I always took it that Jesus had a sort of “aura” of power that was imbued into everything about him. He zapped a fig tree and healed a blind guy without touching him, so the Spirit could be “channeled” for lack of a better term. If power went out without his specific direction, I’d imagine he’d notice just from the temporary power drain.
My best guess for a standard US evangelical response would be this:
Jesus knew the woman was there and that she had faith to be healed. When she displayed that faith (by touching him), he healed her. He asks “who touched me?” even though he knows who he healed*. He wanted her to come forth to point out her faith and to show that you can’t “steal” healing.
*This questioning by God occurs other times in the Bible. For example, after Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of good and evil, they hid. God walked through the garden and called out to Adam “Where are you?” He is God, he knows where Adam is, but this is a process of getting the respondent to “own up” to their actions.
That’s pretty much what I was taught growing up in an evangelical church, and there’s nothing in the text to argue against it. As you say, it has echoes of Genesis to it.
However, as a non-Evangelical Christian today, it doesn’t bother me to acknowledge that [the author of] Mark may have been an Adoptionist. It is, after all, the earliest Gospel, and it took a while for the church’s Chistology to develop. Mark tried to explain the meaning of the Christ as best he could understand it.
ETA: The author of John toyed with heresy too (Gnosticism in his case) but that doesn’t make his Gospel less canonical than the others.
I’ve had it happen to me, so I can hopefully shed some light on it.
After attending a prayer group I felt the power of God around my hands, almost a electric feeling, but it felt all good, without any negative traits of a electric feeling. It was as if light was pouring out of my hands, though I couldn’t see it. It was a very wonderful feeling that I had since then till the next day.
The next day I was walking in NYC, and somehow knew something was to be done with this feeling. Someone to touch. I was praying for what to do. Eventually I saw someone limping and in leg braces. I followed him into a store and asked if I could pray for him. He said OK, and turned around and started to walked away slowly. I touched his back in the prayer as he was moving and the feeling of the power left my hands, like a charged capacitor being discharged. He immediately stopped in his tracks and straightened up a bit.
Unfortunately I was a bit afraid of what happened (this was the first time anything like this has happened), and finished the prayer and hightailed it out of there.
The feeling in my hands was gone, hope it did him some good.
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I assume that if I just was touched by this person without knowing who touched me, this power still would have jumped to him through me, again just like a electric charge grounding out.
What I believe happens is we are all used by God, all God’s sons and daughters, as such God could use one person to be the provider of the healing power, another person to be the carrier and another to be the receiver. As such Jesus was used by the Father to heal Jesus’ sister and the Father’s Daughter.
Can you provide the (original?) Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek of “My Power”?
And when, or how, if you could summarize, does “Eli, Eli,” “indicate” (as you say) the now-removed Holy Spirit?
I know that the meaning of “El,” translated in English always as “God,” is in itself quite complex, but am not knowledgable in its meaning to Late Temple era and obviously not in comparative theology.
Thanks,
Lb
If I read Bartman correctly, what he’s saying is that some early versions of Mark have another word instead of “Eli” – a word meaning “power,” rather than “god.” (Perhaps the Greek word dynamis, the very same one used in 5:25-34?)
But I’ll let Bartman answer on his own. 