14:2, described as ὑδρωπικός. No account is given of the trouble, the controversy with the Pharisees regarding the right use of the Sabbath being the main interest. No indication is given as to the seat of the disease which caused the dropsy, whether kidneys, heart, or liver.
5. Diseases of the nervous system.—Out of 22 cases of healing wrought by Jesus upon individuals, 8, and most probably 10, are to be classed among nervous disorders, either with or without the complication of psychical disturbance. The general exorcisms which mark our Lord’s career are of the same order, and among the general healings of sickness and infirmity which are recorded some may reasonably be supposed to be of the same character, and possibly many of them were purely nervous or hysterical afflictions. Disease of brain centres or of the nerve may also account for some of the cases of blindness. The attempt, however, to show (1) that our Lord’s healings may be all reduced to cases of hysteria and of temporary nervous disorder, such as readily yield to treatment by known therapeutic remedies, and (2) that these are the best attested of the miracles, signally fails (see art. Miracles); and yet it may be freely recognized that many of the ailments cured by Jesus belonged to the nervous category. It still remains that those who desire to minimize to the fullest extent the super-normal powers of Jesus are not helped by these facts, for in order to deal effectively with these troubles He must not only have removed the disturbing cause in the psychical nature, but also brought a Divine power to bear on the whole nervous system, dispersing in some cases organic defect and disease.
Under this head are included—
(1) Paralysis or Palsy (see art. Paralysis).
(2) Epilepsy. The cases in the NT of this distressing nervous malady are complicated with forms of mental disturbance (see art. Lunatic). But it may be supposed that among those who were regarded as possessed and whose restoration was included under the general exorcisms, some were cases of simple epilepsy (wh. see).
(3) Probably the two cases of general impotence must be included here—mentioned in John 5:2; John 5:9 and Luke 13:11-17 (see art. Impotence).
(4) In all likelihood also the man with the withered hand was one nervously afflicted. The case is recorded in Matthew 12:9-13, Mark 3:1-5, Luke 6:6-11. The incapacity and wasting might be due to (a) infantile paralysis, the disease arresting the development and growth of tissue, leaving the limb shrunk and withered; or (b) it may have been congenital; or (c) it might be due to some direct injury to the main nerve of the limb, preventing its proper nutrition.
Among the halt and withered of John 5:3 probably there were cases of chronic rheumatism, joint diseases, and other wasting ailments, in many instances complicated with nervous exhaustion and weakness, if not with positive disease.
6. Nervous and psychical diseases.—Cases of lunacy, of epilepsy combined with insanity and perhaps those allied with idiocy, and others generally described as instances of demonic possession are given in the Gospels, and are to be recognized as having a twofold causation, on the one side physical, on the other psychical; and the problem as to which of these is primary in any particular case is not to be lightly determined. In this connexion arises the outstanding question as to the possibility of a genuine spiritual possession (see art. Lunatic), a matter which may well remain with us for some time yet as a challenge both to medical and to theological investigation. The science of anthropology may throw much light upon it, and possibly in the course of further inquiry some of the conclusions of that science may be found in need of serious modification.
Literature.—For facts relating to the nature and spread of disease in Oriental lands, and especially in Syria, consult Hirsch, Handbook of Historical Pathology (Sydenbam Soc. Tr.); Macgowan in Jewish Intelligence and Journal of Missionary Labours, 1846; Thomson, Land and Book, pp. 140–149, 356, and, for leprosy, ch. 43; also consult generally ‘Krankheiten’ in Herzog’s PRE [Note: RE Real-Encyklopädie fur protest. Theologic und Kirche.] 3 [Note: designates the particular edition of the work referred] ; Jahn, Archœologia Biblica, pt. i. ch. xii.; J. Risdon Bennett, Diseases of Bible; Hobart, Medical Language of St. Luke; Mason Good, Study of Medicine; art. by Macalister on ‘Medicine’ in Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible. For Talmudic conception of disease and medical treatment in vogue, see Wunderhar, Biblisch-Talmudische Medicin.
T. H. Wright.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Disease'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/d/disease.html. 1906-1918.
