A Data Analysis of Healing in the Bible
In 1994, a sixteen-year-old boy named Billy Best sold some skateboard parts, baseball cards, and other belongings and fled his hometown of Norwell, Massachusetts, to avoid undergoing chemotherapy. He didn’t tell anyone he was leaving or where he was going. The story became a national sensation.
Billy had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and had undergone five chemotherapy treatments. He had lost twenty pounds and felt like the chemo was killing him. He had also seen his Aunt Judy suffer through chemotherapy and die.
Billy was discovered in Houston, Texas, a month later and agreed to return home only after his parents promised not to make him go through any more chemotherapy. His doctors later sued his family to force him to undergo treatment, but a judge ruled in Billy’s favor.
I read Billy’s story in his book titled The Billy Best Story[1] in one day. I had never read a book in a single day before, but I was incredibly motivated. It was one of many cancer and healing-related books I either completely or partially read over the course of two years as I walked alongside my ex-wife, Diane, in her battle with pancreatic cancer.
The thing that stood out to me was how Billy picked a treatment approach after deciding to forgo chemo. He had received so much media coverage that millions of people had heard about him, and a good number of them wrote letters to him. He had five shopping bags filled with them. It occurred to him that these were a great source of information, because many of them contained advice from people who claimed they had beaten cancer with “alternative” cures.
Billy initially thought many of these letters were from quacks, but the more he sifted through them, the more patterns began to emerge. He started to sort the letters into piles, and the pile that became the largest was from people who felt that diet had helped them beat their cancer. More specifically, he noticed that people urged him to eliminate four things from his diet: animal protein, dairy products, white flour, and sugar. Another thing that was mentioned repeatedly was the addition of Essiac tea.
To make a long story short, Billy heeded the advice in these letters, added one other thing to his self-prescribed treatment (a solution known as 714X), and has lived cancer free for over 20 years.
Billy had basically done a manual data analysis. While I’m unsure whether he precisely counted the number of letters that contained each of the treatments he chose to follow, it was clear to him that certain commonalities stood out when he sorted the letters into piles. His approach was simple yet powerful.
Since I believe in the ultimate authority of the Bible and the importance of its application to all areas of our lives, I started gathering healing-related scriptures from the Bible not long after Diane was diagnosed. Reading Billy’s story made me wonder if there was a way that I could analyze these passages for pearls of wisdom that could help Diane in her battle with cancer. Given the seriousness of her illness, I wanted to know if there was some way that Diane could experience a miraculous healing.
In particular, I wanted to answer the questions that were gnawing at me. For example, does God want Christians healthy like prosperity Gospel proponents claim? If so, why are so many them chronically sick? Does God make people sick and, if so, why? What were the purposes behind the miraculous healings so abundantly described in the New Testament?
As I collected scriptures in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, I assigned every passage[2] to one of four categories: those that describe one or more miraculous healings (i.e., a healing account), those that mention healing and/or health but don’t describe a healing account, those that seem related to health and healing without specifically saying so, and those that are not healing related but are still worth considering. I looked at 330 passages of scripture in all.
Next, I started drilling down on the healing accounts to determine what each one said about who was healed, who did the healing, and what was the cause of the sickness. I paid attention to the outcomes and consequences of each account to get a sense for the purpose behind those healings.
For each healing account, I tried to note everything that was mentioned. For example, when Jesus healed a government official’s son, I noted, among other things, that it was a specific healing account, that the healer was Jesus, that the sick person was healed because of the faith of a relative, that the healing was performed remotely, that the result was the healed person’s family coming to faith in Christ, and that it was called a miraculous sign.[3]
What follows are some highlights of the results of my data analysis of the miraculous healings described in the Bible.
There are 51 healing accounts in the New Testament. Approximately three quarters of these (38) are in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and all but one of the remaining accounts are in the book of Acts. Many New Testament healing accounts are described two or three times, raising the total number of descriptions to 85. Only two of the healings in the four Gospels involve a healer other than Jesus.
The Old Testament contains 21 healing accounts captured in 23 descriptions. Most of these involve a single person being healed.
Prayer was part of only two of the 51 New Testament healing accounts. Jesus never prayed for anyone He healed, and He never asked God to heal them. He simply healed the sick. Only twice did one of His followers pray prior to healing someone. The contents of those prayers are unknown. In one case, the prayer was followed by a command, and in the other, it was followed by touch. On one occasion following a healing, Jesus indicated that certain types of healing require prayer and possibly fasting. He provided no instructions, though, for determining when prayer is needed.
Jesus used spit in three of the healings he performed. There was more spitting than praying going on.
