In a rather insightful book on “magic” and “miracles” in the time of Jesus (and was endorsed by Craig Keener, who is an excellent scholar on the NT and “miracles”), Richard Horsley wrote the following about how the NRSV (and otherwise excellent translation) and other modern translations using “disease” and “cure” instead of the more correct “sickness” and “healing” in light of the Sitz im Leben of the NT;
The Recent Mistranslation of Sickness and Healing as Disease and Cure
A mark of the narrowness of New Testament studies and of the modern scientific mentality that generated and reinforces the concept of miracle in the NRSV translation of the key Greek terms for sickness and healing (esp. nosos and therapeuein) as “disease” and “cure” (e.g., in Mark 1:34; 3:2, 10; 6:5, 13). The RSV (1946) still translated therapeuein with “heal.” But the same translation committee that, with more critical awareness of the social-political history of Roman Palestine, changed the “robbers” or “thieves” crucified with Jesus to “(social) bandits” narrowed Jesus’s healing to curing. Presumably they were influenced by what had happened in the ethos of health care in North America and elsewhere in the course of the twentieth century. Scientific biomedicine, having won the struggle against other forms of healing, had come to dominate health care and the health care industry.
Language usage in reference to sickness and healing came to correspond to the dominance of biomedicine. Under the influence of scientific medicine disease became a or the standard term for a bodily disorder or dysfunction in a human (or animal or plant) that produces specific symptoms or signs or effects at a specific location of the body (usually not a result of injury). One of the great reasons for the success of scientific medicine was its growing ability to diagnose a specific cause for a specific disease, such as a bacterium or a virus. Perhaps the most common corresponding term became cure, as medical doctors and scientists discovered drugs and treatments for all manner of diseases. Meanwhile, the concepts of sickness and healing retained some of their traditional broader meaning. Sickness could still include feelings, emotional response, and social extension (as in the phrase “I am feeling sick/ill”). And healing retained the broader sense of making health, sound, or whole (again).
Ironically, the NRSV translation committee shifted from the word heal to the word cure at just about the same time that many in the medical profession, along with medical anthropologists increasingly aware of different modes of healing, became concerned that sickness involved more than disease (bodily or organ disorder or dysfunction) and that healing involved more than biomedical diagnosis and medical intervention. In fact, medical anthropologists and some medical practitioners began using just these set of terms in attempts to gain leverage on the narrowness of the very biomedicine they practiced. They began using “sickness” or “illness” to include or refer to personal and social dimensions that often accompanied “disease” (biological dysfunction), and “healing” for the therapy addressed to the personal and social dimensions as distinguished from or inclusive of the curse of the disease.
In contrast to the NRSV translation, the discussions of Jesus’s response to the lame, blind, deaf, or haemorrhaging people who came to him will translate nosos with “sickness” and therapeuein with “heal.” Insofar as “disease” and “cure” are so closely associated with biomedicine, which did not come to prominence until the last century, those terms seem singularly inappropriate for Jesus, who could not have known about them. Some of the sickness he healed may have involved what today might be diagnosed as a disease. (Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Magic: Freeing the Gospel Stores from Modern Misconceptions [Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2014], 31-32)
