The Seventh Sign, Pt. 1

Let's look now at the healings in GMk that don't involve touch (leaving aside the ambiguous healing of the man with the withered hand, which I include in the touch-healings).  They are as follows, with their precise locations in GMk:

The Unclean Spirit (1:23-26)
Healing Many in Capernaum (1:34)
Healing Many in Galilee (1:39)
The Paralytic (2:3-12)
The Storm-Stilling (4:37-39)
The Gerasene Demoniac (5:2-13)
Feeding the 5000 (6:41-43)
The Water-Walking (6:48-51)
The Syro-Phonecian Woman (7:29-30)
Feeding the 4000 (8:6-8)
The Blind Man of Jericho (10:52)

Four of these are healings of demoniacs:

The Unclean Spirit
Healing Many in Capernaum
Healing Many in Galilee
The Gerasene Demoniac.



There was also a fifth healing of a demoniac, on the healing-touch list:

The Boy with the Deaf and Mute Spirit

Notice in that healing, although Jesus does take him by the hand to raise him, he doesn't do so until the child is healed.  Thus, the healing itself is not performed by touch.  The implication is that exorcisms do not involve a healing touch; demons are exorcized by voice.  But although at first this seems to mean these exorcisms were not authored by Mark himself--perhaps he found them in one of his sources and just reworked them--notice that three of the five involve demons who try and name Jesus' identity.  The Unclean Spirit in the synagogue calls him "the Holy One"; those healed in the evening "knew him"; and the Gerasene Demoniac calls him "Son of the Most High God".  Furthermore, the other two are each followed by a key example of the Messianic Secret theme (the Many in Capernaum by the Leper [1:40-45], and the Boy by the Second Prediction [8:30-32], and after all the boy did have a mute spirit, so it couldn't very well try and identify Jesus!)  So Jesus' exorcism of all these demons seems related to the overall Markan theme of the Messianic Secret.  This element seems to indicate that Mark is the one who introduced these healings into the narrative after all.

So let's start thinking in terms of Markan vs. potentially pre-Markan material.  If we remove all the healings by touch (Markan) and the exorcisms (also Markan), we're left with the following miracles:

The Paralytic
The Storm-Stilling
Feeding the 5000
The Water-Walking
The Syro-Phonecian Woman
Feeding the 4000
The Blind Man of Jericho

Michael Turton has shown how the Syro-Phonecian woman was most likely not written by the original Markan author, because it does not follow a typical Markan chiasm.  This means it is either the work of the canonical redactor, or has been heavily edited and relocated from somewhere in the original Markan gospel.  Let's remove it as well, since it seems to post-date the work of the Markan author.

We also have the famous doublet of the water-miracle/feeding-miracle, with the Storm-Stilling/The 5000 and the Water-Walking/The 4000 each forming a pair.  It's long been suspected that the Markan author was doubling miracles he found in a source.  So again, thinking in terms of Markan vs. pre-Markan material, let's remove the second pair from the doublet.  This leaves us with:

The Paralytic
The Storm-Stilling
Feeding the 5000
The Blind Man of Jericho

Suddenly we realize that simply by removing all Markan material (touch-healings, exorcisms, and the second water/feeding doublet) and all post-Markan material (the Syro-Phonecian woman), at least three of four of the remaining pericopes are signs.  And the fourth, the Storm-Stilling, is a thematic and structural parallel to the Water-Walking, which Fortna includes as a part of Feeding the 5000.  This is intriguing.  These remaining miracles seem to form their own unit.  Our methodology of removing Markan and post-Markan material seems to be sound.

It's true that the Blind Man of Jericho is itself a doublet, with the Blind Man of Bethsaida, and that healing was removed from the list because it involves Jesus' touching the man's eyes.  However, the presence of this alternate version near Jericho, in which a blind man is healed without touching, suggests that it may itself be the original version.

So in my next post, I'll be discussing in detail the fourth sign from Signs in GMk; the raising of Jairus' daughter.  We'll be comparing it to SGM1 and the raising of Lazarus, and will discover something surprising; the raising of Lazarus  may not be the seventh sign after all.