In his succinct but well-researched analysis of first-century AD perspectives on sickness, Ian Wallis gives us a landscape within which to situate gospel accounts of Jesus's healing and exorcisms. Drawing on contemporary Jewish and Christian sources, he attempts to explain how witnesses, and indeed beneficiaries, of Jesus's therapeutic care understood what was happening. In this way, Wallis can advance his suggestions concerning the reality lying behind the gospel accounts and the character and message of Jesus. In the words of this monograph's blurb, Wallis seeks ‘the origins of Jesus's reputation for healing and exorcism’.
Before situating the gospels in their socio-cultural setting, in the first chapter Wallis places the healing accounts within the history of interpretation, particularly since the Enlightenment. It is a useful and interesting discussion of the challenges that stories of miraculous cures have presented to modern society and the various heuristic strategies employed to understand, rationalize or absorb them. Nevertheless, in his brief but comprehensive overview of interpretative perspectives Wallis does not clearly introduce the reader to his own presuppositions and evaluative framework, which rather gives the impression that he thinks that his analyses will be free of such subjectivity. This methodological diffidence allows Chapter One—‘Framing the Task’—to fall short of its stated goal.
Chapter Two is the most interesting and promising: a critical summary of biblical, Christian and Jewish literature about sickness and healing. We learn about the suspicious reputation of physicians, the connection made between sickness and sin and the reliance upon divine favour for health and well-being. The care to situate sources as effectively as possible within their socio-cultural milieux permits the clearest appreciation of what texts are intended to convey, at least at their point of composition. By drawing together a wide range of texts near contemporary with the gospels, Wallis gives us a good amount of literary data to evaluate how illness was understood and approached in the first century and so to read the healings and exorcisms performed by Jesus with a new depth. That said, the analysis could go further. Sources beyond texts, from the material culture for example, would have provided a further critical dimension. Often what people say they believe and do (and represent in their texts) is different from what they can be observed doing. In the case of antique literature, this rounded perspective can be approached through archaeological observations. Every text, after all, is written from a particular viewpoint, composed for a particular reason or set of reasons and presented in a particular way. The introduction of socio-cultural data from other media to a consideration of literary sources provides a helpful balance for negotiating the chorus of narrative voices.
In the subsequent chapters, Wallis turns to Jesus and to those who witness to his healing wonders, and here the minor weaknesses of the first two chapters gain methodological momentum. In Chapter Three, Wallis presents the strong evidence for Jesus's reputation as a healer from the gospels and contemporary sources. He traces a development in Jesus from a committed disciple of John the Baptist to a kingdom preacher with his own ministry, enhanced by his reputation as a healer attested in the texts. Thus, in his reading of the gospels, Wallis assumes that the basic information provided is pre-Christian. He speaks of ‘Christianizing influences’ interpolated in the text (e.g., p. 45), on which assumption Josephus appears as a more credible witness ‘unadulterated by Christian redactors’ (p. 45).
With the impression that it is Jesus's reputation for healing and exorcism that is most reliably accessible from the sources (rather than direct evidence for the healings themselves), we are asked to consider the ‘dynamics of Jesus's healing’ (Chapter Four). Namely, how it was that people felt restored by Jesus, why his reputation grew and why such stories ‘resonated with communities of faith’ (p. 64). Wallis notes the role that ‘faith’ plays in the accounts along with pertinent observations regarding the importance of personal encounter and the link made between disease and sin. He draws on research on Greco-Roman literature to argue that the healing stories represent ‘exemplary anecdotes’ for emulation (p. 65) and hence confirms his assumption that the evidence about Jesus's healing ‘are expressions of a quality of human being that Jesus embodied personally and engendered in others’ (p. 95).
Turning specifically to exorcism, Chapter Five is mainly descriptive, citing a number of texts, biblical and non-biblical, that deal with the concept of a spirit world in Second Temple Judaism and beyond. These are interesting and relevant references, but Wallis does not proceed to analysis, despite his indisputable claim that Jesus's healing and exorcism ‘must be interpreted and understood’ against such a ‘canvas’ (p. 122). The most he ventures is that the rather dualistic picture painted by these texts of spiritual warfare between cosmic forces serves to clarify Jesus's vision of inaugurating God's reign, a proposition Wallis explores in Chapter Six. Drawing together his reading of the sources, here Wallis presents Jesus as a herald of God's kingdom which is manifested through the liberating response to his therapeutic activity, an activity open to all those who wish to embrace the ‘kingdom vision he sought to embody’ (p. 146).
The book closes with an account of early Christian care for the sick considered as Jesus's healing legacy and an appendix that in the light of the forgoing analysis seems in a quandary about how to treat claims that Jesus raised people from the dead. While seeming to leave the question open, Wallis's discussion of the gospels in comparison with other accounts of resuscitation strongly suggests that witnesses to such occurrences were simply mistaken.
While clearly written with detailed and useful socio-cultural data for contextualizing Jesus's wonderworking, the methodological shortcomings that emerge in the opening chapters overwhelm the subsequent analysis and leave this book prone to the same flaws that trouble much historical Jesus inquiry, namely, failing to justify the assumptions on which the inquiry is launched.
The implicit assumptions of this study are on the one hand, that an objective approach to the sources is employed, and yet on the other hand, that accounts of Jesus's therapeutic wonderworking cannot be objective, and thus obscure what actually happened. Without substantiating why such assumptions are being made, it is hard to understand the criteria by which sources are deemed credible and why narrative details are considered editorial and for what reason; it suggests an obtuseness to the subjectivity of the scholar's own interpretative framework.
We do not learn why Christian belief is more of a threat to objectivity than non-Christian beliefs; or why a subjective or ideological witness should be considered less reliable. If ‘Christianizing influences’ pollute the source, what ensures the purity of earlier versions? What are the motivations for recording this earliest written witness? Why is earlier better, anyway? Without this scrutiny the use of sources appears inconsistent. For example, Wallis's adoptionist reading of Jesus's ministerial authority suggests that he deems some details of Jesus's early life and baptism to be credible but others not, yet none of these decisions are defended. These methodological flaws seriously weaken the book's contribution. If Wallis seeks the origins of Jesus's reputation for healings and exorcisms, then this (Christian) reader was left wondering if the traditional answer is not the best.
