What Was Ritual Healing?, Transcript

(00:00) we're going to talk about ritual healing and the belief in miracles and our reading that we'll begin with is from the gospel according to monty python and so if you remember from the uh the movie the life of brian um uh brian and his mother are kind of just walking through the streets and there is a bunch of beggars and the beggar one of the beggars says arms for an old ex-leper and at a certain point brian says did you say ex-leper you know that's right sir 16 years behind the bell and proud of it well what happened

(00:38) i was cured sir cured yes a bloody miracle sir god bless you who cured you jesus did sir i was hopping along minding my own business all of a sudden up he comes cures me one minute i'm a leper with the trade next minute my livelihood's gone not so much as a buy your leave you're cured mate bloody dewgooter well brian says thoughtfully why don't you go and tell him you want to be a leper again and the ex-leper says oh yeah i could do that sir yeah yeah i could do that i suppose i always think what i was thinking was i was going to ask him if

(01:10) he could make me a bit lame in the lung leg during the middle of the week you know something beggable but not leprosy which is a pain in the arse to be blunt excuse my french sir so anyway and then after a little bit more ultimately brian puts a coin in his bowl there you are and he says thank you sir thanks and then he sees what it is alpha denarii from your bloody life story brian says there's no pleasing some people that's just what jesus said sir all right so ritual healing so that um you know is one of the

(01:44) one of the a parody anyway that's taken from accounts in the canonical gospels of the christian new testament so the gospel according to luke um there is a story uh that on the way to jerusalem luke writes jesus was going through the region between samaria and galilee so the northern parts of the land as he entered a village ten lepers approached him keeping their distance they called out saying jesus master have mercy on us when he saw them he said to them go and show yourselves to the priests and as they went they were made clean

(02:20) then one of them when he saw that he was healed turned back praising god with a loud voice he prostrated himself at jesus feet and thanked him and he was a samaritan and jesus asked were there not ten made clean but the other nine where are they was none of them found to return and give praise to god except this foreigner and so you may remember from the parable of the good samaritans that the the judeans and the jews and the samaritans are rivals and so he said then he said to him get up and go on your way your faith has

(02:52) made you well so this is a example anyway a canonical example of a faith healing and it's of the same kind of variety that the monty python is making fun of right so there's another account in the earlier gospel the gospel of mark here's a i want to explain a little bit a different version of how you do a faith healing so they came to bethsaida some people brought a blind man to him jesus and begged him to touch him he took the blind man by the hand and let him out of the village and when he had put saliva on his eyes and laid his

(03:26) hands on him he asked can you see anything and the man looked up and said i can see people but they look like trees walking and then jesus laid his hands on his eyes again and he looked intently and his sight was restored and he saw everything clearly so as opposed to the last one where it was uh where they where jesus actually so in both cases actually kind of an interesting um thing that jesus does he doesn't um take a wand and and go boom you're you're uh cured in the first case he has them go do something which is to

(03:57) say uh show themselves to the actual the authorities right so the priests so it's not challenging the authority of the um for example the jewish priests and instead by going and doing that thing they're healed and in this case there's something that's more like a ritual magic practice where you have something like saliva and you also have laying of hands right so historical jesus this is a this image here is a modern reconstruction maybe of what the historical jesus looked like according to some scholars who were

(04:30) doing sort of genetics of uh what people in palestine at the time uh would look like as opposed to the anglo-saxon romantic jesuses that we have from the 19th century paintings so all four of the canonical gospels and many early gospels that did not make it into the new testament depict jesus as a faith healer i mean our only and still contentious almost source contemporary source that's not christian uh that is talking about the historical jesus josephus uh in a potentially uncontaminated part of his text that's in dispute whether this is

(05:05) the case or whether it's all christian interpret interpolation in any event that section says calls jesus one who wrought surprising feats as opposed to wedding if a christian maybe we're interpolating it they might write i don't know when who performed many miracles or something like that that's a person who does feats maybe and there are plenty of contemporaries we should note of jesus who are going around working surprising feats so even though we maybe are only familiar with a couple texts that are very famous out of

(05:38) uh the first century of the common era nevertheless if we were to go through all of the texts all the ancient texts that's this kind of thing is happening all the time and there's plenty of uh miracle workers who are healers and faith healers and things like that and so it definitely fits into a contemporary context it's not making jesus unique among people in his time period so i would suggest then and that many scholars of the historical jesus do i think almost all that if we're going to list off tick off the couple components

(06:06) that we can kind of be more sure of about the historical jesus which are things like he's from nazareth you know he has disciples he got crucified you know if we're going to kind of list off those kind of things then that he is a faith healer or a worker has a reputation for working performing wonders is one of the things that is multiply attested uh and that probably anyway goes back to the historical jesus so in that in that context we could say the context jesus is raised in the context of second temple judaism which

(06:46) is to say that judaism that existed after the original destruction of of jerusalem the destruction of solomon's temple after the temple is rebuilt and at this time in jesus day it's been rebuilt again by herod the great and so it's called herod's temple anyway the second temple and prior to the destruction of that temple by the romans about 40 years later um and then therefore long before the the origin or the actual um institutionalization of rabbinic judaism of which nearly all branches with just a one tiny little exception of all judaism

(07:25) that exist today is descended from rabbinic judaism so before the sort of codification of rabbinic judaism this second temple period that kind of that era of judaism included lots of different um perspectives there were many different kinds of different ways to be adhere and inherent of judaism and they don't all agree with each other in fact they were often violently in disagreement with each other about how to do it but many of them believed in faith healing so this is also a very contemporary belief in that era of judaism and there

(07:58) were all kinds of scriptural examples that second temple jews could be drawing on so for example uh from the first temple period that scripture is talking about things like the nehstan here which is this bronze serpent on a pole that according to the story of the exodus it was moses himself who raised that up in order to heal the people of a disease and more importantly maybe in terms of a historical actual historical component to this object at the time of king josiah that object that was attributed to moses continued to exist as a cult object that

(08:39) was used for healing contemporaneously and because of the religious reforms that took place at the time of josiah the king actually destroyed this object which had been moses's object because it was believed to be part of pagan worship at this point so in other words ritual healing as paganism but there were also then stories like for example of a literary prophet elijah who goes and does miraculous healing feats and so those are used as a very direct model by the author for example of luke who reworked some of

