Centurion's Servant
- ANCIENT SOURCES: see Centurion's Servant (sources)
- LIST OF SCHOLARLY AND FICTIONAL WORKS: see Category:Centurion's Servant (subject)
The Centurion's Servant was one of the Miracles of Jesus, according to the Gospels of Matthew (8:5-13) and Luke (7:1-10) and with different details, John (4:46-54).
Overview
This is one of the few miracle stories coming from the earliest Christian tradition (Q Gospel?), to deal with a Gentile. At Capernaum a Roman centurion asks Jesus to heal his "boy/servant" (pais, Matthew)" or "servant" (doulos, Luke). The episode offers Jesus the opportunity to explicitly praise the faith of a Gentile and foretell their future conversion to the Church.
In Matthew the Roman centurion approaches Jesus directly. Luke recognized the difficulty of such a close encounter; in his account, there is no direct relationship between Jesus and the centurion, as the conversation was mediated by some "Jewish elders" and "friends." Luke also stresses that the centurion was a God-fearer and was well known by the local Jewish population for his "piety." The narrative is more plausible; however it remains very unlikely that a Roman centurion lived at the Jewish village of Capernaum
John offers a less controversial (and more primitive?) version of the story. It was not a Roman centurion but a (Jewish?) royal official who at Cana interceded for his "son" (uios/pais) who laid ill in Capernaum.
The two narratives are too similar to assume that they referred to two different miracle stories. It is more likely that the original reference to a Jewish "royal official" (of king Herod Antipas) could be mistaken for a "Roman centurion" while his "son" became one of the Centurion's slaves. In its metamorphosis the story offered to Q (and then Matthew and Luke) the opportunity to relate Jesus to Gentiles and offer a justification for the Christian preaching to Gentiles.