Chapter 12
In This Chapter
● Performing miracles in Jesus’s time
● Witnessing Jesus’s acts of power
● Finding out what the miracles say about Jesus
● Looking at modern opinions of Jesus’s miracles
The word “miracle” comes from the Latin word miraculum, which means “an astonishing thing.” The gospels use slightly different words for the astonishing things that Jesus does — words like “sign,” “act of power,” “wonder,” and “astonishing (or amazing) deed.” Whatever word you use, there’s no question that the historical Jesus wowed the crowds by performing deeds they couldn’t explain.
In this chapter, you explore what these miracles meant in Jesus’s world and why some experts don’t believe that they occurred. You also test the healing and nature miracles against the historical rules to figure out which ones Jesus most likely performed. Finally, you discover what these acts of power signify about Jesus in the eyes of the gospel authors.
Working Wonders in Jesus's Day
In Jesus’s time, most people believed that God (or the gods) intervened in the world, whether on the macro level of political and military affairs or at the micro level of bodily health. Divine interventions were studied and sought in the official temples of the various deities around the Mediterranean.
The Epicurean philosophers of the Greco-Roman world were an important exception. They doubted that the gods could be enticed to do anything because one of their chief attributes was a tranquility that precluded any involvement with the day-to-day administration of this world.
Even though the Epicurean gods acted like cosmic couch potatoes, other people’s gods were glad to get involved. For example, the micro-managing Stoic deities could be coaxed to reveal omens of the future through various technologies of divination on a daily basis! (Divination is the practice of reading the future through natural signs.)
In the following sections, I explain the similarities and differences between medicine and magic in the time of Jesus, and I discuss the debate on whether Jesus himself was a magician.
Practicing medicine and magic
Many people in Jesus’s day sought physical remedies from professional medical practitioners, some of whom worked at sanctuaries dedicated to healing. But people also sought their remedies from a host of lay technicians and folk practitioners such as Jesus. Not all these practitioners were considered miracle workers, however.
What set a miracle apart was the wonder or awe it inspired. When no one could explain it in terms of how things normally worked, the cause was thought to lie in some superhuman, supernatural force.
These folk healers and miracle workers used various techniques to achieve their goals. The evidence of these folk practices comes from a variety of artifacts. Most significant are the so-called magical papyri — fragments of papyrus scrolls that log various incantations, spells, and rituals intended to produce certain effects. The papyri we have date from the 1st century BCE to the 12th century CE. Also, various incantation bowls (used in rituals with the incantations pressed into the clay), inscribed amulets, and references in ancient novels, histories, and gospels allude to attempts to ward off evil and attract divine assistance.
The professional medical doctors trained in Greek traditions were less likely to look to deities and demons as the immediate cause of illness, and so incantations weren’t usually part of their repertoire. But despite this difference, there were similarities between the magical papyri and the medical treatises (like the Hippocratic Corpus and the medical treatises compiled by the famous school of medicine in Alexandria, Egypt, around 330 BCE). Both followed certain conventions, such as
● Recipes for foods that the patient should eat (in the medical treatises, these recipes are based on complex models of the body’s four humors: black bile, phlegm, yellow bile, and blood)
● Activities the patient should undertake
● Prayers and invocations to be uttered by the practitioner (in the magical papyri, these expressions involve lists of divine names and strings of syllables in various languages)
The purposes of the incantations in the magical papyri range all the way from exorcism to the extermination of bedbugs. In many ways, the miracle workers were the ancient equivalent of modern pharmacists, except that they dispensed incantations and potions in place of pills and injections.
Debating whether Jesus was a magician
It was easy to tell a professional doctor from a folk healer: The doctor had trained in established schools, while the folk healer had more local, popular training. It was a little tougher to tell the difference between a magician and a miracle worker because their techniques and results often looked the same. In fact, the difference comes down to your opinion about the work. You would use the term “magician” when you wanted to criticize someone. It implied that the practitioner operated on the margins of “true” religion or sought to make a buck by his own slight of hand. The term “miracle worker,” by contrast, had a positive meaning — it implied that the agent behind one’s work was a beneficent deity or force.
Was Jesus himself a magician or a miracle worker? The fact that the gospels never call Jesus a magos (magician) isn’t too surprising considering that the term was usually reserved for people you were criticizing. But the gospel authors do report other slurs against Jesus, including the following:
That he’s possessed by Beelzebul (Mark 3:22; see the later sidebar “The Lord of the flies” for more about this term)
That he blasphemes (Mark 2:7)
That he deceives (Matthew 27:63; John 7:12, 47)
So while the gospels don’t report that anyone explicitly called Jesus a magician, these other slurs come awfully close, especially the charge that Jesus was a deceiver or imposter.
