Hector Avalos, Professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, has written two books on the Bible and health: Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East: The Role of the Temple in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel (1995) and Health Care and the Rise of Christianity (1999). His most recent work focuses on disability and the Bible. He spoke with HopeandHealing.org about his life and work.

HH: How did you become interested in health care and Christianity?

HA: I was born into a Pentecostal family in Northern Mexico, and faith healing was an integral part of that tradition. I was indirectly interested in healing from that time on. While doing my PhD work, I was hunting around for a dissertation. At the beginning of my sophomore year of college I developed a very serious illness called Wegener’s Granulomatosis, which is an autoimmune disease. I was quite disabled for most of my 20s and 30s. I was doing my PhD with that disability, and one night I woke up with a terrible cough. Believe it or not, that was the start of it. I thought, “Who could know more than I about illness and health care right now?” I wondered if I could do something about illness and health care in the ancient world, in the Bible.

That was the start of the idea right there. It was an actual experience. At the same time, I became more interested in the healings in the Gospels. What are they doing there? The Levitical health care system described in Leviticus actually disenfranchised a lot of chronically ill people such as lepers.

There were additional restrictions on the blind and the lame entering the temple or the city. Once you disenfranchise a large population of chronically ill people, you have created a new demographic. In the Gospel of Mark, some of the first people Jesus begins his ministry with are the blind, the lame, and the lepers. From this research and my work in Pentecostalism, I saw that that people were attracted to the church because it offered healing.

As I began to research Greco-Roman healthcare, I saw that the problems with their system mentioned in Greco-Roman sources were the problems that were being addressed in the Bible: the cost of healthcare, going to the temple to receive it, crowded spaces and tiny limitations. They address these problems in Greco-Roman literature and the solutions were being addressed right there in the New Testament.

A healthcare system is all of the components that are meant to provide, maintain and restore health in a community. At the birth of Christianity, in the Greco-Roman world, you also had quite a number of healthcare systems that overlapped or were contemporary – you could have a religious approach and a more secular one.

HH: One of the things I was surprised to learn in your book was that there were actual pharmaceuticals at the time.

HA: Yes, we know that from a number of sources. Number one, we have whole books such as a book by a man named Celsus, big compendium on all medical and all the substances that were used. We also have evidence from Christian writers who criticized the pharmaceutical industry. We have discovered little vessels at the Biblical sites. There is a place mentioned just north of Galilee, Bethsaida in John 1:44 where they have uncovered some small vessels which may be for medicinal substances because they are too small to hold large quantities of water.

HH: You have looked at all these healing stories. Which one stands out as the most intriguing?

HA: I have a couple of favorites, but certainly one I found in John 5 - the story of this man who was lame and had been at a pool for some 38 years. He has been there and no one has helped him get into this pool that is supposed to heal you. Jesus comes to him and tells him “You don’t need to do that. All you need is faith, and you are healed.” That also illustrates how even successful healing places could become a problem for patients. When a healthcare location becomes very populous, it really becomes a problem.

The other one is about the woman in Mark 5 who says she had been sick for a lot of years and the physicians could not help her and have been taking all of her money. That is stinging rebuke of Greco-Roman healthcare right there.

HH: Do you see the poor or marginalized as central to all these stories?

HA: Well, yes, I think there was a critique of the traditional Jewish healthcare system in Mark and Luke. If you followed the rules of Leviticus, your family would be fragmented – if you had to kick out lepers, and one of your family members became a leper, your family became fragmented. I see that Jesus was trying to reunite families that have been fragmented by the healthcare regulations that were in place. There are all kinds of healing going on both physical social, and mental. The New Testament does highlight the vulnerable state in which the sick found themselves in that time.

HH: Could you talk a little bit about your latest work on disability?

HA: Disabilities Studies has to do with the differential devaluation of human beings. That is how people are treated differently because of their bodies or certain features of their bodies. It is part of a larger area that I call corporeal studies – studies that center on the embodied experience of human beings. What does it mean to have a body? What is the body that is idealized by society? How do people that deviate from that body become marginalized and stigmatized? It is related to healthcare, but it has a very specific center on differential valuation – how they are treated differently. Our book is titled This Abled Body. The field is pretty new. Ours is meant to be the first systematic studies of how disabilities were configured in the Bible and the ancient healings in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures. It is a co-edited anthology, with many scholars participating. We looked at the whole concept of what it meant to be disabled in the Bible.

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