spit

peacefulpete

Mark 7:33-37: The healing of a dumb man by putting of fingers in his ears and the application of spit to the tongue

Mark 8:22-26: The healing of a blind man by the application of spit to the eyes

John 9:1-12: The healing of the blind man by the application of mud made of spit and then bathing

In the ancient world, saliva was viewed as having therapeutic properties. Galen comments on the usefulness of saliva (phlegm) for medicinal purposes: "And you may observe the extent of the alteration which occurs to food in the mouth if you will chew some corn and then apply it to an unripe [undigested] boil: you will see it rapidly transmuting- in fact entirely digesting- the boil, though it cannot do anything of the kind if you mix it with water. And do not let this surprise you; this phlegm [saliva] in the mouth is also a cure for lichens [i.e., skin ailments]; it even rapidly destroys scorpions; while, as regards the animals which emit venom, some it kills at once, and others after an interval; to all of them in any case it does great damage" (Nat. fac. 3.7). A story is also told of how Vespasian was approached by a blind man, who, being so instructed by the god Serapis, petitioned him to "moisten his cheeks and his eyes with saliva." Though reluctant at first, Vespasian consented, and the blind man regained his sight (Tacitus, Hist. 4.81).

Fe2O3Girl

See under "Spit and Polish" -

peacefulpete

"I have come as a spitting scribe, that I may give the God control of his feet.?My mouth vomits up truth."
?The Book of the Dead

In addition to their specialty, written charms, scribes also healed with spittle.

Here's something for Leolaia....(spit symbolizing spoken teachings)
That the two such healings should be of a blind man and of a deaf and dumb one is fitting. Set amidst parables of hearing and beholding the Truth, these cures are variations on the theme of evangelizing those who must be taught to see and listen, as in the Gnostic tractate "Authoritative Teaching": ): "he applied the word to her eyes as a medicine to make her see with her mind?."( Robinson 305). Like water in baptism, some physical substance in Mark 7-8 gives the initiatory experience a stronger hold on imaginations.
Why, though, is that substance spittle? Egyptian readers might have connected this with their myths. In Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, Budge devotes an entire chapter to "Spitting as a Religious Act." For instance, "[i]n the XVIIth Chapter of the Book of the Dead, we read that the Eye of R?a , i.e., the Sun, was seriously injured by a violent assault made upon it by Set, but Thôth [the god of scribes] came forward, and, having spit upon the Eye, the trouble disappeared, and the Eye soon recovered (1911, II, 203)." The sun god used spittle as part of his cosmic act of creation.

A Paduan

Spit is for breaking down 'food', and for getting rid of unwanted stuff, or taste- note that c omplete indignation is physically expressed by one showing another that they utterly reject all taste of one.

Spit can be used to render materials usable

Is it a combination of flesh and the 'water' we took, or other foods plus the 'water' we have taken in? or all the above?

Narkissos

Thanks Pete. In the Markan context, it is a very interesting element of the old tradition portraying Jesus (= Simon Magus?) as a Magician / Miracle worker. In GMark no theological symbolism is apparent (contrasting with GJohn), and both Matthew and Luke are uneasy enough with the detail as to drop it...

shotgun

I never thought phlegm could be so interesting....

Would the modern english bible read

Mark 8:22-26: The healing of a blind man by the application of hackin a loogie into his eyes

Leolaia

Just a few random comments.....James 5:14 and Mark 6:13 refer to Christians as healing the sick by anointing them with oil, and in a similar way John 9:6 describes Jesus as "anointing" the blind man's eyes with the mud made from his spit. Within the context of John, I wonder if there is a connection between the "living water" that Jesus dispenses (John 4:13-14; 7:37-39) and Jesus' spittle. Note that Jesus dispenses the "living water" (Holy Spirit) by breathing on his disciples (20:22). Outside John, it is also interesting that Jesus is anointed as the Son of God by the Holy Spirit as the unction (Mark 1:9-11), and it is with the Holy Spirit (= oil, =spit) that Jesus and the apostles perform miracles (cf. Mark 6:13; Acts 10:38). It is also interesting that the two Markan spitting stories are not paralleled in Matthew and Luke; might these originate in the Secret Mark recension (which stresses baptismal themes)? Mark 8:22-26 is partly paralleled by Matthew 9:27-31, but the latter story is also dependent on the healing story in Mark 10:46-52, combining the two stories into a single story of "two blind men" being healed at the same time. And interestingly the Matthean story specifically has Jesus "touching their eyes" (neither Markan story mention such touching), and ends with a very characteristic Markan ending of Jesus sternly charging the men to not tell anyone what happened -- an ending which is also absent in both Markan versions (compare Mark 7:36). So I wonder if Matthew 9:27-31 might preserve the original version of the healing story in Mark 10:46-52 which presently includes a reference to Jesus' spit? And what do you make of the miracle story in the present text that has Jesus' miracle as initially unsuccessful?

Another interesting thing is that according to Leviticus 15:8, the spit of an unclean person defiles another. And yet the people that Jesus heals were already considered "unclean" by the Pharisees because of their disabilities, and by spitting (=healing) on the Sabbath, Jesus renders himself as also unclean by "sinning" (cf. also Jesus as ritually "unclean" in Mark 7:1-23). And so Jesus reverses the usual expectation of clean + unclean = unclean by making it so unclean + unclean = clean. In this connection, note Luke 11:41: "Give that which is inside to the poor, and then all things are clean for you." One other interesting tidbit is that the Greek word for "poor" is ptuos, which is either derived from or is a homophone with ptuo "spit". In other words, the "poor" are "those spat upon". Jesus' ministry to the poor is thus to those spat on in contempt. And interestingly in the synoptics Jesus himself lives a lifestyle without belongings (cf. Matthew 8:18-22) and he is later spat upon during the Passion (27:30).

Elsewhere

I don't care how many scriptures anyone throws out... bottom line is this: At that time people thought spit had healing powers. Nothing more.

Why else do you think they even included the comment about spit? For the same reason turning water into wine and walking on water were mentioned. At that time it was fashionable for people to have a "savior" that performed these style of "miracles". At that time "Christs" and "Saviors" and "Son's of God" were everywhere... just as it is now fashionable to have a Zen style religion.

peacefulpete

Another site conected the spoken word with the act of spitting. The word spit itself is a sound of expelling air from the mouth. The Gnostic interpretation that these spittle stories were symbolic of spoken knowledge has interesting possibilities. Perhaps in fact the other mythologies that used this imagery likewise did so symbolically. Of course outsiders literalized.

I don't have a clue about how to place this in a reconstruction. The fact that miracles were not always succcessful the first time (resistance from legion, failure of apostles, and spit story) tend to humanize the agent as a possesser of gift but acting independently from source of that power. More like the image of a magician.

Narkissos

Mark 6:13 and James 5:14 use aleiphô in a similar therapeutic context (in other contexts, Matthew 6:17; Mark 16:1; Luke 7:38,46; John 11:2; 12:3), but I fail to see the relation with spitting. And the Greek NT word for "poor" is ptôchos, unrelated to ptuô as far as I know (except on the grounds of random vicinity in alphabetical order, which could as well bring ptôma, "corpse", or ptôsis, "fall", into the picture...). So I still think the Markan occurrences testify only to magical practice, with little theological overtones if any.

However, unsurprisingly, the Johannine occurrence fits the Gnostic symbolical paradigm. With such evocative terms as "mud", pèlos, typical of the "potter" creation motif in Isaiah 45:9 etc.; Job 10:9; 33:6; 38:14 (cf. Genesis 2:7, other LXX Greek term) and "anointing", epichriô, related to chrisma/christos.

spit

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