Can the Truth Be Spread with Lies?

What this page is asking

Christians of every tradition pray for the sick, and have always done so. The historic churches anoint the sick, lay hands on them, and ask God to heal them; they also send them to physicians, and have founded more hospitals than any other movement in history. None of that is in question here. God is free to heal whom he wills, when he wills, with or without means, and this page assumes throughout that he does.

The question concerns something narrower and more recent: the public healing ministry that promises healing, stages it before crowds and cameras, reads continued illness as a failure of faith, and funds itself from the audience. It has a history of about a century and a half, a set of recurring methods, and a paper trail. The Bible has its own record of healing. The two can be laid side by side.

Stated precisely:

Three positions, labelled, and used consistently throughout

A page that only attacked the healing platform could slide into the opposite error, as though God did not heal at all. Scripture does not go there, and neither does this page.

Notice what S and F share. Both believe God heals. Both pray. Both read the same Gospels. They disagree about one thing: whether God has bound himself to heal on request, so that healing can be expected, scheduled and announced. That is the question the rest of the page follows.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. Reverse it: ask for the strongest biblical case that healing is promised to every believer who has faith, and notice which texts it leans on and whether they are read with their chapters. Localise it: replace the historical figures with a healing ministry you know of that has been dead for at least a generation, and ask what its own publications claimed and what the record shows. Apply it: the next time you hear a healing announced, ask the questions in the claim checker in Part XII, and see how many can be answered.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other
quotation: give the work, the edition or translation, the section,
and the page where possible. Distinguish evidence from inference at
the point of use. Verify every quotation and statistic against a
reliable published source; where one cannot be verified, cut it. Do
not invent quotes, statistics or case details.

TITLE. Can the Truth Be Spread with Lies?

THESIS TO TEST. The Bible documents divine healings. God can
absolutely heal whenever he wants. Divine healings appear to be
usually instant and unexpected. They are also limited in number.
There is no promise to heal anyone and absolutely not to heal
everyone. Contrast this with today's healing spectacles broadcast
everywhere, most of which appear to be manipulation. Were studies
done? What about the early ministries that promised healing about a
hundred years ago, such as John Alexander Dowie, and their documented
consequences? The final avenue: can the truth be spread with lies?

AREAS TO TEST.
 1. The biblical pattern. Catalogue every biblical healing by speed,
    setting, expectation, relapse and outcome. Note possible
    exceptions to "always instant and unexpected", such as
    Mark 8:22-25 and 2 Kings 5.
 2. Healing as sign, compassion or promise. Do healings authenticate
    particular messengers, express compassion, or establish a
    universal expectation? Contrast descriptive miracle accounts with
    the passages used to promise healing today.
 3. The Bible's unhealed believers: Paul's thorn, Timothy's ailments,
    Trophimus, and faithful sufferers in Scripture. What do they
    reveal about illness, prayer, faith and divine sovereignty?
 4. Scarcity and clustering. Map healings across biblical history.
    Why do miracles cluster around Moses, Elijah, Jesus and the
    apostles?
 5. Evidence from medical studies. Controlled studies of intercessory
    prayer and research on alleged miraculous recoveries. Separate
    measurable outcomes from testimony, spontaneous remission,
    misdiagnosis and placebo.
 6. How modern healing spectacles work: selection, audience pressure,
    music, suggestion, "words of knowledge", unverifiable conditions.
    What cameras show versus what independent medical follow-up can
    establish.
 7. John Alexander Dowie as a case study: claims, publications,
    institutions, finances, testimonies, critics, and documented
    consequences for followers who rejected medicine or read
    continued illness as spiritual failure.
 8. A comparative history: Dowie, Aimee Semple McPherson, William
    Branham, Oral Roberts and later figures. Recurring methods,
    theological claims, scandals, institutional incentives.
 9. The human cost: delayed treatment, financial loss, preventable
    deaths, shame, damaged faith, family conflict. Prefer documented
    cases to defenders or hostile critics.
10. Can the truth be spread with lies? Consequentialist defences
    (conversions, hope, charitable giving) against biblical
    condemnations of false witness and "doing evil that good may
    come".

POSITIONS. Label and use consistently: S - the Sovereign (God heals
as he wills; he has not promised to heal all) HELD; F - the Formula
(healing is promised to faith; claim it) UNDER TEST; C - the Closed
heaven (God does not heal) REJECTED as the opposite error.

SCOPE. Grant that God can and does heal today. Do not adjudicate
cessationism against continuationism; test only the promise, the
pattern and the platform.

