99. Cures On the Sabbath. (Chapter 9. The Miracles of Jesus.) (The Life of Jesus Critically Examined) (Studies on Bible & Early Christianity)

Jesus, according to the Gospels, gave great scandal to the Jews by not seldom performing his curative miracles on the sabbath. One example of this is common to the three synoptic writers, two are peculiar to Luke, and two to John.

In the narrative common to the three synoptic writers, two cases of supposed desecration of the sabbath are united; the plucking of the ears of corn by the disciples (Matt. xii. 1. parall), and the cure of the man with the withered hand by Jesus (v.9ff. par.). After the conversation which was occasioned by the plucking of the corn, and which took place in the fields, the two first evangelists continue as if Jesus went from this scene immediately into the synagogue of the same place, to which no special designation is given, and there, on the occasion of the cure of the man with the withered hand, again held a dispute on the observance of the sabbath. It is evident that these two histories were originally united only on account of the similarity in their tendency; hence it is to the credit of Luke, that he has expressly separated them chronologically by the words "on another sabbath." The further inquiry, which narrative is hero the more original? we may dismiss with the observation,that if the question which Matthew puts into the mouth of the Pharisees, Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath days? is held up as a specimen of invented dialogue; we may with equal justice characterize in the same way the question lent to Jesus by the two intermediate evangelists; while their much praised deserip-tion of Jesus calling to the man to stand forth in the midst, and then casting reproving glances around, may be accused of having the air of dramatic fiction.

The narratives all agree in representing the affliction under which the patient laboured, as a xeir chra or echrammenh. Indefinite as this expression is, it is treated too freely when it is understood, as by Paulus, to imply only that the hand was injured by heat, or even by a sprain, according to Venturini's supposition. For when, m order to determine the signification in which this term is used in the New Testament we refer, as it is proper to do, to the Old Testament, we iind (1 Kings, xiii. 4.) a hand which, on being stretched out, is described as incapable of being drawn back again, so that we must understand a lameness and rigidity of the ^{P.524} hand; and on a comparison of Mark ix. 18, where the expression to be withered or wasted away is applied to an epileptic, a drying up and shrinking of that member. Now from the narrative before us a very plausible argument may be drawn in favour of the supposition, that Jesus employed natural means in the treatment of this and other diseases. Only such cures, it is said, were prohibited on the sabbath as were attended with any kind of labour; thus, if the Pharisees, as it is here said, expected Jesus to transgress the sabbatical laws by effecting a cure, they must have known that he was not accustomed to cure by his mere word, but by medicaments and surgical operations. As, however, a cure merely by means of a conjuration otherwise lawful, was forbidden on the sabbath, a fact which Paulus himself elsewhere adduces: as moreover there was a controversy between the schools of Ilillcl and Schamrnai, whether it were permitted even to administer consolation to the sick on the sabbath; an as again, according to an observation of Paulus, the more ancient rabbis were stricter on the point of sabbatical observance than those whose writings on this subject have come down to us: so the cures of Jesus, even supposing that he used no natural means, might by captious Pharisees be brought under the category of violations of the sabbath. The principal objection to the rationalist explanation, namely, the silence of the evangelists as to natural means, Paulus believes to be obviated in the present case by conceiving the scene thus: at that time, and in the synagogue, there was indeed no application of such means; Jesus merely caused the hand to be shown to him, that he might see how far the remedies hitherto prescribed by him (which remedies however are still a bare assumption) had been serviceable, and he then found that it was completely cured; for the expression dTronareordOr), used by all the narrators, implies a cure completed previously, not one suddenly effected in the passing moment. It is true that the context seems to require this interpretation, since the outstretching of the hand prior to the cure would appear to be as little possible, as in 1 Kings xiii. 4. the act of drawing it back: nevertheless the evangelists give us only the word of Jesus as the source of the cure, not natural means, which are the gratuitous addition of expositors.

