John J. Pilch, Healing in the New Testament: Insights from Mediterranean and Medical Anthropology.

Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2000. Pp. xiv + 180. Paper, $18.00.

Healing in the New Testament is a foundational book for any scholar interested in interpreting the Jesus healing miracles. This well organized volume features a collection of six of John Pilch's most insightful articles published between 1981 and 1995, together with an impressive new treatment of healing in John's Gospel. With its meditative conclusion, appended discussion questions, and glossary of social-scientific terms, Pilch's book constitutes both a preventative and a cure for scholarly pre-suppositions.

The introductory chapter, "Basic Perspectives: Healing and Curing," uses the five elements in the Kluckhohn-Strodtbeck model to illustrate the fundamental differences between the U.S. culture and that of the ancient world. Our U.S. culture (a) prizes "doing" over the ancient world's "being," (b) emphasizes the individual while the ancient world is attentive to the group, (c) focuses on the future rather than on the present, (d) inclines to master nature, rather than sensing that we are being mastered by it, and (e) generally views humankind in an optimistic manner rather than seeing it as a mix of good and evil. While this model cannot reflect the nuances in any culture, it helps to establish the orientations that characterize it.

With the second chapter, "Medical Anthropology," Pilch moves to a "microsystem," where he discusses the three cultural concepts of "sickness," "illness," and "disease" as they were understood within that first-century world. He outlines the three social arenas of the "professional," "popular," and "folk." Each culture has agreed-upon perceptions and roles for all persons connected with the healing event in each of these contexts. Furthermore, how a culture understands that healing has taken place and the implications of healing is a matter to be carefully explored, not assumed to be the same as our own. These differences are illustrated in the third chapter, "Selecting an Appropriate Model: Leprosy--a Test Case," where Pilch uses the Markan miracle of "The Healing of the Leper (Mk 1:40-45) and its redactions by Matthew (Matt 8:1-4) and Luke (Lk 5:12-15). While our culture is more inclined to train attention on the disease, what is called a "biomedical" approach, the Mediterranean world focuses on the persons and their interaction with one another, how they view the condition and how they understand the healing--thus a "hermeneutical" approach. This evidence alerts us to the many points of communication assumed by a first-century writer to be understood in the encounter that takes place between Jesus and the petitioner(s).

In the four remaining chapters of the book, each of the Gospels is discussed with attention to the particular light it brings to the understanding of healing. For example, Pilch uses Mark's Gospel to expose evidence of the "popular" sector most often represented there. Matthew's groupings of miracles (Matt 8-9) raises the question of his taxonomy. Pilch notes Bruce Malina's identification of the three "symbolic zones of the body," which are most often afflicted in men in Matthew's collection: "heart-eyes (blind, Matt 9:27-31; 20:39-44); mouth-ears (mute, Matt 9:32-34; 12:22-24); hands-feet (paralytic, Matt 8:5-13; 9:1-8; withered hand, Matt 12:1-5)." (p. 79). Women, on the other hand, experience sickness in domestic settings: fever (Matt 8:14-15), hemorrhage (Matt 90:20-22), or death (Matt 9:18-19). Pilch also treats Matthew's inclusion of First Testament texts, all of which show the evangelist's desire for an explicit connection between healings and divine Mercy.

Luke's healings introduce the concepts of "spirit-related" disease so common to the first-century world. Lukan scholars have long known that Luke--Acts emphasizes a strong "spirit" theme, but Pilch shows how this awareness reflects a community sense of health and wholeness as their interpretive context for Jesus' miracles. For John's Gospel, Pilch observes that healing takes a secondary place to those conflict dialogues with authorities where Jesus will reveal his true identity. Yet it is these conflicts which are the Johannine community's perception of the enormous significance of Jesus' healings. The One who makes the Community children of God intervenes on behalf of the victimized non-elites before the powerful in the society. Jesus' miracles are protests against the evils of a society that legitimates stripping God's children of honor, fragmenting their family context, and marginalizing them to perish. Pilch's rich insights throughout this chapter allow the Johannine miracle stories to take on the full weight of their social challenge and the full scope of their vision for the Community.

If one were to offer suggestions, there would be two. First, it is better to establish first-century culture using more sources than the First Testament; then one could show how the Gospels participate in that world. Second, sometimes more distance needs to be maintained between the worlds of First Testament and Second Testament. Even the exploration of a First Testament allusion by an evangelist can be done only by establishing how that ancient text would have been seen through a first-century lens.

John Pilch does not make the claim that social scientific analysis is the only method necessary to uncover the meaning of the healings in the Second Testament; rather, he calls it "a contribution." In this important book, however, he has profoundly illustrated that the "contribution" is an indispensable one.

Wendy Cotter, Ph.D.
Loyola University
Chicago, IL 60611-2196