The Bible and Beyond Podcast Episode

Healing in Antiquity: Medicine, Magic, Ritual, Demons, and Gnosis

An Interview with Dr. Andrew Crislip

Dr. Andrew Crislip

Ancient concepts of bodily functions differ so radically from modernity, we need a basic overview of these beliefs in order to understand both early Christian and non-Christian healing methods. Two competing concepts were viewed as causes for disease: an imbalance of ‘humors’ in the body and an ‘invasion’ of the normally healthy body.  Jesus’s approach was addressing invasions, such as demons. By the second-century, thinkers had expanded the idea of illness to a broader sense of evil.

Dr. Crislip is Professor of History and Blake Chair in the History of Christianity at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, where he has taught since 2008. He has written and co-authored numerous books, book sections, and peer-reviewed articles on the subject of health care in antiquity. His articles have appeared in such journals as Interpretation, Harvard Theological Review, Biblica, the Journal of the Bible and Its Reception, and Vigiliae Christianae. Professor Crislip’s current work focuses on Egyptian monasticism, ancient healing traditions, and the history of emotions. He has taught also at the University of Helsinki, Union Presbyterian Seminary, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Yale University. He earned his PhD from Yale.

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Interview Transcript

Shirley Paulson

Well, this is really fun for me to introduce to you. Our guest scholar today, Dr. Andrew Klip. He’s going to talk to us about healing in the early centuries after Jesus. And it’s a topic I’m really interested in. I was especially delighted to find that we were both invited to speak at Westar’s Christianity seminar in March of 2024 that focused on healing and antiquity. Dr. Crislip is a Professor of History and Blake Chair in the history of Christianity at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He’s written several books, book sections and articles on this subject and is well known among scholars for his work in this area. I really am excited to have you with us today on the Bible and Beyond podcast. Andrew, thanks so much for being with us.

Andrew Crislip

Thanks for the invitation, Shirley. Really happy to be here.

Shirley Paulson

Great. Alright, so I keep hearing lots of questions about healing from the early centuries of Christianity, and I’m pleased that you’ve come to talk about this because it’s really not an easy topic to describe and we need someone who’s got experience here. So you’re the best one I know to talk to about this. Clearly we have a different kind of medical model in our modern minds that tell us what health should look like, but there are more differences than that particular model between antiquity in the modern world. And I thought maybe you could get us started thinking about healing and antiquity by describing what other factors might be involved in our modern understanding of ancient healing. What do you think?

Andrew Crislip

Sure. I mean there are actually a lot of similarities once you dig through the surface, but there are really important differences that you point to that are hurdles to kind of overcome when we’re trying to engage with early Christian texts. First of all, we have bodies, and fundamentally scholars today like to talk about the social construction of the body and bodies. Fundamentally, we have the same bodies that early Christians did, right?

Shirley Paulson

Good point.

Andrew Crislip

However, the experience of that body could have been very, very different. And I think when we’re looking at ancient sources, whether that’s in the New Testament or later, we need to take really seriously their concepts and metaphors that they use when talking about the body. I mean, so we know we have arteries, we have veins, we have organs that have different functions. We have a brain.

This is where we think. We have a heart, which beats this blood through our arteries. But the ancients thought about their bodies in very different ways and very different concepts. They had organs, but they understood organs to have different functions, but often to be different shaped containers or sponges that really functioned to move around, to contain humors. These liquids that ended up coursing through and pooling in different parts of our body. These are names we might be familiar with. Bile, black bile (the name for black bile is ‘melan-cholē’ or melancholy), blood, and phlegm. And these different hot and cold liquids kind of constituted our health. And when people think about being embodied in the ancient world, it’s good to think about what it might’ve felt like to really feel these different liquids pooling in different parts of your body. It probably was a very different experience. So the nature of the body and the way people thought about their bodies is an important difference.

Going along with this, just to kind of get into a little bit more of the differences and similarities, a lot of people in the ancient world, certainly when you’re coming from a medical point of view, understood health to really be equilibrium, to be a balance of these different humors within the body. So in order to heal, you’re trying to take something that has been disordered. You have these hot and cold, dry and wet factors, forces in your body that get out of balance, often in complicated ways. It’s not just too dry, but too dry and also too wet somewhere else, et cetera. And the goal of medicine is to bring that all back into its original balance. But for every human being you can have a different constitution. So you and I might have naturally different states, naturally different balances. And the goal of the truly insightful physician is to be able to determine our natural constitution and drive those forces back to equilibrium.

