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2. Gray, Jeffrey Alan, The Psychology of Fear and Stress, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; 1st ed. 1971), 248–53.Google Scholar

3. Lyons, Albert S. and Petrucelli, R. Joseph II, Medicine: An Illustrated History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987), quotation from 313.Google Scholar

4. Research supporting these findings is described in Koenig, Harold G., McCullough, Michael E., and Larson, David B., Handbook of Religion and Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Csordas, Thomas J., “Imaginal Performance and Memory in Ritual Healing,” in The Performance of Healing, ed. Carol, Laderman and Marina, Roseman (New York: Routledge, 1996), 91–113Google Scholar; also see Csordas, , The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).Google Scholar

6. Of course, religion (and Christianity in particular) can also cause suffering. The celebration of suffering in Christian history, and the role of Christian belief in stimulating suffering, is a subject for another paper. Suffice it to say here that if its effect in promoting suffering consistently overshadowed and exceeded its healing effect, Christianity would probably be a dead or dying religion.

7. Bradstreet, Anne, “Meditations When My Soul Hath Been Refreshed with the Consolations Which the World Knows Not,” The Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine, Hensley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 253.Google Scholar

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9. Kelsey, Morton, Healing and Christianity: A Classic Study (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995; orig. 1973), 42–46Google Scholar; also see Dearmer, Percy in Body and Soul (London: Isaac Pitman, 1909)Google Scholar and Ethel Tulloch Banks, The Great Physician Calling (San Diego: St. Luke's, n.d.)Google Scholar. Along with accounts of the healing power of Jesus, the synoptic gospels identify the disciples of Jesus as persons commissioned to heal. Mark 6:7–13 reports that Jesus bestowed “authority over the unclean spirits” on twelve followers who proceeded to “cast out many demons, and anoin[t] with oil many that were sick and healed them.” Matt. 10:1 and Luke 9:1 follow Mark in agreeing that Jesus called twelve disciples to exorcise demons and cure other forms of disease.

10. Drawing from the existential theology of Søren Kierkegaard, Bultmann understood God's relation to the world as a powerful, ongoing activity that required engaged faith to see. Acknowledging Martin Heidegger's argument about the impossibility of ever being able to separate the vital essence of being from finite interpretations of it, he admitted that every act of demythologization involved an inevitable tendency to remythologization. Hoping to stimulate fresh experiences of God's ongoing activity in the world, Bultmann passed over questions about the literal, historical truth of the miracle stories and moved away from the quest for the historical Jesus that had inspired previous generations of New Testament scholars. Rather than thinking of a miracle “as an event which happens on the level of secular (worldly) events,” Bultmann argued that we should think of it “as happening within them.” As he claimed in 1958, “Belief in the almighty God is genuine only when it actually takes place in my very existence.” Locating the meaning of Christian revelation within the existential self, Bultmann believed that “[t]he question of God and the question of myself are identical.” Bultmann, Rudolph, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958)Google Scholar, quotations from 63, 61, and 53; also see Bultmann, Rudolf, Primitive Christianity in its Contemporary Setting, trans. Fuller, Reginald H. (Cleveland: Meridian, 1956)Google Scholar; and Bultmann, Rudolf and five critics, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Bartsch, Hans Werner; trans, and rev. Fuller, Reginald H. (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961; orig. pub. in German, 1948).Google Scholar

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14. This concerted effort to resist injustice did not come out of the blue, Crossan argued, but was grounded in longstanding Jewish teaching. “[T]he kingdom movement was acting absolutely out of the heart of Judaism,” Crossan asserted, “absolutely in obedience to the covenantal God of justice and righteousness (and to) the will of God for this earth here and now.” As one of the “new questers,” Crossan resumed the search for the historical Jesus after Bultmann and other neo-orthodox scholars challenged the historical preoccupation for objectivity with regard to Jesus and called for a more existential approach. Nevertheless, he might be said to follow Bultmann in re-mythologizing the stories of the New Testament for our time. Crossan, John Dominic, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998)Google Scholar, quotation from 304.

15. Avalos, Hector, Health Care and the Rise of Christianity (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999), passim.Google Scholar

16. Twelftree, Graham, Jesus the Exorcist: A Contribution to the Study of the Historical Jesus (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993), 170Google Scholar. For discussion of gospel accounts of Jesus' teaching as a secondary layer of interpretation, see Broadhead, Edwin K., “Echoes of an Exorcism in the Fourth Gospel?” Zeitschrift fur die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 86 (1995), 111–19.Google Scholar

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