The essence of religion is authority and obedience.

Cardinal Newman

Exorcisms and Healing Miracles 3

A Dumb Man
A Blind Man
A Dumb Spirit
Blind Bartimaeus
Healings of Asklepios

Abstract

Unless Bethany was a leper colony, Jesus could not have been dining with a leper. Nor would he anyway—leprosy was unclean. Either leper is a code word or the event did not happen in reality. For the rabbis, leprosy in the Jewish scriptures was often a euphemism for spiritual uncleanness or immoral behaviour, not necessarily for a physical ailment. Christians always regard the spikenard as a perfume, even though it is described correctly as an ointment, and so fail to realize that it is for the leper not for Jesus. In fact, nard is an oil from the plant Nardostachys jatamansi which is a member of the valerian family. Its active constituents include camphor and patchouli. The conclusion of the story is that “the poor” will have everlasting life. It is another kingdom parable. The healing miracles of Jesus

A Dumb Man

Jesus returns from Tyre to Galilee by way of Decapolis a route which required him going also through, Iturea, the country of Herod Philip, the half brother of Herod Antipas of Galilee. He is travelling the long way round, going down the east side of the Lake and entering Galilee from the south. In Decapolis, he cures a deaf-mute:

And they bring unto him one that was deaf, and had an impediment in his speech.

Though the man is apparently deaf and dumb, which would suggest opposition to the band in Jewish territory, it cannot simply be this because in a gentile country support could hardly be expected. Evidently the man was refusing to give the Nazarene band information, but they forced it out of him. That is why he was taken away from the crowd privately. The War Scroll has a line in a victory hymn:

He has lifted up in judgement the fearful of heart and has opened the mouth of the dumb that they might praise the mighty works of God.

In The Scrolls judgement usually means “of the wicked” and, therefore, meant punishment. This captive was deaf because he refused to help them and would not respond to their questions except in an uninformative way—the Greek word translated “impediment” translates properly as “hesitating to speak”—in short, not saying much. The disciples were determined to open his mouth in pursuit of the mighty works of God.

They tortured him into talking. They spat upon him and held his tongue somehow, the gospel says with string, though the Greek actually means fetter—this was not merely metaphorical. Translators of the gospels from Greek into English, faced with words which cannot be accepted in context at their face value, adopt figurative meanings for them however unlikely they might be semantically, when a literal meaning would be correct. Much of the so-called New Testament Greek is distorted Greek—distorted to fit the meanings Christian translators have determined to find.

Almost a trivial example occurs in John where the marriage at Cana is introduced with the phrase, “And the third day”. Theologians seem determined to mistranslate this simple phrase. A frequent reading is “three days later”. The immensely popular Today’s English Version of the New Testament, Good News for Modern Man, translates it as, “two days later”. There is no excuse for this except to mislead. The correct translation is “And on Tuesday”, the Jews and the Greeks alike giving numbers to their days of the week not names (except the sabbath). Tuesday is also for Jews a traditional day for marriage because, in the story of the creation, God twice notes that what he did on Tuesday was good. The refusal to translate it correctly is virtually unintelligible—certainly in the TEV—but seems to be to preserve a spurious reference to the resurrection on the third day. There are more serious examples.

To put your hands upon someone is taken to be a gesture of healing but when you actually put your hands on someone you are more likely to be manhandling them. The earlier incident of the demoniac suggested that torture occurred. This confirms it. He would not talk, so he had a string tied to his tongue and no doubt pulled vigorously, with the threat of cutting it out, and his ears poked. Jesus commands in Aramaic, “Be opened!”, but cognate words in Hebrew mean “draw out” or “break”. Mark disguised it all by making it appear like a magic exorcism and adding the final two verses to match other miracles.

The other gospel writers do not like this miracle. It is too blatantly violent so they omit it. Matthew 15:29-31 substitutes a general description of healing which includes dumb people.

A Blind Man

8:22 And he cometh to Bethsaida; and they bring a blind man unto him, and besought him to touch him. 8:23 And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the village; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought. 8:24 And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. 8:25 After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly. 8:26 And he sent him away to his house, saying, Neither go into the village, nor tell it to any in the village.
Mark 8:22-26

This miracle could not have taken place in Bethsaida, a city not a village, the word used in the Greek. Herod Philip had renovated Bethsaida and renamed it Julias in honour of Augustus’s daughter, Tiberius’s estranged wife, Julia. The Nazarenes were, of course, barjonim and avoided main towns, especially Hellenized ones like this. Possibly, there was another Bethsaida, but, if so, no one now knows where it was. Most probably it simply means the place where the messianic meal would be held—the house (beth) of food (sayid).