(09:14) those stories to create jesus healing stories for example and other examples being the book of tobit which didn't make it ultimately into the rabbinic jewish canon but was very popular and circulating at this time in second temple judaism there is a tale within it of the angel raphael one of the archangels the angel of healing who cures blindness a blind per a person blindness tobit a blindness using the gall of kind of a magic fish and so the gallbladder and so it's much like again that kind of um practice where jesus is taking saliva or

(09:53) a little bit of mud and things like that and using that as a as a component of kind of a ritual magic healing in this case a magic fish's gallbladder right so that's the context within uh second technical judaism a little bit uh but there's another context that jesus and then especially christianity uh after jesus uh gets to so um we were it was just last year yeah so last fall during september break we were in arleigh and one of the things and this is in southern france and so one of the things that rla has is this amazing

(10:28) collection of early christian sarcophagi from the 4th century the biggest that anybody has outside of the vatican and these are in fact among the earliest depictions that we have of jesus so there's nothing from the first century certainly or second century or anything like that it's only when christianity really takes off and and and frankly rich people start to be christians that they start making pictures and and start having um they can afford sarcophagi right so and so what interesting so what's happening

(11:00) here in this particular um sarcophagus is so the person is in the in a coffin here right and so then there's images on either side here six and there's one in the middle and so these each one of them has jesus so jesus here's the one on the left in each case and then on this side the one on the right in each case and he and you can see he's got a toga and he's got a magic stick here and what he's doing in each case is performing a miracle so whether or not it's turning water into wine it's primarily healing and so in this case

(11:32) he's raising someone from the dead he's getting the woman with osteoporosis cured he's carrying a blind man and a  right and so then what's happening in the middle is he's also resurrecting the dead right and so the idea of it is um this rich woman who was in here she is going to be resurrected because of her faith in jesus right and so that's what they're showing in these cerca guys there's plenty of them one of the um interesting things uh above about all these is there's very little difference you know in this

(12:06) fourth century depiction of jesus than let's say a fourth century depiction of asclepius or apollo uh who were both called the healer as an at a a designation so as sleepy as the healer apollo the healer um this jesus here you know looks very and they would have these sticks they look very much like the same so the model for this they don't have they don't have some kind of picture of jesus that they're working from for sure in fact no one does you know rather what's happening here is they have as their model uh a healing god a

(12:38) young healing god apollo and so jesus is is being depicted in that way so while faith healing is part of that second temple judaism tradition galilee where jesus is from actually had been hellenized for many many centuries and of course it was part of the roman empire and early christianity anyway so however much that actually affected the historical jesus it was critically important as uh as christianity expanded into uh the roman empire and be quickly beyond its jewish roots into uh to convert greek and latin pagans

(13:11) and when it did that it had all of the faith-healing traditions of greek and latin paganism to draw from from their roman that from that religion which included all sorts of ritual healing and healing gods like this and so like i say jesus here is depicted almost exactly like uh apollo the healer and again he even has the staff that's not in the text there's no talking about we read it as we were reading it's not like jesus took his staff and and did these things but this is the kind of thing that asclepius has right

(13:42) there they're being decorative i think i don't know so remember you have to repeat the question okay the question was what are the birds doing up there and so there's birds and i just think they're being decorative so i think that this is a traditional trope of how to make a sarcophagus and and to make the different vignettes and so this is another one of the sarcophagus sarcophagi and so this again is jesus um and so where's the beard right so so of course paula doesn't have a beard and so these earliest depictions don't

(14:20) uh when when jesus is going this in this case is jesus the teacher so he's got a book that he's teaching from and so they usually have then when he's running around as uh in in his actual ministry before the crucifixion they have him in the guise of essentially apollo or a young god like that uh and so he's an unbearded man wearing a wearing a roman toga but then when he gets resurrected this is the same sarcophagi here the same you know so now suddenly the beard comes in and so what's happened is that now that

(14:52) he is no longer a young miracle worker god running around the the planet for the romans and so now romans understand him to be god reigning in heaven so now he has the same image of zeus and so shaheen has a question no wow [Laughter] not fair all right here we go um oh okay since there's feedback okay um it was more of a a comment so this whole thing of you know jesus pre-resurrection being this beardless youth and then

(15:54) post-resurrection being a bearded man there's a lot of tribes in which [Music] rites of passage yeah that young men would undergo would involve a death of the old self yeah yeah and i'm wondering if this is just some of that same old just yeah i so it's interesting right because i mean when we went looked at all the sarcophagi i was like i was really struck by this because i was like you know i was ready for them to not have beards because that was very common but then i'm like wait a second these jesuses up in heaven do have beards and

(16:31) so it is kind of an interesting thing i mean like you say so i i have been just reading for example um a lot of those sorts of uh coming in of age practices in the history of ancient rome and so there is this um this very famous one so the romans saw themselves they saw uh yeah as um the the the wolf is a sacred animal romulus and remus are are are cast out of a basket and onto the river and just like moses but found and and then ultimately suckled by a she-wolf right and so that's one of the famous things and so and the idea of it is that then

(17:09) um they've gone off into the wild and they've been wild young men they're brigands they're pirates and all this kind of thing and so then they come back into um into society and you know have to found the city and get get wives and all that kind of thing but that that that is ceremonially recreated uh year after year after year in the ancient romans of the at the vet at the february um festival of the lupercalia and so in the lubricalia they do this thing where the young men of that age um you know they essentially

(17:42) have sent them out ritually to be living as wild wolves and so they um they're they run around the they start at the the um anyway the lupercalia shrine in rome they're they are dressed only in a in a wolf skin loincloth or on the wolf on the top or whatever it is and they have thongs of of high goat height i think or whatever that they are running around with and um whipping all the young women with you know as they're running around the whole circuit of the town and the idea of it is that these are the young men

(18:15) who have gone out and and been living as wild wolves and now they are going to become you know they're all that all those wild ways are going away and they're going to be um you know you know adult men and of course then it's also a fertility ritual and everything like that and that was so popular that um you know like hundreds of years into into christianity the the popes still couldn't you know get them to stop doing that every year you know and so they ultimately um you know they ultimately replaced it with the um the set the festival of the

