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Jesus the Healer: Possession, Trance, and the Origins of Christianity

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When this book first came out it was attacked by some critics. I think this was for a couple of reasons. Davies denies the "Teacher" model as a primary explanation for who Jesus was and he posits that some of the Jesus sayings in the Gospel of John may stem from early sources and possibly Jesus himself. When I first read this book that latter contention rankled me. After all New Testament scholarship usually assumes all low christology to be early and high christology to be late. This works when we consider Mark the earliest gospel because Mark's Jesus is more human there than other gospel presentations of him. There is much good evidence that Mark is earlier than Matthew or Luke and that parts of John are late. The rub here is that Paul wrote before any of this and his christology is very high. It could be that parts of John come from a source or tradition that is early. Davies doesn't try to defend that here because that would be a book in itself and there is just not enough evidence, so far at least, to link pericopes from John to an earlier independent source or tradition. Davies view of the Historical Jesus as a spirit possessed healer brings to mind studies of primitive people and their various trance states. These trance like altered states of consciousness have been found in so many different primitive cultures even in modern times. Jesus's followers believed he had the spirit of god in him and later after his death they sought to have Jesus's spirit come into them and encouraged others to let Jesus's spirit enter them and dwell inside them. Historical Jesus books come and go and many,(most), are forgotten in a few years. I think perhaps this monograph by Davies just might be regarded as a classic some day.

Given that alternate states of consciousness are associated with religions--whether examined cross-culturally or historically--it is somewhat surprising that the Jesus literature has ignored this fact. Until the publication of Davies's book, that is. Why this gaping hole in the literature? Either Jesus scholars have not read widely in the religion literature, or have themselves never experienced alternate states of consciousness--or both. I suspect that the second factor is the more important one--and reflects the fact that most Jesus scholars have come from a socio-economic class that precludes their having had much, if any, contact with contemporary pentecostalists.

I read Davies's book several years ago (shortly after it was published), and the book sticks in my mind because I can't think of another book about Jesus that displays more creativity than Davies's book (not surprising given that creativity is not particularly welcomed in academia, "normal" research being what's prized, as Thomas S. Kuhn has argued). Granted that a creative book is not THEREBY a good book; but Davies's book IS a good book--and for two reasons.

First, it makes a very plausible argument for a facet of Jesus's ministry that has been all but ignored by Jesus scholars. My main complaint is that Davies goes too far in arguing that he is presenting an ALTERNATE view of Jesus. I think, rather, that he should have stated that he was presenting a COMPLEMENTARY view--and then indicated how his particular puzzle piece fits into the larger picture of Jesus, as presented by critical scholars.

Second, one of the problems of the dominant scholarly view of Jesus (that he was an apocalypic) is that it renders Jesus virtually irrelevant for the modern. For why should one today be interested in an individual who, 2000 years ago, (1) made a false prediction (i.e., that God's arrival was imminent), (2) offered an ethic that was premised on the assumption that God's arrival was imminent, and (3) whose ministry was a "bust" (given, e.g., that the "orthodox" Christianity that emerged to dominance had--and has--virtually no relationship with his ministry)? Insofar as Jesus attained alternate states of consciousness, and we can do the same today (also through "natural" means), we can emulate some aspects of Jesus's ministry. (Davies does not state this, but such a conclusion is implicit in his discussion.) Thus, Davies's thesis helps us arrive at a picture of Jesus that makes Jesus relevant for us moderns. Which picture is the only one that is of ultimate interest anyway.

Davies provides some answers to questions that have eluded the first two thousand years of Christianity. While Jesus spoke more about spirit and the Kingdom of God than anything else, traditional Christianity hardly addresses them. We have little chance of understanding Jesus without looking at these phenomena. I do tend to differ with Davies when he states that Jesus was not a teacher. I see no reason why he couldn't teach both verbally and experientially. I would recommend this book to any serious student of the real Jesus, and I am disappointed it is not more widely available. The Parables of Jesus by Richard Q. Ford is a good companion to this book. Ford, like Davies, makes the reader look at the parables in whole new ways.

With rare exceptions (the late John A.T. Robinson comes to mind), the Christian gospel of John is usually assigned a comparatively late date and its understanding of Jesus regarded as a pretty well-developed "high" christology. It is therefore usual, at least among theologically liberal scholars, to dismiss it as almost entirely unhistorical. (Interestingly, this dismissal is usually performed by Christians, of whom I am not one.)

Stevan Davies, himself a secularist New Testament scholar, here makes an interesting argument that such dismissal may be unnecessary. His claim is that Jesus sometimes underwent spirit-possession, speaking and healing while in a "trance state" known as the "kingdom of God."