It is suspicious that there is no suggestion of repentance, no hint at the coming kingdom, suggesting that the miracle might not be genuine Nazarene tradition, and the other synoptic gospels omit it.

This miracle is, in the Greek, worded so similarly to the miracle of the deaf and dumb man that it is beyond coincidence. Essentially it is a copy of the earlier miracle except that the first saw a deaf man cured—here it is a blind man. Both are depicted as magic healings but were actually rough treatment. Here the man is spat upon, and Jesus sets hands upon him as before. The gentile bishops have tried to claim the spitting was part of the cure but it is quite fatuous to pretend that the most high God incarnated on earth would go around spitting to effect miracles. Jesus took tha man out of Bethsaida so that his maltreatment would not be observed by others, and having “cured” the man he warns him not to tell anyone. At first the man is only imperfectly cured but a second round of the same treatment fully cures him—again hardly the power of a god.

There is an similar miracle attributed to the Greek god Asklepios who cures a man of blindness and the first things he sees are trees. Here, the reference to “trees” is a hint that the tradition could be genuine. The Essenes were known as “Trees” from Isaiah 61:3:

To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified.

The point might have been that the blind man refused to recognise the Essenes as God’s representatives—His Trees of righteousness.

A Dumb Spirit

Master, I have brought unto thee my son, which hath a dumb spirit.
Mark 9:17

Mark 9:17 begins a healing miracle, differing from earlier ones in that it gives remarkable detail of the symptoms, that the disciples had tried and failed and that the devil could only be cast out by prayer. Jesus asking How “long shall I be with you?” is plainly hindsight and, indeed, verses 18 to 24 look to be overblown compared with other verses and comparable stories, with symptoms unnecessarily repeated, suggesting Christian elaboration and that they contain little of the original. Both Matthew and Luke concur and eliminate the father’s speech which looks added. Both of the final two verses, Mark 9:28-29, are considered by scholars also to be late additions to the original story. The point of the reference (Mk 9:18) to the disciples’ inability to cure is to contrast their lack of faith with the messiah—in Acts they can cure anything that appears before them. It too is added.

In Mark 9:22 appears the detail that the spirit cast the young man into the fire and into the waters. Fire and water are the very elements that purify, implying what is perhaps obvious—that we have a very intractable unclean spirit!

When insertions have been removed, an exorcism miracle remains. These are cases of strong arm tactics by the band and the symptoms here are the same. The story turns out to be similar to that of the Syro-Phœnician woman and her daughter with the sex of the suppliants changed. The epileptic is described as a child but he is more likely to have been a young man over the age of thirteen since in Mark 9:21 the father says he has had the affliction since childhood. He and his father are at loggerheads about the Nazarenes and the father complains about him. The disciples beat the son unconscious so that people think he is dead:

And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him, and he was as one dead, insomuch that many said, He is dead.

Mark’s dominant theme from now on is the resurrection of Jesus and next comes a hint of it—the messiah raising the boy from apparent death just as God would raise the messiah from death itself. The same words are used here in the Greek:

Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up, and he arose.

This then will be a pious addition. In the original incident the man’s son was left for dead. The other two synoptic gospels mention nothing about the youth being as one dead—their authors considering it too transparently savage—and also leave out much more of Mark’s account, because of its barely disguised violence.

Blind Bartimaeus

Never mind about these! What do they matter when you have faith! Well, unless someone had bothered, most of the faith community today would never have even lived!

This is the final healing of the gospel. Jesus cures the blind man, Bartimaeus. For Mark, the symbolism of this is that Jesus no longer hides his position and objectives. He has come out and is openly the metaphorical heir of David—the messiah.

Now blindness is one of the Nazarene code words for a doubter or opponent of the Nazarenes, but he is more than blind. He identifies Jesus as the king of the Jews, an action that hitherto has been coded as an unclean spirit which has to be battered to release it. Here the disciples sternly tell him to be silent but Jesus intervenes and cures him—converts him into a follower. No unclean spirit is mentioned.

Or is it? Mark gives Aramaic words when he wants to disguise something from the uncomprehending gentile Christians, though later an editor sometimes adds a translation. This is the only cured man whose name is recorded in the gospel but here it is not a real name. Mark gives it as “Bartimaeus” and explains that it means “Son of Timaeus”, but by the strangest coincidence Timaeus is the Greek rendering of a word which in Aramaic means unclean!

