dealing with his patients. Exorcism is always effected by word of mouth alone, but with the exception of the verbal healing of a paralytic,40 physical cures entail the performance of a rudimentary or occasionally complex rite.
Not counting allusions to mass healing in Capernaum,41 by the lake-side,42 and throughout Galilee, where people ‘scoured that whole country-side and brought the sick on stretchers to any place where he was reported to be’, and in ‘farmsteads, villages, or towns’, where ‘they laid out the sick in the market-places’;43 leaving aside, also, the interesting remark that despite the unbelief of Nazareth, he still performed a few cures there,44 the Gospels contain twelve particular healing narratives (some of them, however, thought to be duplicates).
Arranged according to illnesses, three refer to cures from blindness,45 two from leprosy,46 one each from fever,47 haemorrhage,48 a withered arm,49 deaf-muteness,50 paralysis,51 lameness52 and dropsy.53
In most cases the Gospels attest that there was some kind of bodily contact between the healer and the sick. Jesus practised the laying on of hands in Nazareth;54 he did the same with the cripple woman;55 he held Simon’s mother-in-law by the hands;56 he touched the leper57 and the blind men,58 and was touched by many sick persons59 and by the woman suffering from haemorrhage.60 In the last case, Jesus is said to have been aware that ‘power had gone out of him’.61
In two accounts a ritual is performed privately. In the first, Jesus puts his finger into the ears of a deaf-mute, touches his tongue with saliva and gives the command, ‘Be opened!’62 In the second, the blind man from Bethsaida is cured after Jesus has spat into his eyes and laid his hand on him twice.63
It is not said how the man with dropsy was healed, or the ten lepers64 – whether by means of contact or without it – but three instances are described in which a cure was performed without any exchange of touch between Jesus and the patient. In two of these the miracle is attributed to faith, namely in the healing of the blind beggar from Jericho65 and that of the servant of the centurion from Capernaum.66 In the second case, contact was physically impossible since the sick man lay paralysed in his home.
The method of healing by command alone – ‘Stretch out your arm!’ – is noteworthy since this is the only cure placed by the unanimous Synoptic tradition on a Sabbath day.67 Speech could not be construed as ‘work’ infringing the law governing the Jewish day of rest.68
It should be added that with their powers of exorcism the twelve apostles also received the gift of healing. Their method of treatment was, however, the more conventional one of anointing the sick with oil,69 although in the Acts of the Apostles reference is nevertheless made to healing by command and touch.70
Other Miracles
The accounts of the raising from the dead of Jairus’s daughter, and of the son of the widow from Nain, scarcely differ from any ordinary healing. Jesus holds the hand of the girl who, in his opinion, was in any case not dead, and tells her in Aramaic to rise.71 Similarly, he touches the young man’s bier and orders him to stand.72 It is worth remarking, even before the matter is discussed more thoroughly,73 that Jesus is never depicted as a person concerned with defiling himself ritually through contact with a dead body. No one can be a healer and preserve himself from sickness and death, or an exorcist and be afraid of the devil.
Compared with the massive insistence of the Synoptists on the healing of mental and physical disease, other miracles assigned to Jesus are numerically insignificant. The calming of the storm on the Sea of Galilee,74 and the feeding of a large crowd with a few loaves and fishes,75 must be set beside other Jewish miracle tales of a similar kind.76 Others appear to be secondary accretions: for example, the story of Jesus walking on the water by night,77 the unexpectedly large catch of fish by Peter and his colleagues,78 and that most convenient landing by the penniless Peter of a fish with a coin in its mouth of just the right value to allow him to pay the Temple-tax for himself and Jesus.79
Jesus the Teacher
From the outset the Gospels portray Jesus as a popular preacher and preserve various types of sayings ascribed to him. Some of these may have been handed down intact, but others are reformulations of the originals made by the early Church, and still others are actual interpolations devised to secure the authority deriving from the ‘words of the lord’ for beliefs in vogue at a subsequent stage of doctrinal development. It is not proposed at this moment even to try to extricate the authentic from the inauthentic, but simply to determine what kind of teacher Jesus was according to the evangelists. The enquiry will be concerned not so much with the contents as with the mode of his preaching, and the impression it left on sympathetic listeners.
Contrary to the Essene practice reserving instruction to initiates only,80 but imitating John the Baptist, Jesus addressed his preaching in Galilee to all who had ears to hear – or rather, to all Jews with ears to hear, for he never envisaged a systematic mission to Gentiles.
‘I was sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and to them alone.’81
But even within Israel he preferred the uneducated, the poor, the sinners and the social outcasts.82 All were called to repentance and told that God’s rule over the world was imminent.
‘The time has come; the kingdom of God is upon you; repent, and believe the Gospel.’83
His ethical message was also aimed at all and sundry, as were also his parables, a form of homiletic teaching commonly used by rabbinic preachers. That he employed them to conceal the meaning of his message84 is a contorted and tendentious explanation. Non-Jews unaccustomed to Palestinian teaching methods must have found some of them difficult to comprehend, but it would have been they, and not Jesus’ direct disciples, who would have needed every detail of a similitude to be spelled out.
The equally traditional Jewish method of preaching in the form of Bible interpretation is less frequently attested in the Gospels, though this may be accidental. Nevertheless, if Jesus was primarily a teacher of morals, he might be expected to have shown a liking for short, pithy, colourful utterances, the kind of rabbinic logia with which the pages of the Sayings of the Fathers in the Mishnah are filled. He several times taught in synagogues85 and once delivered the liturgical sermon after reading the prophetic lesson of the day in Nazareth.86
Did the preaching of Jesus differ from that of his contemporaries? Yes, the evangelists assert, in so far as, unlike the doctors of the Law, he spoke with authority.87 New Testament commentators usually see in this a contrast between Jesus’ method of teaching and the rabbis’ habit of handing down a legally binding doctrine in the name of the master from whom they learned it, which was held to derive from a chain of tradition traceable (ideally) back to Moses. Jesus, however, was no expert in Jewish law, and it is therefore misleading to compare his style of instruction to that of later rabbinic academies. It is more probable that people saw the exorcisms and cures as confirmation of Jesus’ teaching. For instance, it was when moved by amazement at his expulsion of a demon that his listeners cried out:
‘What is this? A new kind of teaching! He speaks with authority.
When he gives orders, even the unclean spirits submit.’88
This interpretation appears clearly preferable to that opposing the ‘scribal’ authority of the rabbis to the ‘prophetic’
