Healing in the New Testament: Insights from Medical and Mediterranean Anthropology

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 180 pages
• Published by: Augsburg Fortress Publishers 2000
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0800631781
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0800631789
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Weighs: 11.7 ounces

Product Description
How are we to read and understand stories of Jesus healing the lame, deaf, blind, and those with a variety of other maladies? Pilch takes us beyond the historical and literary questions to examine the social questions of how the earliest followers of Jesus and ancient Judeans understood healing, what roles healers played, and the different emphases on healing among the gospels. In his comparative analysis, the author draws on the anthropology of the Mediterranean as well as the models employed by medical anthropologists to understand peasant societies and their health-care systems. Healing in the New Testament also features a complementary website with additional resources.

About The Author
John J. Pilch is Professor of Biblical Studies at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Pilch is also a popular speaker in parishes and at conferences, and he contributes regularly to Biblical Theology Bulletin and The Bible Today.

Reader Reviews
To Pilch and other who march with him in the little known but highly influential "Context Group", anthropology provides a set of incredibly powerful (and almost infallible) tools for simply and easily "unlocking" the mysteries of the New Testament world. The result is an overly confident series of textbook like simplifications and rules: "all illnesses are always and infallibly healed, since all human beings ultimately find some meaning in a life-situation, including disvalued states," Pilch proclaims (p. 93) If that kind of argument impresses you, then you've found your book. But actual anthropology is an empirical, not a deductive science, and Pilch seems to have missed that point altogether. Most of the theory here derives from the ground-breaking work of Arthur Kleinman (who is both an M.D. and a trained anthropologist) who began studying how different kinds of healers in Taiwan went about their crafts, how they interacted with patients, and what the results were. Kleinman's work (Patients and Healers in the Contexts of Culture) is enormously insightful, and is worth reading in its original form. But Pilch seems fails to understand that Dr. Kleinman actually went into the field to study these healers first hand, and to attempt to measure the efficacy of a variety of non-western healing techniques. In describing his own work, Kleinman at one point (unfortunately) says, that there is a "dichotomy" between medical curing (according to Western standards--measurable change in structure/function) and the more holistic intent of non-Western "healing." (This is an oversimplification). But Pilch has taken this empirical observation made thirty years ago and built an astonishing edifice upon it, emptying Kleinman's work of its empirical intent and disregarding the very limited scope of Kleinman's one-culture, one-time period study. Whew! The result is a series of grand, globalized statements and "laws" that appeal strongly to people who believe that uncovering "laws" in the social sciences makes intellectual life much simpler (which, I'm sure, it does.) But this all goes against the spirit of anthropological exploration. There are scores of medical anthropologists who do not treat their field data by imposing Dr. Kleinman's conceptual framework upon it...but you'll never know that by reading Pilch. Medical efficacy--which is exactly what Dr. Kleinman and his associates went to Taiwan to study--is merely a "cultural construct" Pilch proclaims. But this puts Pilch in the position of having to imply that the lepers, the blind, and the lame of Jesus' time either couldn't tell the difference (or didn't care) whether they could see, walk, have physical relief from their very visible and frightening skin disorders. Pilch argues that since Jesus' real work involved integrating these outcasts into his new social network, they were (by definition, again) HEALED even if they still limped blindly with disfiguring skin conditions. Hard to understand how this would cause Jesus' reputation as a great healer (which even his enemies acknowledged in their attacks on him) to spread like wildfire. As a historical explanation, it simply lacks credibility. What Pilch has missed is that "western" medicine itself has changed enormously in its theoretical orientation since the mid-1970's when Kleinman's fateful "dichotomy" was "discovered." The emergence and growing robustness of the biopsychosocial models in medicine undermine the entire conceptual groundwork of Pilch's book because doctors know understand that there is an enormously dense two-way web between body and mind, and mind and community. Unfortunately, New Testament scholars here, as elsewhere, have been far to eager to latch upon a handful of models in sociology and anthropology without ever interacting with (or acknowledging) the complexity and tenuousness of most models. Last example: Pilch constantly referes to "Mediterranean anthropology" as though it were some unified, simplistic set of dictums rather than a mere hypothesis which has been challenged with increasing vigor for over twenty years. Just because I know that a person is "Mediterranean", I do not necessarily know more about them than I did prior to applying the label. For the must erudite and amusing refutation of this kind of thinking, anthropologist Michael Herzfeld wrote a funny but serious article called "The Horns of the Medierraneanist Dilemma" in American Ethnologist back in the mid-1980's. (Lots of "horn/cornuto" in jokes for anthropologists.) Bottom line: Those who really want the world to follow Aristotelian or Thomistic logic complete with syllogisms shouldn't be allowed to run with anthropological scissors in their hands. That's how people get hurt. (Fortunately, any such hurt can/is/always be ipso facto, q.e.d. healed...even if the patient bleeds to death.) Ouch!