This remarkable clue shows that this was originally another story of an unclean spirit being driven out of one of the Nazarenes’ opponents by a beating—the blind man begs for mercy. But Mark, anticipating the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, wants Jesus to acknowledge his kingship openly. So he has changed a cleansing into an acceptance by Jesus of his messiahship. Mark chose the affliction of blindness, rather than leprosy or palsy, to symbolize, through its cure, visibility or openness, and to punctuate the end of this section which began immediately after the previous curing of a blind man.

Note that the cured blind man followed Jesus in “the way”, the word that the Essenes had used for their movement long before Jesus appeared on the scene. Such apparently small correspondences prove Christianity’s debt to the Essenes.

The event is recorded at Jericho, only twelve miles from Qumran and 17 from Jerusalem. It is quite likely that fellow Essenes from the tented city at Qumran joined the Nazarenes on the final few miles to Jerusalem. On leaving Jericho, two things happen in Luke’s gospel, Jesus calls the head taxgatherer Zacchaeus and then he tells a parable about a man who receives a kingdom. Both stories contain genuine tradition.

The eccentric naming of Jericho twice in the opening sentence suggests that a passage has been moved or excised at an early stage. The most obvious events to insert here are those which refer to payment of tribute or custom because there was a custom post at Jericho as Luke implies with his story about Zacchaeus, the tax collector. Zacchaeus is a collaborator, a man who shelters in a sycomore tree—a fig tree. In the Zacchaeus story, there seems to be an allusion to the fourfold division of the kingdom of Herod, with the assurance that half shall be returned and then the fourfold parts. The Romans had taken half of the Jewish kingdom and now they would be made to restore it to its rightful owners, the poor, God’s righteous.

Judaea was formerly the kingdom of Herod Archelaus, the son of Herod the Great. Archelaus had been ethnarch, a title meaning a king of a half of a kingdom. His two brothers had been given the other two quarters of the kingdom—they were tetrarchs. In a speech, Jesus refers to all this and it has appeared in Luke as the promise of Zacchaeus to yield up half his possessions (two parts of the kingdom—Judaea) and then to restore fourfold—in other words the whole kingdom—all four parts. The reference to Archelaus is confirmed in the next parable of Luke when he appears again.

At this point, the Greek cleverly uses for “defrauded” the word, “sukophanteo”, which gives us the word “sycophant” meaning a “toady” or “flatterer” but which literally means “one who shows figs”. Unless there was a similar pun in the Aramaic, it is doubtful that Jesus could have put it the way the gospel writer did, but Luke puts the meaning over clearly. The ones who showed figs, those who pandered and toadied to the Romans, were the two Herods, Antipas and Philip, who would soon be passing over their respective quarters of the kingdom to make up the fourfold restoration.

A visual reference to a scriptural claim to kingship

Luke, but not the other gospel writers, adds another parable here. Christians think it is a reference to Jesus’s impending death because it is about a nobleman who goes to a far country to receive a kingdom. Their interpretation is that his servants left in charge are Christian disciples who will be punished if they do not use all their abilities to make the kingdom grow in the absence in death of the king, the Christ. Yet the man who would be a king is a tyrant in every respect, and could not be identified with God or gentle Jesus under any circumstances.

Jesus the Essene could not have preached either this parable or the equivalent one in Matthew 25:14-30, the parable of the talents, both of which seem to praise the garnering of riches. Jesus was one of the poor. He despised wealth and considered the wealthy as men of the pit. He could not have advocated rewarding extortioners even parabolically. He could only have preached it as a warning or as an acknowledgement of a wrong to be righted.

The speech is in two related parts which the author has intermixed. One part harks back to the Zacchaeus parable, adding a clue to its interpretation. Extracted it is this. A certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return. And he called servants and said unto them, Occupy till I come. But his citizens hated him, and sent a message after him, saying, We will not have this man to reign over us. And it came to pass, that when he was returned, having received the kingdom, then he commanded these servants to be called unto him, those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.

This short tale is simply a piece of history. If it is Jesus’s and not Luke’s, it is part of the explanation of the half and the fourfold of Zacchaeus because it tells the story of how the ethnarch, Archelaus, came by his half of the Jewish kingdom, and his relations with his subjects. We know that Archelaus went to Rome to plead for the kingdom of his father Herod from Augustus, the Roman Emperor. The leaders of the Jews sent a delegation begging Augustus to refuse the supplications of Archelaus. Augustus decided to split the kingdom and gave half to Archelaus and the other two quarters to his brothers. According to Josephus, at the first Passover of Archelaus’s inheritance of Judaea on his father’s death he called in a Roman legion to kill 3000 of his subjects. Jesus the Essene had no interest in turning the other cheek to Romans or collaborators like the Herodians. So doubtless the final line of this tale was meant as a reminder of retribution outstanding.