OBJECTIONS. Answer them inside the argument, in their proponents'
strongest terms (Isaiah 53:5; James 5:14-15; Mark 16:17-18;
John 14:12; "he healed them all"; "people were saved"; Philippians
1:18). No separate counter-case section.

NAMING. Deceased figures and closed records only. Living figures may
be quoted only in their own published words, verbatim, with a dated
citation; do not repeat third-party allegations about living people.
Describe contemporary ministries as a pattern; compose and label any
modern scene. Do not name children or private individuals.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz up front. A filterable catalogue of every
biblical healing. Predict-then-reveal exercises on the exceptions and
on the prayer trials. A zoom-out reader for Isaiah 53. Reading tabs
on the unhealed believers and on the healing evangelists. A chart of
healings by era. A "words of knowledge" probability simulator. Sorts,
a Dowie timeline, a pattern matrix, an objection drill the reader
answers before seeing a reply, memory cards, a verdict board, and a
closing claim checker for a healing the reader has heard about.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating key
points in prominent boxes for skimming readers, and giving the reader
something to do in every major section. Also produce a plain-English
quick version of about fifteen minutes with three short exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. In three places the evidence added something the brief did not expect. First, the thesis is wrong in one word. Many biblical healings were not unexpected at all: the sick sought them, sometimes loudly and repeatedly. What holds without exception is that none was scheduled, advertised or guaranteed in advance, and that is precisely what the healing platform does (Parts I and II). Second, in the Gospels, when a healing failed, the blame fell on the disciples who attempted it, not on the sick boy or his doubting father, and a large share of biblical healings involved no faith on the part of the person healed at all. The modern practice of blaming the sick has the direction of blame reversed (Part IV). Third, the largest controlled trial of prayer for the sick found that patients told they were being prayed for had slightly more complications than those who were uncertain, and Jesus, by contrast, repeatedly sent the healed to the priests to be examined. Scripture’s own standard of healing was independent verification, not announcement (Parts VI and VII).

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has an answer you can check in the texts and sources in Part XIV. Answer before reading and lock them in; they come back in Part XIII beside the sources.

What follows

Every healing in the Bible

Begin with the record itself, since everything else depends on it. The table below lists every individual account of healing or raising from the dead in the Old and New Testaments: thirty-eight of them, from Abimelech’s household in Genesis to Publius’s father on Malta. Exorcisms without a stated physical ailment are left out, as are the summary statements (“he healed all that were sick”), which are discussed separately below. Where a healing is told in more than one Gospel it is counted once.

Each account is classified on four questions, all answerable from the text: How fast? (immediate, delayed, in stages, or not stated). Was it sought? (by the sick person, family or friends, or not). Whose faith is mentioned? (the sick person’s, someone else’s, or none). Where? (in public, or in private or aside). The classifications are this page’s judgement, stated so you can dispute them. Two of the categories, “delayed” and “in stages,” are the exceptions the brief asked to be noted.

Try it: predict before you look

Try it: filter the catalogue

Choose any combination of filters. The count and the bars update as you go. Tap an entry to read the note.

Thirty-eight accounts. Classification by this page from the Authorised Version text; references are to the fullest account. “Sought” includes being brought or asked for by others. “Faith mentioned” records only what the text says.

What the catalogue shows

“He healed them all”

The strongest objection from Position F rests not on the individual accounts but on the summaries: “he … healed all that were sick” (Matthew 8:16); “great multitudes followed him, and he healed them all” (Matthew 12:15); “there went virtue out of him, and healed them all” (Luke 6:19). If Jesus healed everyone who came, the argument runs, he is the same today (Hebrews 13:8), and so healing is for all.

The summaries are real and should not be minimised: in the presence of Jesus, in Galilee, in those years, healing was abundant. But they describe what Jesus did in a particular place and time, and the Gospels themselves put limits beside them. At Nazareth “he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk” (Mark 6:5). At Bethesda, where “a great multitude of impotent folk” lay waiting (John 5:3), he healed one man and left. Hebrews 13:8 says Jesus Christ is “the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever”; it does not say his ministry in Galilee is the same, any more than it says he still walks the roads of Judaea. The constancy of Christ is a constancy of person and promise. The question is what he promised.

“Men as trees, walking”

The brief asked for the exceptions to “always instant and unexpected” to be stated honestly. There are more than two, and they matter, because a healing movement that meets a delayed or partial result often points to exactly these texts: “even Jesus needed two attempts.” Read them before deciding what they show.

