Epilepsy in the Bible: What Scripture Says About Seizures

The word epilepsy is not in the Bible, but the Gospels tell of a boy whose fits look very like seizures. His father tells Jesus that the boy falls, foams at the mouth and grinds his teeth (Matthew 17:14–18; Mark 9:17–29). Epilepsy is a medical condition of the brain, and doctors treat it. A first seizure needs urgent medical help.

The World Health Organization calls epilepsy “a chronic noncommunicable disease of the brain” and, in its 2024 fact sheet, counts around 50 million people living with it worldwide. A seizure starts in the brain. In the WHO’s words, “Seizure episodes are a result of excessive electrical discharges in a group of brain cells.” Epilepsy is not contagious, and treatment helps many people. The WHO estimates that up to 70% of people with epilepsy could become free of seizures with the right antiseizure medicines.

Before the story raises any question about medicine or spirits, it is about a father. His only child had suffered since he was small, the disciples had tried and failed, and still he came to Jesus with a prayer many of us know by heart: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24). Those of us who love someone with seizures have prayed it too, in a waiting room or beside a bed, and Jesus did not send that father away.

Three Gospels tell one story. Jesus had gone up a mountain to pray with Peter, John and James, and Luke says that on the next day, when they came down, a crowd met him (Luke 9:28, 37). A man in the crowd begged Jesus to look at his son. The disciples had already tried to help the boy and failed. Each Gospel gives the father’s words a little differently.

Gospel	The father’s words (KJV)	A detail only this Gospel gives
Matthew 17:14–18	“he is lunatick, and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water”	The word “lunatick”
Mark 9:17–29	“he teareth him: and he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth, and pineth away”	It began in childhood
Luke 9:37–43	“a spirit taketh him, and he suddenly crieth out”	“he is mine only child”

Mark tells it most fully. When the boy is brought to Jesus, “straightway the spirit tare him; and he fell on the ground, and wallowed foaming” (Mark 9:20). Jesus asks how long this has been happening, and the father answers: “Of a child. And ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him” (Mark 9:21–22). The fall and the convulsions match what the NHS calls a tonic-clonic seizure, in which “you become unconscious and may fall, your muscles get stiff and your body jerks and shakes.” The study notes in the New American Bible, published by the US Catholic bishops, are not official Church teaching, but their note on Matthew 17:15 says that “the symptoms of the boy’s illness point to epilepsy.” No one can examine the boy now, so the diagnosis remains a reading of his symptoms rather than something the text states.

It means “moon-struck.” Matthew’s Greek verb is selēniazomai, built on selēnē, the moon. Thayer’s Greek lexicon defines it as “to be epileptic (epilepsy being supposed to return and increase with the increase of the moon).” The word appears only twice in the New Testament, in Matthew 4:24 and Matthew 17:15, and the King James Version renders it “lunatick” both times. The New American Bible notes explain the old belief behind it: “attacks of this were thought to be caused by phases of the moon.” Some modern translations leave the moon out; the New American Standard Bible, for one, renders the word in Matthew 4:24 as “epileptics.”

Yes. In Mark the father is close to giving up: “if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us.” Jesus answers, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth,” and the father “cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:22–24). His prayer admits belief and doubt at the same time, and what Mark 9:24 means is a question of its own.

Jesus then speaks to the spirit, and the boy lies as if dead: “he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose” (Mark 9:26–27). Matthew says “the child was cured from that very hour” (Matthew 17:18). Luke says Jesus “healed the child, and delivered him again to his father,” and that the crowd “were all amazed at the mighty power of God” (Luke 9:42–43).

The Gospels tell this one boy’s story as the work of a spirit. In Mark the father speaks of “a dumb spirit,” and Jesus commands, “Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him” (Mark 9:17, 25). The Bible never speaks of a “spirit of epilepsy,” and it does not turn the boy’s case into a rule for every seizure. When Matthew summarizes Jesus’ work in Galilee, he lists people with seizures apart from the possessed: “they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them” (Matthew 4:24).