(18:47) of the purification of the blessed virgin and so then that's held at the same time and that's now where valentine's day is right and so so that's why we have a love letters or whatever because the popes couldn't get people to stop doing this but anyway to your point that's exactly the kind of thing that's happening and there's all sorts of those um holdovers because the immediate context for all of um romans are that they're familiar with those stories they're familiar with that kind of rituals they're familiar with this

(19:14) imagery the early christians are not coming with any imagery and so you know it's hard to replace something with nothing and so when you um you know when you're wanting to fill in the in the the art if you don't have anything ready they take the models at hand so this is why then you know the portrait that many christians have in their head today uh what they imagine god literally looks like in some kind of real literal sense they are actually looking at zeus right and so if zeus were um wearing a tunic he's a little more modest now as as god

(19:49) than he was as zeus but if you were wondering if if god is ripped the answer is yes [Laughter] when he didn't wear his tunic back in the old days okay so medieval christians then inherited then both those jewish and pagan ritual healing faith-healing traditions and this is a picture of the different canterbury pilgrims getting ready for the canterbury tales and so if you remember from the prologue we always loved this a lot we had to memorize this in high school so priket him nature in here then long and folk to go on on

(20:30) pilgrimages and palmers for to say can strange astronages to fairness in sondre londes especially from every shiraz and of england to canterbury they bender the holy blissful martyr for toseka that ham hath hope in one that they were seika and so so they are wanting to go on pilgrimage at this time of year and they want to go to district shrines in various lands from every every shire's end of england they go to canterbury where thomas becketts is where he his he is a martyr is known to uh be able to heal people who need to go on these

(21:06) pilgrimages they're going then to seek the holy blissful holy blessed martyr who helped them when they were sick so this is just a regular tradition it's worked right into the main piece of medieval middle english literature okay that tradition continues and we'll mention that here in toronto center place we have in our our heritage room we have this set of stained glass windows that are from our old building two buildings back when we were on soho street that building was built in 1906 and so we preserved stained glass

(21:44) windows from it and brought it along with us and uh the um the what it's narrating here it's again a jesus without a beard really right so that it's kind of a very um androgynous jesus right so why is that stuck okay so he laid his hands on her and immediately she was made straight and glorified god luke 13 13 is what the caption reads and so this is um specifically meant to be a depiction ostensibly of jesus healing a woman with osteoporosis but the particular image was actually chosen in 1906 they were commemorating

(22:21) an event that took place in the congregation in the 1890s this young woman then minnie falls this is her later half a century later in 1948 she had always from early childhood worn a brace and had used a crutch and then there was in 1890s just a very famous faith healing in the congregation um and then afterwards she never used either and she continued to testify that until you know well into like whatever like i say the middle of the 20th century and that had been a very important part of the congregation's story and understanding

(22:57) of itself back then and i'll just mention that in our particular tradition in community of christ we have eight sacraments and so you know there's things like baptism confirmation blessing of children communion and then here laying on of hands for the sick and so laying on of hands for the sick is one of eight special sacraments that we continue to maintain as a as a sacrament in our denomination and so if we read from my own church's website then it says during times of physical mental or emotional distress people may seek this

(23:29) sacrament from ministers this sacrament opens a way for healing in whatever form it comes quote so i'll also say then from my personal experience as a minister i've been called upon numerous times to perform this sacrament we use our jargon we call it administration that's i don't know why that should be called administration but anyway that's very um jargony right so um from my perspective i always see this as a sacrament of spiritual healing uh and specifically what we're doing is expressing uh that the individual is part of a

(24:06) community that values and loves them and indeed they're of inestimable worth in the sight of god but i have also then every time i've been called upon to do it i found it to just be an amazingly moving and powerful experience when you were saying a blessing of support and comfort and healing um spiritual healing and being in physical contact with someone so this is in fact not an administration this is a different sacrament but it looks exactly the same we don't usually take pictures of administration and so i just this is

(24:44) a confirmation but this is what it would look like is what i'm suggesting here so the website says usually two elders administer the sacrament together they visit with the person to find out more about the person's need one elder places a drop of consecrated oil on the forehead of the person places the hands on the person's head and offers a statement of purpose and blessing the second elder then places the hands on the person's head and offers a prayer for wholeness and well-being and so that's essentially what that sacrament

(25:09) is that's me okay so this is after i had my bike accident and broke my arm so yeah this was i was in need of administration for spiritual healing but of for ohip for physical healing and so the ontario health administration um so so this i'm going to now talk about my own i've now revealed my own my own personal uh background as a as a faith healer you know but i'm also going to talk a little bit here about my bias so my bias is that the responsible use of faith healing as a practice does need to emphasize the spiritual or

(25:51) therefore non-material aspect of it the person's connection to god and community and it doesn't make pronouncements like if you have faith you will be cured of your cancer which is the kind of thing that sometimes happens in faith healings as a person will make those kind of pronouncements um i also find it to be now that's responsible use irresponsible for example when a faith healer let's say blames the victim for insufficient faith so the person who they've been told that they will have their cancer cured of them if they

(26:21) believe and then the cancer isn't being cured and so it's obvious that it's the person's fault for insufficient faith and then much worse um if they also are in this place where they say well if you're going to you know an actual doctor that shows you don't have faith you know which unfortunately has also um happens in some of the more fundamentalistic versions of of faith healing so that why way that background i'll just say going all the way back you know disease uh and injuries and everything else have been with us since

(26:54) pre-prehistoric times and so that goes all the way back however the reality is that effective medicine is an extremely recent modern phenomenon there were things that were effective that the physicians did but not um in any kind of comprehensive way and so really this um the kind of miraculous modern medicine is is in the 20th and 21st centuries but it starts kind of getting going for real in the 19th century only so this is anyway from my perspective as a medievalist that's pretty recent stuff so oh elizabeth has a comment