Try it: what happened next?

Five scenes. Before each reveal, predict what the text says.

What the exceptions share

Taken together, the ten non-immediate accounts do refine the thesis. Healing in Scripture is not always instant. Sometimes God attaches an act of obedience (dip, wash, go and show yourselves), sometimes a means (a fig poultice), sometimes a wait (seven days, three days), sometimes a process visible to the onlooker (the child growing warm; the man seeing men as trees). Anyone stating the biblical pattern as “always instant” overstates it.

But the exceptions share three things that the healing platform does not. They end in a complete, visible cure within a short and definite time: the same day, the third day, the seventh day, a second touch. Nobody in Scripture is told to go home and act as though healed while the illness continues. The delay is specified by God or the prophet in advance, as with Naaman and Hezekiah, not explained afterwards. And none is announced before it has happened. The lepers were told to go to the priests while still leprous; they were not told to testify that they were clean.

The correction the thesis needs

The thesis says divine healings were “usually instant and unexpected.” “Usually instant” stands. “Unexpected” does not, at least as a general rule. Of the thirty-eight accounts, twenty-two were sought, many with great persistence: Bartimaeus shouting over a crowd that told him to be quiet (Mark 10:48), the woman pushing through to touch a hem (Mark 5:27), a Gentile mother arguing with Jesus (Mark 7:28), friends digging through a roof (Mark 2:4). Asking is not the problem. Jesus invited it.

What does hold in every case is subtler and more important. No healing in Scripture was scheduled, advertised in advance, or guaranteed to anyone who met a condition. No prophet or apostle announces a healing meeting for next Thursday. No one sells the result. The biblical pattern is not “unexpected” so much as unowned: the initiative, timing and choice stay with God.

Sign, compassion or promise?

Why does God heal in Scripture? The texts give two reasons plainly and repeatedly, and a third reason is argued for from texts that turn out, on reading, to say something else.

Reason one: a sign that authenticates a message

The New Testament says outright that healings accredited the messenger and the message. “Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know” (Acts 2:22). The gospel “at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him; God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will” (Hebrews 2:3–4). Paul could appeal to “the signs of an apostle” as proof that he was one (2 Corinthians 12:12). John’s Gospel calls the miracles sēmeia, signs, and says why they were written: “that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31).

A sign points past itself. The healing of the man born blind is followed by “I am the light of the world” (John 9:5); the raising of Lazarus by “I am the resurrection, and the life” (11:25). When John the Baptist asked from prison whether Jesus was the one to come, Jesus answered with a list of healings that echoes Isaiah 35 and 61 (Matthew 11:4–5): the healings identified the Messiah.

Reason two: compassion

The Gospels also say, just as plainly, that Jesus healed because he pitied people. “Jesus went forth, and saw a great multitude, and was moved with compassion toward them, and he healed their sick” (Matthew 14:14). He stopped a funeral at Nain because “he had compassion on her” (Luke 7:13), and nobody had asked. Compassion is not a lesser motive than evidence; the two go together. But compassion is God’s free response, not a debt he owes.

Reason three, argued: a promise to every believer

Position F rests on a handful of texts that seem to promise healing to all who believe. The most important is Isaiah 53:5, “with his stripes we are healed,” from which the doctrine of “healing in the atonement” is drawn: Christ bore our sicknesses on the cross as he bore our sins, so healing can be claimed on the same terms as forgiveness. Read the passage as the New Testament reads it.

Try it: zoom out, one layer at a time

At each layer, before revealing the note, ask: what kind of healing is meant here, and when is it said to happen?

Read whole, the atonement does secure the healing of the body, at the resurrection. Christians of every tradition confess it: “the resurrection of the body.” Paul says that we “groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23). What the passage cannot bear is the claim that every believer may demand the healing now. If it did, Paul, Timothy and Trophimus lacked something the cross had purchased for them (Part IV), and every Christian who has ever died of an illness died because of a failure of faith.

The other texts, briefly

Try it: description, instruction or promise?

Eight statements. Is each a description of what happened, an instruction to do something, or an unconditional promise that every believer will be physically healed now?

Left at Miletum sick

If healing were promised to every believer with faith, the New Testament’s leading believers should be the healthiest people in it. They are not, and the New Testament mentions their illnesses without embarrassment, in passing, and without a word of blame.

Try it: read the cases

Six people, all faithful, none healed on request. Choose each in turn.

