Cleansed Lepers, Cleansed Hearts

Purity and Healing in Luke-Acts

Pamela Shellberg

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781451485240
• eBook ISBN: 9781451494310
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Commento della Bibbia

Illnesses are perceived and understood differently across cultures and over time. Traditional interpretations of New Testament texts frame the affliction lepra ("leprosy") as addressed either by ritual cleansing or miraculous healing. But as Pamela Shellberg shows, these interpretations are limited because they shift modern ideas of "leprosy" to a first-century context without regard for how the ancients themselves thought about lepra. Reading ancient medical texts, Shellberg describes how Luke might have perceived lepra, /I> and used the language of "clean" and "unclean" and demonstrates how Luke's first-century understandings shaped his report of Peter's dream in Acts 10 as a warrant for Gentile inclusion. Shellberg illuminates Luke's understanding of "cleansing" as one of his primary expressions of the means of God's salvation and favor, breaking down and breaking through the distinctions between Jew and Gentile. Shellberg's conclusions take up the value of Luke's emphasis on the divine prerogative to declare things "clean" for discussions of inclusion and social distinction today.

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Lepra in Ancient Contexts

Once, when he was in one of the cities, there was a man covered with leprosy. When he saw Jesus, he bowed with his face to the ground and begged him, “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.” Then Jesus stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “I do choose. Be made clean.” Immediately the leprosy left him. And he ordered him to tell no one. “Go” he said, “and show yourself to the priest, and, as Moses commanded, make an offering for your cleansing, for a testimony to them.” (Luke 5:12-14)

In the passage above, a part of the gospel tradition Luke received from Mark, the references to examinations by priests, declarations of being clean, and allusions to Moses and levitical legislation situate the cleansing of the man “covered with lepra” in a decidedly cultic context. Here lepra appears as an affliction requiring priestly examination and an offering, an affliction identifying one as unclean until the proper purification rituals are carried out, until that time rendering a person unfit to live in a home shared with others or to enter temple precincts. When lepra is considered in this cultic context, judgments about what transpires between Jesus and the man full of lepra are often interpreted primarily in terms of ritual purity, and subsequently as manifestations of Jesus’ power to make whole and holy. The theological cache is rich: in the cleansing of one afflicted with lepra, Jesus restores him to a state of purity and opens the way for his access to the temple, to the worshiping community, and to God.

But in 85 ce,^[1] more than fifteen years after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, the cleansing of lepra as restoration to ritual purity—even as a religious metaphor for access to the divine—might be less significant to Luke’s largely non-Jewish audience. It would not be significant, at least, in the same way it would have been to the first Jewish followers of Jesus whose reports and interpretations of their experiences of Jesus’ healing formed the tradition Luke received.^[2]

Still, it is clear that the affliction of lepra captured Luke’s imagination. Among the canonical gospels, only Luke relates four separate episodes in which lepra is a prominent element, two of which are unique to his gospel.^[3] In fact, among all the conditions, afflictions, and disfigurements suffered by people in Luke’s narrative and specifically identified, lepra is named most often.^[4] However, the significance of the affliction is shaded with a slightly different nuance in each of the four episodes. In Luke 7:22, cleansed lepers appear in a list of signs identifying Jesus as the fulfillment of Jewish messianic expectation.^[5] In Luke 4:27, Jesus recalls a story from the Hebrew Scriptures in which lepra afflicts a non-Jew of high stature and reputation and whom Elisha, a prophet of God, subsequently heals. The narrative of the healing of a single leper in Luke 5:12-16 is marked by cultic features and the afflicted one’s restoration to a state of ritual purity. Luke’s final report of lepra, Jesus’ healing of ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19), recapitulates and juxtaposes elements from the two stories told in chapters 4 and 5, creating a story with layers of accumulated meaning.^[6] The fulfillment of messianic expectation, the role of the prophet, the recipients of God’s favor, the realities of the social and religious isolation of the afflicted, and instruction in faith and piety appear as different shades of meaning in the spectrum of Luke’s theology when refracted through the prism of lepra.^[7]

My proposal is that lepers, the cleansing of lepra, and the terminology of cleansing have special significance for Luke, a significance Luke relates to the warrant for Gentile acceptability in the Christian community as recorded later in the Acts of the Apostles. This chapter investigates all the potential fields of meaning lepra could have had for Luke, such that it became for him a potent symbol of some of his theological points, in order that we might appreciate its full potency.^[8]

The chapter will be ordered in two major sections. The first half is devoted to a general explication of the theoretical notion of “constructs” of bodies and of illnesses in an effort to clarify the distance between first-century understandings of disease and disease etiologies and twenty-first century understandings of the same. The purpose is twofold: first, to demonstrate specifically how modern-day constructs of illness in general, and of lepra in particular, are different from those of first-century people and, as such, create a kind of “interference” when it comes to trying to understand how the ancients understood the affliction. This interference can be seen in the difficulties posed when lepra is translated as leprosy in English editions of the Old and New Testaments, calling to mind the appearances, symptoms, and treatments related to what is known in today’s medical world as Hansen’s Disease. It is evident in the many and varied perspectives scholars take when dealing with the healing narratives in the New Testament, with conclusions often limited to the forced choice of seemingly mutually exclusive categories of explanation—religious (e.g., miracle or cultic) or medical (e.g., a modern-day diagnosis). Therefore, the first purpose in considering the theoretical idea of illness constructs is to illuminate the reality of the interference caused by the presuppositions of modern-day constructs of the body and illness, and to minimize it.

