Mission and Healing in Historical Perspective

October 2008 H has been an important element in the proclamation of the Gospel from the very beginnings of Christianity. Jesus healed and ordered his disciples to do likewise in order to make the presence of the kingdom of God known, seen, and experienced (Matt. 10:8; Luke 9:2; 10:9). Healing was also one of the dominant features of spreading the Good News during the first centuries of the church’s existence. Summing up his findings on medical matters in the early church, Adolf von Harnack remarked: “Christian religion and the care of the sick have traveled a long way together in the course of history; as a result, they now are inseparable. . . . The influence and future of the church depend on her caring for those who suffer spiritually and physically. . . . This is definitely the meaning of the Gospel of the Savior and of salvation. The Early Church understood it this comprehensively. And the only way that the Old Church remains young and the Young Church remains the old is that it keeps and preserves this understanding of the Gospel in its fullness.”1 Despite the biblical mandate regarding healing and its early importance in spreading the good news of salvation for all (Mark 16:20),2 healing did not generally become a topic of concern for Christian missions until the advent of medical missions in the nineteenth century. There are two reasons for this delay: the disciples were explicitly charged not to make their living by healing (Matt. 10:8), and it took long centuries for medicine to become scientific. Early medicine, suffused with religion, was virtually indistinguishable from the cults of Asclepios and the Greco-Egyptian Serapis, which were extremely popular in Hellenistic times (approximately 300 b.c.e.–300 c.e.). Noted for their greediness and (not unlike today’s health-care system!) their constant demands for more and more donations, early medical practitioners made healing very expensive and thus unaffordable for desperate commoners. To become actively engaged in healing in this context would have compromised in no small degree the proclamation of salvation for all, which includes the command to provide healing dōrean (Matt. 10:8), that is, free of charge. The brother physician-saints Cosmas and Damien, who suffered martyrdom during the Diocletian pogrom about 303 c.e. and whose popular cult emerged in the fourth century, were commonly referred to as “the moneyless” because of their practice of not receiving payment from their patients.