The other tale is a modified version of Matthew’s parable of the talents. Evidently Luke or an editor saw fit to merge them into one. Jesus comments from an Essene view of justice on the treatment meted out by the tyrants notably the taxation system.

The money given by the wicked king to his servants was the total wealth of a peasant—the servants therefore represent ordinary people. While the king is away, some succeeded through extortion to multiply many fold the money they had initially received. Where else but extortion would their profits come from? Pilate, the high priests and the wealthy puppet kings all got their wealth by exploitation. The wicked king returns and rewards the most successful extortioner with a proportionate number of cities to exploit permanently—he makes him a publican. The next one gets a lesser reward but is also made a publican. The last one, representing the remainder of the ten—the majority of the people—struggled to earn a living. He was only able to return the original sum, and says to the king, “I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow”, and the king agrees with him. This tyrant and robber is the man clergymen think is Jesus. The cautious man’s reward was to be impoverished to the benefit of one of the rich publicans. The remaining seven protest to the king that the rich man already has wealth, “Lord, he hath ten pounds”, but to no avail. The king tells them, “unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him”.

The parable was obviously directed at the tax collector, Zacchaeus, possibly meant to be the High Priest (Zacchaeus, meaning “cleansed”—the temple would soon be cleansed) or even the Roman governor (his position is a unique word in the Greek). Jesus was commenting on the injustice of the system that rewarded the dishonest few—the tax collectors—while penalizing the many. He was saying that Zacchaeus and his type had become rich by extortion—otherwise they were no different from anyone else. Now the exploitation would end. It is not coincidence that the same expression summarizes the respective rewards of the righteous and the wicked—the wicked are rewarded in the polluted kingdom of Israel in just the same way as the righteous are rewarded in God’s kingdom on earth. Jesus will have finished with some mention of the reward for the righteous poor in the kingdom. It is the origin of the pie in the sky that Christians have accepted ever since.

In Luke 19:11 the expectation of the multitude surging upon Jerusalem was that the kingdom would appear immediately when they reached the city. One has only to reject the later Christian concept of a suffering messiah coming in peace and realize that the Jewish prospect was of a Davidic messiah, a warrior who would retake the city and set up a kingdom, to grasp that the entry into Jerusalem would be frightening to the administrators and garrison of the city.

Healings of Asklepios

For those who believe the literal truth of Jesus’s healings, are these Pagan healings any the less remarkable?

Cleo was pregnant for five years. When she had now been pregnant for five years, she turned for help to the god and sleep in the holy of holies. As soon as she came out again and had left the sacred precincts she bore a son, who as soon as he was born, washed himself at the spring and walked around with his mother.

A man whose fingers, all but one, were paralyzed. He came to the god looking for help, but when he read the tablets set up in the temple he gave no credence to the healings and made fun of the inscrip tions. But as he slept he had the following dream. It seemed to him that he was playing dice in the temple and was about to make a throw. The god appeared to him, and sprang upon his hand and stretched out his fingers. Then he got up and, still in his dream, the man clenched his fist and opened it, stretching out one finger after another. After he had stretched them all out, the god asked him if he still refused to believe what the inscriptions related, and he said ”no.” ”Well then” answered the god, ”since you formerly refused to believe what is not unbelievable, you shall henceforth be known as the ”Doubter.” When it was day, he came out cured.

Ambrosia from Athens, who was blind in one eye. She came to the god seeking help, but as she went about the temple she mocked at the many records of curse: ”It is unbelievable and impossible that the lame and the blind can be made whole by merely dreaming!” But in her sleep she had a dream. It seemed to her that the god came up and promised to make her whole; only in return she must present a gift offering in the temple—a silver pig, in memory of her stupidity. After saying this he cut open her defective eye and poured in some drug. And when it was day she went forth cured.

Page Tags: Jesus, Exorcisms, Healing Miracles, Medical, Use of Oil, Plants In The Bible, Unclean Spirit, Unclean, Leper, Ailments, Essene Code, Spirit, Mark, Palsied Man, Withered Hand, Syro-Phoenician Woman, Dumb Man, Blind Man, Dumb Spirit, Blind Bartimaeus, History, Blind, Essenes, Gentiles, God, Greek, Jews, Kingdom, Luke, Oil

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.