What the cases show

Four things follow from reading them together. Illness is not proof of weak faith or hidden sin. Jesus said so explicitly when his disciples asked whose sin had caused a man’s blindness: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents” (John 9:3). Job’s friends insisted otherwise, and God said to them, “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right” (Job 42:7; see Dossier 16). Prayer for healing is right, and so is using means. Paul, who had healed others, told Timothy to take wine for his stomach; Luke, “the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14), travelled with him. God’s answer may be no, and the no may be grace. “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Healing can come slowly and ordinarily and still be God’s mercy. Epaphroditus recovered; Paul called it mercy, not a miracle.

Try it: whose faith?

Position F says healing follows faith, and failure reveals a lack of it. Eight biblical scenes. For each, whose faith does the text mention?

When healing failed in the Gospels, who was blamed?

There is one recorded failure of healing in the Gospels. A father brings his son, who suffers convulsions, to the disciples while Jesus is on the mountain. “I spake to thy disciples that they should cast him out; and they could not” (Mark 9:18). Jesus’ rebuke, “O faithless generation,” falls on the scene as a whole, and when the disciples ask privately why they failed, the answer is about them: “This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting” (9:29; Matthew 17:20 adds “because of your unbelief”). The father’s own faith was openly weak: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (9:24). The boy was healed anyway.

That is the reverse of the modern practice. On the healing platform, when the healing does not come, the explanation offered is usually the sick person’s faith, or unconfessed sin, or “losing the healing” by doubting afterwards. In the one Gospel case where a healing failed, the would-be healers were at fault, the sick person was a child who had no say, and the parent’s doubt did not stop Jesus.

Try it: the texts to keep

Ten short texts that carry the argument so far. Turn each over, then mark whether you knew it.

Many lepers, one Naaman

A common impression is that the Bible is full of miracles from cover to cover. It is not. The Old Testament covers well over a thousand years of history; long stretches of it record no healing at all. The miracles gather in a few short periods.

Healings and raisings by period

Individual accounts from the catalogue in Part I, grouped by period. Dates for the earliest periods are approximate and disputed; the shape does not depend on them. Hover or focus a bar for the accounts.

Twenty-eight of the thirty-eight accounts fall in the ministry of Jesus and the first generation of apostles, a span of about thirty years. Four more fall in the ministries of Elijah and Elisha, and two in that of Moses. Between them are centuries, including the whole period of the judges, the reigns of David and Solomon, and the four hundred years between Malachi and John the Baptist, with no recorded healing at all. The pattern was noticed long ago, and it has an obvious explanation in the texts themselves: miracles cluster at moments of new revelation, when God is sending a new word through a new messenger who needs to be recognised. Moses at the giving of the law; Elijah and Elisha when Israel’s faith was being contested with Baal; Jesus and the apostles at the coming of the gospel.

Jesus on the scarcity of healing

The clearest statement of the pattern comes from Jesus, preaching in his home synagogue at Nazareth, and it nearly got him killed.

Luke 4:25–27
But I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land; But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian.

This is the text Position F never quotes. In the greatest healing ministry of the Old Testament there were many lepers in Israel, faithful Israelites among them, and one foreign general was healed. Jesus cites it to explain why he would not perform on demand for his home town (“whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here,” 4:23). God’s healing was sovereign then, and Jesus says so.

Signs do not authenticate themselves

Scripture adds a warning that runs the other way. A sign is not proof that the one giving it is from God. “If there arise among you a prophet … and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, And the sign or the wonder come to pass … saying, Let us go after other gods … Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet” (Deuteronomy 13:1–3). Jesus says that on the last day many will say “have we not … in thy name done many wonderful works?” and will hear “I never knew you” (Matthew 7:22–23; see Dossier 28). Paul warns of “signs and lying wonders” (2 Thessalonians 2:9). In Scripture the message tests the sign, not the other way round.

Try it: which period?

What the studies found

The brief asks whether studies were done. They were, many of them, and it is worth being clear first about what a study can and cannot test. No trial can test whether God heals: God is not a drug, and many Christians regard the whole exercise as misconceived (“Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God,” Deuteronomy 6:16). What a trial can test is a narrower claim: that when people are prayed for, measurably better outcomes follow. That is not Position S’s claim. It is Position F’s.

The controlled trials

All are published and indexed. The 2010 study is included because it is the strongest published evidence on the other side and because it tested proximal, laying-on-of-hands prayer, the kind the healing movement actually practises. A 2001 study reporting that prayer doubled pregnancy rates in IVF is omitted; it has been discredited and should not be relied on by anyone.