This view has a number of advantages. First, it allows us to recognize John as a possibly historical source of at least some of Jesus's spirit-entranced speeches. Second, it deals neatly with a problem that faces those who attribute the Johannine speeches to early Christians "speaking in the spirit": why would anyone think they sounded like Jesus if Jesus himself never talked that way? Third, it links Jesus's speech closely to his healings and exorcisms, and therefore resists the tendency to reduce Jesus to a merely "ethical teacher." And fourth, it offers us at least the beginning of a way to assimilate even the Johannine Jesus to the Judaism of his time -- not, indeed, as an academic-Marxist "empowerer of the oppressed," but as a charismatic holy man announcing (perhaps mistakenly) the eschatological reign of God.

Davies may overstep a bit in arguing that even Jesus's parables were therapeutic in nature. Nevertheless there is a foundation even for this claim, at least if we allow that Jesus's parables were not merely tales to be listened to passively but little "story-bombs" intended to bring about spiritual transformations and paradigm shifts.

I do not think Davies provides a full picture either of Jesus or of the "kingdom" he announced; nor does Davies claim to do so (in fact he expressly acknowledges that he has _not_ done so). Nevertheless, though there are parts of the New Testament record that resist assimilation to Davies's account, he has provided a new window into the gospel of John that may prove helpful in the task of placing Jesus properly into his own time and place -- i.e., as the faithful Jew that he was, and not as the "liberation theologian" some modern readers might like him to be.

'Jesus of history as a spirit-possessed healer whose healing was effected by induction of spirit possession analogous to the psychotherapeutic techniques of Milton Erickson'

The are only a handful of books dealing with evidence of the practice of hypnosis in the Ancient World. This is one of the best. Well-written, intelligent and orignal.

This is one of the most intriguing and insightful sources that I have found to date on the topic of spirit possession and trance.

Using the stories of Jesus from the "Gospels" as a foundation, Davies Davies builds with knowledge that we have gained from modern anthropological and psychological studies to construct an incredible understanding of trances, spiritual possession, and healing in the ancient (and even modern) Middle East. What is more amazing is that he does it all without resorting to mystical mumbo-jumbo and spiritual claptrap. He brings these phenomena down to the human level where we can appreciate them for what they are: part of the human experience. Even more amazing is that the book is readable.

Whether you are a wide-eyed religious fanatic needing a bit of grounding in the real world or a hard-core skeptic needing to understand that trances and "possessions" are real phenomena rooted in human psychology and brain chemistry this book will open your eyes to a very different view of the human world around you.

In titling his book Jesus the Healer, Stevan Davies means to swap out one tenacious yet, he argues, inadequately examined metaphor for another more revealing and less presumptive one. The last century's quest for the "historical Jesus" has most often been conducted under a single ruling rubric--that of "Jesus as teacher." The result, the author informs us, has been to call forth a specific set of sometimes erroneous interpretations of Jesus' words, deeds and motives that have since firmly planted themselves in the popular imagination as a truth about the person of Jesus. Davies makes the provocative point early and often that if Jesus had had a coherent message, a central teaching, "...and neither we nor his known near contemporaries know for sure what it was, he ought not to be thought, first and foremost, to have been a great and challenging teacher." (13)

Yet a ruling metaphor is necessary; utilized precisely because we have, after two millenia of arguments, no single idea of what Jesus' message was. Davies' approach in making a switch is to build from the foundation of what scholars agree is historical bedrock about the person of Jesus--that he was regarded during his life by some as a prophet, and by some as an exorcist and healer. And that it's likely that Jesus himself believed he was a prophet (45).

In confronting the question, How did he heal? the author's working assumption is that cultural attitudes, practices and the actual psycho-physical manifestations associated with healing, exorcism and prophecy are inexorably related, even mutually constitutive, within a historical context. Davies' approach to conveying how this is so is guided by a jointly anthropological and psychological examination of spirit and demon possession. Importantly, he looks at how possession would have been perceived in Jesus' time, as well as how it is construed today. "Anthropology can provide explanations for the social relationships among persons who experienced [states of possession]. Psychology can help us understand those states apart from the Christian language by which they are described in our texts." (205)

The efficacy of the book hinges on the fact that Davies walks with one foot in each of the camps. That is, the scholarship is made credible with the most-often-effective balancing of contemporary and ancient, psychological and historical/anthropological perspectives. The secular reader will be comfortable knowing that his arguments are not based around investigation of Jesus' nature, but rather they stick to what we can know about who Jesus thought he was, who his contemporaries thought he was, and how--and, to a lesser extent, why--common consensus as to what a prophet is and does has been reified by traditional mythemes of Jesus' life.

