The Man with the Withered Hand

Matthew 12:9–14; Mark 3:1–6; Luke 6:6–11

Works of art by Hendrick Goltzius, Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib and Jan van Orley

The Anonymous Afflicted

This is a page from a seventeenth-century Arabic manuscript of the Four Gospels, copied in Egypt by the Coptic monk Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib. The Naskh calligraphy, traditionally used in the Qur’an, was designed to be easy to write and attractive to read. The hypnotic fluidity of Naskh calligraphy at times leads to a lack of clear division between words, as can be seen in this example.

The written verses span the end of Matthew 12:13 (‘just as sound as the other’) to the opening clause of verse 17 (‘[t]his was to fulfil what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah’). For an Arabic-reading audience, text and image would have been received and interpreted in the same glance, creating a beautiful interplay between the pictorial and the verbal.

In the illumination, Jesus stands with a cluster of his disciples in the synagogue. He is looking at a man, who extends his left hand towards him (Luke specifies the right hand, but Matthew and Mark do not identify which hand needed healing). There is no visible indication that the man’s hand is ‘withered’, though there is a clear indication of limpness in the wrist.

The clothing of the man is markedly different from the surrounding figures. He wears a short tunic with long boots, which may be an indication of his occupation. This is perhaps because in the Gospel of the Nazarenes—a second-century version of the Gospel of Matthew—there is reference to the man being a stonemason. Within that context, he appeals to Jesus and asks for his hand to be restored so he can continue earning his living.

In this illumination, Jesus extends his own hand and studies him closely, suggesting his willingness to heal.

References

Engelhardt, Jillian D. 2022. Matthew, Disability, and Stress (Lanham: Lexington Books)

Mahfouz, Tarek. 2013. Arabic Calligraphy: Naskh Script (Morrisville: Lulu Press)

Rossi, Maria Alessia. 2024. Visualizing Christ’s Miracles in Late Byzantium: Art, Theology, and Court Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

The Mechanics of a Marvel

Commentary by Chloe Cooke

Cite Share

A typical human hand has 27 bones. These bones are surrounded by an intricate web of muscles, ligaments, tendons, sheaths, arteries, veins, and nerves, which connect the hand to the rest of the body.

This drawing—‘by the hand’ of Hendrik Goltzius, as we might metaphorically say when attributing authorship to an artist—focusses on the complex anatomical structure of a hand, positioned in an awkward gesture. The precision lends us to contemplate the intricacies of the human hand as well as the artist’s ability to create such a rigorous depiction.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke each use the same verb and its cognates to describe the hand of the man whom Jesus heals in this episode: xérainó, ‘withered’ (literally meaning ‘dried up’). To a modern reader, the word suggests an object that has shrivelled or shrunk. The verb is also used by the Gospel writers when Jesus curses a fig tree, causing it to ‘wither/dry up’ and die (Matthew 21:18–22; Mark 11:12–25; Luke 13:6–9).

Similarly, the verb used across all three of the Synoptic accounts to denote the healing itself is apokathistemi, ‘restoration’.

Goltzius had had his own right hand permanently damaged in a fire when he was just one year old. His impaired hand was an identifier, and at times he covered it to avoid being recognized. The careful manipulation of the hand in this pen drawing—in which he extends individual fingers to different positions, augments the three-dimensionality of veins, and replicates the texture of skin—reveals an artist imagining/imaging this human hand fully restored, and marvelling at its mechanics.

References

Brown, Peter Scott. 2018. The Riddle of Jael: The History of a Poxied Heroine in Medieval and Renaissance Art and Culture (Leiden: Brill)

Leeflang, Huigen, Ger Lujiten and Lawrence W. Nichols. 2003. Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617): Drawings, Prints, and Paintings (Amsterdam: Wanders)

Van der Vorst, Patrick. 2024. ‘There was a man in the synagogue who had a withered hand: Mark 3:1–6, 17 January 2024’, www.christian.art, available at: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/mark-3-1-6-2024/ [accessed 30 July 2024]

A Sabbath Controversy

Commentary by Chloe Cooke

Cite Share

When read in isolation, the healing of the man with a withered hand is a story of Jesus’s miraculous power over physical suffering. When read within its biblical context, the story is part of a longer discourse on Sabbath regulations—a particularly important topic to the Jewish leaders of the day.

Jan van Orley has pointed to this wider, religious context by setting the story in the corner of a monumental temple-like structure—although the building’s grand interior is much more reminiscent of a seventeenth-century Catholic church in the artist’s native Brussels than a first-century Jewish synagogue. A little under thirty people are visible in the composition, but an abundance of three-dimensional figurative sculptures increases the effect of a crowded, busy space.

The man with the withered hand leans against the imposing column in the right foreground. He lifts his arm towards Jesus, who points to it with his own right hand. Yet, Jesus’s attention is directed towards two figures to his right. The man closer to the picture plane appears in shock, his splayed figures suggesting an urgent desire to stop Jesus in his tracks. These figures no doubt represent the group of Pharisees who are attempting to find a way to accuse Jesus. Their hope is that he will actively heal the man, thus violating sabbath prohibitions regarding non-lifesaving ‘work’ (Exodus 20:10; Deuteronomy 5:14; Mishna Yoma 8.6). Indeed, in Matthew’s account they directly question him regarding his stance on this matter.

