This book illustrates in detail the range of understandings of the human condition in New Testament times.

This book illustrates in detail the range of understandings of the human condition in New Testament times and remedies for ills that prevailed when Jesus and the apostles were spreading the Christian message and launching Christian communities in the Graeco-Roman world.

Miracle-workers and magicians are diffcult characters for contemporary readers of Greco-Roman narratives to comprehend and to distinguish. Hindered both by our modern definitions of "miracle" and "magic," we need to focus our attention on those ancient texts that deal with such characters and their differentiation. Two such texts, the Acts of the Apostles and Philostratus' Life of Apollonius, come from quite different religious backgrounds, but demonstrate remarkably similar subtle cultural scripts at play. A detailed investigation of the social interactions in these two narrative worlds brings these characters and their communities alive and reveals how legitimate miracle-workers were distinguished from illegitimate magicians by the Mediterranean population of the Greco-Roman world.

To learn more about Rowman & Littlefield titles please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

Did Jesus really restore sight to blind people? How are we to understand the stories of demon possession? What are we to make of the virgin birth? What was Paul's thorn in the flesh? These and many similar questions often arise in people's minds as they read the New Testament, and there are few places for the general reader to look to find the answers; even ministers and students find it difficult to access useful and up-to-date information. Commentaries on the New Testament rarely pay much attention to the diagnosis of the illnesses mentioned in the Gospels and elsewhere, and the technical discussions that occasionally appear in medical and other journals are not easy to access. Medicine, Miracle, and Myth in the New Testament is an attempt to bridge these gaps for the general reader as well as for students, ministers, and preachers, and even doctors, in order to provide a coherent interpretation of the New Testament data that meets the criteria of modern medical science. Most attention is paid to the narratives of healing in the Gospels and Acts, as it is important to be able to provide, as far as possible, a reasonable diagnosis of the conditions which Jesus met in his day to day ministry. The application of modern insights into these stories would suggest that Jesus acted as a prophetic folk healer in the tradition of the Old Testament prophets such as Elijah and Elisha, and this provides one important facet of his ministry. Other subjects on which medical science has an important bearing, such as the problems associated with the stories of the virginal conception of Jesus, the possible cause of his death on the cross, and the nature of Paul's thorn in the flesh, for example, are also discussed, thus providing a comprehensive and intelligible outline of medical matters in the New Testament.

Analyzing the illness-related terminology of the Gospel against the background of classical medical texts, Annette Weissenrieder examines the degree to which ancient medical knowledge was incorporated into the healing narratives of the Gospel of Luke. Thus, her work focuses on the crossroads of theology and medical history. Her primary reference is the Corpus Hippocraticum, supplemented by the writings of Soranus, Empedocles and Caelius Aurelianus. She also examines Jewish sources in the light of these secular medical texts. The premise of the study is the constructivist concept that has been developed in the context of 'writing the history of the body': that there is no objective view of the sick body. Every description of the body is formed by the cultural norms of a particular society, and society's culture influences the way in which any given illness is seen.In investigating concepts of medicine prevalent in antiquity, Annette Weissenrieder brings to light the cultural parameters of perception specific to Luke. She deals with gender-specific images of illness as well as with those associated with impurity or demonic possession. Her analysis confirms that the concepts of illness used by the Lucan author were profoundly characteristic of his time. She demonstrates how he uses these concepts to make his central message plausible: the presence of divine reality in the human sphere which can be experienced by both the physical body and the social body.