A central characteristic of the Gospel portrait of Jesus is that he is a healer. For instance, the Gospel stories focus on Jesus healing paralytics. But are these accounts worthy of belief? Should we take them as history or legend?
Let’s take a look.
There are two accounts that I want to examine here. The first is the narrative of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof, recorded in Mark 2:1-12. The other is the healing of the paralyzed man by the pool in John 5:1-9.
Let’s start with the man lowered through the roof. I’ll leave it to you to read the narrative. There are three details that favor the historical reliability of this account.
First, there are several details that fall outside the scope of apologetical, catechetical, or instructional purposes. For example, we’re told that four individuals go up to the roof and help lower the man down. Then we’re told they dig a hole in the roof through which they lower the man.
These details don’t serve any apologetical purpose. So why would Mark include them unless he also intended to report the event as it went down?
Such details wouldn’t have been worth preserving if this story were mere legend. There being four people digging a hole in the roof doesn’t really beef up Jesus’ portrait as a healer.
Second, these details don’t just go beyond the scope of instructional purposes; they indicate the presence of eyewitness testimony. As New Testament scholar John P. Meier notes in volume two of his book A Marginal Jew, the digging of the hole in the roof was so extraordinary that such an event must have “stuck in the corporate memory precisely because of its strange circumstances” (680).
Third, this narrative meets the criterion of coherence with the unique style of Jesus. This criterion suggests that when a saying, expression, or action is distinctive or unique to the style of Jesus—departing significantly from those of the milieu in which he lived—there is good reason to believe it’s an authentic saying, expression, or action of Jesus. Here’s the relevant details that are unique to Jesus:
- His saying, “I say to you” (Mark 2:11),
- Jesus’ healing the paralytic by his own power (not calling on God to do it),
- Jesus’ declaration to have the power of himself to forgive the man’s sins (again not calling on God to forgive his sins), and
- The very association of the healing with the forgiveness of sins.
Given the coherence of these details with the common Jesus portrait, we have reason to think it’s rooted in the historical Jesus.
So, on account of the details that go beyond the scope of instructional purposes, their strong suggestion of the presence of an eyewitness, and the criterion of coherence, we can conclude that the healing of the paralytic lowered through the roof is an event that has its origins in the public ministry of the historical Jesus.
Let’s now turn to Jesus’ healing of the paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda, recorded by John (5:1-19). Again, I’ll leave it to you to read the entire narrative.
The first thing this narrative has going for it, like in the previous story, is that it includes non-apologetical details. For example, John reports on the geography of the pools, writing, “Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Hebrew called Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes” (5:2). This adds nothing to the portrait of Jesus. So why include it unless John intended to report accurately the place of the miracle?
Second, this precise knowledge of the features of the area—“by the Sheep Gate a pool,” “called in Hebrew Beth-zatha,” “with five porticoes”—suggests an eyewitness account. Even the knowledge of its connection with the healing cult suggests an eyewitness account. Meier argues along these same lines in his previously mentioned book, stating, “The knowledge of [the pool’s] location and [its] connection with a cult of healing shows remarkable acquaintance with the details of life in Jerusalem in the pre-70 A.D. period” (681).
Meier also notes that the paralyzed man’s behavior meets the criterion of dissimilarity. This criterion states that when a saying or deed attributed to Jesus is dissimilar to the Jewish traditions, the broader historical milieu of the time, or the Christian tradition, it is likely to be authentic, coming from Jesus himself rather than being derived from these other sources.
In the story that we’re considering, the paralyzed man expresses hesitancy to answer Jesus’ question as to whether he wants to be healed. Jesus asks, “Do you want to be healed?” (v. 6). Rather than saying, “yes,” the paralyzed man talks about how he has no one to put him into the pool and his inability to make it to the pool before the others (v. 7). As Meier argues, this doesn’t “fit the stock character of many stereotyped miracle stories.” Meier sees such dissimilarity as important enough to add to the pile of evidence for the historicity of this healing story.
Another detail that supports the historicity of this narrative is that we have extrabiblical corroboration concerning the features of the area that John describes. For example, the Copper Scroll from Qumran confirms that there was an area of Jerusalem called Bethesda, or Bethzatha, and connects it to an area of pools that people entered (see Meier again).
Moreover, there is the nineteenth-century archaeological dig near the church of St. Anne in Jerusalem that unearthed two large pools, along with some smaller pools near them, which scholars confirm include the pool of Bethesda mentioned by John (see Rainer Riesner, “Archaeology and Geography,” in Green, McKnight, and Marshall, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels [Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 1992]), 33-46).
The last thing to point out about this narrative is that it is only one of two miracles in Jerusalem recorded by John. Such restraint in reporting Jerusalem miracles is a strong indication that John is trustworthy concerning this miracle, along with the other Jerusalem miracle of the man born blind, recorded in John 9. If he were fabricating these events, you would expect John to ramp up the miracles in the great city of Jerusalem. Surely, that would make for a great story. Meier puts the argument this way:
It hardly strains credulity to suppose that during Jesus’ ministry there was more than one person in Palestine suffering from some form of bodily paralysis. In fact, if one holds that Jesus’ ministry lasted for more than one yar and that—as most religiously inclined Palestinian Jews would—Jesus regularly went up to Jerusalem for the great pilgrimage feasts, one would be surprised if the famed miracle-worker from Nazareth performed no miracles in and around the Holy City.
What is surprising instead is that, granted the great emphasis John’s Gospel gives to Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem, the Fourth Gospel has only two full-blown miracles set in Jerusalem proper: this healing in John 5 and the healing of the man born blind in John 9. Despite his intense focus on the Jerusalem ministry, John has not gone out of his way to flesh out that ministry with a large number of miracle stories.
So both narratives of Jesus healing paralytics contain details that meet several criteria for historicity: coherence, non-apologetical details, eyewitness testimony, dissimilarity, extrabiblical corroboration, and restraint. When all these criteria are combined between the two narratives, we have a solid foundation to affirm the historicity of the Gospel portrait of Jesus as a healer of paralytics. And if that’s the case, then we have good reason to believe Jesus’ testimony about his self-understanding as God, since his miracles are performed as a direct confirmation to his claims to divinity.