The gospels are certainly keen to give a different impression. They never report that Jesus took money for his cures, and they never report any special incantations during his cures. Instead, he used simple, straightforward commands, whose power the gospel authors sometimes acknowledge by preserving them in the original Aramaic — such as Talitha koum (“Little girl, arise!” Mark 5:41) or Ephphatha (“Be opened!” Mark 7:34).
Perhaps most importantly, the gospel terms for Jesus’s acts are “sign,” “act of power,” and “wonder.” Signs, for instance, are things that point to something else. They aren’t important in and of themselves in terms of the immediate event or healing; they’re important only because they point to something bigger. As you see in the later section, “Tying God’s Message to the Miracles in the Gospels,” Jesus’s signs in the gospels point to the inauguration of God’s kingdom and to Jesus’s role as its agent.
Holy Healer! How Jesus Helped Bodies and Restored Lives
Jesus’s most common miracles involve exorcising demons and healing the sick. A couple of accounts also claim that Jesus raised a dead person to life. If Jesus performed any deeds of power, this cluster of deeds, which I explain in the following sections, has the best claim to historicity because they are reported in various independent sources and types of material. (I discuss the modern debate about the historicity of these miracles later in this chapter.)
These healing stories are sometimes strange for modern people in the western world to read because for the most part, we view the human body and illness through a biomedical model. According to that model, the body has various parts and systems that occasionally break down and require treatment. Patients today know that the biomedical model doesn’t answer every question or heal every problem, and that different cultures have their own working models for how the body works and how to restore it to health. Healing, illness, suffering, and death are “constructed” differently, depending on your social context and worldview.
In the cultural world of the gospels, demons exist and can possess a person. The origins of illness are rarely explored, and if they’re referred to at all it’s often a person’s sins that are thought to be the cause (Mark 2:1-12; John 5:14; 9:34; but see also John 9:2-3, 31). In other words, illness has social causes and consequences in the gospels, and the society within which it’s understood includes human and heavenly beings.
The messianic secret
Mark's gospel emphasizes a strange feature: It implies that Jesus wanted to keep his messianic status a secret. For instance, when demons recognize Jesus, when certain cures are performed, when Peter says who he thinks Jesus is, and when Jesus is transfigured on a mountaintop, Jesus commands all the witnesses to be silent about it.
It's one thing to silence a shrieking demon in this way — who would trust what a demon says anyway (Mark 1:25; 1:34; 3:12; contrast those passages with Mark 5:18-20)? But how in the world can you expect a cured leper or a little girl raised from the dead and all her mourners to keep it quiet (Mark 1:44-45; 5:43; 7:36; 8:26; 8:30; 9:9-10)?
Various explanations have been offered: Was Jesus modest? Was he trying to keep the crowds down and avoid the hostile attention of the authorities? A famous solution to the problem is that of William Wrede, a German Lutheran theologian (1859-1906). Wrede thought that nobody believed Jesus was the messiah during his lifetime but that they certainly did after his resurrection.
Wrede noticed how often in Mark 1-9 Jesus kept silencing demons and disciples who recognized him as messiah. Wrede called this the "messianic secret" in a famous 1901 book. For Wrede, the secrecy in Mark's gospel is the author's awkward attempt to blend the historical memory of a miracle worker with the post-resurrection belief that he was also messiah and son of God. Wrede's view is that Mark's gospel isn't a historical portrait of Jesus but a theological reworking of the Jesus tradition. Whether or not Wrede is right, it's true that in Mark's gospel you can't understand who Jesus is until the death and resurrection; until then, his true identity remains hidden.
Driving out the Devil
Seven stories of Jesus exorcising demons are mentioned in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). A couple of Q sayings also refer to his exorcisms. I arrange these exorcisms in the following list by source (Q, Mark, and L; see Chapter 5 for more about these sources):
Two mute demoniacs: These two accounts of exorcism take place in Q and in Matthew (Q 11:14-15; Matthew 9:32-33). The Q version is clustered with some other Q sayings in which Jesus claims a godly origin for the power over demons (see the nearby sidebar, “The Lord of the flies,” for details about this debate). The Q story is a little more reliable than Matthew 9:32-33, which is basically just a copy of the Q tale that Matthew inserts to bookend a cycle of miracle stories.
The man with the unclean spirit: This exorcism takes place in the synagogue at Capernaum one Sabbath Saturday (Mark 1:23-28 || Luke 4:33-37). In this story, the spirit inside the man shrieks that Jesus is “the holy one of God,” and Jesus silences him. The silencing of the demon may be a Markan addition (see the nearby sidebar, “The messianic secret,” for this motif in Mark). But the core episode of an exorcism has a general ring of authenticity to it because Jesus is so often shown to perform such acts across the gospels.