Christians have read the boy’s story in more than one way, and the readings shade into one another. The New American Bible notes observe that “not until this verse does Matthew indicate that the boy’s illness is a case of demoniacal possession” (verse 18). Matthew Henry, the Presbyterian commentator who died in 1714, saw an illness and an evil spirit together: “A lunatic is properly one whose distemper lies in the brain, and returns with the change of the moon,” he wrote (a distemper is an illness), and the devil “either caused this distemper, or at least concurred with it, to heighten and aggravate it.” Epilepsy Action, the British epilepsy charity, simply calls the child “the boy with epilepsy,” and it notes that in the ancient world epilepsy “was often thought of as an evil spirit or demon inhabiting the unfortunate human.”

The Catholic Church and the Church of England both still practice exorcism or deliverance, and both require that illness be considered first. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, explaining exorcism, says: “Illness, especially psychological illness, is a very different matter; treating this is the concern of medical science. Therefore, before an exorcism is performed, it is important to ascertain that one is dealing with the presence of the Evil One, and not an illness.”

The Church of England sets the same rule for its deliverance ministry: “Where formal rites of deliverance are being considered, a medical professional must be consulted.” The Russian Orthodox Church, in its statement on health, says that “The Orthodox Church has always treated the medical work with high respect as it is based on the service of love aimed to prevent and relieve people’s suffering,” and it warns against confusing the grace of the sacraments with “conjuration, incantation and other magic manipulations and prejudices.”

If someone tells you that your seizures, or your child’s, are a demon to be cast out instead of an illness to be treated, remember that the Catholic Church’s and the Church of England’s own rules send illness to doctors first.

Neither the WHO nor the NHS lists “spiritual epilepsy” among the types or causes of epilepsy. The phrase raises two questions: whether seizures come from a spiritual cause, and whether the intense feelings some people have during a seizure are religious experiences.

The first question is older than Christianity. In ancient Greece epilepsy was called the sacred disease, and the Greek medical treatise On the Sacred Disease, credited to Hippocrates and dated about 400 BC, argued against the name: “it appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases.” Its author placed the cause in the body: “the brain is the cause of this affection.” Medicine has kept that answer and refined it. The WHO groups the causes of epilepsy as structural, genetic, infectious, metabolic, immune and unknown, and notes that the cause is still unknown in about half of cases worldwide. Whatever the cause, the WHO describes the seizures themselves in the same way, as “excessive electrical discharges in a group of brain cells.” The old fears have lasted a long time. “Fear, misunderstanding, discrimination and social stigma have surrounded epilepsy for centuries,” the WHO says.

The second question has a medical answer too. Ecstatic epilepsy is a rare form of focal epilepsy in which a seizure begins with a feeling of bliss, clarity and certainty. Researchers who study it write that the state “has also been described as a ‘religious’ or mystical experience,” and they trace it to seizure activity in the temporal lobe and, more recently, in a part of the brain called the insula. The feeling begins in the brain, as part of the seizure.

No. Scripture never names epilepsy as a punishment, and no one in the Gospel story blames the boy, whose illness began in childhood. When Jesus’ disciples met a man born blind, they asked whether sin lay behind it: “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:2–3).

The question has not gone away. The WHO lists the belief that epilepsy is “a result of morally bad behaviour” among the myths that “can keep people isolated and discourage them from seeking treatment.”

Christians pray for physical healing, and Scripture tells them to: “Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up” (James 5:14–15). Catholic and Orthodox Bibles also honor doctors. Ecclesiasticus, also called Sirach, says in the Douay-Rheims translation: “Honour the physician for the need thou hast of him: for the most High hath created him.” It puts prayer and medicine side by side: “My son, in thy sickness neglect not thyself, but pray to the Lord, and he shall heal thee,” and of the physician, “let him not depart from thee, for his works are necessary” (Ecclesiasticus 38:1, 9, 12). Catholic and Orthodox Christians count this book as Scripture; the Church of England reads it for instruction in how to live, but not to establish doctrine.