Decisive evidence, alike for the necessity of viewing this as a miraculous cure, and for the possibility of explaining the origin of the story, is to be obtained by a closer examination of the Old Testament narrative already mentioned, 1 Kings xiii.1ff. A prophet out of Judah threatened Jeroboam, while ottering incense on his idolatrous altar, with the destruction of the altar and the overthrow of his false worship; the king with outstretched hand commanded that this prophet of evil should be seized, when suddenly his hand dried up so that he could not draw it again towards him, and the ^{P.525} altar was rent. On the entreaty of the king, however, the prophet besought the Lord for the restoration of the hand, and its full use was again granted. Paulus also refers to this narrative in the same connection, but only for the purpose of applying to it his natural method of explanation; he observes that Jeroboam's anger may have produced a transient convulsive rigidity of the muscles and so forth, in the hand just stretched out with such impetuosity. But who does not see that we have a legend designed to glorify the monotheistic order of prophets, and to hold up to infamy the Israelite idolatry in the person of its founder Jeroboam? The man of God denounces on the idolatrous altar quick and miraculous destruction; the idolatrous king impiously stretches forth his hand against the man of God; the hand is paralyzed, the idolatrous altar falls asunder into the dust, and only on the intercession of the prophet is the king restored. Who can argue about the miraculous and the natural in hat is so evidently a myth? And who can fail to perceive in our Gospel narrative an imitation of this Old Testament legend, except that agreeably to the spirit of Christianity the withering of the hand appears, not as a retributive miracle, but as a natural disease, and only its cure is ascribed to Jesus; from which also the outstretching of the hand is not, as in the case of Jeroboam, the criminal cause of the infliction, continued as a punishment, and the drawing of it back again a sign of cure; but, on the contrary, the hand which had previously been drawn inwards, owing to disease, can after the completion of the cure be again extended. That, in other instances, about that period, the power of working cures of this kind was in the East ascribed to the favourites of the gods, may be seen from a narrative already adduced, in which, together with (he cure of blindness, the restoration of a diseased hand is attributed to Vespasian, But this curative miracle does not appear independently and as an object by itself: the story of it hinges on the fact that the cure was wrought on the Sabbath, and the point of the whole lies in the words by which Jesus vindicates his activity in healing on the sabbath against, the Pharisees. In Luke and Mark this defence consists in the question, Is it lawful to do good on the sablath days, or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it? in Matthew, in a part of this question, together with the aphorism on saving the sheep which "might fall into the pit on the sabbath." Luke, who has not this saying in the present occasion, places it (varied by the substitution of an ass or an ox for "sheep," and of frear (well) for (ditch,) in connection with the cure of a man who had the dropsy (xiv. 5.); a narrative which has in ^{P.526} general a striking similarity to the one under consideration. Jesus takes food in the house of one of the chief Pharisees, where, as in the other instance in the synagogue, he is watched. A dropsical person is present; as, there, a man with a withered hand. In the synagogue, according to Matthew, the Pharisees ask Jesus, "Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath day?" According to Mark and Luke, Jesus asks them whether it be lawful to save life, etc.: so, here, he asks them, "Is it lawful to heal on the sabbath?" whereupon in both histories the interrogated parties are silent (in that of the withered hand, Mark; in that of the dropsical patient, Luke. Lastly, in both stories we have the saying about the animal fallen into a pit, in the one as an epilogue to the cure, in the other (that of Matthew) as a prologue. A natural explanation, which has not been left untried even with this cure of the dropsy, seems more than usually a vain labour, where, as in this case, we have before us no particular narrative, resting on its own historical basis, but a mere variation on the theme of the sabbath cures, and the text on the endangered domestic animal, which might come to one (Matthew) in connection with the cure of a withered hand, to another (Luke) with the cure of a dropsical patient, and to a third in a different connection still; for there is yet a third story of a miraculous cure with which a similar saying is associated. Luke, namely, narrates (xiii.10ff.) the cure of a woman bowed down by demoniacal influence, as having been performed by Jesus on the sabbath; when to the indignant remonstrance of the ruler of the synagogue, Jesus replies by asking, whether every one does not loose his ox or ass from the stall on the sabbath, and lead him away to watering? a question which is undeniably a variation of the one given above. Soentirely identical does this history appear with the one last named, that Schleier-machcr comes to this conclusion: since in the second there is no reference to the first, and since consequently the repetition is not excused by confession, the two passages Luke xiii. 10, and xiv. 5, cannot have been written one after the other by the same author.

So we have here, not three different incidents, but only three different frames in which legend has preserved the memorable and thoroughly popular aphorism on the domestic animal, to be rescued or tended on the sabbath. Yet, unless we would deny to Jesus so original and appropriate an argument, there must he at the foundation a cure of some kind actually performed by him on the sabbath; not, however, a miraculous one. We have seen that Luke unites the saying with the cure of a demoniacal patient: now it might have been uttered by Jesus on the occasion of one of those cures of demoniacs of which, under certain limitations, we have admitted the historical possibility. Or, when Jesus in cases of illness among his petitioners, cured them on the sab- ^{P.527} bath, he may have found this appeal to the practical sense of men needful for his vindication. Or lastly, if there be some truth in the opinion of rationalist commentators that Jesus, according to the oriental and more particularly the Essene custom, occupied himself with the cure of the body as well as of the soul, he may, when complying with a summons to the former work on the sabbath, have had occasion for such an apology. But in adopting this last supposition, we must not, with these commentators, seek in the particular supernatural cures which the Gospels narrate, the natural reality; on the contrary, we must admit that this is totally lost to us, and that the supernatural has usurped its place. Further, it cannot have been cures in general with which that saying of Jesus was connected; but any service performed by him or his disciples which might be regarded as a rescuing or preservation of life, and which was accompanied by external labour, might in his position with respect to the Pharisaic party, furnish an occasion for such a defence.