● The man scrambling among the tombs in the pagan city of Gerasa: In this exorcism story, a possessed guy is constantly screaming and cutting himself with stones (Mark 5:1-20). The townspeople try to chain him up, but he breaks free with the strength of a “Legion” of demons (a not-so-veiled swipe at the Roman army). Jesus casts the demons into a herd of pigs, which promptly rushes headlong off a cliff into the Sea of Galilee. The pagans panicked over the swine suicide and the suddenly sane demoniac, and so they asked Jesus to take a hike. There’s likely a historical kernel here, but over the years the story has become garbled with changes (such as how far the pigs have to run).
● The Syrophoenician woman’s daughter: In this story, a mother whose daughter is possessed begs Jesus to cure her (Mark 7:24-30 || Matthew 15:21-28). Because she’s a Gentile, Jesus at first insults her: “It isn’t right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” In other words, he’s saying that his cures are for the Jews alone. She counters, “Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.” For her scrappy comeback, Jesus cures her daughter from a distance. Did this event really happen? It’s a little suspicious, mostly because it seems to justify the mission to the Gentiles, an outreach that didn’t occur until after Jesus’s death.
● The epileptic boy whom Jesus’s disciples can’t cure: While Mark describes this boy’s affliction as demon possession, the symptoms look a lot like an epileptic seizure: The so-called demon throws the boy down, he foams at the mouth, he grinds his teeth, he becomes rigid, and then he goes into convulsions — until Jesus cures him (Mark 9:14-29). The story is more complicated than your average exorcism: The disciples had tried to heal the boy first, the father intervenes rather than the child/demon, Jesus despairs of the people’s faith, the father seems to question Jesus’s power, and details of the boy’s symptoms are repeated three times. Because these extra elements aren’t typical of a miracle story, and because some of the phrasing is more Aramaic in style than good Greek, the basic story may go back to the historical Jesus.
● Mary Magdalene: This female follower of Jesus gets seven demons cast out of her according to Luke 8:2. But can we believe him? Given Luke’s interests, which I describe in Chapter 10, this report doesn’t really hold up.
John’s gospel doesn’t include any accounts of Jesus expelling demons from people, most likely because he doesn’t want to diminish Jesus’s divinity by showing him constantly duking it out with the Devil. Besides, John shows Jesus’s complete defeat of Satan on the cross (John 1:5; 12:31-33; 16:11), so he has no need to provide any previews.
Heating the sick
People with various maladies sought Jesus out. The most common healings were for paralysis, blindness, and skin diseases. Some cures were performed in public and others in private, but in every case people quickly got wind of these amazing deeds and the crowds continued to get bigger.
In Q, when the imprisoned John the Baptist sends his disciples to ask Jesus if he’s the “one to come” that John had preached about, Jesus says, “Go tell John what you have seen and heard: Blind people see again, crippled people walk, lepers are cleansed and deaf people hear, dead people are raised, poor people are given good news” (Matthew 11:4-5 || Luke 7:22). That’s a pretty early witness to Jesus’s reputation, and it occurs in the literary form of a saying. Add that literary form to the miracles stories in the following sections, and you’ve got two literary forms (saying and story) and several independent witnesses to healing (for the independent witnesses and sources of the gospel traditions, see Chapters 3 and 5). Keep this Q saying in mind as you read the following sections.
The Lord of the flies
The name Beelzebul, meaning "prince of demons," has been around for a long time (Mark 3:22-26; Matthew 10:25). In the Jewish scriptures, for instance, we hear of a Philistine deity in the city of Ekron named Baalzebub, which literally means "Lord of the flies" (2 Kings 1:2-16; William Golding borrowed this term for the title of his 1954 novel about some British schoolboys who were stranded on a tropical isle). Very few people would likely call their god something so pejorative; it's more likely that the Jewish author is engaged in wordplay on the name Zabal ba'al, or "Exalted Lord," a divine name recently found on some Ugaritic texts. (Ugarit was a Canaanite city that flourished in northern Syria around 1450-1200 BCE; between 1928 and 1994, excavators found several libraries with hundreds of documents.)
The Ugaritic texts and a couple of references to zebulamong the Dead Sea Scrolls suggest another meaning of Beelzebul: "Lord of the (exalted) Abode" (that is, Lord of Heaven). Matthew may have been punning on this meaning when he called Beelzebul the oikodespoten, or "despot of the house," rather than "Lord of the house" (Matthew 10:25).
Paralytics
The gospels contain five different stories about people with paralyzed limbs or withered body parts, organized in the following list by their independent sources (Q, Mark, L, and SQ):
● The centurion’s sick servant from Capernaum: In Matthew’s gospel, this servant is paralyzed, but in Luke and John’s he’s simply sick and dying. Either way, Jesus heals this servant from a distance (Q 7:1-10; compare to John 4:46-54).
