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From Cleansed Lepers to Cleansed Hearts: the Developing Meaning of Katharizo in Luke-Acts Pamela Shellberg Marquette University

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From Cleansed Lepers to Cleansed Hearts: the Developing Meaning of Katharizo in Luke-Acts Pamela Shellberg Marquette University Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Dissertations (2009 -) Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Projects From Cleansed Lepers to Cleansed Hearts: The Developing Meaning of Katharizo in Luke-Acts Pamela Shellberg Marquette University Recommended Citation Shellberg, Pamela, "From Cleansed Lepers to Cleansed Hearts: The eD veloping Meaning of Katharizo in Luke-Acts" (2012). Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 180. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/180 FROM CLEANSED LEPERS TO CLEANSED HEARTS: THE DEVELOPING MEANING OF KATHARIZŌ IN LUKE-ACTS by Pamela Shellberg, B.A., M.S., M.A. A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Milwaukee, Wisconsin May 2012 ABSTRACT FROM CLEANSED LEPERS TO CLEANSED HEARTS: THE DEVELOPING MEANING OF KATHARIZŌ IN LUKE-ACTS Pamela Shellberg, B.A., M.S., M.A. Marquette University, 2012 Luke develops the theme of God’s salvation prominently and fully in the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles to mean the deliverance from danger, disease, and death, experienced physically and religiously. Isaiah’s oracles announcing the inauguration of a new era of God’s favor and a salvation reaching to the ends of the earth shape Luke’s vision; their images and vocabulary permeate his thought. For Luke, “cleansing” is a means by which God extends this salvation, and Luke therefore uses cleansing language, in forms of the word katharizō, to mark three specific manifestations of salvation in his accounts of the life of Jesus and of the early church. Katharizō explains the predominantly Gentile presence in a first-century religious movement born in Judaism. It marks a pivotal point in the heavenly speech accompanying Peter’s dream of clean and unclean animals in Acts. And it appears in the multiple Gospel references to the restoration of leprous bodies to wholeness. Luke exploits the multivalent ritual and medical meanings of katharizō in service of his message by means of the leprous body, understood as both physically afflicted and ritually unclean. The leprous body, with its boundary of skin appearing to deteriorate, is relegated to places beyond the reach of both the human and the holy. As such it is symbolic of salvation found at the boundaries where distinctions are made between the afflicted and the whole, the clean and the unclean, the Jew and the Gentile, the holy and the human. The cleansing of the leprous body similarly is a potent symbol of the means of that salvation. Luke proclaims God’s deliverance from the distinctions that afflict the body of humanity and God’s preservation of that body in holiness. Luke shapes his message on the deliverance from a skin disease that afflicts the boundary of the individual human body. The cleansing of a leprous body thus becomes the pattern for the cleansing of Gentile hearts, and one of Luke’s primary expressions of the means of God’s salvation. i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Pamela Shellberg, B.A., M.S., M.A. In this very moment I feel little bit like Abram, standing outside the tent of my dissertation and hearing God whisper in my ear, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them,” (Gen 15:5). A universe of space and time has expanded around this project so that I stand with it now under a vast sky of stars, constellations of friends and family who span the horizon from California to Maine and whose love and support have kept the measure of many of my seasons. The psalmist writes that God has numbered the stars and given to all of them their names (Psalm 147:4). This is a beautiful thought to me, and I rest in it as I give thanks for all those who are numbered in my starry skies of Dubuque and Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison, Portland and Bangor—your names are known, imprinted in this page and on my heart. I want to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Kevin Sullivan for his unfailing support and steadfast commitment to me and to the completion of this work. I am grateful for the faculty in the Theology Department for the excellent education I received and for its largesse in extending to me so many opportunities for growth. I want to thank especially the members of my dissertation board, Dr. Sharon Pace, Dr. Michael Duffey, and Fr. William Kurz, for the time and careful attention given to ideas I present here. I am very grateful to Ulrike Guthrie, whose editorial assistance on this work has been immeasurable, as has been her encouragement. I also want to thank Lorraine McQuarrie, librarian at Bangor Theological Seminary, for her boundless enthusiasm in securing all manner of needed research material and for her attention to the bibliographic details of this dissertation. I acknowledge, with much gratitude, my faculty colleagues at Bangor Theological Seminary whose affirmation and partnerships have been a source of great inspiration. And I am grateful, beyond measure, to the students at BTS, whose earnest engagement with the Scriptures and eagerness to encounter God within them have allowed me to enjoy the yield for which this project was always intended. I want to express a special word of gratitude to my friend, Patricia Lewis, who has been a part of my Marquette life from the very beginning, taking me to lunch when I was just a prospective M.A. student, and right up to the last, delivering the hard copies of this dissertation to the department on my behalf. In between, we have navigated the seas of graduate school and life together, and she has often been the Polaris by which I have found my way. I want to thank my brothers, Herb and Ken, for the kind of support that only brothers can give and has often been the kind exactly needed. I want to thank especially my parents, Rita and Herb Shellberg, who have never believed there might be something I couldn’t do, and the strength of that belief has held me in more moments than they probably know. And then finally, I want to thank my nieces, Danielle and Ashley Shellberg, who have hardly ever known their Aunt Pam to not be working on “that big homework project.” They are, in their own beautiful ways, handfuls of stardust, and their presence in my life keeps my heart oriented to true north. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTERS I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 1 A. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM .................................................... 1 Luke’s Construction of Cleansing ................................................ 7 The State of the Question ........................................................... 11 B. THESIS ............................................................................................. 14 C. METHOD .......................................................................................... 14 D. PROJECT OUTLINE ........................................................................ 15 II. LEPRA IN ANCIENT CONTEXTS .............................................................. 30 A. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 30 Lepra is not Leprosy .................................................................. 34 B. THE THEORETICAL LENS AND CONCEPTUAL TOOLS OF CONTRUCTIVIST THEORY ................................................................ 37 Representative Perspectives in Studies of Healing in the New Testament ........................................................................... 43 Implications for Exegesis ............................................................ 49 C. LEPRA IN ANCIENT CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE BODY AND ILLNESS ............................................................................................... 54 Physiognomic Consciousness ...................................................... 54 Physiognomics in Luke-Acts ....................................................... 63 The Relationship Between Body and Soul in Ancient Thought .... 69 Ancient Medical Theories: Disease Etiologies and the Pneuma. .. 75 iii Lepra in Ancient Medical Texts .................................................. 83 D. LEPRA IN THE SEPTUAGINT ........................................................ 85 Lepra in Leviticus ....................................................................... 85 Lepra in the Non-Priestly Writings ............................................. 89 E. COMPARISON OF LEPRA IN THE ANCIENT MEDICAL TEXTS AND THE SEPTUAGINT ........................................................ 96 III. DEKTOS and KATHARIZŌ .......................................................................... 98 A. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 98 B. LITERARY AND THEOLOGICAL PARALLELS IN LUKE-ACTS ......................................................................................... 99 Literary Features ....................................................................... 102 Theological Emphases .............................................................. 116 C. LUKE 4 AND ACTS 10 LINKED BY DEKTOS AND KATHARIZŌ .................................................................................. 122 D. DEKTOS .......................................................................................... 124 Scholarly Considerations of dektos ............................................ 124 1. Robert Brawley ......................................................... 125 2. J. Bajard .................................................................... 127 3.
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