(27:34) my tutor in college once remarked that it was only at about 1890 that it became uh that having a doctor attend to you made it more rather than less likely that you would get better right yeah and and i think that can be the case so even though in the 19th century um the doctors knew better what they were doing nevertheless it was still early times and so there was lots more promise of of medicine but there was still lots of failure like a huge failure rate compared to what we have now and so as a result of that

(28:12) there's actually um the late 19th and early 20th centuries is actually one of these moments uh in the west of a huge uptick in spiritual he of spiritual healing and faith healing and so actually almost all of the faith healing that we are familiar with now as you're thinking about pentecostals christian science all those kind of things that all emerges out of that time period when people are are clued into the promise of modern medicine but modern medicine isn't always getting the results that they wanted and so they are doing things like

(28:45) specifically in my congregation too many faults right so there's a they've got these braces and crutches and things like that that in some cases are causing more pain than their than they're helping at that time period with the with the technology that they have and there's all these faith healings where they throw the crutches and braces away uh and that's the kind of thing that's um you know that's emerging and so there's way more of it frankly at this time period that medicine is getting going um than there was even before

(29:11) so so to um elizabeth's point here uh i think i'm going to say what she just said so although anyway um there have been high culture traditions across eurasia so it's the theory of the humors in the west and so humorism is called but there's also a whole elaborated system for example in china chinese medicines acupuncture that kind of thing those are based on very sophisticated ideas and philosophies and then they're extraordinarily elaborated so you see maybe with acupuncture you see all these diagrams and everything like that we

(29:49) have that same thing going on in the west with humorism so all of the uh the you know we make fun of bloodletting and things like that now but it's really the same level of thing which is to say there is an old philosophical idea behind there that is not the same as modern medicine in terms of having any having being tested with a scientific method and that kind of a thing anyway so their um aggressive intervention as to elizabeth's point by physicians was often just as likely to harm the patient as help the patient and

(30:19) so there's plenty of of people in history who ultimately the bloodletting you know is what killed them right anyway given the environment of the past there has always been a market for healing people have always been ill and they've wanted to have healing and so given the fact that physicians then are not helping very much in the past requests for intervention from higher powers by be it in a society that's animistic you know spirits gods for pagans god for um monotheists that extends all the way back into prehistory as well

(30:59) and if you actually oh valerie we should perhaps mention too that for a time the knowledge and practice of medicine in islamic lands especially in the high middle ages was far advanced to anything that was going on in europe yes to a certain degree because they had preserved uh greek learning on the matter and advanced it but also because they were open to experimentation and evidence-based medicine yes so yeah so they had both aspects of it in islam right and so the medieval i mean when i talk about here um the

(31:39) humorism when we're talking about the four humors whether you're melancholic and colic and how you know all the different biles and bloods and sanguine um those those ideas go all the way back to um the ancient greeks aristotle galen all of these very famous physicians but there it was largely only known in a little bit of abridgement in the west and so it became very studied and it's the center of islamic medicine as the as the muslims translate um all of that greek learning into arabic and so then that becomes the

(32:09) basis for um anyway medieval islamic medicine which translates through through spain and through both the muslim and jewish physicians into the western europe and so that's where they get it from but meanwhile to valerie's point they also have some of the the very earliest um scientific method kind of stuff going on for example the treatise um on optics by is it razzie and so he he is uh that's really then um he's working on the eye and although he doesn't quite get it right exactly what he does do in these very elaborate

(32:51) studies he begins to create the modern scientific method and so then that out of that is where we do start to get the beginnings the proto beginnings we're not still not to the point where anything that the physicians are doing is better than halfway gonna um cure or not cure you but in any events this is also um it's causing that uh it's on the one hand that um humorism which is to say this high philosophical but not scientifically helpful um uh type of traditional um high western islamic greek and medieval wet latin medicine but it also is the

(33:26) beginnings of that scientific method that's going to eventually give birth to modern medical science and so shaheen has a comment in that i'd like to add that along with this you know emphasis on actually using like medical systems there is still a very strong aspect of faith healing um so for example you know similar to moses's rod or you know jesus laying on hands or using saliva in the quran for example in the surah of joseph jacob goes blind with grief when he thinks that joseph has died and so when joseph's brothers are

(34:05) returning to jacob he sends his shirt with them and he tells them to lay his shirt on his father and his sight will be restored oh okay very good yeah and along with that as well is that in other aspects of faith healing is that it's very widespread in you know islamic culture to have things like a protective amulet which will contain like a miniature copy of the quran or sewers of the quran and also that in some cases people believed that if you wrote the words of the quran and then washed the ink off the page and

(34:45) then drank that water that that would heal you of your remedies so oh wow it's just as much of a mix yeah yeah so there's on the one hand the the high well there's a couple things you know the high um ancient greek philosophical type of of medicine that's traditional the um the beginnings of scientific medicine but then also um what we might think of as faith healing you know through different types of um physical magic kind of things to do but although obviously taking in a uh uh edifying the quran in other words we're

(35:21) saying we're not finding some kind of outside source the source from god is quran right and so that's what that's where the able to maybe you're drinking the magic of that as or the power of the miracle yes yeah i just wanted to also mention a few things and in islam for example there's the science of hadith which is what the prophet says to people and guides them through some of the hadith are called hadith kotzi that is the words of god um right away written as hadith so it's not the words of the prophet it's words from god and

(35:56) yeah and and one of them encourages people to to seek help um medical help while still says it's the uh it's like god's willing that you get healed so people ask the prophet then what is the point who's the doctor yeah what what does a doctor mean or where do they uh yeah that's a good question yeah what does the prophet say and the answer is it's someone um through whom uh healing is sent to you something like that so the doctor even the doctor in modern medicine yeah is portrayed as sort of a vehicle yeah where you can seek modern uh

(36:38) medicine it's just combining the two schools of knowledge yeah yeah well what i would in terms of the characteristic characterization i had just made then i would call that more responsible faith healing you know as opposed to less right because in other words because we're we're not saying if you if you go and seek the the physician that means you didn't think that god was going to do it for you or you know or something like that or god you're you're denying god's power to perform a miracle and that obviously can

(37:09) have just disastrous results when it when a religious group or society decides they're going to go down that way i mean the to the extent i think the christian scientists are kind of in that sometimes because they are so focused on a particular kind of faith healing that they if they do if they go and have certain kinds of medical procedures they're going against you know their their beliefs which makes it they have a belief that's more dangerous as a result i found this interesting because it just it's contrary to that

