A pool strangely stirred: The healing at Bethesda in John 5

Steve Bryan walks through the healing at Bethesda in John 5 to explore what we can know about the pool from archaeological remains, and how that helps us make sense of the text.

One of the oddest episodes in the Gospel of John occurs in John 5, where Jesus heals a man who has been unable to walk for 38 years. When Jesus meets the man, he is sitting beside the Bethesda pool in Jerusalem, along with a great number of sick, blind, lame, and disabled people. We are not told how many years the man has spent at the pool, but when Jesus asks him whether he would like to become ‘whole,’ he responds with a mix of frustration and despair, since he believes that the pool is periodically infused with healing power. ‘When the water is stirred, I have no one to help me into the pool,’ he complains; ‘While I am trying to get myself to the pool, someone always get in ahead of me’ (John 5:7).

Attentive readers will notice that there is no verse 4 in most English translations. This verse says that an angel stirred the water from time to time, but only the first person to get into the water after the angelic visitation would be healed. If you check the footnote, you will see that the translators think it unlikely that this explanation of the stirring of the water was originally part of John’s Gospel. A later scribe may well have added it to explain popular beliefs about the pool that were current at the time, but from what the man says in verse 7, it appears to be what he believed.

This is the first of several features of the story that cast the man in an unfavourable light. It suggests that he holds beliefs about spiritual power and about God that are, well, unorthodox. Such beliefs have sometimes been categorised as ‘superstition’ or ‘magic’, though such terms have fallen out of favour with some who regard them as derogatory, rather than descriptive and neutral. But charges of ‘magic’ and ‘superstition’ are also found within ancient texts and tend to arise around beliefs in, or use of, power that operates impersonally. Methods for accessing such power varied widely, but belief in such power remains very much a part of our world. In this case, people accessed the power in the pool according to purely arbitrary convention, that is, on a ‘one-and-done’ basis.  In all such cases, being able to use the power had nothing to do with the personal will of whatever divine being was behind it.

What does this tell us about the meaning of the episode in John? It helps to consider what we know about the Bethesda pool where the healing took place. Until quite recently, some scholars believed that this was a pagan site. Recent archaeological work at the site suggests, however, that it was not until the Romans refounded Jerusalem in the second century AD that a pagan healing sanctuary developed somewhat east of the Bethesda pool.

Anyone who has visited Jerusalem will have noticed that the Bethesda site has an upper and a lower pool. John’s reference to the five covered colonnades (John 5:2), or stoa, reflects the fact that they ran along the four sides, with a fifth between the upper and lower pools. It now seems clear that, in keeping with regulations attested in the Mishnah (the first significant written collection of Jewish rabbis’ teaching), the upper pool was an otzer used to collect rain water. This then supplied the lower pool, which functioned as a miqveh, that is, a pool used for purification prior to entry into the nearby temple court. The requirement that water for a miqveh be ‘living water’ (as opposed to, say, water drawn from a well) explains the need for the upper collection pool. One scholar (Ulrich Von Wahlde) has suggested that the stirring of the water can be explained as the movement of the water from the upper to the lower pool through an underground channel.

Whether or not this explains the movement of the water, if the pool in question was not a pagan healing centre but a Jewish purification pool, we learn something important about the man’s beliefs. It’s not that he was seeking power from a pagan healing god, but that he harboured magical notions about the working of God’s power. In particular, it suggests a belief that God’s power could operate arbitrarily, independent of any personal intention or concern on the part of God. Thus, we rightly imagine, when the water bubbled up, a tragic melee ensued with the lame, the paralysed, and the blind all scrambling to be the first to enter the ‘living water’ of the miqveh. If, in Israel’s symbolic world, the rites of purification marked the restoration of wholeness and life, what better place to seek power to restore bodily wholeness than from water that was alive with the power of God?       

We might suppose that the temple authorities would disapprove of such unsanctioned views of God’s power. Instead, as John tells the story, the authorities share these views. That they do so is evident from their response when they see the man carrying his mat on the Sabbath after Jesus has healed him. When they demand to know why the man is doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath (John 5:10), he tells them that he is just following the instructions of the man who healed him. But he doesn’t know who it was (John 5:13). Throughout the episode, the man remains remarkably incurious about the identity of his healer. He remains in character as one who cares little about the connection between the power that healed him and the source of that power. The Jewish authorities, for their part, do not seem to question the idea that Jesus has drawn power from God to heal the man. They don’t accuse him of healing the man with Satan’s power, or object to the healing per se. Rather, they object to the fact that Jesus has healed the man on the Sabbath. In their view, Jesus has somehow managed to acquire power from God and use that power in a way that violates the will of God.

Something similar happens in John 9, where the authorities reluctantly admit that the man born blind has, in fact, been healed by Jesus and that such a healing can only be attributed to God’s power. Coming to this realisation, they insist that the man give glory to God (John 9:24). At the same time, they also insist that Jesus is not from God because in their eyes he is a lawbreaker (John 9:16). Once again, the charge is that Jesus has accessed the power of God, but used it in a way that violates the law of God.

This is a slightly veiled charge of sorcery—a charge against Jesus that persisted well past the time that John wrote his Gospel. It helps us understand the connection between the healing and the discourse in John 5. The discourse begins with Jesus’s powerful claim about his identity: that his work just is the work of God: ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working’ (John 5:17). The point is not that Jesus justifies work on the Sabbath because God also works on the Sabbath. Rather, the point is that God never relinquishes control over his power, but always does his work through his Word (John 1:1-4), now revealed as the Son of God. The fact that God’s action is simultaneous with, and identical to, Jesus’s action demonstrates that the work Jesus does is the life-giving work of God. If God does all that he does through his Word, then Jesus must be that Word. If life is in the Word (John 1:4), revealed in the incarnation as the Son of God who has life in himself (John 5:26), then it is foolish, even idolatrous to look for it elsewhere. Even the Scriptures are misread and misused if they do not lead us to the one in whom alone there is life (John 5:39).

There is much to gain from reading John 5 in this way. I confess that I might not have asked the right questions of this text had I not taught for many years in Ethiopia. While there, I encountered beliefs about impersonal power, and learned to read Scripture through the eyes of my Ethiopian brothers and sisters. But such beliefs are common enough even in the West where, despite secular assumptions about the nature of reality, many do not think of the world as a place devoid of spiritual power. Rather, people are far more likely to place their faith in impersonal power, sometimes in the form of imprecise notions of cosmic energy, or the power of crystals and the like. Even in our so-called secular age, people still look for spiritual power to meet the challenges of life. Texts like John 5 point us to the living Word, the Son of God, in whom alone we find the life and life-giving power of God in the world.