Extra Credit Reading Notes: Infancy Gospels Part B

Curing the Leprosy

              Healing stories like this are always interesting to me because they are kind of counterintuitive. Normally diseases spread through touch or air, so healings typically seem somewhat risky to the healer. It is kind of interesting that water is the agent of healing in this story in particular because it ruins that sense of risk. Water is already associated with cleanliness so it almost doesn’t seem strange that water is what heals the lepers. Certainly this water is supposedly special because it is used to wash the Lord Jesus though. I tend to prefer the earlier type of healing as seen in the first woman who holds the infant Jesus and Satan departs from her. There is this potential that her touch will harm him or that Satan will attack the baby through her but this is not what happens.

Plot:

• A gentlewoman is cursed by Satan as she bathes, he dwells as a serpent in her stomach.
• The gentlewoman holds the Lord Christ and Satan flees her forever.
• The woman washes Jesus with perfumed water and keeps the water afterwards.
• A girl with leprosy bathes in the stored water and is cleansed from leprosy.
• The girl moves with Mary, Joseph, and Jesus to city with the great king’s palace.
• The girl encounters the prince’s wife who is ashamed
• The prince’s wife discloses she has given birth to a son with leprosy who must be killed or sent away.
• The girl tells wife about encounter with Jesus.
• The prince’s wife bathes Jesus in perfumed water and stores the water afterwards.
• The prince’s wife uses stored water to heal her son.
• The prince’s wife praises Jesus and gives his family many gifts.

Adult Christ Healing of a Leper (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Curing the Leprosy, The First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ: Taken from The Lost Books of the Bible by Rutherford B. Platt