(37:38) thinking that it's either or yeah yeah no i like that it's complementary yes and another point i wanted to mention is even if we look into the ancient books of medicine i mean while just i'm a medical doctor i do respect and understand spiritual healing yes my mom's grandfather used to do this he's sort of like he has his own knowledge of quran and so on yeah he tries not to do it like he just encourages people to do their own reading and carry on with their lives in a good way yeah but i have seen him healing the

(38:16) practice is very similar to the picture you showed that they they put the hands on the someone's head and do the healing but the ancient books of modern medicine portray some some horrific images of somebody being held down in a oh yeah yeah surgery being performed without anesthesia oh yeah of course and well as a student of medicine when i look at this it it's horrific yes yeah and i think this links to the the the practices that link healing to suffering which i i still continue to find as really just like strange yes but some

(38:55) some schools say you have to suffer in order to get healed yeah yeah and and that's a very good point anyway thank you for all of that i appreciate that um so what i will say is not as a medical doctor who has a faith healer in my own family but as a historian when you go back and read ancient texts history you know the kind of history of historical accounts of things what you end up finding is ancient people are experiencing or at least they are saying that they're experiencing they're perceiving that they're experiencing

(39:24) miracles and miracle healing all the time so it's not just for example in my own community here the um the historian from the middle of the 20th century who you know it's not a trained historian but anyway this congregational historian who told that story of many false she's certainly not the first person in history to have experienced a healing miracle and indeed they're just everywhere that's what people talk about historians part of the job of being a modern historian is always to delete out miracles you know so because

(39:53) that's what the ancient people wanted to write and and that's not part of our our world view right so healing from antiquity to late antiquity to medieval to early modern and modern times it's just all but bunches of accounts of that so in late antiquity especially um authors became really obsessed with miracles and indeed it's not just christian saints so it's not simply this time period that christianity has is emerging and becoming the dominant force in the in the roman empire in point of fact for the pagans as well

(40:24) contemporary paganism has al is become quite like it's its christian rival and so in the end the philosophers natural philosophers they had to essentially become sorcerers and this is the idea that we kind of have of where sorcerers come from they are performing different types of what we think of as supernatural feats and miracle healings and things like that that's what um uh where anyway the contemporaries of early christians so what how does the how does science tend to explain all this uh um we've had a very generous explanation

(40:59) from a medical doctor but um one of the what if some critics are not as generous and so there's three kind of general or main accounts for the fact that miracles are all over the place in the historical record and so a large proportion of these accounts historians will tell you are literary which is to say they're composed by authors who aren't eyewitnesses and so that's going to be true for all of the canonical gospels as we were reading matthew i'm sorry mark and luke those those authors did not witness those miracles those are traditions that

(41:31) they're writing down or in some of the cases we can kind of show with luke luke is actually reworking old testament stories and creating new um new testament stories and so there may not be any underlying account at all other than other than that as a literary source so it's entirely literary um the next one of those so in other words literary creation the next one is the logical fallacy of post-hoc ergo proper hope which is i think everyone's favorite logical fallacy i don't know because we just love saying it so much

(42:03) post hoc ergo propter hoke anyway so which is to say just because this came after that it doesn't mean that this is on account of that right so you did this and that the other thing in terms of um a healing ritual and then the person was healed but that doesn't mean that just because the one thing became first that that's the why they were healed right you might have done this that in the other thing to another person and then they not healed right and so then that doesn't it is not the that's not causing the

(42:30) consequence and it's a logical fallacy causation yes yep and that's why women then people don't have that's just how we understand things you know kind of without if we aren't having recourse to the scientific method you know of study so sheen has a comment yeah i just want to add that um sometimes the faith healing works not on account of because of something else but on account of faith um and i and it's not it's it's it's something that in in pharmaceutical studies and drug studies they call the placebo effect that's the third point as well yeah see

(43:14) i'm lying today so i can oh oh yeah that's right yeah shaheen doesn't have hurts i need to come and get you want me to spit in your eyes here i'm going to split in your eyes i won't do it i won't do it shaheen lost her contacts and doesn't have her glasses so yes the third point is to chavin's point she's exactly right the placebo effect so this is the third way that scientists will kind of argue okay how do we explain why there have been so many miracle healings well one is that believing if you can't that you

(43:44) uh can we're gonna get better that can have a real effect that is measurable the placebo effect is so strong that you have to have really good medicine in order to be better than placebo and there's a lot of different practices that um that are only as good as placebo you know because because placebo is really good valerie has a or sheen can have one more finance placebo yeah so like uh good examples of how you know faith can be a really powerful can cause observed and objective changes is for example like with some women who

(44:20) really want to become pregnant oh yeah right um they're they're so they desire it so much that their bodies undergo fake pregnancy right yeah right like queen queen mary the first of england has a phantom pregnancy because she needed a child so bad you know i mean her her dad was able to just kill what kill wives but she doesn't have that option right anyway wow yeah exactly so that's a great example and there's other ones where um you know the opposite of placebo is nocebo right so you you've been told that the cancer medicine you know

(44:53) it's good it's it's it's amazing it's gonna this is gonna be finally do it you know everything else hasn't worked but this this placebo but you don't know what it is you know is going to uh cure you you and then it works but then someone you find out that no it was just a phony and so then boom you you know it kills you right you gave me that example yeah so so yeah and going back to the pregnancy one with some men like who are very empathetic towards their wives when their wives are pregnant they undergo symptoms of pregnancy yeah yeah yeah

(45:24) right sympathetic um uh valerie and then elizabeth then we'll plow forward i'm just thinking too that um a certain proportion of such uh healing effects may be due to an alleviation of what in modern times in in psychology and psychiatry might be termed psychosomatic illness right um and it's not quite the same let's say as the placebo effect because in the placebo effect there might be an actual illness that somehow is alleviated but but in psychosomatic illness excuse me there may be effects that are more imagined than than real nonetheless

