Before Jesus, a pious Jew could help the sick but not feel sorry for him, since it was a punishment from God that the condemned had to accept.
By: Maria Camila Sanchez
March 28, 2024
The legacy of Jesus Christ in medical science marked a key point in the history since he not only cured several sick people, but also put an end to the archaic theory that diseases are the product of divine punishment.
Diseases in the Old Testament
According to biblical literature, the diseases that affected Judea in the years of Jesus Christ were infectious types such as tuberculosis, leprosy, smallpox and scabies. Hebrew medical history comes from the Old Testament.
In the Old Testament, laws and protocols related to health are cited, such as the isolation of infected people, mandatory bathing after handling the deceased or the burial of excrement in places far from homes. It also details that many of the curses that awaited the people of Israel if they fell into disobedience.
Illnesses were seen as divine punishment
In the time of Jesus, blindness, physical defects and especially leprosy were considered diseases impure, therefore, were associated as the product of a divine curse or demonic possession.
Therefore, a pious Jew could help the sick person, but not pity him, since it was a punishment from God, which he had to accept. So much so, that anyone who touched a sick person would later turn out to be incapable of addressing God in prayer. Therefore, they were banished, forced to beg at the city gates.
Jesus, the Jewish doctor
Now, for a large part of society in Judea, Jesus was the doctor who cured both the body and the sick souls, people approached him begging for healing, in the same way, he is the same Jesus who presents himself as a “doctor” in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, as well as in the letters of the apostle Peter.
Such was the power of similarity, that many of those Christians of the second century were passionate about the medical profession, convinced that healing body and soul was something complementary within the religious vocation.
Certainly, those devoted healers took the medical science that they found in Roman culture, already in itself an extension of Greek knowledge, but adding to the recipe their doctrine based on love for the man who preached. Jesus resulting in assistance to sick neighbors.
The teaching of love in current medicine
That is why, based on the treatment that Jesus had with the sick, that hospital and charitable institutions began to be created, establishing the egalitarian condition of medical treatment, without distinctions in care between believers and Gentiles, free men and slaves, poor or rich.
For this reason, in society a doctor is conceived as a source of comfort for the sick and their families. It should be noted that the primitive medicine Christianity was not free from apostasies, superstitions and influences of paganism, which added to the healing practices such as exorcisms, spells, the use of relics, amulets for the healing rites typical of the religious confusion of the period.
Source consulted here.