Shirley Paulson

Could I bring you to Jesus in this? Because he didn’t ever talk about those things. So what was his healing like that would take all that into consideration or would they connect?

Andrew Crislip

Where I’m talking about an idea of health as equilibrium, often this comes out of elite literature. Greco Roman literature, probably Jews also who were educated in the time of Jesus in Judea would’ve known this literature. This is what you get in the Hippocratic literature. Hippocrates, the founder of medicine or closer to the time of Jesus, the medicine of Galen, who really was the basis for western medicine from the 2nd century to the 19th century. This is the literature of medicine that we have from the elite Greeks and Romans. For a lot of other people, including I think those around Jesus specifically, they probably have a different competing understanding of sickness and health. And this anthropologically would be more of a model, not of balance, but of invasion, that we are sick. So instead of being because my humors or my forces have been out of balance, I am sick because something external has entered my body and must be cast out.

Shirley Paulson:

Okay. So that’s a very different kind of concept, but it was still an ancient part of the…

Andrew Crislip

Very much. So these were two competing concepts, and you can see we still have these competing concepts. When I speak about balance, you can go to a naturopath and get that same or a lot of traditional medicines.  Ayurvedic medicine, traditional Chinese medicine in different ways will evoke this language of equilibrium. But if you go to a doctor often it will be ‘invasion.’ You have a virus that has entered your body and we now need to kill it or we need to take this cancer out of your body. So we have these two ways of speaking today, but they play out differently in the first century and second century. But it’s good to be aware of these competing theories of illness. And even me as an ancient person, I might not be particularly consistent. I might move in between these two ways of thinking about my body in the same way that I do today as a not particularly consistent person might go to a naturopath.  And I might go to my doctor depending on what I need. Or if one doesn’t work, I might go to the other or just do both and not tell them that I’m doing the other thing.

Just do everything and see what works. I think people in the ancient world did that as well. See what works.

Shirley Paulson

That’s a fascinating way of thinking about this. If there wasn’t just sort of one monolithic way of doing this, then, with that kind of concept in mind, would you say that there’s a distinct  difference between maybe the first 300 years after Jesus himself, and then 300 years later? How would you describe that kind of difference? Or was there any difference?

Andrew Crislip

There definitely is a difference in the type of healing narratives we get in the first few centuries and later. Certainly, just to kind of back up, say the woman with the hemorrhage would be an example of this type of duality of invasion versus equilibrium. It says she’d gone, she’d spent all her money going to doctors, and they would’ve been treating the imbalance in her humors. That didn’t work. So then she goes to the last resort, which would be this Messiah walking around, and that works. So you definitely have invasion narratives in the first century in the gospel literature. And in the first three centuries you certainly see references to exorcists within church orders.

This is something that continued to happen within Christian practice, and we see other probably less familiar discussions of healing, certainly in the New Testament. Paul mentions that there are healers within the Corinthian congregation. James mentions that people are anointing the sick with oil, not entirely sure what’s going on there, but we do have this kind of, we might call it spiritual healing, faith healing, exorcism, these types of maybe ritual healing that definitely shows up in the first few centuries.

Shirley Paulson

Would you say that there was some kind of, I don’t know a better word for this, but maybe medical theology going on here, or was medicine mixed in with this spiritual kind of healing? Or were they completely separated?

Andrew Crislip

There is a distinctive medical theology that does not seem to embrace the actual profession of medicine in the first few centuries, if that makes sense. I don’t know if Christians in the second and third centuries are describing themselves as doctors. There’s the old theory that Luke was a physician because he talks a lot about illness and healing. But you do see very early on—and you see this as early as the memory of Jesus—who just says a physician comes to the sick, not to the healthy. So in the early memory of people thinking about Jesus—certainly in the synoptic tradition—thought of him as something of a physician. By the time you get into the second century, you have Christians describing him as christus medicus, that he is the healing messiah, he is the Physician Messiah. But in the first few centuries, this tends to focus more on ritual, that the Eucharist is the medicine of immortality.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, let me ask you about that, because I thought the Eucharist, formal Eucharist became sort of later developed, but you mean right around Jesus time? There was a Eucharist going on.