Try it: predict the largest trial

The STEP result does not show that prayer harms anyone, and the investigators did not claim it did; they suggested that being told strangers were praying for you might itself cause anxiety (“am I that sick?”). What it does show is that knowing you are being prayed for, the very condition Position F says releases healing, made no one better. The trials as a body are what Position S predicts: no effect that can be summoned by method.

The miracles that were investigated

The most rigorous Christian investigation of healing claims is also the oldest continuous one. Since 1883 a medical bureau at Lourdes has examined reports of cures from pilgrims, and an international committee of doctors reviews the strongest. A cure is referred to the Church for recognition only if the committee finds it “unexpected, complete, lasting and unexplained according to medical knowledge”; the criteria descend from those set by Prospero Lambertini, later Pope Benedict XIV, in the 1730s. On the sanctuary’s own figures, more than 7,000 cures have been reported since 1858, and 72 have been recognised as miracles, the most recent in April 2025. Hundreds of millions of pilgrims have visited in that time.

Whatever one concludes about those 72 cases, and Protestants and Catholics will conclude differently about the setting, two things stand out for this page. The criteria are the biblical pattern in medical language: complete (not partial), lasting (not relapsing), unexpected in the medical sense (not a condition that was improving anyway). And the rate is what Luke 4:27 would lead one to expect: many sick, few healed in a way no one can explain.

A surgeon follows up the healed

In the early 1970s William A. Nolen, a Minnesota surgeon, spent two years investigating healers for his book Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle (Random House, 1974). He attended a service held by Kathryn Kuhlman (1907–1976), then the best-known healing evangelist in America and one of the most careful, and took the names of twenty-three people who had come forward as healed. He followed them up. By his account, none had been cured of an organic disease. One woman, announced as healed of cancer of the spine, had removed her back brace and run across the stage; her spine collapsed the next day, and she died about four months later. Nolen’s conclusion was not that nobody felt better: many did, of conditions that respond to emotion and suggestion. It was that the healings which could be checked did not survive checking.

Why someone can feel healed and not be

Try it: what would need checking?

Eight testimonies, composed by this page. For each, which explanation would a careful doctor most want to rule out before calling it a miracle?

How the platform works

Begin with what happens in the room. The scene below is composed by this page; it is not a transcript of any meeting or person. It is built from elements described in the published investigations cited in this Part, and many readers will recognise it.

Everything in that scene can be shown on camera. The question is what else it shows.

Eight working parts

Investigators documented further techniques in the 1980s. The magician and investigator James Randi (1928–2020), in The Faith Healers (Prometheus, 1987), described among other things wheelchairs supplied by ushers to people who could walk, so that they could be seen to rise from them; the “leg lengthening” trick, in which a seated person’s shorter leg is made to appear to grow by shifting the shoes or posture; and a radio receiver hidden in a healer’s ear through which details from prayer cards were read to him as “revelation.” Some of the evangelists Randi investigated are still living, and so, under this page’s rule, they are not named here; the book is.

Try it: the word-of-knowledge simulator

Choose a crowd size, then choose a “word.” The simulator shows how many people in a crowd of that size would, on ordinary rates of illness, be able to stand up and say “that’s me.”

Try it: what can a camera show?

Eight things you might see on a healing broadcast. Which can the camera actually establish, and which can only independent medical follow-up establish?

The Bible’s own standard: go and be examined

Here the biblical pattern is at its sharpest. Jesus did not ask the healed to testify on stage. He repeatedly told them to say nothing, and to go to the priest, the official examiner under the law of Moses, who alone could pronounce a leper clean (Leviticus 13–14): “See thou say nothing to any man: but go thy way, shew thyself to the priest, and offer for thy cleansing those things which Moses commanded, for a testimony unto them” (Mark 1:44). The ten lepers were sent the same way (Luke 17:14). The testimony was the priest’s examination, not the leper’s word.

The biblical healings also survived hostile investigation. The man born blind was questioned by his neighbours, then twice by the Pharisees, who also summoned his parents to confirm that he had been born blind (John 9:8–34). The lame man healed at the temple was over forty and known to everyone who used that gate (Acts 3:2, 10; 4:22). The council that wanted to suppress the apostles investigated, and conceded: “beholding the man which was healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it … that indeed a notable miracle hath been done by them is manifest to all them that dwell in Jerusalem; and we cannot deny it” (Acts 4:14, 16).