My second purpose then is to highlight some of the more important features of the ancients’ constructs of the body and illness, and to locate the symptoms, etiology, healing, and meaning of lepra in the context of those constructs. Then we can get a little closer to how lepra might have been seen, understood, and explained by Luke.

The second half of the chapter is devoted to surveying how lepra appears in the ancient medical texts and in the Septuagint (lxx). The different character of lepra in the Priestly and non-Priestly writings will be highlighted, and commonalities and differences in the representations of lepra in the medical texts and the Septuagint will be summarized.

Lepra is not Leprosy

English translations of the Bible from medieval to modern times have regularly employed the word “leprosy” to translate the Greek lepra where it occurs in the New Testament and Septuagint and the Hebrew tsara’at where it occurs in the Hebrew Bible.^[9] Many modern translations typically include footnotes and annotations that qualify the use of the term “leprosy,” such as The New Oxford Annotated Bible’s footnotes at Luke 5:12: “the terms leper and leprosy can refer to several diseases,” and at Leviticus 13:45: “A term for several skin diseases; precise meaning uncertain,” and the annotation provided at Matthew 8:2-4: “Leprous, a skin disorder of an uncertain nature. Several diseases were probably referred to by this name.”^[10] The effort behind the footnotes and annotations accomplishes at least two things: first, it acknowledges, in light of modern and advanced medical knowledge about leprosy, that the conditions signified by the term “leprosy” in the biblical texts are not actually the same disease which we refer to as leprosy today; second, it attempts a corrective to the modern day reader’s inclination to associate the characteristics of leprosy with the skin diseases identified in the Bible as leprosy, and thus inadvertently import images, beliefs, and attitudes that can interfere with a proper understanding of what is intended in the biblical texts.^[11]

Known today as Hansen’s Disease, leprosy is an extremely chronic condition of relatively low infectivity produced by Mycobacterium leprae, the leprosy bacillus. In its more severe form, and when left untreated, it produces large skin lesions and can cause deformity of the feet, hands, and face, the bacteria affecting particularly the nerves near the skin surface and in oral and nasal mucous membranes. The presence of the bacteria can lead to a loss of sensation in affected areas, which renders the afflicted person vulnerable to unnoticed cuts and burns that become infected. The infections can become so serious that amputation is the only medical recourse. Paralysis of the blinking reflex results when the leprosy bacteria attack the nerves around the eyes, and this can lead to blindness. The mucous membranes of the nasal cavity are especially vulnerable, susceptible first to scarring and eventually to collapse of the nose.

I describe the symptoms here simply to contrast Hansen’s Disease with the descriptions of tsara’at/lepra given in Leviticus 13 and 14.^[12] Chapter 13 of Leviticus begins with the Lord describing to Moses the skin appearances that should be recognized as potentially unclean: “When a person has on the skin of his body a swelling or an eruption or a spot, and it turns into a leprous disease on the skin of his body, he shall be brought to Aaron the priest or to one of his sons the priests” (13:2). Leviticus 13:30 describes a fourth potentially unclean appearance, that of an itch, “a leprous disease of the head or the beard.” These four appearances—swellings, eruptions, spots, or itch—are characteristic of many different skin diseases, however, and cannot be regarded as four different manifestations of a single disease, and especially not leprosy.^[13]

Upon the appearance of these primary characteristics, Leviticus requires examination by the priest for certain secondary skin features and only when those features were present could a pronouncement of tsara’at/lepra, and therefore uncleanness, be made. Secondary features include a change either in skin color or hair color, an infiltration of the skin, an extension or spread in the skin, and an ulceration of the skin. Leviticus 13 lays out a fairly complex diagnostic scheme for the priest to follow in determining the presence of ritual uncleanness; only certain combinations of primary and secondary features result in a declaration of uncleanness.^[14] It is interesting to note that skin does not have to have been fully restored to a non-leprous state (i.e., what we might consider “healed”) to be considered clean; there are instead certain combina...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Additional Praise for Cleansed Lepers, Cleansed Hearts
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Lepra in Ancient Contexts
• Dektos and Katharizō
• Katharizō Texts in Luke-Acts
• Reading the Peter-Cornelius Story Again “Their Hearts were Cleansed by Faith”
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Scripture Passages