Healing the centurion's servant
Healing the centurion's servant is one of the miracles said to have been performed by Jesus of Nazareth as related in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke (both part of the Christian biblical canon). The story is not recounted in the Gospels of either John or Mark. According to these accounts, a Roman centurion asks Jesus for his help because his servant is ill. Jesus offers to go to the centurion's house to perform a healing, but the centurion hesitates and suggests that Jesus' word of authority would be sufficient . Impressed, Jesus comments approvingly at the strong religious faith displayed by the soldier (despite not being a Jew) and grants the request, which results in the servant being healed the same day. Sources. Scriptural sources. The story of the centurion appears both in the Gospel of Matthew and that of Luke: Origins. The story of the centurion is not mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the four gospels. One theory is that material not in Mark but found in both Matthew and Luke may have come from a lost source known as "Q". If true then this  passage would still be an anomaly as Q is believed to have been a collection of sayings of Jesus (a list of sermons and quotations) with no other contextual material; but the story of the centurion does include background detail. It would also be the only miracle story that originated in Q. One possibility is that only the dialogue was in Q, and both Matthew and Luke added the background details from a shared oral history. The Gospel of John does narrate the account of Jesus healing the son of a royal official at Capernaum at a distance in . Some  modern commentators treat them as the same event. However, in his analysis of Matthew, R. T. France presents linguistic arguments against the equivalence of "pais" and son and considers these two separate miracles. Merrill C. Tenney in his commentary on John and Orville Daniel in his Gospel harmony also consider them two different incidents. Use in the liturgy. The statements made by the centurion are used in the Prayer of Humble Access contained in many Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other Christian Eucharist liturgies. His statements are also used as part of the Communion rite in the Roman Rite of the  Catholic Church. Interpretations. According to I. Howard Marshall, there were no Roman forces in Galilee prior to AD 44; therefore, the soldier was probably a member of Herod Agrippa's troops, which modeled Roman organization. While his nationality is not given, he is clearly a gentile. Meaning of "servant". Luke 7:2 and 7:10 refer to the person to be healed as (), unambiguously meaning "servant" but has the centurion himself call him () – which has a number of more ambiguous meanings including "child" (, ), "son" () and, "servant" (, ). Gnostic interpretation. In his Against Heresies, Irenaeus tells us that some Gnostics believed the story to  be metaphorical, with the centurion being merely a symbol of the demiurge. According to this interpretation, the demiurge tells Jesus that he has tried all he could to save the servant (humanity) but his laws have not succeeded in healing humanity or offering it a proper means towards spiritual development. Accordingly, the demiurge urges Jesus to say a word (spread gnosis) to offer true salvation to humanity. Homosexual interpretation. Daniel A. Helminiak, an American Catholic priest, theologian and author of ""What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality"," states that the word , used for the servant, could have a sexual meaning . Theodore W. Jennings Jr. and Tat-Siong Benny Liew, also authors of various Christian books, further write that Roman historical data about patron-client relationships and about same-sex relations among soldiers support the view that the in Matthew's account is the centurion's "boy-lover", and that the centurion, therefore, did not want Jesus to enter his house for fear perhaps that the boy would be enamoured of Jesus instead. The Roman military historian D.B. Saddington writes that while he does not exclude the possibility, the evidence the two put forward supports "neither of these interpretations". Healing the