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4. illness and Possession, Healing and exorcism The way interpreters of Jesus and the Gospels deal with Jesus’s healings and exorcisms has not changed much since Rudolf Bultmann’s influential presentation in the 1920s. Treating the Gospels as mere containers or collections of discrete sayings and stories, they sort the materials by categories such as individual sayings and various kinds of stories. While they classify Jesus traditions ostensibly by (literary) form (sayings, parables, controversy/pronouncement stories), modern Western rationalist criteria are also determinative. Thus, stories that deal with healings, exorcisms, “nature miracles,” and “raising the dead” are all lumped together in the controlling category of “miracle stories,” before being separated into subcategories (e.g., healing stories, exorcism stories). Then, partly because “the sayings tradition” also attests healings and exorcisms, contemporary scholars such as Meier and Funk (and the Jesus Seminar)1 repeat Bultmann’s conclusion of 1926: that while most of the miracle stories are legendary, “there can be no doubt that Jesus did the kind of deeds which were miracles . . . , that is, deeds which were attributed to a supernatural, divine cause; undoubtedly he healed the sick and cast out demons.”2 But these same scholars then ignore Bultmann’s other conclusion from 1926: that there is “no great value in investigating more closely how much in the gospel miracle tales is historical.”3 They devote great energy and hundreds of pages to ferreting out fragmentary “historical facts” or elements that “have a chance of going back to some event in the life of . . . Jesus.”4 Meier devoted twice as much space (530 pages) to the “miracle stories” as to Jesus’s message, and Funk and the Jesus Seminar devoted 500 pages and five years of research, discussion, and voting (1991–96) to the task. As the result of this painstaking analysis of the “miracle stories,” however, they find few elements that they deem “authentic.” Meanwhile, they give little or no attention to the historical social context or to spirit possession and exorcism or to the significance of the healings and exorcisms in Jesus’s mission. Interpretation of Jesus’s healing and exorcism has thus been severely limited by a combination of a fragmenting approach to the Gospel sources for Jesus and illneSS and PoSSeSSion, healing and exorCiSm 81 the rationalist assumptions of modern Western culture. Recent developments in other fields suggest that it may be possible to take some provisional steps toward a broader and more historically appropriate approach to Jesus’s healing and exorcism . A first crucial step is to move beyond the modern rationalist “scientific” reduction of reality toward a more comprehensive perspective on and approach to illness and spirit possession and healing and exorcism. This involves learning from medical anthropology how to recognize that illness and healing are culturally defined and that political-economic factors significantly affect illness and healing, including spirit possession and exorcism. Second, studies of spirit possession and exorcism in African societies have found that they are related, as recent medical anthropological studies suggest, to the impact of colonial rule, as indigenous societies make cultural adjustments to cope with this impact. This suggests, third, that it would be particularly pertinent to attend to the effects of Roman imperial conquest and rule on Judean and Galilean society, discussed in chapters 2 and 3, and to investigate late second-temple Judean culture for how it may have been adjusting to those effects. Finally, with an appropriately broadened perspective on and approach to the historical context and determinative factors in illness and spirit possession, we can better appreciate how key healings and exorcisms of Jesus are represented in Mark, often considered the earliest (narrative) Gospel source. broadening oUr aPProaCh To healing and exorCiSm Problematic Projections It is nowhere more evident that the standard interpretation of Jesus is rooted in Western Enlightenment culture than in the treatment of his healings and exorcisms . The Enlightenment reduced reality to rationally apprehensible terms. Only the natural was allowed as knowable, that is, as empirically or scientifically knowable. Only what was humanly possible was deemed natural; phenomena and causation beyond human capability were classed as “supernatural” or “miracles.” Christian believers and theologically trained scholars alike were understandably placed on the defensive. As Enlightenment Reason became dominant in Western culture, many Christians took comfort in the stories of Jesus’s “miracles” as evidence of his divine empowerment and as proofs that he was indeed the Messiah and the Son of God. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, liberal theologians...

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