When Jesus sent out twelve — and later, 72 — disciples, He commanded them to heal — not pray for — the sick. He also told them to preach the Gospel and pray for God to send out more workers. Sending, preaching, and healing were tied together in the two healing accounts in the Gospels that did not involve Jesus as the healer.
The most common actions that were part of New Testament healing accounts were short, bold proclamations and commands (described in 27 accounts), as well as some form of touch (described in 22 accounts).
The majority of New Testament healing accounts are silent on the cause of healing.
Faith is the most often cited reason for healing given in New Testament healing accounts, but only in 20 percent of the healings. When combined with what could be called “acts of faith,” faith explicitly and implicitly plays a role in approximately 60 percent of New Testament healing accounts. Acts of faith include things like people coming to a healer and pleading for help or people being brought to a healer by a family member or friend.
The faith of the sick person, a loved one, and the healer are all cited as factors in healings. Faith could be considered a prerequisite for healing if we assume that all the New Testament healers (i.e., Jesus, his disciples, and a few other men of note) had great faith.
The other significant factor in healing accounts is something I call “God factors,” which includes things like God, His power, and the power He grants to others in His name.
Repentance or the confession of sins is never mentioned as a factor in, or prerequisite for, New Testament healings.
Old Testament healing accounts provide much more detail on the causes of sickness than New Testament healing accounts. The vast majority of sicknesses described in these accounts were due to either sin and rebellion, punishment of Israel’s enemies/oppressors, or God’s desire to teach or affect something.
While New Testament healing accounts offer less insight into the cause of sickness, the devil, evil spirits, and even Jesus are mentioned. Sin and God are also implied in two respective accounts.
There are a rich variety of outcomes and consequences mentioned in New Testament healing accounts. We concluded from them that healings
were miraculous, undeniable, awe-inspiring, and widely known.
validated Jesus and His disciples’ message.
aroused praise and worship of God.
revealed who God is (i.e., a compassionate, merciful, and loving God).
demonstrated that love and compassion are more important than the law.
provided a foretaste of God’s coming Kingdom, a Kingdom without sickness, pain, or death.
A variety of ailments were healed in New and Old Testament healing accounts, and their seriousness is remarkable (including blindness, paralysis, and leprosy). In New Testament accounts, Jesus and His followers were not in the business of healing unseen minor ailments while leaving those with obvious and profound conditions unattended. Quite the contrary, The New Testament emphasizes their focus on the most challenging health issues, including sometimes raising the dead.
Jesus is the dominant healer in Bible healing accounts, followed by God, the disciples/apostles, and a handful of other individuals. In the New Testament, only three people other than Jesus and the original twelve disciples are mentioned by name as healers — Paul, Philip, and Ananias. The apostle Luke also describes Jesus sending out 72 “other” disciples to heal the sick.
The variety of people who were healed in Bible healing accounts is noteworthy, including individuals and crowds, men and women, children and adults, Israelites and foreigners, kings and beggars, rich and poor, commanders and servants, madmen and sane people, and army commanders and mothers.
The speed of healing was noted in the majority of New Testament healing accounts involving single-person healings, and it was always either instant or very quick. The healings were also complete, not partial.
In a small number of healing accounts, Jesus told the healed person(s) not to tell anyone about their healing. In an even smaller number of accounts, He told people to do the opposite. In one particular healing, He said both.
Only one New Testament healing account ends with the healed person being told to stop sinning. Also, after healing a beggar at the Temple, Peter told the crowd to repent and believe.
The New Testament includes far more accounts (15) of people being released from spiritual oppression than the Old Testament (1).
Jesus and his disciples never solicited money from the people they healed nor did they take up an offering before or after healings.
A small number of healing accounts (four in the New Testament, one in the Old Testament) were remote, i.e., the healer was not in the same physical location as the sick person when they were healed.
In five New Testament healing accounts, healing was preceded by one or more questions posed by the healer to the sick person or a member of their family. All of these exchanges were very brief. There were no extended question and answer sessions to assess a person’s condition.
None of the New Testament healing accounts tell us what happened to the people who were healed later in life. We have no sense if any of their ailments returned.
While the data analysis is revealing, it does not give us a full picture of healing, health, and wellness or the potential for miraculous healing. For that, we need to consider healing-related and other scriptures along with our data analysis results.
I plan to share my broader analysis in a future blog post. If you’d like to see these results sooner, please check out my book entitled Healing Plunge: An In-Depth Analysis of Healing in the Bible.
FOOTNOTES: [1] The Billy Best Story, Beating Cancer with Alternative Medicine, Billy Best & Linda Conti, Sandcastle Memoirs, 2012 [2] From this point in, when I use the words passage, scriptures or verses it can mean anything from a single Bible verse to an entire chapter or two in the Bible [3] John 4:46–54.