Andrew Crislip

I’m talking about the early second century. You start to see this language of Christ, the physician, I think as early as Ignatius of Antioch, who’s in the first couple centuries of the second century. And then you start to see it fully developed by the time you get to Origen in the early third century. But you do see this trajectory of people really thinking about the ritual bread and wine and to kind of recall ancient medicine, but largely about diet, not about drugs—well also about drugs—but food was medicine. So the idea of talking about this wine and bread as medicine could have had a medical connotation as well. But you certainly do see this in the second century. And also, I mean, even going back to Paul, he describes, I believe it’s in I Corinthians where he talks about people taking the Eucharist, and they’re spiritually unprepared for it. And they die, or they get sick. So I think even by the 50s, you have some Christians who are thinking of this as a powerful substance, a drug, that can either heal or kill. Actually ‘pharmacon’ the word ‘drug’ can mean poison. It can mean drug, depending on how you use it. So you see this early on that this is a powerfully transformative thing that can hurt you and it can harm you. And definitely by the third century, you have a very developed theology of Christ as the physician, but it’s primarily through ritual.

Shirley Paulson

Wow. Okay. So let’s go back to Jesus a little bit more here. And I appreciate you’re talking about the way Paul is talking about it, but Jesus doesn’t seem to use any of that language. It just seems like he’s casting demons out. But we don’t hear much explanation about it. Do you think that he was participating in this kind of general medical thought? I mean, I do see in the ancient pictures that Jesus is using a wand. Does that get into magic or where’s Jesus in all this?

Andrew Crislip

I don’t honestly don’t see much engagement in medical discourse in the gospel stories.

I think he, as a historical figure, would’ve been working in a very different sort of mode. I think one could plausibly see him as a magician. Certainly people did, but he would probably be a ritual healer and an exorcist. But probably in first century northern Judea, Galilee, among his followers, there wouldn’t have been a great deal of awareness of medical thought. But if you get to the cities, once you get to Paul and urban Christianity, medicine was around and it would be a useful way for Christians to start making sense of what’s going on in churches. And then later, when the gospels are written, you can make sense of what comes out of those traditions.

Shirley Paulson

Okay. Well then let’s go a little bit deeper then into the whole demon world and the exorcism thing. We’ve had several Bible and Beyond sessions discussing demons. What could you say about the role of demons in the prevailing concepts of health and healing?

Andrew Crislip

Well, certainly in the first century, you see this understanding that demons, as this sort of intermediary kind of divinity, is a major factor of disease. And demons and exorcism feature largely in the New Testament texts. As I mentioned before, we do see exorcists as church officials in later church orders. So this is something that continues to be a part of Christian practice. Honestly, I don’t see a whole lot of discussion about exorcism in a kind of reflective way. It’s almost like this is something that people do. They exorcize demons. But I don’t know of a text that describes, from the early period, exactly the mechanisms by which it works. But this is typical, say if we think about magic, which we’ll probably come to talk to you about a little bit. Magicians also never describe how what they do works. It just works. They sometimes describe what they do, but unlike the doctors, there’s not like a second order reflection of ‘how does this ritual work?’ and ‘what’s the theory behind this?’ I think also with exorcism, I don’t get a sense of the theory for how it works. It just does work.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, that’s very, very interesting. Well then let’s go into the whole thing about magic. I mean, today, it’s so easy to think of magic as a child’s birthday party with somebody pulling a rabbit out of a hat. But this is not the kind of magic we’re talking about in antiquity. Maybe you could describe how people understood magic in antiquity. It was pretty prevalent.

Andrew Crislip

Magic was all over the place, though ‘magic’ is one of these buzzwords that scholars like to debate whether we can even use it,like  the debate over that bugaboo, ‘gnostic,’ ‘gnosticism.’ Can we use this anymore? Magic is like that. Or can we even use the word ‘religion,’ since they didn’t have a concept of religion in the ancient world? Magic is similar. Magic is a way that the first ancient Greeks developed to describe ritual practices of other people, foreigners. So ‘mageia‘ comes ultimately from Iran. It was the way Greeks described the ritual practices of those Persian others. But everyone practiced magic if we just think of that as a neutral sort of word. And this is really just the ritual manipulation of nature.

Shirley Paulson

Now, tell us a little bit more, what do you mean by ritual? Because you’ve used that term frequently. Can you give us some examples of what a ritual might look like besides Eucharist? Or is that the only kind of ritual you’re talking about?

Andrew Crislip

Oh, there’s lots of rituals. For example, let’s say one particularly interesting corpus of ritual healing, we could call it healing of a sort, from the ancient world, is love magic. So people were often suffering from the pains of love. And actually, if you look at medicine, love sickness is a major problem in Roman medicine. You see this in Galen. They understood love sickness, quite literally to be a pathology, a form of sickness that could kill you. But we see a lot of this in ancient love magic, which is preserved in Egypt and described in many other places in some novels. So if for example, I am deeply in love and attracted to someone who isn’t… this is unrequited love. Through ritual manipulation, I could take an item of that person’s clothing, something that had touched that person, fingernails, hair, anything that had been in contact with that person, steal that, and incorporate it into a likeness of that person. You see where this is going? I could maybe create a doll of that person, incorporate parts of that, and then hammer nails into body parts of that doll while saying ritual prayers—to get back to demons—to force demons to do my bidding.