(46:07) they have they have an effect and um i i i was acquainted with a physician for a number of years a family doctor who assured me that what he felt that a very large number of the patients he saw were in fact suffering from psychosomatic illness like doctors stomach arts whatever and he would suspect that he would send them to a psychiatrist yes there would be some alleviation but then they'd be back you know several months later he didn't think much of psychiatric modern psychiatry yes and still doctor my stomach hurts nonetheless there was no

(46:40) apparent physical basis for it and i'm wondering whether in the possibility of faith healing actually is more face-to-face yeah it might be even more effective than modern psychiatry for whatever reason yeah right but that a certain percentage let's say of right so if you have a psychosomatic illness and it's manifesting for example as you think that you're possessed by a demon yeah and then you have a healing where the demon is exercised that may actually work better than a a physician yeah there's not the demon's making the demon

(47:11) is making your arm hurt right yeah exactly yeah right yep and it was elizabeth and then karen oh yeah there's just a comment on the um i think it was luke um uh describing the blind man who was healed i think it was oliver sacks who commented about that passage that um it's it's accurate that when somebody's blind and they get their sight back yeah at first things yeah things don't they they they don't know what they're seeing right um yes and that that people can look like trees walking the other uh passage that occurred to me

(47:56) is from um somerset moms uh of human bondage you may know it the protagonist is has a club foot and he's told that if his faith is strong enough it will be healed and he prays and his faith is really strong and he thinks tomorrow when i wake up my club foot will be healed guess what okay so john proposed like this is a really amazing discussion but yeah just for uh so that everyone knows there's 50 plus slides left that we would like to go through within the next 30 minutes okay so let's let's cut pause and let's

(48:38) go i'm sorry karen let's pause because we have been having a great discussion but let's get through it and then we can we'll save the discussion for the for the end okay so um this is a big topic in scope and size right so we have things like uh this is our lady of lords so pilgrims that are uh going in a specifically institutional christian context to be healed people who have all different injuries going to a shrine of the virgin in france we have uh this is benny hinn right so we have televangelists who do and has got a miracle center where he's

(49:17) doing faith healings we have uh more traditional um uh faith healers like you're talking about it was your is your dad or your grandfather i can't oh i usually went oh okay anyone i'm sorry so yes so uh anyway more traditional um vernacular healing kind of thing uh we have more new agey kind of healing so how your all the different crystals are are let's say healing you um we have very traditional as opposed to like the other one being like a monotheistic christian practice um this is a case of a voodoo practitioner so um

(49:53) indigenous and other not not in this case indigenous but anyway in this case haitian but anyway other kinds of traditions like that we have these uh ancient what had been high the high cultural ideas so humorism acupuncture these kind of things that have continued on and then we have maybe modern ideas ones that are more pseudoscience things like this entire giant industry of supplements right and so between all of these kinds of faith healing practices there's going to be as we try to map them out i can't talk about every single one of these

(50:31) things in the course of we can try in the 50 slides that are left but uh essentially if we try to map out a spectrum we um i have already um defined before uh in my own understanding of this this idea between let's say a less responsible and a more responsible maybe faith healing topic and this is my own bias perspective or whatever but as i'm trying to um map this whole thing out so we might say for example on this kind of less responsible practice i've said like say making these kind of absolute um physical claims you're going

(51:03) to be cured of cancer if your faith is strong enough right blaming the victim your faith wasn't strong enough you know this kind of a thing um bilking the victim it's going to cost you a lot to get to this to happen you know this we can we can do it with all this electromagnetism and you have to have all of these very expensive procedures telling the victim that they need to avoid actual medical treatment is a very obviously potentially very very dangerous and irresponsible kind of faith healing on the other side here

(51:35) we talked about done in conjunction with actual medical treatments i think emphasizing the spiritual nature of this as opposed to the physical part of it that western medicine does so well um uh not making those certain physical claims like you're gonna be healed or no matter what and i also think that not bilking is an important one so definitely in our tradition we're not allowed to charge for sacraments of course but anyway whatever i mean you can people have to have a livelihood but not bill king people um so that's one way we can kind of map

(52:10) out the difference in this broad spectrum of faith healing but i think that they're actually in order to get it we also have to have more complexity to our map and so add another axis here as we're it's not just a spectrum but maybe a a whole plane and so here we might say on the one hand there's a faith healer who fully fully believes in this practice that they are engaged in and then at the opposite pole from that on the access is a face healer that is is frankly knowingly a fraud so they know what they're doing

(52:44) um that that is a fraud right and um so one of those on that you can have things like for example someone who is a believer in this kind of faith healing in general but they maybe know as the practitioner they're kind of the insider they know that much of what the faith healer has to do is for a little bit of show so it may well be that um that actually let's say like let's say a psychic or whatever really believes in being able to talk to ghosts and things like that but still knows that some of the what they have to do is a little bit

(53:19) of a show for to get the other people to understand it right and so that may be that we might call that a pious fraud as they are they still are a believer but they um are obviously more in the know than the others and i'm even higher on that might be that they're a believer but they have a just a significantly more nuanced view of what's going on than the what they tell the regular believers right so the regular believers who are being healed maybe have a very simple and literalistic view and the practitioner maybe has a much more

(53:55) sophisticated or nuanced view and so it's on this pole uh they're believer but not you know necessarily a full believer right so we then have then there's kind of two different ways and two axes on which to plot these things which is to say the less responsible practitioners the more responsible practitioners the ones who are full believers the ones who are full frauds and so we might say you know your grandmother's folk remedy that she's going to give you when uh when you're also experiencing treatment from the

(54:26) doctor and everything like that but she just knows that this particular uh t and with taken in conjunction with this at this time of night is going to also be very efficacious and she believes that you know and it may be you know has always been that case yeah chicken soup i believe that so anyway i have that all the time so anyway that's a believer and it's pretty responsible it's not um problematic she's not charging you for that she's doing that out of love however your crazy uncle email may well um advise you to skip

(54:56) chemo and because his super food that he has stumbled upon is sure to be you know you want to go through all of this horrible thing that the doctors want to do to you because you can be cured of cancer by doing this other thing that is going to be so much less or horrible but might actually ultimately end up killing you because you didn't do your actual treatment so less responsible um i'm going to say that this televangelist you know who's a multi-millionaire who knows that he's staging a bunch of frauds often or

