Why I Think Jesus Was A Physician-Scholar

Among Progressive Christians in Canada these days there's a popular new trend in church reform. This is the "Jesus-is-obsolete" trend.

Well-known authors such as Gretta Vosper and Tom Harpur, along with less well known but influential biblical scholars such as William Arnal (plus my own New Testament professor), have concluded that even if we could figure out who the historical Jesus was with some degree of accuracy, it wouldn't matter to the church today. According to these authors, if Jesus has any remaining importance to us in the third millennium, it's only in a symbolic way. In other words, the symbol of Jesus is more important than the reality of Jesus. Our acceptance of this reality will help the church move forward, say these authors. Tom Harpur is so convinced of this that he no longer believes a real individual called Jesus of Nazareth even existed. For him, Jesus the Pagan Christ was an entirely fictitious character from the get-go.*

I guess you wouldn't be surprised to learn that I don't agree with these authors or my New Testament professor.

Limestone ossuaries were used in Jewish burials in Palestine for a fairly limited period of time just before and after the start of the Common Era, so they’re a useful archeological tool for gathering information about Palestinian Jewish families from the late Second Temple period. This one, with a common motif of rosettes, was found in Jerusalem and is dated to the Herodian Period. (It’s on display at the Royal Ontario Museum. Photo credit JAT 2017) If you want to know more about this topic, you can read my post called “Excavating James: The James Ossuary and the Talpiot Tomb” at http://www.jenniferthomas.ca/?p=603

 
On the other hand, I wouldn't dispute the level of confusion and disagreement among scholars of the historical Jesus. These are the researchers who use historical, archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic data to try to piece together the facts of Jesus' life -- things like his actual date of birth, his actual date of death, the identity of his family members. They're looking for information from verifiable sources outside the Bible to try to make sense of the conflicting biblical accounts of who Jesus was. This "Quest for the Historical Jesus" has been going on since the time of the Enlightenment, so it's not new. Albert Schweitzer was so frustrated by the whole process that he gave up on theology and went off to Africa to be a doctor. (There's a certain irony in this, as I'll show.)

A couple of years ago I stumbled across a really cool website called "Historical Jesus Theories," put together by Peter Kirby (www.earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html). On the first page, you can see at a glance how much disagreement exists among scholars of the historical Jesus. You can see that scholars have studied the "facts" about Jesus, and have concluded that Jesus is best described as "Jesus the Myth: Heavenly Christ." But wait! There are also 8 more theories! There's the theory of Jesus the Myth: Man of the Indefinite Past -- Jesus the Hellenistic Hero -- Jesus the Revolutionary -- Jesus the Wisdom Sage (a popular one) -- Jesus the Man of the Spirit -- Jesus the Prophet of Social Change -- Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet (also a popular one) -- and last but not least, Jesus the Saviour.

Wow. All those theories based on the facts, and not a single one that suggests Jesus was a physician-scholar. It's my own thesis that Jesus is best understood as a physician-scholar, so I can't suggest any books for you to read on this theory because as far as I can tell there aren't any books (apart from the one I'm writing).

I also think Jesus was a practising mystic, but secondarily to his role as a physician-scholar. (If you think I ruffled a few feathers in my theology classes with my theory that Jesus was a physician-scholar, you should have seen my Christology professor's eyes almost pop out of her head when I suggested in a class discussion that Jesus had been a mystic!)

I have to admit I'm somewhat puzzled about the resistance to this idea that Jesus was a physician-scholar. To be frank, this understanding of Jesus fits much better with historical and psychological realities than any of the other theories. It fits like a hand in a glove when you read the Gospel of Mark. When you read only what Mark says, and you try to completely ignore what the other gospels say, you have a story about a guy whose priorities are healing the sick, forgiving people, teaching people, spending lots of time with people (even when they make him slightly exasperated), and trusting God.