Prayer does not always bring a cure, and the churches say so. The Catholic Catechism teaches that “even the most intense prayers do not always obtain the healing of all illnesses,” and it points to Paul. He asked three times for his “thorn in the flesh” to leave him, and the answer he received was “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:7–9). The Russian Orthodox statement says the same: “Many illnesses are still incurable and cause suffering and death.” Praying for healing is never a reason to stop treatment. The NHS gives this advice to anyone taking medicine for epilepsy: “Do not change your dose or stop taking your medicine without talking to your specialist.”

St Valentine and the saints

In the Middle Ages, Christians with epilepsy asked about forty different saints to pray for them, Epilepsy Action counts, a number exceeded only by the saints invoked against the plague. The best known is St Valentine, and there was more than one saint of that name. Tradition makes a priest martyred in Rome and a bishop of Terni in Italy one man. Another Valentine was a missionary bishop of Passau, in Germany, from 435 and died about 475; from the 9th century the legends of the two saints merged. In German, the name sounds like fallen, “to fall,” and epilepsy, long known as the falling sickness, came to be called Saint Valentine’s illness. Pilgrims seeking a cure traveled to his shrines at Rufach in Upper Alsace and Kiedrich in the Rheingau. Pictures of Valentine beside a boy or man in a seizure appear across southern Germany, eastern Switzerland, Austria and northern Italy, beginning with the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, and they echo the Gospel story of the boy. Elsewhere other saints held the role: St John in France, and St Paul in Ireland.

Homes and hospitals

Christians also built places where people with epilepsy could live, learn and work. On October 14, 1867, a 14-year-old boy from Dortmund named Adolf Strate and two other boys moved into a small farmhouse near the center of Bielefeld, in Germany. Adolf had probably had seizures since early childhood, and after his mother died he had been sent onto the streets to beg. The Inner Mission, forerunner of today’s Diakonie in Westphalia and the Rhineland, founded the home to give people with seizures a place to live at a time when, in Bethel’s own words, “less able people were increasingly being pushed to the margins of society.” Pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh became its director in 1872, and a new house opened in 1873 under the name Bethel, Hebrew for “house of God.” The name passed to the whole foundation, which today is a church foundation under the Protestant Church of Westphalia. It runs the Mara Epilepsy Clinic in Bielefeld, a children’s epilepsy center, rehabilitation and training programs, and research into the causes and treatment of epilepsy.

Bethel tells its history without hiding the failures: “people were also wronged at Bethel,” it says, naming the National Socialist period and the welfare education of the early Federal Republic. The Catholic Catechism calls Christ’s command, “Heal the sick!”, a task the Church carries out “by taking care of the sick as well as by accompanying them with her prayer of intercession.” Families who care for someone with epilepsy do this work at home, and they need prayer too: prayers for caregivers ask for strength, patience and rest.

A seizure usually stops by itself within a few seconds or minutes. The NHS gives these steps for anyone nearby:

• Move the person only if they are in danger, such as near a busy road or a hot stove.
• Cushion their head if they are on the ground, and loosen anything tight around the neck.
• When the jerking stops, turn them onto their side.
• Stay with them and talk calmly until they recover, and note when the seizure started and stopped.
• Do not put anything in their mouth, including your fingers, and give no food or drink until they have fully recovered.

Call an ambulance if it is the person’s first seizure, if it lasts longer than is usual for them or more than 5 minutes when you do not know what is usual, if they do not regain full consciousness or have several seizures without regaining consciousness, if they are badly hurt, or if they have trouble breathing afterwards. Some people with epilepsy carry a card or wear a bracelet that says they have it. Many have a care plan agreed with their doctors and family that says what to do, such as giving emergency medicine; if you know the plan and have been trained, follow it.

When the seizure is over, the person on the ground needs what the boy in Mark needed: someone near, and a hand. “Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose” (Mark 9:27).

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• Catholic prayers for the sick, and the Anointing of the Sick
• Bible verses for healing the sick, and how Jesus healed
• Why do pain and suffering exist in a world with a loving God?
• Why did Jesus perform miracles?
• What does the moon symbolize in the Bible?