(55:27) planting people in into the different mix uh although some of them actually are you know coming for actual healings but he also it's so very profitable so he has a very big native so um less responsible not so much responsible that he's preventing people from getting actual treatment but knows he's kind of a fraud and also is motivated especially they built people out of their money and then over here maybe there's a hypothetical healer who's maybe filling that role that valerie was talking about who knows maybe that a person has let's say maybe

(56:00) a psychosomatic illness and is either going to be doing something that they think you know they will invoke that either placebo effect or they know that this kind of a healing or something like that you know they're being told that and they'll believe that um and that maybe we'll have alleviate psychosomatic um symptoms um as a result of that and so that would be that the person knows that they're kind of committing a little bit of fraud with a pious intent and maybe it's responsible to be doing that i don't know so that's

(56:28) kind of if we're kind of mapping those kind of faith healings out but i'm going to suggest that maybe we need one more access x's here to map the complexity of this tradition and so i'm going to turn these ones on end we still have more responsible less responsible fraud healer believing healer and i'm also going to say that there is a big difference in the whole course of this as i was going through it between what sometimes is called like the little culture and what sometimes is called either big culture or high

(56:59) culture and so there's a big difference between you know a local faith practitioner healer your grandmother somebody who's has superstition individually and a a high tradition like acupuncture or something like that that was once for example it had its uh place anyway and still probably it has a pretty um firm place at the top of the establishment uh in chinese society and same thing we can mention in the middle ages the church in terms of uh these faith healings that happened at pilgrimage sites right so that would

(57:34) be have been high culture and so little culture your peasant culture is really even though we don't our heart we have trouble even finding it and exploring it and things like that because because history is written not so much only by the victors but by the rich so the majority of the people though throughout time the vast majority of people have the lived experience of little culture and it's generally speaking ignored by uh history uh because history is always has to be focused on the rich the elite high culture

(58:08) but there have always been let's say local wise women which is shamans there might be farmers who believe in various kinds of folk magic and remedies what the high culture calls superstitions that tend to be denigrated by sophisticates in the contemporary high culture and so those would have been back in the day people like on the one hand the court physicians the natural philosophers and for example the clergy the bishops and everyone so if we're going to map those kind of things out on that axis we have things like peasant

(58:41) sympathetic magic things that we were talking about having an amulet or something like that that is not part probably it's not anything in quran that says to wear the amulet like that but it's something that has become a folk practice you think that if you wash the ink off and you drink the ink you know this is a um it's sympathetic in the sense that now god's word the quran is actually healing you right which is you know performing spells that are learned by a mentor this is a little bit higher culture because it's actually

(59:13) being passed down from practitioner to practitioner right even though it's generally speaking denigrated by the high culture right and so and at the height of witches which is the early modern time period they were also getting burned for for practicing uh in the west um there's monks and nuns that have herbal remedies without having been very well trained you know so at the low end of the clergy there a lot of folk stuff is going on they're only participating so much in the higher culture above that though is more official stuff

(59:45) in the middle ages for example when you go on these kind of big showy pilgrimages and you're healed by a saint at a shrine that is controlled by a powerful bishop at their cathedral and then even higher culture or these sorts of contemporary court natural philosophers and things like that physicians who are making use of this very elaborated uh philosophical system right and so we can kind of see that other axis which is at the time of this that's not necessarily a faith healing but as those become artifacts nowadays

(1:00:17) if anybody is a humorist if you're doing bloodletting this is no longer the science and the high culture it's now an artifactual thing like acupuncture it's a it's a faith healing now but it's one that is derived from high culture as opposed to one that's derived from the little culture unless you're giving blood yeah so what we can say though is like little culture continues right so we obviously there's individual superstitions as we might call them denigrate them here but then there's also all kinds of traditional

(1:00:46) healers in less developed or even indigenous societies and things like that and then in um in among non-elites in western society too they'll be things like snake handlers right so that emerges not as something that um the leader of the united methodist church ever told anybody to do but rather uh you know you know people in the back country who are uh christians who read that um if uh the in the isaiah thing that has the line of the lamb that also has the you can hold snakes and they won't you know and they won't bite you and everything

(1:01:18) like that uh and you won't in in yet and so then this is a sign that um fulfillment of god's word and everything like that although they now get that you sometimes do get bitten by the snakes but anyway so it's a little culture kind of a practice there's also then as we mentioned kind of these artifacts from old high culture that have continued so humorism acupuncture there continued to be as we saw that shrine of our lady of lourdes large institutional religious healing that goes on and we also then have kind of

(1:01:50) emerging in the middle kind of a it's not peasants but it's not the until you know it's not the forefront of modern science or something like that um things that have a pseudo science bent to it so industry stuff and then also stuff that is popular stuff so things like the crystals new age that kind of a thing and so that's maybe kind of in the middle between high and low little culture so i want to circle back around here and look at jesus and the lepers you know this again looking now having kind of made that map having put this

(1:02:22) context into place let's go back to the story so we're in an era here long long before there was any you know effective medicine so 1900 years or whatever it would be uh 1800 years before um and so what i'd suggest is if we take that story of jesus and all of his healing that we saw there's very little that we can definitively say about the historical jesus and so in terms of trying to map out the story on our multi-dimensional axes here but what we can say i think almost certainly is that he's down here so as opposed to being part of the high

(1:03:06) culture as if he were he's not um the court physician to the emperor augustus or something like that and he is not the chief priest or something like that at the jew temple in jerusalem instead he is likely to say an itinerant preacher miracle worker who's wandering around the peasant countryside of galilee right so he's emerging the historical jesus anyway emerges out of this peasant culture little culture so his hometown which is one of those things that's multiply attested and so therefore probably goes back to

(1:03:38) the actual historical jesus this town of nazareth it's just a little town of peasants it's not known it doesn't even exist in the historical record before the name jesus of nazareth actually makes it be written down for the first time um so it's probably nobody would make up the idea that he's from nazareth right because as he even says in the gospel can any good thing come out of nazareth and indeed two of the gospel writers made up stories that he's from bethlehem so that they could um have it be fulfill a prophecy that they prefer

