Stevan L. Davies; Continuum; New York; 1995.
by James A. Bacon
After 200 years of scholarship, the quest for the historical Jesus seemingly has led us nowhere. Thousands of monographs have scrutinized Jesus’ words in every conceivable social, political and symbolic context, yet the academic community is nowhere near consensus on who Jesus was or what he said. Far from coalescing in agreement, the scholarly movement is schisming with more competing theories about the historical Jesus than ever before — creating more diverse schools of thought than 2nd century Gnosticism! Jesus as counter-cultural wisdom sage. Jesus as peasant Jewish Cynic. Jesus as Pharasaic rabbi. Jesus as anti-patriarchal communalist. Jesus as eschatological preacher.
The problem, suggests Stevan L. Davies in Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance and the Origins of Christianity, is the prevailing paradigm of Jesus as a teacher. Most research is based on the flawed assumption that it is possible to uncover a core set of sayings attributable to the historical Jesus and that those sayings form a coherent point of view. That paradigm, suggests Davies, has led to conceptual chaos.
With Jesus the Healer, Davies cuts the knot. Perhaps we shouldn’t try to understand Jesus as a teacher, he suggests. Perhaps we should look at him as a healer. Because most scholars have dismissed reports of healing miracles as legendary or allegorical accretions to the historical Jesus, they have devoted little effort to understanding them. But Davies believes that Jesus did, in fact, heal people of common psychosomatic disorders. The fact that Jesus’ contemporaries provided a supernatural explanation for those healing events — they thought that he healed by the power of God — should not dissuade us in the 21st century from seeking a naturalistic explanation.
Davies’ key thesis can be summarized as follows: Jesus experienced repeated occurrences of an altered state of consciousness, a phenomenon, common in agricultural societies, that anthropologists have identified as a possession-trance. Jesus attributed this altered personality/mental state to possession by the spirit of God. Those who believed in him accepted this explanation. Simultaneously, the Jews of Galilee and Judea suffered from widespread “somatization disorders,” also characteristic of pre-industrial societies, in which extreme stress or anxiety expressed itself in the form of chronic blindness, deafness, paralysis, muscle weakness or excessive menstrual bleeding. The Jews of the 1st century regarded these maladies as punishment for past sins. Jesus could heal people because they believed that the spirit of God possessing him had the power to forgive sin.
Likewise, inhabitants of the Mediterranean world suffered an affliction characterized by fits of shouting, flailing and other uncontrolled behavior, which they interpreted as demon possession. Davies applies the modern label of Multiple Personality Disorder. The spirit-possessed Jesus could cure this disorder because his contemporaries believed that God was more powerful than the demons. We can accept the healings as real even if we do not accept the early Christians’ supernatural explanation for them.
With this radical perspective, Davies reinterprets the significance of numerous New Testament passages. Like other scholars, he regards Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptism as a transforming event. But he draws unconventional conclusions from it. In all likelihood, the baptism induced in Jesus a possession-trance that he interpreted as a visitation by the spirit of God. Mark recalls the incident this way:
And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. (Mark 1: 10-11)
Early Christians did not invent this story, Davies argues. Jesus experienced a powerful, emotional event, which he described using the images of a dove and a voice from heaven. His disciples simply repeated his words until they found fixed form in the Gospel of Mark. The baptism marked the first of Jesus’ possession trances and the beginning of his public career as a conduit for the spirit of God. Thus began a virtuous cycle. As Jesus healed people, he gained credibility for his claim to be possessed by the spirit of God. In turn, that power of belief, or “faith” as Jesus called it, made people psychologically predisposed to being healed — which increased the likelihood that he would heal them.
It is an axiom of New Testament scholarship today that Jesus did not regard himself as the “son of God.” Early Christians supposedly applied that label years or decades after his death. But once we grant that Jesus and his contemporaries believed that he was possessed by the “spirit of God,” Davies argues, it is but a small step to suggest that Jesus also referred to himself as the “son” of God. If Jesus did, in fact, apply this label to himself, then a host of sayings attributed to him — the spirit sayings in John and the Son-of-God sayings — are historical. The early Christians may have set those sayings in a different theological context and imparted a different meaning to them, but they did not fabricate them outright.
Applying insights from anthropological theory to the phenomenon of demon possession, Davies also provides a novel take on Jesus’ exorcisms. Cross-cultural studies suggest that demon- or ancestor-possessions usually affect individuals in socially subordinate family roles: primarily women and children. People having difficulty coping with their domestic situations find that demon possession gives them power because the people around them fear and respect the demon. Davies contends that this theoretical profile fits the evidence of the New Testament. With one exception, which will be noted momentarily, demoniacs in Galilee were women and children. Many of the women whose demons Jesus expelled, notably Mary Magdalene and Joanna wife of Chuza, subsequently became his followers. From this, Davies hypothesizes that Jesus recruited many of his disciples from among those he healed. His exhortation for people to abandon their families — often viewed as a call to reject earthly priorities and embrace heavenly ones — must be viewed in this new light. Jesus was speaking to people who already hated their families. By leaving their families, people removed themselves from the stress-inducing environments that caused the demon possession in the first place.
