Is anyone ill among you? He should call on
the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in
the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick and
the Lord will raise him, and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.
(Jas 5:14-15 | Thomas
A. Wayment’s Translation)
While
reading this text today, I encountered something interesting. The “ill” in
verse 14 is ασθενεω, which can refer to both physically, as well as spiritually
ill individuals. In verse 15,
however, James uses a different term. He uses καμνω, which often refers to those who
are spiritually sick or sick as a result of being sinful, not simply being
physically ill merely, and as linguists
would agree, a change in word denotes a change in meaning. Consider the
following instances of καμνω having such a meaning in the Greek pseudepigrapha and early
Christian literature:
For my soul within me is weary (καμνω).
(Sibylline Oracle 3:3)
Idols of dead (καμνω) gods of wood and stone.
(Sibylline Oracle 3:588)
Will not escape ignoble fate, but will
succumb (καμνω). A foreign dust will hide his corpse. (Sibylline Oracle 5:44)
And then, O you rich with the wealth of
cities, you will be rich with distress (καμνω). (Sibylline Oracle 5:98)
Demons without life, images of the worn-out
dead (καμνω). (Sibylline Oracle 8:47)
Now let me rest a little and put aside the charming song from
my heart; for weary (καμνω) is my heart. (Sibylline Oracle 12:297-98)
And my father always rejoiced in my
generosity. Because if someone was sick (καμνω), I offered through the priest
all first-fruits to the Lord; then to my father, then to me. (Testament of
Issachar 3:6)
Then there are the following attendant on
these: helping widows, looking after orphans and the needy, rescuing the
servants of God from necessities, the being hospitable — for in hospitality
gooddoing finds a field — never opposing any one, the being quiet, having fewer
needs than all men, reverencing the aged, practicing righteousness, watching
the brotherhood, bearing insolence, being long-suffering, encouraging those who
are sick (καμνω) in soul, not casting those who have fallen into sin from the
faith, but turning them back and restoring them to peace of mind, admonishing
sinners, not oppressing debtors and the needy, and if there are any other
actions like these. (Hermas Mandate 8 1:10)
The only
other instance of καμνω in the New Testament denotes, not physical sickness, per se, but spiritual/mental distress or
physical fatigue:
For consider him that endured such contradiction
of sinners against himself; lest ye be wearied (καμνω) and faint in your minds.
(Heb 12:3)
That
eschatological, not merely physical/temporal salvation, of the sick person is
in view here can be seen in the following comment from New Testament scholar
Luke Timothy Johnson:
will save the sick person: James uses the attributive participle of the
verb kamnein, which when intransitive
means “to be weary/fatigued” (see Heb 12:3) or ill,” either with respect to
specific symptoms (Plato, Gorgias 478A;
Lucian, Toxaris 60; 4 Macc 7:13) or
simply in general; thus “the sick” (hoi
kamnontes), in Herodotus, Persian War
1:197; Plato, Rep. 407C). The
verb sōzein has in this context its
familiar ambiguity. At the most literal level, it means that the sick person
will be healed. But in NT literature, especially when combined with “faith,” it
tends to mean “saved” in a religious sense. Indeed James’ language here (“faith
saves”) is unmistakably part of early Christian argot, especially in connection
with stories of physical healing. The phrase “your faith has saved you” (hē pistis sou sesōken se) is found in
both Mark (5:34; 10:52) and Matt 9:22 in connection with Jesus’ healing. In
Luke, the expression is used even more frequently (Luke 7:50; 8:48; 17:19;
18:42), and in Acts, Luke explicitly connects “faith” to the power worked by “the
name of the Lord” in healing (Acts 3:16; 4:9-10; 14:9), as well as t the
joining of the Christian community (Acts 15:9, 11; 16:31). This is now the
third time that James uses the language of “saving”: in 1:1 he spoke of “the
implanted word that is able to save your souls/lives”; in 2:14 he declared that
faith without deeds could not “save”; now the two notions are joined: the
prayer of the community is certainly a “deed of faith,” and it is also “the
name of the Lord” that has the power to save the life/soul of the sick person. (Luke
Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James: A
New Translation with Introduction and Commentary [AB 37A; New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995], 332-33)
As one
Protestant commentator wrote about the relationship in the ancient world
between sins and physical ailments which is rather apropos:
The Jewish belief on this subject may be illustrated
by the following: in Test. Of the Twelve
Patriarchs, Simeon, ii. 11 ff., because Simeon continued wrathful against
Reuben, he says, “But the Lord restrained me, and withheld from me the power of
my hands; for my right hand was half withered for seven days”; in Gad. v. 9 ff.
the patriarch confesses that owing to his hatred against Joseph God brought
upon him a disease of the liver, “and had not the prayers of Jacob my father
succoured me, it had already failed but my spirit had departed”. That sin
brings disease was, likewise, in the later Jewish literature, and article of
faith, indeed here one finds specified what are the particular sicknesses that particular
sins bring in their train. According to Rabbinical teaching there are four
signs by means of which it is possible to recognise the sin of which a man has
been guilty: dropsy is the sign that the sin of fornication has been committed,
jaundice that of unquenchable hatred, poverty and humiliation that of pride, liver
complaint (?) (אסכרה) that of back-biting. In Shabbath, 55, a, it says: “No death
without sin, no chastisement without evil-doing,” and in Nedarim, 41 a it says: “No recovery without forgiveness”. Leprosy
may be due to one of eleven sins, but most probably to that of an evil tongue.
(W.E. Oesterley, “The General Epistle of James” in W. Robertson Nicoll, ed. The Expositor’s Greek Testament, volume 4 [Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1970], 475)
This adds further biblical support for the Latter-day Saint practise of "priesthood blessings," as well as highlighting their spiritual, not physical merely, importance.