(1:04:07) so anyway that's probably where he's from jesus himself is said to have been a and sometimes we say a carpenter is how it's translated but that means he's not actually building big houses or something he's essentially making wooden bowls and fixing uh wooden tools and stuff and so that by the criterion of embarrassment you don't necessarily want your son of god or whatever to just be a woodsmith or something and so that may well be the case we don't know it's not for sure but anyway that's possible it's peasant

(1:04:36) activity though and so there are perhaps in sayings that are among the most attested sayings or best attested sayings jesus talks about um establishing a heavenly kingdom on earth that belongs to the poor where the first or last and the last are first and often his parables are are set in an agricultural setting and they're about things like debt which is the thing that all these peasants are especially concerned of because that's what's driving them off the land uh farmers are still having having these kind of

(1:05:05) problems so farmers in the united states are all going bankrupt because of this this trade war right now so debt is a huge thing and all the way going back so he's part of that cultural setting is what i'm suggesting we can say and so um this is fitting something that fits very well into the little culture which is to say faith healing so um i want to also make the point that prior to the modern era people didn't make any distinction between the supernatural and the natural causes and indeed we have this word supernatural that's actually coined in

(1:05:40) modern times it's a it's a neo-latin word it doesn't go back to antiquity all natural effects as far as ancient people were concerned had what we think of as a supernatural cause the first cause was ultimately god according to uh or the source the unmoved mover however you want to phrase it in in most ancient greek philosophy but in any event there's intermediate causes where things like death and and wind and any other kind of thing are understood to be as a force they're a divine force which is to say a god and so there's no um no particular

(1:06:15) distinction there may be additional causes past that in between so jesus and his peasant followers and most of their contemporaries then would have believed in faith healing since that's happening all around them all the time but lacking any autographic text we have nothing that jesus wrote himself and indeed probably nothing from any eyewitnesses who who knew jesus and so it's impossible to say definitively what the historical jesus believed about himself and all of these sort of purported healings of the sick blind and

(1:06:45) the crippled but what i want to suggest is and this almost ties in i think with what valerie even talked about with the psychosomatic healing that although the perceived physical component of the healing would have been totally inseparable for ancient audiences because they don't have this division that we have between natural and supernatural jesus's focus on healing and saving which is essentially the same word in greek here outcasts he's not only saved healing the blind the crippled uh but it's also other kinds of outcasts on

(1:07:24) the margins of society so the poor prostitutes tax collectors who were breaking law and theirs therefore couldn't be in in uh jewish society other perceived sinners that implies that there is a social dimension to how jesus is perceiving or forwarding his vision of this kingdom that he's talking about so when a person in antiquity becomes an outcast from from society if you're in that peasant society and you do something horrible you um i don't know do something that's not allowed you're you're breaking the sexual boundaries

(1:08:03) you're sleeping with someone else's spouse you have done something where accidentally maybe like manslaughter has happened or something like that you've done something where you've said something that just can't be taken back uh and you're simply cast kind of out of your village there is no um you're not falling back on your savings there's no social safety net if you have something where you are temporarily ill and you're knocked out for a whole season and you lose your property and everything like that and you have to go

(1:08:32) be a beggar for a while as that coming out of that condition in antiquity is um not not the easiest thing in the world so they're because because of all those things not existing so um healing then a ritual healing where you know so one of the one of those things when you are having those things happen that may have a psychosomatic perceived physical effect um the example in quran that we heard is when when jacob thought his son is dead his beloved son he went blind and so maybe he psychosomatically made went blind you

(1:09:10) know and so uh that kind of thing happens and so and so what what happens then at a pivotal moment is that there can be a um a ritual healing those those symptoms cease to occur or you cease to feel like they're happening you can go from madness if you were possessed and now you have recovered from your madness that allows the person during that healing moment that public thing that happens and so everything is a public performance we don't have it is not a literary society where you're writing things down and now you're in this

(1:09:42) condition and now you're that the doctor says you're okay and go to go home and he signs a form and you're you're released you have to go through a public ceremony or ceremonial for anything to happen and have meaning in a in a uh an oral and an ancient demonstrative society so when you go through a ritual healing then you cross that threshold and can be welcomed back into the society from which you've been outcast for whatever reason so that i think is also then a core component of what ritual healing continued to mean

(1:10:16) throughout the middle east certainly too but also through the christian west and so for example in the case that we had with canterbury here and all these medieval pilgrims some of them sure had very uh real physical elements for which they hoped maybe beyond hope uh for a physical cure but many others would have been outcasts for breaching some social norm and they might have had penances imposed on them and they went on this pilgrimage they went to the shrine they prostrated themselves before the saints and they're healed

(1:10:50) and then they're able to come back into the society now having gone through that healing and this would be quite explicit for for example if you're a knight and you had just done something horrible in the course of a war that you're having and you let's say uh burned a church down with all the people inside it which happened all the time you know then if they were to do that then they would you know they might have to let's say go as a crusade and be as live as a crusader for 18 years or something like that and then they would be um you know

(1:11:23) that penance would be lifted and they could come back to the society right so when they're declared healed at the same shrine then they're ready to be reinvited into the society so let's sum up and then we can get back to our discussion so uh we have our little our graph that's that we tried to try to go through this vast vast subject so whereas i think we're rightly viewing much contemporary faith healing with some healthy skepticism nevertheless um for contempt there's a lot of contemporary faith healing that we

(1:11:54) should beware very aware of our bias and tendency to disparage non-elite culture so little culture as it continues to exist we may privilege academic and well-informed and scientifically accurate culture and everything like that uh nevertheless in a lot of cases little culture has tradition with very deep roots that is uh very deeply experienced by the people who are part of it and so we should anyway be aware of that our bias and finally we should be especially cautious i think this is the first time i've used

(1:12:28) like like a modern uh movie picture for jesus as these um images try to make things especially literalistic it's a cute movie jesus though anyway so anyway you know we should be especially cautious of imposing our modern lenses like literalism supernaturalism historicism onto stories you know that are from antiquity that were told with very very different paradigms and understandings in the original telling and that is my take on ritual healing and belief in miracles [Applause] [Music] you