As an aside, Davies comes out swinging against the notion of demon possession as a symptom of colonial exploitation and anti-Roman nationalism. Proponents of this school of thought cite the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac who went by the name of Legion. In this story, Jesus expelled the demons, which leaped into a herd of swine — a gentile animal — which then drove them to destruction in into the Sea of Galilee. Davies finds it preposterous to draw a connection between demon possession and the injustices of “the colonial social system.” First, as an anti-Roman allegory, the story of the Gerasene swine is obviously a literary construction. Davies attributes the story to anti-Roman insurgents active in Galilee during the Great Revolt in 66 A.D., more than 30 years after Jesus’ death. The colonial system was a remote abstraction to Galilean peasants: There were no Roman troops stationed in Galilee during the reign of Herod Antipas. While Galilean peasants undoubtedly suffered under a heavy load of taxation, there is no indication that they paid more taxes than peasants elsewhere or suffered any greater psychological trauma from their burdens. Further, Davies might have added, demon possession (and analogous behaviors such as ancestor possession) is so ubiquitous across time, cultures and forms of political organization that it cannot be tied to a colonial-imperialist context. As Davies rightly points out, the capacity for trance-possession is so universal that it must be regarded as part of the genetic endowment of the human species.
Spirit possession certainly was a defining characteristic of the early Christian movement. As Davies reminds us, the foundational event of Christianity was the Pentecost: the mass spirit possession of Jesus’ followers. Later, the ability to receive the spirit was a requirement for membership in the Christian community. And it was Paul’s belief that he was possessed by the spirit of Jesus that allowed him to assume a leadership position in the early church. Yet in their quest for the historical Jesus, contemporary scholars downplay the importance of the holy spirit in the origins of Christianity — even though the 4th century church formally bequeathed the “Holy Ghost” co-equal status with God the father and Jesus the son in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
Davies’ core thesis seems incontrovertible. Anyone steeped in anthropological theory will find it slap-in-the-forehead obvious that Jesus did experience possession trances similar to those of priests and shamans documented in hundreds of other cultural settings. In his enthusiasm to apply this insight in re-reading the New Testament, however, Davies does push the envelope. His theory tying Jesus’ exorcisms to his renunciation of family bonds is bold and intriguing, though still somewhat speculative. It warrants further investigation by scholars willing to subject it to close scrutiny.
Less persuasive is Davies’ endeavor to apply insights from Ericksonian psychotherapy to understanding the function of Jesus’ parables. In a nutshell, Davies argues that Jesus’ parables are best understood as paradoxical statements designed to jar people from conventional ways of looking at the world. By restructuring thought patterns in a technique similar to Ericksonian therapeutic practice, Jesus made people more receptive to achieving their own altered states of consciousness. It is one thing to experiment with such techniques in a clinical setting, however, and another to do so while preaching to a crowd. Davies seems to be stretching the evidence here. It would bolster his case if he could demonstrate that shamans and healers in other cultures successfully employed similar strategems.
Finally, Davies is too quick to reject the work of Morton Smith (to whom he dedicated his book) who argued in Jesus the Magician that Jesus performed his works of healing and exorcism through the same kind of ritual magic found in the Egyptian papyri and ostraca. Davies says that he doesn’t find any evidence of ritual magic in the New Testament, but he doesn’t look very hard. There are abundant signs to suggest that Jesus was a devotee of throne mysticism, a spiritual discipline in which practitioners entered a trance for the purpose of ascending through the heavenly spheres and looking upon the face of God. By learning the names of angels and demons, masters of this discipline believed they could control them and exercise their power to perform mighty acts on earth. Various sources hint that Jesus initiated selected disciples into secret teachings associated with the ascent to heaven. And the Jews’ Beelzebub accusations may have been based on observations about Jesus’ thaumaturgic technique that were suppressed in the Gospel accounts. These topics warrant farther research, not being dismissed out of hand.
Still, all things considered, Jesus the Healer represents a breakthrough in the search for the historical Jesus. Davies makes a compelling case that Jesus experienced trance-possessions and believed himself to be possessed by the spirit of God. Mainstream scholarship must confront his challenge of re-interpreting the New Testament in light of this paradigm-shattering insight or run the risk of irrelevance.
Sept. 9, 2000