The next question he asks--one which would be useful to aim at other studies of
biblical prophets who experienced possession--is this: if we can say that Jesus was, and/or that people thought he was, at times possessed, how was it determined what sort of entity or force possessed him? Davies supplies copious quotes from the New Testament to demonstrate that a "demon paradigm" was common during that time period, and a "prophet paradigm" was much more rare. So why did Jesus' cronies conclude that the "Spirit of God" rather than a demon was speaking through him? Putting on his self- statedly ill-fitting exegete hat, Davies supplies us with one specific reason why we should wonder this: the Gospel stories that include Jesus being "driven" into the desert by the Spirit. "The Greek word Mark uses [for this] has connotations of being violently driven against one's will." (63) Davies opens up a tantalizing area of inquiry here, but doesn't fully flesh out the line of thought.

In contrast, one of his more developed arguments has to do with the significance of Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist. He again engages what he terms the "logic of possession" as he devotes a meaty chapter to his intriguing psychotherapeutically informed theory of the significance of Jesus' "reception of the Spirit" at his baptism (an episode that he holds is just as historically certain as the fact of the crucifixion). In brief, the book explains that the manner in which John the Baptist conducted baptisms established a patterned response for people who were present. Participants were first subjected to self-denigration, which then called them to repentance and finally led to a perceived self-transformation/revelation. That Jesus' first spontaneous possession experience occurred in this setting among a group of onlookers primed for transformation was a fortuitous and circumstantial beginning to his career, says Davies. Moreover, citing studies of those who speak in tongues as evidence of an analogous patterned cultural phenomenon, he says that a person can expect the feeling of revelation to be accompanied by a sense of "mastery" and delusion of ego omnipotence. He needn't spell out his diagnosis of Jesus. The implications couldn't be more clear. Davies' credibility wanes a bit here, as he could stand to acknowledge that some would regard the correlation of glossolalia as studied in the modern/contemporary era to possession trance as manifested in early Christianity as loose. Too, if he is going to use Western psychological theory, he could as well have cited yet another not-uncommon psycho- spiritual outcome of spiritual revelation, which is that of the ego dissolution, rather than inflation.

This last point underscores one of a few strings the book leaves dangling. Davies deserves credit for consolidating a plethora of evidential pieces into a convincing case for an important historical reframe, and for bringing to a subject so inherently and acutely polemical an almost contagious enthusiasm such that only the most intransigent reader, whether s/he agreed with him or not, wouldn't concede that his findings are not at least interesting. But some of his evidence needs closer examination. For example, in his sometimes hasty culling of evidence from studies of possession within cultures far and wide, he glosses over such niggling points as the necessary comparison of demographics. In another section, in effort to delineate the specific types of healing and exorcisms that he is dealing with, Davies identifies the ailments of Jesus' "clients" (to use his term) rather sweepingly as somaticization and conversion disorders. He refers to some of these disorders as "dissociative" even though they would not seem to qualify as such by many standards (e.g., fever, excessive menstrual bleeding, deafness and blindness). (72) Also, much hangs on his arguments that the majority of demon-possessed individuals whom Jesus exorcised came from "intolerable circumstances of social subordination within their family groups" and also that it was likely that many of these were women (85); and further, that many of them came to be his followers. (108) But while he gives a footnote's nod to Joanna Dewey's (author of "Jesus' healings of women") questioning of the degree to which this is a characteristic of a male perspective of women as, by and large, more demon-possessed than men (85), he never seriously engages the question of how he or anyone could safely know that "bad families" were responsible for so many of Jesus' clients cum followers. Overall, he is comfortable naturalizing possession-trance into a psychic safety valve.

Despite his upfront disclaimer as to his lack of exegetical background, Davies nevertheless verges into theological territory in some sections of the book, though giving way for the most part to psychosocial explanations in the end. One example is his treatment of the perennially confusing passages from Luke 12:51-53 and14:26-7, Mark 3:32-25, et al., that invoke a Jesus advocating familial hatred. Jesus' uncharacteristic vitriol is accounted for within Davies' theory that the sayings attributed to Jesus were situationally aimed. That is, if we interpret them as meant for specific individuals--his clients who were maligned by bad families--Jesus is then seen as having acted as both their social worker in giving them permission to leave the situations of abuse to join a surrogate family with God as the father, and as a surprisingly skilled therapist. Davies insinuates that Jesus was using a tactic called "paradoxical therapy" by which the affirmation of the cause of the affliction by the therapist to the client gives control back to the client. This not only accounts for those harsh anti-filial statements attributed to Jesus, but further, attributes to them a healing effect. (143) If we buy that Jesus could have been that prescient, perhaps a honing of the ruling metaphor to "Jesus as savant psychotherapist" is in order!