Elijah the Restorer

The modern healing movement did not begin with television. Its first great institution was built in Illinois at the turn of the twentieth century by a Scottish-born preacher who promised healing without medicine, forbade doctors in the city he founded, and called himself the prophet Elijah. John Alexander Dowie (1847–1907) is the obvious case study because the record is closed, extensive and not seriously disputed on its main facts, and because his influence ran straight into the healing revivals that followed.

Try it: walk through the record

Step through Dowie’s career a stage at a time. At each step, before moving on, ask what the next stage is likely to bring.

What Dowie claimed, and what the record shows

Sources: H. J. Gibbney, “Dowie, John Alexander (1847–1907),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 4 (1972); Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (1918); contemporary Chicago and New York press as reported in later accounts. For the full history, see Philip L. Cook, Zion City, Illinois: Twentieth-Century Utopia (Syracuse University Press, 1996). Allegations of financial misconduct were made by his successor and are reported as allegations.

Where Zion led

Dowie’s movement did not end with him. John G. Lake and F. F. Bosworth, both later healing evangelists, passed through Zion; missionaries sent from Zion helped found the Zionist churches of southern Africa, today among the largest Christian movements there. And a boy born in Zion City in 1906 to parents who followed Dowie, Gordon Lindsay (1906–1973), grew up to found The Voice of Healing in 1948, the magazine that promoted William Branham, and then Oral Roberts, A. A. Allen and the other evangelists of the post-war healing revival. The line from Dowie to the television era is not a metaphor. It runs through one family.

A contemporary Christian verdict

The most searching contemporary critique of Dowie came not from sceptics but from a Christian theologian who believed in miracles and in answered prayer. B. B. Warfield of Princeton did not dispute that God heals. He disputed that God had promised to heal without means, and he drew the practical conclusion bluntly:

He who prays for healing and does not employ all the means of healing within his reach—hygiene, nursing, medicine, surgery,—unless God has promised to heal him in the specific mode of precise miracle, is certainly a fanatic.

B. B. Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (1918), “Faith-Healing.” Free at the Internet Archive.

He added, on the claim that illness reveals the sufferer’s sin: “That all the sicknesses which afflict our race are a result of sin is true. But that special sicknesses infer special sin our Saviour Himself explicitly denies.” That is Position S, in 1918, against the first large institution of Position F.

The healing evangelists

Dowie was followed, over the next half century, by a line of healing evangelists who filled halls, tents and eventually television schedules. All the figures below are deceased and their records are closed. They differed greatly. Some forbade medicine and some built hospitals; some were accused of fraud and some of nothing worse than overstatement. Read them as individuals first, then look for the pattern.

Try it: read the records

The recurring pattern

Across the records, six features recur. Not every figure shows all six, and the differences matter: Oral Roberts, for one, built a hospital. But the pattern is plain enough to name.

1. PromiseHealing is presented as available, even certain, for those who come and believe.
2. PlatformHealing is performed publicly, before crowds, at announced meetings, and later on radio and television.
3. Testimony without follow-upHealings are counted by announcement and testimony. Where they were checked, by Nolen, by Branham’s own associates, by journalists friendly to the movement, the results were, in Ern Baxter’s words, “embarrassingly low.”
4. Blame on the sickFailure is explained by the sufferer’s lack of faith, or by doubt that “lost” the healing afterwards.
5. MoneyThe ministry is financed by the audience, often with appeals tied to the promised blessing, and the sums become very large.
6. ScandalLegal, financial or personal crises follow with notable regularity: prosecutions, tax cases, lawsuits, disappearances, deaths.

Try it: whose record?

The human cost

The brief asks for documented cases rather than the claims of defenders or hostile critics. The most careful count is a medical one, and it concerns children, who could not choose.

Try it: predict the count

Seth M. Asser and Rita Swan, “Child Fatalities From Religion-motivated Medical Neglect,” Pediatrics 101, no. 4 (April 1998): 625–629. 172 deaths in the United States, 1975–1995, where parents withheld medical care on religious grounds, grouped by the authors’ estimate of the chance of survival with ordinary care.

The leading causes of death were ordinary and treatable: pneumonia (22), meningitis (15), cancers (15), type 1 diabetes (12), ruptured appendix (7), measles (7). Five groups accounted for 83% of the deaths. The largest single group, 64 of the 172, belonged to one Indiana church, Faith Assembly, whose founder taught that medicine was contrary to faith.

The cases on the record

The costs that are not counted

Can the truth be spread with lies?

