Smoodock's Blog

In the Gospel of Luke, we discover that Jesus cleansed a leper during the first year of his public ministry, and he is also mentioned by Matthew (Matthew 8:1-4). Moreover, this particular leper was **full** of leprosy (Luke 5:12). This means, the disease was no longer active and wasn’t transmittable to others. So, technically, the man was no longer unclean (Leviticus 13:13, 15). Leprosy was an incurable disease in ancient times (cp. 2Kings 5:7), and typified the corruption of sin, because both the disease and a man’s sinful condition involved separation from the community, namely from those who were ceremonially clean. In other words, the physical disease made the person unclean, and he needed to separate himself from society, just as the spiritual condition made the sinner unfit to sit with the righteous.

The wages or reward of sin is death (Romans 6:23), and a leprous condition was similar to the decaying body of a dead man (Numbers 12:12). Therefore, it came to be a representation of sin, which is especially significant, because the Lord at times judged a man’s sin by making him a leper (cp. Numbers 12:1-10; 2Kings 5:27; 2Chronicles 26:20-21). Prophesying of Jesus, Isaiah said: “Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted” (Isaiah 53:4), and Jerome’s Vulgate translates this as: “…we thought Him to be a leper smitten of God,” which is, no doubt, more of an interpretive rendering, which may have been inspired by a reading in the Babylonians Talmud:

“What is his [the Messiah’s] name? …The Rabbis said: His name is ‘the leper scholar,’ as it is written, ‘surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him a leper, smitten of God, and afflicted.” (Sanhedrin 98b).

So, whether we interpret the spiritual significance of a leprous condition in the Bible, according to the Christian worldview or a Jewish one, leprosy was often used as a type of a man’s sinful condition.

Some scholars conclude that Matthew’s leper (Matthew 8:1-4) isn’t the same as Mark’s (Mark 1:40-45) or Luke’s (Luke 5:12-16). However, I don’t take the same approach to this miracle. I believe all three witnesses agree in most of what the records reveal, and those other matters that seem different can be explained in that more information is offered in the other two Synoptics.

For example, Luke tells us that, while Jesus was “in a certain city” (Luke 4:12), a man full of leprosy worshiped him by falling down before him. Yet, there isn’t any mention of a city in Matthew, and the only mention of one in Mark is that Jesus couldn’t enter the city due to it being known he performed such a wondrous miracle (Mark 1:45), and this only after the healed leper published Jesus’ deed throughout the area. I don’t see the problem here that is seen by some scholars. There isn’t anything in Matthew that would indicate Jesus wasn’t within a city. While the chapter does begin with “When he came down from the mountain…” the city limits extended to its suburbs for 2000 cubits or 3000 feet on every side (Numbers 35:5). This is a distance of over a half mile, so whether or not Jesus was inside the walls of the city isn’t said in any of the accounts. Therefore, I don’t see anything in the text that would prevent all the Synoptics from speaking of the same event.

Another point that scholars make is that Mark’s leper published what Jesus did (Mark 1:45), which may be implied in Luke (Luke 5:15-16), but in Matthew this information isn’t given. Why? Is it because they are different miracles and Matthew’s leper didn’t publish what Jesus did for him? That information is assumed and not stated in the account. Therefore, I believe Matthew simply ignored that detail. There is no real evidence in the text that shows the Synoptics record two different lepers who were “full of leprosy” and both were healed by Jesus during the first few weeks of his public ministry. There simply isn’t enough information to conclude two miracles, but there is an abundance of common information that implies all three witnesses record the same event.