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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78.2 (2004) 468-469



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John J. Pilch. Healing in the New Testament: Insights from Medical and Mediterranean Anthropology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000. xiii + 180 pp. Ill. $18.00 (paperbound, 0-8006-3178-1).

John Pilch is well known for his application of social-science methods to the study of healing in the New Testament. The volume under review summarizes his researches. Six of the seven chapters have been previously published, most of them in Biblical Theology Bulletin. They do not constitute a comprehensive treatment of healing in the New Testament world, but rather a collection of essays that focus on strategies of healing in the Gospels and Acts. Pilch hopes the studies will enable the biblical exegete to adopt a "transcultural stance" that will enable him or her to become a "culture broker" (pp. 35-36).

In reconstructing the healing culture of Palestinian society in the first century, Pilch uses a model developed by anthropologists Florence R. Kluckhohn and Fred L. Stodtbeck. He begins in chapter 1 by comparing medicine as currently practiced in the United States with that of the ancient world. Pilch paints with broad strokes: his comparisons abound in generalizations that lack nuance and ignore temporal and geographical distinctions. He describes his scholarly style as intuitive, "with a preferred interest in the bigger picture" (p. 76). Operating with modern definitions of health, Pilch (not surprisingly) finds that the ancient Palestinian definition of the concept "might be patterned after" that of the World Health Organization (p. 12)!

Historians have long drawn on the categories of social anthropology in their attempts to reconstruct ancient culture and society. Several classical historians (e.g., Geoffrey Lloyd, Peter Brown) have found them to be useful in supplementing more traditional historical approaches to medicine and early Christian healing. Pilch, however, writes with the unqualified enthusiasm of a convert, seemingly without any realization of the limitations of his method. While admitting that the studies of medical historians (which he largely ignores) have cast much light on ancient medicine (p. 15), he thinks that "social-scientific insights" provide the best method of interpreting ancient texts and the most fruitful framework for understanding ancient medicine. There is nothing self-critical in his approach, no attempt to assess the strengths and weaknesses of medical anthropology. Pilch acknowledges that biblical scholars who use conventional philological and historical methods are often uncomfortable with the interpretive strategies of social scientists—but rather than address their concerns, he assures his readers that their objections have been adequately rebutted (p. 17). [End Page 468]

Far from providing a perspective that permits us to get inside the minds of ancient writers or understand societies that are (in M. I. Finley's phrase) "desperately foreign," Pilch imposes on the evidence procrustean definitions and interpretive grids. One finds in these studies little wrestling with difficult texts, few references to historical studies of Palestinian culture (either Jewish or Greco-Roman), no discussion of Jewish theological understandings of health and disease, and little interest in the practice of ancient medicine. Pilch ignores theological questions, substituting cultural explanations that often falsify the issues at hand. He writes a comparative anthropological study in which he views the world of first-century Palestine as a "field report." He exhibits little interest in reaching a historical understanding of ancient Mediterranean culture. The "modern interpreter" who wishes to understand Jesus' healing, he thinks, will turn to medical anthropology (p. 14). In Pilch's terms, Jesus is "the Mediterranean folk healer" (p. 1) who "apparently urged a reorientation of human activity values that would emphasize doing more than being" (p. 12)—a view that seems at variance with Jesus' frequent emphasis on the internal motivation of one's actions, which is a leitmotiv in the Gospels.

Pilch seeks a means by which he can understand healing in the world of the New Testament in its cultural context: "How can we adjust our viewpoint to perceive things like [sic] Luke did?" (p. 90). His approach is that of a...

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