Right near the beginning of Mark, Jesus says, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners" (Mark 2:17). Today's commentators seem to want to interpret this allegorically: they say that Jesus wasn't actually a physician, but was more like a healer of the soul for those who had sinned. So when Jesus self-identifies with the role of medical practitioner, it's okay for Christians to ignore it. But when other people who don't even like or trust Jesus call him "the carpenter" in Mark 6:3, that's not allegorical -- that's factual! Jesus is a poor, illiterate carpenter! Jesus is a poor, illiterate, Jewish, Aramaic-speaking carpenter who probably couldn't speak Greek! Jesus is a poor, illiterate, uneducated, Aramaic-speaking carpenter from Galilee who obtained his amazing ability to engage in sophisticated debate with scribes and Pharisees because . . . well, because the Spirit had chosen him! And, to prove this fact, we can easily see that the history of Christianity has been similarly shaped only by men who imitated Jesus in his illiteracy, who were all were poor, uneducated tradespeople, fluent only in their local dialect, and unable to use the tools of rhetoric to argue their case except when the Spirit moved them! Yes! History and psychology prove that Jesus must be seen in this light! Why, all of Christianity's thinkers fit this model!

Don't they?

What . . . you mean you think that history and psychology prove the opposite -- that the great religious thinkers who've been remembered for centuries (regardless of their respective religious traditions) have -- to a person -- been highly educated and charismatic but emotionally humble? Like, oh, like maybe Gandhi. Or Martin Luther King, Jr. Or the Dalai Lama. These men are from our own era, yet it's pretty hard to imagine that any of them could have made a difference if they hadn't used their personal charisma and advanced education in service to the people they love(d).

Do we have to imagine that Jesus was a carpenter and only a carpenter? (Not that I have anything personal against carpenters. My own father is a tekton in every sense of the Koine Greek word, and has always spent his spare time building and repairing things in his workshop -- but my father is also one of the smartest people I know, and he earned a Master's degree in Chemical Engineering in the 1940's. The fact that he's an amateur carpenter doesn't negate his other training.)

There are many other clues in Mark that together build a portrait of Jesus as an educated physician-scholar. (I won't go into all of them in this post, or this post would end up as long as a book chapter.)

I've wondered from time to time whether today's scholars can't "see" Jesus in this light because they're thinking of "physicians" through their own hermeneutical lens. Let's face it -- modern Western medicine of the allopathic variety is not doing much these days to impress people with its compassionate bedside manner. This is especially true if you live in the United States, where health care decisions are increasingly being made by for-profit insurance companies. If your own personal experience has led you to equate physicians with cold-hearted, scientifically-based, profit-oriented medical care, then you're probably not going to be looking for Jesus to be a physician. In fact, you probably wouldn't want Jesus to be a physician, because then you wouldn't be able to relate to him anymore.

This is where it's important to step back and apply the criterion of "historical context" to Mark's picture of Jesus as a physician-scholar. Jesus lived in a time when healing and religion were intertwined in a way we don't fully relate to in this era of modern medicine. So when Jesus is quoted in Mark 2:17 as saying that sinners are in need of a physician, he means that both medically and religiously. Mark is giving readers the clue they needed in the first century CE to understand what claims he is making about Jesus' training and background. It would have been obvious to readers then that Mark's Jesus was a physician-scholar. It also would have shocked many pious people, because according to the "righteous" (who also make an appearance in Mark 2:17) only priests sanctioned by the Temple had the power and the right to heal the sick.

Mark's Jesus is a rogue healer. He doesn't follow any of the Laws when he does his healing, either Jewish laws or Greco-Roman laws. This is why I call Jesus a founding member of Doctors Without Borders. He put the suffering of the sick ahead of the Law.

Only those who've had a doctor fight for them or their loved ones against today's institutional medical bureaucracy and conventional scientific wisdom will understand what courage it took for Jesus to do this.

Thanks be to God.

*  For a scholarly update on some of the early non-biblical sources that talk about Jesus or imply his historical existence, please the article by Dr. Lawrence Mykytiuk called "Did Jesus Exist? Searching for Evidence Beyond the Bible" in the Jan/Feb 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

 For more on Jesus’ approach to healing, please see “Spit-Wives and Dead Goats.”  For introductory exegetical commentary on healings in the Gospel of Mark, please see "The Way, the Truth, and the Life."