conversion and conversion
In his Jesus: The Village Psychiatrist , Donald Capps makes the to-me plausible case that several of Jesus's healings were of conversion disorders - or of what today we tend to call functional neurological disorders (FND). The New Testament, let's recall, tells various tales of Jesus's healing ministry (Mark 2, 5, 8, 9, 10; Matthew 8, 9, 12; Luke 4, 5, 6, 8, 17, 18; John 5, 9). And various of the troubles with which people then presented - paralyses, possession states, fits, skin ailments (which are all misleadingly called "leprosy" in the biblical translations) and blindness - do indeed sometimes have a psychogenic origin. That they responded to a non-medical intervention would itself ordinarily be taken as further evidence of their possible FND character. But Capps doesn't offer us an understanding of the method of cure; he offers us only the idea of Jesus as having charisma and an unspecified psychiatric nous and as having taught some of this to his discip...
