From time to time an angel of the Lord would come down and stir up the waters. The first one into the pool after each such disturbance would be cured of whatever disease he had. (John 5:4, New International Version)
Back when I was a member of the Church of Christ, we didn’t spend much time on this particular Bible story. Frankly? The one or two times the pool at Bethesda did come up, I wasn’t a big fan of the tale.
Imagine this gruesome scene: around a public fountain lie dozens of blind, lame, and paralyzed people. Conjure up a vision that brings together the worst of all the third-world tragedies you’ve ever witnessed on television. Hear their moans. Smell their stench. See these unfortunate, outcast people pressing as close to the fountain as possible — like modern-day stunt contestants trying to keep on hand on a new pickup truck for as long as humanly possible.
At random times, apparently at the behest of the Lord, an invisible angel comes down and splashes around in the water. A frenzy ensues. At the first sound of turbulence, the blind lurch toward the pool. Men without legs use calloused hands to drag themselves forward. Families of the paralyzed lift up their loved ones in blankets and run, shrieking, toward the water.
The first to touch the water leaps up, miraculously healed. Everyone else just gets soaked … or trampled … or worse.
If we must, as the fundamentalists tell us, take the Bible as God’s literal, word-for-word Truth, then this passage portrays a monstrous God. What kind of God doles out divine healing in such a cruel and stingy way? What kind of God offers wholeness … but compels those who crave it to compete in the sort of twisted stunt you would normally see on Fear Factor?
Modern Bible scholars are quick to point out this verse doesn’t appear in the oldest manuscripts, and appears to have been added at a later time. (That’s why the New International Version of the Bible pulls the verse, marks it as “iffy,” and drops it into a footnote.)
This solution, however, makes fundamentalists pretty twitchy. The elimination of this one verse suggests that suggests all is not right with the precious King James Version. If the “early manuscripts” logic can be used to explain away this verse, then the entire ending of the Gospel of Mark must also be cast aside, as it doesn’t appear in those manuscripts either.
For those who assert the entire modern Bible has been “breathed out,” word for word, by God, admitting this verse wasn’t in the Bible to begin with just isn’t an option.
Another popular alternative? Claim the “troubling of the waters” wasn’t a miraculous event at all. The pool, this camp asserts, was connected to an “intermittent spring.” At random intervals, the water level noisily surged upward for entirely natural reasons … prompting locals to imagine angelic involvement.
Fundamentalists don’t care much for this explanation, either. The Bible, after all, plainly says the water was being disturbed by “an angel of the Lord.” Was the Gospel writer — supposedly inspired by God — taken in by local superstition? That would imply God, too, was fooled … which is unthinkable.
So what to do? Most fundamentalist writers simply shrug. “God has a way of picking the ones who really WANT to be free,” says one. Healing and mercy, they reason, are God’s to give as God sees fit; if the Lord wants to set up a cruel competition to qualify people — to discover who really, really WANTS healing — then that’s God’s option.
This is where a slavishly literal approach to Scripture takes you: a desperate corner of the mind where history must be re-written, evidence must be ignorned, and cruelty must be painted as divine compassion.
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