Faith means never having to admit you were wrong

Jesus performed “healing miracles” all around the Galilee countryside, except in his hometown of Nazareth. The people there knew him and his tricks.

Threatening to throw Jesus off a cliff - Luke 4: 19

As one young “Christ follower” says: “After bringing Jesus out of the desert, God calls Him to preach in Nazareth where he is unable to do many miracles because of their lack of faith (Matt 13:58). But it gets worse. He then preached in the synagogue and offended the people (Mark 6:3). They were so incensed by His sermon they tried to push him off a cliff (Luke 4:14-30).”

That doesn’t stop Christians like the blogger quoted above – they just go into their Have-it-both-ways mode. Jesus as God is not the same as Jesus as man… Jesus as God is omniscient and infallible, Jesus as man is fallible and still learning… How can you tell which Jesus you’re dealing with? By the results, of course! If a miracle succeeds, it was God. If it fails, it was just the human.

This is the heart of faith: A person is in a car crash and survives – “Praise the Lord!”… but their spouse is killed – “God works in mysterious ways.”

A child is in hospital with doctors and medicine and survives some rare and often-fatal illness: “Proof that prayer works! Praise the Lord!”

Meanwhile there are 30 countries in Africa in which over 10% of children die before the age of 5. The leading causes of death for them are simple: acute respiratory infections, diarrhea, measles, malaria and, of course, malnutrition. Worldwide, according to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, 7,000,000 children a year die from preventable causes. So why do so many innocents die? “God works in mysterious ways.”

Faith means never admitting you were wrong. It’s not a good attitude for raising children, making educational policy, or running a government.

Jesus as Faith Healer

I’ve never understood exactly what Jesus is trying to demonstrate, and to whom, with regard to the Christian view of his healing miracles.

How faith healing works

If he wanted to be effective and merciful, he should have healed thousands in a big city like Jerusalem, instead of just one person on any given occasion.

If he wanted to demonstrate God’s power to the world, he should have gone to a Greek or Roman place of healing in Caesarea, and healed all the difficult cases that the doctors were struggling with.

He didn’t seem to want to do either of those things – just as a faith healer never goes to a hospital to heal the people there.

It looks suspiciously like (the Christian, unhistorical) Jesus and the faith healer only work to cure you of your love of money – “the root of all evil”.

Maybe the answer is in the name, “faith healer” – all they can really heal is your faith!

Jesus’ Healing v. Greco-Roman Medicine

Here is Jesus healing in Mark 9: 20-27.  The father of an epileptic boy, believing that the problem is a demon inhabiting him, asks Jesus to heal him. The boy is summoned.

And when the spirit saw Jesus, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” And Jesus  rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, “He is dead.” But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose.

Here is Greek healing, earlier than Jesus, from Wikipedia:

Ancient vaginal speculum

Another of Hippocrates’s major contributions may be found in his descriptions of the symptomatology, physical findings, surgical treatment and prognosis of thoracic empyema, i.e. suppuration of the lining of the chest cavity. His teachings remain relevant to present-day students of pulmonary medicine and surgery. Hippocrates was the first documented chest surgeon and his findings are still valid.

Hippocratic medicine was notable for its strict professionalism, discipline, and rigorous practice.The Hippocratic work On the Physician recommends that physicians always be well-kempt, honest, calm, understanding, and serious. The Hippocratic physician paid careful attention to all aspects of his practice: he followed detailed specifications for, “lighting, personnel, instruments, positioning of the patient, and techniques of bandaging and splinting” in the ancient operating room. He even kept his fingernails to a precise length.

The Romans, naturally, are better known for the engineering aspects:

The Romans invented numerous surgical instruments, including the first instruments unique to women (vaginal specula with a screw device which when turned forces a cross-bar to push the blades outward), as well as the surgical uses of forceps, scalpels, cautery, cross-bladed scissors, and the surgical needle. Romans also performed cataract surgery.

Jesus came to preach, to heal and to cast out demons;  this in the Roman Empire when it was discovering anesthetics and making major medical advances. Presumably if Jesus came to the United States today he would avoid places like Johns Hopkins and hang out with the snake handlers in the backwoods of the South.

This reduces the credibility of Jesus-as-God to zero. But it supports the idea that Jesus was a Jewish fundamentalist, working within the framework of Jewish law and tradition, and ignorant and hostile regarding all things Roman.