I have nothing but unsupported guesses for these questions.
Now, we got three incidents where Jesus uses His saliva to conjure up a cure, but why did He do that?
I can think of a couple reasons.
1)
His conjuration requires material components. This would limit Jesus’ abilities to a spell-like function but could still maintain that his abilities come from god.
2)
He did it for example. His cure didn’t require the saliva, but, in order to suggest that the cure came from his ability and not some other source, he acts out somatic components of the spell for the crowd. This way they don’t claim that Jesus was not responsible for the cure.
Now, Jesus didn’t even need to be present to cure someone, so what was all the showmanship with the saliva about?
For this one I look at this part of what Jesus said:
quote:
I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.
—Jesus
Perhaps it was the amount of faith the man had that allowed Jesus to complete the spell without the material component.
If Jesus does not require any components for his spells then I would have to say that #2 above is the reason for all the showmanship.
did Jesus crave the limelight?
I don’t think he
craved it. But, he was trying to save
everyone. If he didn’t step into the limelight sometimes then nobody would have heard of him and he couldn’t have gotten the job done. This again, puts limits on Jesus’ superpowers and I don’t have the answer for why him and god didn’t just save everyone without the whole ”broadway show’ being involved. I don’t think it is up to me to question god’s methods.
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