Mark’s graphic report of the impression produced by Christ's first appearance in the synagogue of Capernaum may be cited as an instance. ‘What is this? A new teaching!—with authority He commandeth even the unclean spirits, and they obey Him.”! This is a veritable reminiscence, and it points to a double surprise created by an original style of preaching, and by an unprecedented power. Still more significant are the theories invented to explain away the power. The Pharisees accounted for it, as displayed in the cure of demoniacs, by the suggestion of an alliance with Beelzebub. Herod said: “It is John whom I beheaded risen from the dead and exercising the power of the spirit world”. The one theory was malevolent, the other absurd, but the point to be noticed is the existence of the theories. Men do not theorise about nothing. There were remarkable facts urgently demanding explanation of some sort.
The healing acts of Jesus then, speaking broadly, were to begin with facts. How they are to be explained, and what they imply as to the Person of the Healer, are questions for science and theology. It is not scientific to neglect the phenomena as unworthy of notice. As little is it scientific to make the solution easy by under-statement of the facts to be explained, as, ε.σ., by viewing demoniacal possession as an imaginary disease. Demoniacal possession might be an imaginary explanation of certain classes of diseases, but the dis- eases themselves were serious enough, as serious as madness and epilepsy, which appear to have formed the physical basis of the malady.
Finally, it is not to be supposed that these healing acts, though indubitable facts, have no permanent religious value. Their use in the evidences of Christianity may belong to an antiquated type of apologetic, but in other respects their significance is perennial. Whether miraculous or not, they equally reveal the wide-hearted benevolence of Jesus. They throw a side light on His doctrine of God and of man, and especially on His conception of the ideal of life. The healing ministry was a tacit but effective protest against asceticism and the dualism on which it rests, and a proof that Jesus had no sympathy with the hard antithesis between spirit and flesh.
12. Before leaving the topic of historicity, it may be well here to refer to a line of evidence which, though not worked out, has been suggestively sketched by Professor Sanday in his Bampton Lectures
1 Mark i. 27.