Shirley Paulson

Oh my goodness.

Andrew Crislip

And then I could cause those pains of love, sickness to be manipulated, to travel across time and space into the body and soul of my  would-be beloved, to cause her love sickness for me. So that would be a ritual manipulation where you could manipulate one object and have an effect on something far away by, especially in magic, especially likeness—like effects—which we see in modern homeopathy.

Shirley Paulson

Oh my goodness. All right. This is a little bit surprising here. I want to understand a little bit better what you’re saying about the way we can’t use the word ‘magic’ because it’s a scholarly debate going on, which I understand and recognize. Would you say just generally that people would use the term ‘magic’ to maybe accuse someone of using magic, but as opposed to their own proper method?

Andrew Crislip

Correct. Magic is an accusation of other people’s ritual practices. My ritual practices: “Oh, that’s just the way I heal. That’s the way my mother taught me to do it.” Okay. Magic is what those other people do.

Shirley Paulson

Alright.

Shirley Paulson

So if I’m going to call myself superior to those who are doing magic, what would I call what I’m doing, or maybe what Jesus di, or what people did who wouldn’t be doing magic? What would they call that?

Andrew Crislip

I don’t know. They don’t have a word for that. That’s why you see, for example, in a textbook of David Frankfurters and Marvin Meyer who did a great source book of this. I think they called it Coptic Texts of Ritual Power. I don’t think there is an indigenous name for what it is we’re doing when we carry out these ritual texts. It is healing. There are other types of healing that did have names that kind of were related. So for example, we know of a class of healers that were called Root Cutters, and these were probably herbalists. And they may have been something close to naturopaths or magicians. But there were names like that: Root Cutters, and certainly there were women in villages who kind of transmitted these sorts of non-written, often non-written traditions about healing. But there isn’t any name for what we do.

Shirley Paulson

So we’re sort of dancing around a lot of the ways people think about their bodies and think about the way diseases come and go. Another huge concept that I think seems to be involved in all this is a practice of asceticism. Would you call that kind a ritual too? Or how did asceticism fit into this? Maybe you can even define asceticism within here.

Andrew Crislip

So asceticism and the early Christian practice of asceticism really intersects. It intersects with demons, it intersects with healing, it intersects with magic in all sorts of interesting ways. So the practice of asceticism originally had nothing to do with spirituality, really the word askesis in Greek is an old Greek word, and it goes back to that core of Greek identity, which is going to the gym. So askesis is training. And originally it was about athletic training, which in ancient Greece was not entirely separate from medicine. What you’re doing, you’re training your body. What you’re doing to stay healthier, is very closely related. So it has this athletic and competitive sort of connotation, and it really is about the control, the management, both of your body and of course your mind as well. So asceticism is controlling your body and controlling your mind. Okay?

Shirley Paulson

Well, I don’t understand how that works with healing then. If you’re controlling yourself, you just say, are you keeping yourself from getting a disease by practicing asceticism?

Andrew Crislip

Oh, you could be, certainly. So for example, in medical literature, Galen who is a second century physician, one of the things we see in doctors, especially, is that a lot of their writings are attacking other healers for not being the correct kind of physician. And so you have someone like Galen saying, “I’m someone, I call myself a doctor, and you need to come to me for health. But don’t go to the personal trainers. Don’t pay them. They’re not really going to make you healthy.” But you can imagine the personal trainers teaching asceticism at the gym are saying the same thing about Galen! They’re both teaching basically preventative medicine. Now, when you get to the Christian sort of asceticism, which is where we’re kind of going with this. This becomes transformed into Christian practice as a way of controlling bodily processes and controlling the mind in order to regain a lost original sort of preternatural or the health of paradise, a state of health that we have lost through the fall into sin. So by controlling the body, one can get back to that state that Adam and Eve had of pure health before they sinned. So that becomes kind of how asceticism gets taken into this idea of health, within a specifically Christian setting.

Shirley Paulson

It seems a real twist of things to come to that conclusion. Am I right, or was this the natural evolution? I mean, this seems so forced into this way of looking at things.

Andrew Crislip

Maybe I’ve just read so much of this stuff, it just seems natural, but you do see early on, in Hellenistic Judaism, and then into early Christian reception of that, the idea that the world that we live in is a world of sickness because of the fall.

