The Double Healing Passages

One of the reasons why the evidence against baptismal regeneration is underestimated is that much of that evidence is overlooked. An example of that is a category of passages that could be referred to as involving double healing. An individual is healed both physically and spiritually. But the physical healing tends to get more attention, sometimes even to the point of not noticing or forgetting the accompanying spiritual healing.

Think, for example, of Mark 5:34. The healed woman is told "go in peace and be healed of your affliction". It's unlikely that Jesus would tell her to go in peace if she was still spiritually unwell. A double healing makes more sense of both his telling her to go and the reference to peace. If she was still unreconciled to God, if she was still spiritually dead, you wouldn't expect Jesus to both tell her to go and to add that she's "in peace". A physical healing is involved, but so is a spiritual healing.

And there are a lot of passages like that. The incident with the paralytic may be the one discussed the most these days, since people often consider it evidence for Jesus' deity (Mark 2:7). That episode is one of the clearer ones, since Jesus refers to the explicitly soteriological category of forgiveness of sins and explicitly distinguishes between the healing and the forgiveness. It's a double healing passage, but more explicit than others. We need to be careful to not overlook the ones that aren't so clear. Mark 10:52 and John 4:50 just have Jesus telling the individuals involved to "Go", for example, which is easy to overlook. Though it's just one word, if it isn't accompanied by some relevant qualifier, it carries the implication I referred to above with regard to Mark 5:34. The (formerly) blind man probably wouldn't be told to go if he was still spiritually unhealed. A double healing makes more sense of the passage. Similarly, the "take courage" in Matthew 9:22, the "your faith has made you well" after the healing and when the one leper is separated from the other nine in Luke 17:19, etc. are better explained by a double healing than a single healing.

But couldn't it be argued that the spiritual healing occurred earlier, perhaps in a context that involved baptism? That's a less likely scenario. For one thing, it requires assuming the inclusion of some other factor that neither the text nor the context suggests was included. That's a less simple interpretation of the evidence. Secondly, Jesus repeatedly refers to "your faith", not "your faith and your baptism", faith in the context of baptism, etc. Third, when Jesus sees a need to inform these individuals of their spiritual healing (e.g., "go in peace"), that makes more sense if the faith is a more recent development rather than something in the more distant past, in some context involving baptism. Fourth, it isn't merely the justification of these individuals that was brought about by faith. So was their physical healing. And the physical healing wasn't acquired through baptism. Fifth, it's unlikely that they had faith in general, as distinct from faith for a healing in particular, at a significantly earlier point in time, yet didn't have faith in Jesus to perform the miracle in question until later. It's more likely that general faith would have been accompanied by faith in Jesus to perform the miracle. So, the chronological nearness of the physical healing suggests the chronological nearness of their coming to faith in general.

And all of these passages take place in a context unlikely to involve baptism. There wouldn't be water for baptism in the house the paralytic was lowered into, there wouldn't have just happened to be water nearby for baptism as Jesus was walking and encountered a person he healed, etc. None of the passages mention baptism. The cumulative effect is especially significant. The idea that baptism was involved in all of these passages, but went universally unmentioned by a few different gospel authors across so many contexts, is unlikely.

I think the fact that these are double healing passages and that they often involve other significant issues as well (e.g., the deity of Jesus in the account about the paralytic) helps explain why their soteriological significance is often overlooked or underestimated. In a passage like Mark 1:44, there's so much going on, and Jesus is saying so much to the man, that the likelihood that the man was spiritually healed along with his physical healing often isn't noticed.

Remember, this is just one category of evidence for justification apart from baptism. There are other lines of evidence as well, such as the instances of justification apart from baptism in non-healing contexts (the tax collector in Luke 18:10-14, the thief on the cross, etc.). In John 9, where the physical healing and spiritual healing seem to occur in distinct contexts, they're still close, and Jesus ties them together (verses 39-41).