Throughout this book, we have seen how techniques employed in ritual healing were shared across the notional lines that separated the ethnic, cultural, and religious communities of ancient Palestine. People wore amulets to heal them from their illnesses and to ward off the potential for new diseases. Some of these amulets contained lengthy texts or biblical quotations, while others included only a few words or images. The sick visited sites known for producing miraculous cures, in some cases expecting to encounter a divine healer in a dream. The control of many of these places changed hands with the shifting political landscape of the region, but their association with healing was remarkably persistent. Ritual practitioners addressed speech acts to demon-causing illnesses or higher powers in order to make a demon, and the disease with it, flee, while charismatic wonderworkers drew on their innate abilities or personal connection to the divine to perform miracles for those in need.

Some of these forms of ritual healing included syncretistic elements, such as charaktares or voces magicae. Others lacked such overt characteristics, but nevertheless reflected shared techniques for seeking ritual cures. In these cases, the ritual’s spoken or written components may have stayed within the parameters of a particular community’s religious expression. Yet, among Christian authors in particular, it was not only the former, more explicit forms of shared practices that drew the ire of elite authors. Some of their harshest critiques were directed at the techniques themselves and at the ritual practitioners who facilitated them, even maintaining the extreme position that death would be preferable to being healed through such means. In this chapter, I argue that it is precisely the commonalties among ritual healing practices demonstrated throughout this book that prompted Jewish and Christian elites to make healing practices a litmus test for coreligionists.

My approach in this chapter mirrors that of Hagith Sivan, who used conflict theory to explain how the communities of late antique Palestine related to each other. Sivan argued that intra-communal conflicts offered the opportunity to sift through positions held by coreligionists and identify those that were acceptable, and that external conflicts focused on the shared characteristics that united a group in the face of a common enemy.