So you see this in certain Christian theologians, but you can see it in something like a text like the Life of Adam and Eve, which is a pseudepigraphic narrative, mainly narrated by Eve—but also Adam’s in it— about what happened in the Garden of Eden. And then what happened immediately after that. And one of the things that’s developed in that text, which—how we date it is, of course, debated as everything is—but the real kind of outcome of the disobedience of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden is the introduction of disease into the world, the introduction of illness which they did not have before. So Adam gets sick at the end of his life. Everyone’s like, what’s happening here? No one had gotten sick before. So at least by the first century of the common era, you have Christians and Jews thinking about why there is so much disease in the world. It’s because of this primal error. So how do we get back to what we want, which is what’s better than health? Well, maybe here on this earth, we can figure a way to manipulate our bodies, to control our minds, to approach that kind of health that Adam and Eve would’ve had at the beginning. So it’s really not a huge leap from the way that people started to think about the Genesis text, which you see of course, in gnostic literature as well.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that link together for us. So then let’s go back into what you brought up now with gnosticism. How does that play into this theology of healing?

Andrew Crislip

I think the Gnostics and the Valentinus played a core role, certainly by the second century Christians, trying to think creatively about the nature of healing, the nature of illness in the world that we live in. And so some texts that listeners to this podcast might be familiar with may be the Secret Book of John, or the Apocryphon of John, sometimes it’s called The Secret Revelation of John.

We see this was really a core scripture of gnostics according to Irenaeus, and we see, in the heart of this Eden narrative, the creation of Adam. And so how is Adam created in the Secret Book of John? Well, he’s created by cosmic demons. These demons or archons—maybe there’s 365 of them,that seems like a good number—each of them, which is the cosmos, all pick a part of the body of Adam and fashion it. And then some of them also pick the emotions of Adam and different rational faculties. So our emotions, our cognition, and all of our body parts are fashioned by these demons. In the gnostic world, how do you get control of the body? How do you get control of the mind and thus escape it and get back to where you came from? That’s through asceticism, through controlling these body parts, through knowing the names of the demons that kind of mark each of our body parts and our thoughts, we can then control our bodies and then escape the domination of the stars and the world in which we live. So you start to see this early asceticism there in these gnostic and then kind of the later Valentinian texts.

Shirley Paulson

Well then with gnosis being so tightly involved in that, do you think that you’re saying that asceticism gives them the path out of it? Or do you think that the gaining of gnosis or the gaining of understanding of something also relates to this? Or is it just simply practicing a ritual?

Andrew Crislip

I think they’re interrelated. The reception of gnosis, of the way I was trained, would be to think of gnosis not as knowledge, but as acquaintance. That’s the way Bentley Layton describes it or translates in his scriptures. And so it’s not book learning. The gnosis is not book learning; it is the knowledge that I get from someone I love. But the knowledge I get from being in a body, this true acquaintance, knowing who you are and knowing your relationship to other people that you love. And so this gnosis and understanding the true nature of yourself are, I think, inextricably linked.

Shirley Paulson

Interesting. Okay. So then to wrap this up, there’s so much more to ask you, but to sort of get all this together in maybe one piece here. How would you say that this research on healing concepts in their early centuries should impact our reading of the New Testament, do you think?

Andrew Crislip

I would love people to stop reading the New Testament as the New Testament, but to incorporate it into the larger trajectory of Christianity beyond the Bible.

If you get what I mean. I think, for example, there’s a big conference that scholars go to, the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and there will be sessions on healing every time. There’s lots of sessions on healing. And overwhelmingly the concern is the Bible, and there will be more papers trying to reinterpret a lot of these, often very few healing narratives in the Bible. There’s so much more out there in early Christianity that I would like to see the New Testament, well, move beyond the Bible, the New Testament read as important early Christian texts, but not separated from the Gnostic and Valentinian and Marcionite, and ascetic reception of that, because I think it’s all part of a common discourse in the ancient world.

Shirley Paulson

That’s really cool that you tied this all together by referring to the name of our podcast, which is the Bible and Beyond.

Andrew Crislip

Yes.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah. I think we feel the same way that the Bible has to be understood in the context of beyond what else is out there that helps us understand it all. That’s really cool. So well then I will look forward to seeing you at that conference and hearing more from you, but I sure do appreciate you stopping by to talk to us today about this amazing topic that I think will go on and on and on. But for right now, you’ve given us a lot to chew on, and I really appreciate your helping us out with this, Andrew.

Andrew Crislip

It’s my pleasure.