Paul and Asklepios: The Greco-Roman Quest for Healing and the Apostolic Mission(The Library of New Testament Studies)

What role did offers of physical healing (or the hope of receiving it) play in the missionary program of the apostle Paul? What did he do to treat the many illnesses and injuries that he endured while pursuing his mission? What did he advise his followers to do regarding their health problems? Such questions have been broadly neglected in studies of Paul and his churches, but Christopher D. Stanley shows how vital they truly become once we recognize how thoroughly “pagan” religion was implicated in all aspects of Greco-Roman health care. What did Paul approve, and what did he reject? Given Paul’s silence on these subjects, Stanley relies on a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach to develop informed judgments about what Paul might have thought, said, and done with regard to his own and his followers’ health care. He begins by exploring the nature and extent of sickness in the Roman world and the four overlapping health care systems that were available to Paul and his followers: home remedies, “magical” treatments, religious healing, and medical care. He then examines how Judeans and Christians in the centuries before and after Paul viewed and engaged with these systems. Finally, he speculates on what kinds of treatments Paul might have approved or rejected and whether he might have used promises of healing to attract people to his movement. The result is a thorough and nuanced analysis of a vital dimension of Greco-Roman social life and Paul’s place within it.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Part I: The Greco-Roman Health Care System Chapter 1. Sickness and Disability in the Greco-Roman World Chapter 2. Home Remedies Chapter 3. “Magical” Treatments Chapter 4. Religious Healing Chapter 5. Medical Care Chapter 6. Overlapping Health Care Systems Part II: Judean and Christian Health Care Systems Chapter 7. Judean Approaches to Health Care Chapter 8. Christian Approaches to Health Care Chapter 9. Paul and the Greco-Roman Health Care System Chapter 10. Sickness, Healing, and the Mission of Paul Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Christopher D. Stanley is Emeritus Professor of Theology at St Bonaventure University, USA. He has written or edited seven academic books and numerous articles on the social, literary, and rhetorical context of Paul’s letters.

Review :
This book will be of great value to those interested in ancient medicine, healing practices, disease, and early Christian engagement with such topics. The book will also be of value to those interested in how distinctions were invented in antiquity between “pagans,” “Christians,” and “Jews.” It seems that, when it came to dealing with health crises and serious injuries, such distinctions were often immaterial. This book offers an impressive survey of the different practices and practitioners that were deemed effective in healing sickness and injuries in the Roman empire, in order to situate Paul’s relative disinterest in such issues in a wider context. In so doing, it sheds much light on ancient understandings of health and illness, and on the “magical,” “religious,” and “medical” healers who competed with each other in the world in which Paul preached, and to which he offered his own vision of a life in Christ. This wide-ranging and informative book places the ideas and practices of healing in the New Testament firmly in the context of the many recent discoveries about healing in the Greco-Roman and the Middle Eastern worlds. Christopher D. Stanley’s new book, Paul and Asklepios: The Greco-Roman Quest for Healing and the Apostolic Mission, is broad, thoroughly researched, and engagingly written. It compares many different notions of disease and kinds of healing practices from ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, and other sources, finally concentrating on what we can say, and what we cannot say, about disease and healing in early Christian communities. The study concentrates most on Paul and Pauline Christianity, seeking to explain why we hear so little from Paul and his own or healing practices among his churches. But the study goes much further afield also, including much of what we know from ancient Christian groups and writing otherwise. This study is excellent. It should become a classic of early Christian studies. Christopher D. Stanley’s Paul and Asklepios gives a thorough investigation of Greco-Roman and early Christian healing practices in their historical contexts and then applies concepts of medical anthropology to these developing a unique picture of Paul’s approaches to healing and its importance for the spread of Christianity. To reconcile the conflict between Paul’s paucity of medical advice and Luke-Act’s imagery of Paul the healer, Stanley delves into eight useful scenarios settling on one that captures the nuances of Paul’s missionary activity in a mixed and changing society. Paul and Asklepios. The Greco-Roman Quest for Healing and the Apostolic Mission juxtaposes Paul, the miracle-worker of Acts, with Paul, the theologian of the letters, and firmly embeds early Christianity’s approaches to ritual healing in the pluralistic medical marketplace of the Graeco-Roman world. In doing so, this well-written and well-researched treatise makes an important contribution not only to New Testament Studies but to the History of Ancient Religion and Medicine as a whole. In this one book there is a giant leap forward in Pauline studies. Until now what Paul thought about physical healing – miraculous or otherwise – and its role in his missionary strategy has not been addressed with any thoroughness. With consummate attention to primary material on ‘magical’, religious and medical healing practices, and writing in a highly accessible style, Stanley shows that Paul and the members of his churches were people of their time rather than ours. Our view of Paul and his mission in relation to the healing methods of his day need to change in the light of this important book. Christopher Stanley’s fascinating, well-researched, well-written study of sickness and disability in the Greco-Roman world, of the overlapping and contested categories of of miracle, medicine and magic, and of how Paul and his gentile congregations may have negotiated various health-care options, should be prescribed for all interested not only in the New Testament’s historical context but also in how it depicts care of the human body. The book provides a reliable orientation to the multi-faceted ways in which concerns about health and well-being were treated in the Greco-Roman world. ... Stanley rightly notes the overlapping web of practices that characterized healthcare in the ancient Mediterranean world. Stanley’s patient and detailed journey through the social world of sickness and healing and the literature of that world is illuminating and well worth the journey … [I]ts detailed description of that social world makes Paul and Asklepios a valuable addition to Pauline studies.