Of the two cures on the sabbath narrated in the fourth gospel, one has already been considered with the cures of the blind; the other (v.1ff.) might have been numbered among the cures of paralytics, but as the patient is not so designated, it was admissible to reserve it for our present head. In the porches of the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem, Jesus found a man who, as it subsequently appears, had been lame for thirty-eight years; this sufferer he enables by a word to stand up and carry home his bed, but, as it was the sabbath, he thus draws down on himself the hostility of the Jewish hierarchy. Woolstonf and many later writers have thought to get clear of this history in a singular manner, by the supposition that Jesus here did not cure a real sufferer but merely unmasked a hypocrite. The sole reason which can with any plausibility be urged in favour of this notion, is that the cured man points out Jesus to his enemies as the one who had commanded him to carry his bed on the sabbah (v. 15; comp.11ff.), a circumstance which is hardly to be explained on the ground that Jesus had enjoined what was unwelcome. But that notification to the Pharisees might equally be given, either with a friendly intention, as in the case of the man born blind (John ix. 11. 25), or at least with the mnocent one of devolving the defence of the alleged violation of the sabbath on a stronger than himself. The evangelist at least g'ves it as his opinion that the man was really afflicted, and suffered from a wearisome disease, when he describes him as having had an infirmity thirty-eight years, - the forced interpretation once put on this passage by Paulus, referring the thirty-eight years to the man's age, and not to the duration of his disease, he has not even himself ^{P.528} ventured to reproduce. On this view of the incident it is also impossible to explain what Jesus says to the cured man on a subsequent meeting (v. 14): Behold you are -made whole; sin no more lest a worse thing come to you. Even Paulus is compelled by these words to admit that the man had a real infirmity, though only a trifling one: in other words he is compelled to admit the inadequacy of the idea on which his explanation of the incident is hased, so that here again we retain a miracle, and that not of the smallest.

In relation to the historical credibility of the narrative, it may certainly be held remarkable that so important a sanative institution as Bethesda is described to be by John, is not mentioned either by Josephus or the rabbis, especially if the popular belief connected a miraculous cure with this pool. But this affords nothing decisive. It is true that in the description of the pool there lies a fabulous popular notion, which appears also to have been received by the writer (for even if v. 4 be spurious, something similar is contained in the words kinhsij tou u(datoj v. 3, and taraxqh v. 7). But this proves nothing against the truth of the narrative, since even an eye-witness and a disciple of Jesus may have shared a vulgar error. To make credible, however, such a fact as that a man who had been lame thirty-eight years, so that he was unable to walk, and completely bed-ridden, should have been perfectly cured by a word, the supposition of psychological influence will not suffice, for the man had no knowledge whatever of Jesus, v. 13; nor will any physical analogy, such as magnetism and the like, serve the purpose: but if such a result really happened, we must exalt that by which it happened above all the limits of the human and the natural. On the other hand, it ought never to have been thought a difficulty that from among the multitude of the infirm waiting in the porches of the pool, Jesus selected one only as the object of his curative power, since the cure of him whose sufferings had been of the longest duration was not only particularly adapted, but also sufficient, to glorify the miraculous power of the Messiah. Nevertheless, it is this very trait which suggests a suspicion that the narrative has a mythical character. On a great theatre of disease, crowded with all kinds of sufferers, Jesus, the exalted and miraculously gifted physician, appears and selects the one who is afflicted with the most obstinate malady, that by his restoration he may present the most brilliant proofof his miraculous power. We have already remarked that the fourth gospel, instead of extending the curative agency of Jesus over large masses and to a great variety of diseases, as the synoptic Gospels do, concentrates it on a few cases which proportionately gain in intensity: thus here, in the narrative of the cure of a man who had been lame thirty-eight years, it has far surpassed all the synoptic accounts of cures per ^{P.529} formed on persons with diseased limbs, among whom the longest sufferer is described in Luke xiii. 11, only as a woman who had had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years. Without doubt the fourth evangelist had received some intimation (though, as we have gathered from other parts of his history, it was far from precise) of cures of this nature performed by Jesus, especially of that wrought on the paralytic, Matt. ix.2ff. parall., for the address to the patient, and the result of the cure are in this narrative in John almost verbally the same as in that case, especially according to Mark's account. There is even a vestige in this history of John, of the circumstance that in the synoptic narrative the cure appears in the light of a forgiveness of sins; for as Jesus in the latter consoles the patient, before the cure, with the assurance, your sins are forgiven you, so in the former, he warns him, after the cure, in the words, sin no more, etc. For the rest, this highly embellished history of a miraculous curewas represented as happening on the sabbath, probably because the command to take up the bed which it contained appeared the most suitable occasion for the reproach of violating the sabbath.