Our Lord's miracles of healing : considered in relation to some modern objections and to medical science / by T.W. Belcher.

Thomas Waugh Belcher

Date:: [between 1800 and 1899?]

Credit: Our Lord's miracles of healing : considered in relation to some modern objections and to medical science / by T.W. Belcher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

119/316 page 87

$such a couch as we see used for like purposes in our own dayd St. Luke, doubtless, had an object in using the word ; for probably he meant to draw attention to the fact that, although the bed may have been ‘ a mean and vile pallet,’ as St. Mark calls it [/c^a/^arro?], yet that, even if mean, it was still a bed [kKIvt]], as St. Matthew tells us ; and a diminutive bed so small as to be let down through the roof of an Eastern house by the removal of a comparatively small portion of the tiling. Moreover, it was the professional litter for carrying the sick. And, on the other hand, observe St. Luke’s verbal honesty, where the idea is to show that a sick man lay on a bed,—‘a mean and vile pallet,’— when the size or special construction of it, or the possibility of lowering it through a hole in the roof, was not the point to which he would draw attention. In Acts ix. 33 (I here assume that St. Luke wrote'this book), he writes of St. Peter finding Eneas, ‘which had kept his ’ ‘ k\iv18iov, a diminutive from K\br], was a small couch, and was also used, like the Latin diminutives lectica and lecticula, to a litter for carry mg the sick? . . . ‘ That the/cXu//5toz/ was a couch of so light a kind that a woman could lift and carry it, may be seen from Aristophanes Lysistr. 916.—Hobart’s ‘ Medical Technology of St. Luke,’ 116.$