Everything so far leads to the question in the title. Suppose a reader accepts all of it: that platform healings are mostly suggestion and selection, that some are staged, that the promises are misread. A defender of the platform can still reply: but people come to Christ. The gospel is true. If a dramatic meeting, even an exaggerated one, brings a man to hear it, is that not worth it?

Two kinds of untruth

It is worth being precise, because most people on a healing platform are not frauds. There is deliberate deception: the planted testimony, the hidden earpiece, the wheelchair supplied to a man who can walk. It is rare, and it is indefensible on any account. And there is the soft untruth, which is common and often sincere: “better” announced as “gone”; a feeling reported as a cure; healings counted and failures forgotten; a service advertised with “miracles will happen tonight” that no one could know. The question applies to both. A statement that God healed someone, when he may not have, is a statement about what God did.

The case for the platform, stated fairly

The consequentialist defence deserves its strongest form. Outcomes: people hear the gospel who would never enter a church, and some are converted; the sick receive hope and attention; giving funds schools, orphanages and missions. Scripture: Paul rejoiced even when Christ was preached “in pretence” (Philippians 1:18); God used Rahab’s lie to protect the spies (Joshua 2) and blessed the Hebrew midwives who deceived Pharaoh (Exodus 1:19–21). Humility: who are we to say God did not heal that woman? Better to err on the side of faith than to quench the Spirit.

The answer Paul gives by name

Paul met exactly this argument, and answered it.

Romans 3:7–8
For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner? And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just.

The argument that God’s truth can “more abound” through a lie is stated in the first person and rejected as slander. Paul describes his own method in terms that exclude the soft untruth as well as the hard: “not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Corinthians 4:2); “our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile … nor a cloke of covetousness” (1 Thessalonians 2:3, 5).

“False witnesses of God”

Paul’s sharpest word on the subject concerns the resurrection, and it applies directly. “If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain … Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up” (1 Corinthians 15:14–15). To say that God did something he did not do is, in Paul’s words, to bear false witness about God. An announced healing is precisely a testimony that God raised someone up. If he did not, the preacher has become what Paul feared to be.

This is also why the soft untruth damages the thing it means to serve. The apostles staked the faith on the resurrection being a public, checkable fact: most of the five hundred witnesses, Paul says, “remain unto this present” (15:6), which is to say, go and ask them. A church that tolerates staged or unexamined signs hands the sceptic his explanation for every sign, including that one. Every faked healing is an argument that the empty tomb was staged too.

The objections, answered in their own texts

The historic church’s answer

The question was put directly to Augustine around AD 420. A Spanish Christian named Consentius proposed that Catholics should pretend to be Priscillianists, a secretive heretical sect that permitted lying about its beliefs, in order to infiltrate and expose them. The cause was the truth; the method was a lie. Augustine’s reply, Against Lying, refused:

How then by a lie shall I rightly be able to prosecute lies? Or is it by robbery that robberies and by sacrilege that sacrileges, and by adultery that adulteries, are to be prosecuted?

… By truth must we beware of, by truth must we take, by truth must we kill, lies.

Augustine, To Consentius, Against Lying 1 and 12 (c. 420). Trans. H. Browne, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol. 3. Free at New Advent.

In the same treatise Augustine quotes Romans 3:8 against the proposal. Eight centuries later Thomas Aquinas held that every lie is a sin, and that a lie “about divine things” is “a most grievous and a mortal sin,” because it offends against faith and religion as well as charity (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 110, aa. 3–4). The medieval church legislated against the religious version of the soft untruth too: the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), canon 62, forbade the sale of relics and the promotion of new ones without authority, and ordered that pilgrims not be deceived with false stories and documents for the sake of gain. The Reformation itself began with a protest against selling spiritual benefits to the anxious. On this question Augustine, Aquinas, Lateran IV and Luther agree.

Try it: an objection to answer

Try it: honest or not?

Eight practices, composed by this page. Is each honest, dishonest, or does it depend on how it is done?

The judgement, and a claim checker

Before seeing the page’s verdicts, give your own. Ten claims drawn from the areas in the brief.

Try it: rate the thesis claim by claim

The page’s judgement

So the thesis stands, with one word corrected. God heals whom he wills; he has not promised to heal all; the biblical healings are few, clustered, complete, checkable and unowned; and the modern platform, whatever the sincerity of many who stand on it, departs from that pattern at every point where it can be examined. The ministries that promised healing a century ago left a record of investigations, collapse and graves, and the ones that followed left the testimony of their own associates. And the truth cannot be spread with lies, because the truth in question is a claim about what God has done, and a false one makes the speaker a false witness of God.

