Preface

Summary

After the completion of my study, Miracle in the Early Christian World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), my continued interest in the phenomenon of healing in the New Testament led me to an investigation of another mode of healing from this period: medicine. It quickly became clear to me that this aspect of Graeco-Roman culture did not fall into a simple, neat category, but was as subject to change as I had discovered miracle to be. The result of these preliminary explorations was the determination to investigate in their inter-relationships to each other the three approaches to healing from this period: medicine, miracle and magic.

With the encouragement of my colleagues at Boston University, I applied for and was granted a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. My research was carried out in the superbly equipped and staffed library of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine in London in the summer of 1984. Conversations with colleagues at the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas at its annual meeting later that summer in Basel led me to undertake converting my research notes into a monograph on the subject. It was my hope that the assembling of this evidence and the analytical framework in which it was placed might help to enrich our understanding of the context in which the New Testament was written and in which the early Christian movement spread so rapidly.