The book is nothing if not ambitious. As if it were not enough to historically contextualize and systematically re-construe Jesus as medium-healer, Davies also manages to tackle in 210 pages a handful of other pivotal Gospel topics. To give one example, in analyzing the prevailing meanings of the Kingdom of God he presents two major interpretations, again considered in contexts both ancient (using Johannine and Pauline literatures) and modern. Seen as metaphor for both a future time, and as experiential reality in the here and now, they are juxtaposed as realist and idealist. Davies further argues that Jesus had in mind a fusion of the two--a Kingdom within as well as a future "objective geopolitical event" (205-6)--and that this holistic version was bifurcated after his death. The former became a theory or a belief, rather than an experience available to all in the present, with, as we know, enormous ramifications for all subsequent history. This is one of the book's more satisfying pieces of intellectual history, a point where the reader finds substantial payoff for having made the journey. That it comes in the final 3 pages of the book's conclusion suggests that Davies had more story to tell.

Overall, with Jesus the Healer, Davies manages to produce a compelling read for a wide range of readers and audiences. Those interested in the phenomenon of possession will find scores of intriguing cross-cultural studies here. Davies makes active use of the work of anthropologists Felicitas Goodman and Erika Bourguignon. (One cited study purports to define which types of societies are most prone to give rise to possession- trance. Though the societal attributes--sedentary agricultural societies with populations greater than 100,000, hierarchical social stratification and political integration (40) are so generalized that making a positive correlation to 1st century Palestine has to be seen as a bit stretchy.) For a newcomer to the topic of the historical Jesus as pursued in religious studies, the book introduces several heavyweights in the field such as Richard Horsely, Paul Hollenboch and John Dominic Crossan, whose concurring psycho-Marxist reading of exorcism Davies flatly refutes. He allies himself chiefly with the scholarship of J.P. Sanders with whom he is a tad blithe in simply agreeing. Unfortunately, the text is not indexed, making it not user-friendly for referencing. Those who read it for what it does provide in abundance, however will certainly be enriched.

There is much to be commended in any book which focuses on the historical Jesus as a healer. The two most secure pieces of Gospel evidence are that (1) Jesus proclaimed and taught about the "Kingdom of God" and (2) he was a successful exorcist-healer. Deny either of those, and you may as well trash the Gospels. Davies recognizes this quite clearly and has attempted to come to terms with it. Unfortunately, he misassimilates a lot of fine knowledge.

Davies uses contemporary psychology to account for the successful nature of Jesus' healings and exorcisms: Blindness, deafness, loss of speech, and paralysis were "conversion disorders" occurring as interiorizations of guilt and despair, and, likewise, demon-possessions were "multiple personality disorders" occurring as coping mechanisms for abusive family relationships. He then argues that the function of Jesus' parables was to heal such disorders (!). He sees the Kingdom of God as a therapeutical state of religious trance, effected by the parables. A wild and far-fetched claim like this calls to mind some of the liberal questers of the nineteenth century. To be sure, Jesus spoke in parables, and he healed people, but one had little to do with the other. There is also a problem with Davies' misuse of modern Western psychology, applying it to the ancient Middle-East. Abusive family relationships would not have caused many multiple personality disorders in antiquity, where all people -- men, women, and children alike -- were conditioned to defend their honor constantly and forcefully against abuse and attacks. Ancient Jews were not "psychologically damaged" by the same kinds of things we are today. There is nothing wrong with using psychology to explain demon-possession, but Davies doesn't have the correct psychological model.

On the whole, Davies has pushed a lot of Gospel data through a single (and not entirely correct) interpretive sieve. Jesus was indeed a dynamic and successful exorcist-healer. But he was also a teacher. He told parables to empower people living under oppression, not heal them of illnesses. None of his teachings in any way diminish his role as a healer.

Stevan Davies is just another conspiracy theorist and his work concerning the gospel of Thomas has already been debunked. Apparently, with this book, he believes that all of the people whom Jesus healed were merely suffering from psychological disorders. This means of course that a cripple, a leper, and even a man who was born blind were healed due to the placebo effect. Oh, and let's not forget that Jairus' daughter must have REALLY wanted to come back to life again. How convenient..
Further, he believes that Jesus was "possessed" by God and came to notify others as to how they could become "possessed by God", which is not what you originally stated. You originally said that ALL men ARE Gods and that he came to make them aware of this by means of this "Christ Consciousness" crap. So if we already are Gods, why then do we need to be taught how to become possessed by God? What's more, Historians don't appear to agree with anything the man has to say as far as his translations go. He is about as credible as Sitchin.