Perhaps this is the moment at which Jesus appeals to the Pharisees and asks them what is lawful on the Sabbath: ‘to save life or to kill’ (Mark 3:4; Luke 6:9), or whether if any of them had a sheep and it fell into a pit on the Sabbath, they would not ‘take hold of it and lift it out?’ (Matthew 12:11; Tosefta Shabbat 15.1; Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 128b).

In the end, Jesus carries out no work in healing the man’s hand, instead commanding the man to perform the crucial action: simply stretching out his own hand.

In Orley’s engraving, we see the man’s healing take second place to the challenge that Jesus is delivering to his interlocutors, both through his words and his lack of work.

References

Heil, John Paul. 1979. ‘Significant Aspects of the Healing Miracles in Matthew’, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 41.2: 274–87

Saldarini, Anthony J. 2021. Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible: Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans)

Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib :

Jesus Heals the Man with a Withered Hand, from an Arabic manuscript of the Gospels, c.1684 , Ink and pigments on laid paper

Hendrick Goltzius :

The Artist's Right Hand, 1588 , Pen and brown ink

Jan van Orley :

Christ healing a man with a withered hand, c.1685–before 1700 , Etching

‘Stretch Out Your Hand!’

Comparative commentary by Chloe Cooke

Cite Share

The story of Jesus healing the man with a withered hand appears in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, largely following the same narrative arc in each case, though punctuated by the occasional deviance. As Jan van Orley’s etching reminds us, all three Gospels render the story within the context of Jesus’s attitude towards the Sabbath. A synagogue setting adds dramatic intensity to the Gospels’ account of this debate over the interpretation of the Law. Jesus uses his encounter with the afflicted man as an opportunity to reiterate how mercy, not rule-following, is at the heart of the Law.

The gospel accounts relay very little information about the man with a withered hand, apart from the fact that he was Jewish and attended synagogue on the Sabbath, as was the custom. His name is omitted; he does not utter a word; and he is not commended for his bravery or his faith like the recipients of some other miracles (e.g. Matthew 9:20–22; Mark 10:46–52; Luke 17:11–19).

Within his cultural context, the man’s withered hand would have had an impact on his ability to earn a living, and perhaps have led him to be judged inferior. Jesus’s command to the individual to ‘stand up in front of everyone’ could be interpreted as cruel; the man may have cowered from the eyes of those swarming around his body.

Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib’s illuminations of Matthew’s Gospel provide a welcome opportunity to think about the man behind the healing, as they seem to draw on the second-century tradition that the man was a stonemason. At least here, he is presented with agency, and as much more than an illustrative pretext for religious debate.

Jesus’s second command to the man recorded in the Gospels is ‘stretch out your hand’ (Matthew 12:13; Mark 3:5; Luke 6:10). The man obeys: ‘[h]e stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored’ (Mark 3:5). It is unclear whether this command actuated the miracle, or whether it was merely the revealing of the miracle, but it is interesting to note that in a healing of a man with leprosy earlier in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 8:3; Mark 1:4; Luke 5:13), it is Jesus who stretches his hand out to heal, whereas here, it is the man who carries out the action. Jesus subverts his audience’s expectations—perhaps especially the expectations of those who hoped to catch him out.

Jesus’s command to the man to stretch out his hand is laden with theological significance. This same command was uttered by God to Moses in Exodus 14: ‘stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground’ (v.16). Moses obeyed and the seas parted. The stretching of the hand was a powerful act that saw the Israelites freed from their Egyptian enemies who had bound them by impossible workloads in slavery (Deuteronomy 5:15).

Within the context of a Sabbath debate in the Gospels, the allusion to the Exodus story serves as a reminder that restoration to wholeness is a distinguishing feature of the Sabbath and was the precise reason for which it was created. When God ordains the Sabbath in Deuteronomy 5:12–15, he says: ‘[r]emember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm’. It may appear that Jesus is rewriting the Sabbath laws. But—in common with later Jewish Mishnaic interpretation of the first and second centuries—he is in fact reminding this group of his opponents of the original call for Sabbath, which was an alternative socioeconomic order, grounded in justice, mercy, and human freedom (see, e.g. Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 128b).

When read as an interpretation of the healing of the man with the withered hand, Hendrik Goltzius’s The Artist’s Right Hand visualizes a return to physical wholeness, much like a biological Sabbath. We can imagine the man slowly flexing his hand, exploring the renewed strength and ability flowing through the wrist to the palm, from the palm to the fingertips. The restoration is almost audible as bones, muscles, and veins reconnect and recalibrate. Goltzius’s hand is powerful and vital (something an artist would especially appreciate and value), as it savours every tantalizing, liberating new movement of the Sabbath healing.

References

Lowery, Richard H. 2012. Sabbath and Jubilee (St Louis: Chalice Press)

Queller, Kurt. 2010. ‘“Stretch Out Your Hand!”: Echo and Metalepsis in Mark’s Sabbath Healing Controversy’, Journal of Biblical Literature 129.4: 737–58

Next exhibition: Matthew 12:15–21 Next exhibition: Mark 3:7–12 Next exhibition: Luke 6:17–19