Cleansed Lepers, Cleansed Hearts

Pamela Shellberg shows that Luke's use of the language of "clean" and "unclean" has particular first-century medical connotations that make it especially powerful for expressing his understanding of the universal salvation prophesied by Isaiah and by Jesus. Shellberg traces how the stories of Jesus' cleansing of leprous bodies in the Gospel become the pattern for the divine cleansing of Gentile hearts throughout Acts, and one of Luke's primary expressions of the means of God's salvation and favor through the dissolving of distinctions between Jew and Gentile.