Try it: check a healing claim you have heard

Think of a healing claim you have heard: in a meeting, on a broadcast, from a friend. Answer eight questions about it. Nothing you select is stored or sent anywhere. The result applies the tests of this page; it is a way of organising what you know, not a verdict on any person.

Your answers, revisited

Here are your locked-in answers from the top of the page, beside what the sources say and where each is discussed.

Check it yourself

Eighteen items. The Scripture is free in any edition; the patristic and scholastic texts are free at New Advent and CCEL; Warfield is free at the Internet Archive; the medical studies are indexed on PubMed, and the Cochrane review is free to read. If you read only three, read the first three. Together they take about forty minutes and settle the core question without any help from this page.

1. 1. Luke 4:16–30; Mark 6:1–6; John 5:1–15. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. Many lepers and one Naaman; few healed at Nazareth; one man at Bethesda.
2. 2. 2 Corinthians 12:1–10; Philippians 2:25–30; 1 Timothy 5:23; 2 Timothy 4:20; John 9. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. The unhealed apostles and friends, and the healing that survived an investigation.
3. 3. Roberts L, Ahmed I, Hall S, Davison A. “Intercessory prayer for the alleviation of ill health.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2009, CD000368. Read this first. Ten minutes for the plain-language summary.
4. 4. Isaiah 52:13–53:12; Matthew 8:14–17; 1 Peter 2:21–25; Romans 8:18–25. The atonement, healing, and the redemption of the body.
5. 5. James 5:13–18; Mark 16:9–20 (with a note on its manuscript history in any study Bible); John 14:12; Exodus 15:26; 3 John 2. The promise texts, in their contexts.
6. 6. Acts 2:22; Hebrews 2:1–4; 2 Corinthians 12:12; John 20:30–31; Deuteronomy 13:1–5; Matthew 7:21–23; 2 Thessalonians 2:9. Signs, their purpose and their limits.
7. 7. Mark 1:40–45; Luke 17:11–19; Leviticus 13–14; Acts 3:1–4:22. Healing and examination.
8. 8. 2 Kings 5; Matthew 10:5–10; Acts 8:9–24. Naaman, Gehazi, “freely give,” and Simon Magus.
9. 9. Romans 3:1–8; 1 Corinthians 15:1–19; 2 Corinthians 4:1–6; 1 Thessalonians 2:1–12; Philippians 1:12–18; Job 13:1–12 and 42:7–9. Truth, lies and false witnesses of God.
10. 10. Augustine, To Consentius, Against Lying (c. 420), NPNF I/3; and City of God XXII.8 (c. 426), NPNF I/2, where Augustine records healings of his own day and insists that written accounts be read publicly.
11. 11. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 110 (c. 1270), on lying.
12. 12. B. B. Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles (New York: Scribner, 1918), especially the chapter on “Faith-Healing.” A Christian critique of Dowie and the faith-cure movement by a theologian who believed in miracles.
13. 13. H. J. Gibbney, “Dowie, John Alexander (1847–1907),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 4 (1972). Free online. Then Philip L. Cook, Zion City, Illinois: Twentieth-Century Utopia (Syracuse, 1996).
14. 14. David Edwin Harrell Jr., All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Indiana University Press, 1975). The standard history of the post-war healing evangelists; and C. Douglas Weaver, The Healer-Prophet: William Marrion Branham (Mercer, rev. 2000).
15. 15. William A. Nolen, Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle (Random House, 1974); and James Randi, The Faith Healers (Prometheus, 1987).
16. 16. The trials: Byrd, Southern Medical Journal 81 (1988); Harris et al., Archives of Internal Medicine 159 (1999); Aviles et al., Mayo Clinic Proceedings 76 (2001); Krucoff et al., The Lancet 366 (2005); Benson et al., American Heart Journal 151 (2006); Brown et al., Southern Medical Journal 103 (2010).
17. 17. Asser SM, Swan R. “Child Fatalities From Religion-motivated Medical Neglect.” Pediatrics 101 (1998): 625–629.
18. 18. The Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, “Miraculous healings,” lourdes-france.com: the procedure, the criteria and the list of 72 recognised cures.

No living person is named on this page as an example of anything. Historical figures are named only where deceased and the record is closed; children and private individuals in the historical cases are not named. Every modern scene is composed by this page and labelled as composed. Nothing here is medical advice.