● The paralyzed man from Capernaum: This man’s friends cut a hole in the roof of a house and lower him through it so that Jesus can cure him. After curing him, Jesus tells the man that his sins are forgiven. The scribes are upset by Jesus’s remark because they believe that only God can remove people’s sins (Mark 2:1-12). We never hear whether Jesus helps the homeowner fix the roof.
● The man with the withered hand in Capernaum: Jesus heals this man in the synagogue on a Sabbath, supposedly flouting the law against working on the Sabbath. This defiance leads the Pharisees and Herodians to plot Jesus’s death (Mark 3:1-6).
● The woman who has been crippled and bent over for 18 years: Jesus lays his hands on her one Sabbath in the synagogue, which immediately straightens her so she can stand (Luke 13:10-17).
● The sick man in Bethesda: This man, who’s lying alongside the pool of Bethesda (or Bethzatha) in Jerusalem, can’t reach the healing waters when they stir. Jesus cures him on a Sabbath, and the man promptly reports him to the Jewish authorities (John 5:1-9).
Not all these individual accounts have the same claim to historicity. However, recalling the saying in Q 7:22 about crippled people walking again, you have four independent witnesses to the tradition that Jesus healed the lame (Q, Mark, L, and SQ). Add the fact that the event is in both story and saying form, and the likelihood that Jesus performed such cures increases.
Blind people
Three separate stories of Jesus curing blind people exist. Once again, they’re organized in the following list by source (Mark and SQ). In these stories, Jesus cured the following people:
● The blind man of Bethsaida: Jesus cures this man in the Galilee (Mark 8:22-26). To cure him, Jesus takes him out of town by the hand, spits on his eyes, and places his hands on him. However, the cure doesn’t fully take — the guy says “I can see people, but they look like trees walking.” After another try, the man’s eyes are good as new, but Jesus’s power seems to be compromised. The embarrassment of this story and its discontinuities with other healing stories suggest that it has some degree of historicity.
● The blind Bartimaeus of Jericho: This man is cured as Jesus travels to Jerusalem (Mark 10:46-52). Because the recipient’s name and hometown are identified, and because of other details of local color, several scholars think that this story has some authenticity.
● The man who was born blind: Jesus cures this man in Jerusalem, but he goes on to testify on behalf of Jesus before the Jewish authorities (John 9:1-41). This cure is one of the few that Jesus accomplishes with props, namely a poultice of mud that he makes with his own spit. Again, the discontinuity of this account from other healing stories suggests that it reflects an old established story.
Recall the saying in Q 7:22 about the blind seeing? If you add that to these stories, then you’ve got traditions about healing blindness in three sources (Q, Mark, and SQ) and in two forms (story and saying). That’s decent evidence, by gospel standards.
Lepers
There are two accounts of Jesus healing lepers. (See the nearby sidebar, “The true meaning of ‘leprosy’ in Jesus’s time,” for a description of what leprosy was like in first-century Palestine.)
I arrange these stories here by their sources (Mark and L):
● The leper in the Galilee: In an unusual display of emotion, Jesus is “moved with pity” at the site of this man (Mark 1:40-45). He touches and cures the man and tells him to present himself to the priest and to do the requisite sacrifices (Leviticus 14:2-32). Jesus also tells the man not to tell anyone; of course, the man tells everyone.
● The group of ten lepers whom Jesus cures somewhere between Samaria and the Galilee on his way to Jerusalem:
This story is actually two fused together (Luke 17:11-19). The first details the cure and the second focuses on the return of one grateful Samaritan leper. The second half of this story may be a later addition that recognizes Samaritan conversions to Christianity after Jesus’s death (Acts 8:4-17).
It’s difficult to conclude that the specific details in these stories are historical given that they don’t satisfy the rules of historicity in Chapter 3. However, the saying in Q 7:22 about lepers being cleansed and the presence of a saying and stories about curing lepers in three sources (Q, Mark, and L) and in two forms (story and saying) suggest a historical memory.
The true meaning of "leprosy" in Jesus's time
True leprosy or Hansen's disease, caused by Mycobacterium leprae, is a terribly disfiguring disease that takes about ten years to incubate and affects between 1 and 2 million people today. With this disease, tuber-shaped nodules form on the surface of the body, especially on the face and in the mucous membranes (for example, in the mouth and nose). These nodules gradually enlarge and spread, and the nerves below them begin to die. If untreated, this disease can lead to paralysis, wasting of muscle, and deformations.
Having said that, evidence suggests that true leprosy wasn't actually known in the Near East in Jesus's time. When Greek medical doctors began to speak of true leprosy, they used the terms elephasor elephantiasis. When they used the term lepra, they generally meant any number of the exfoliative skin diseases, such as eczema or psoriasis, just as the authors of the Torah do when they speak of the scaling or flaking of skin as a kind of impurity (Leviticus 13-14).
Solitary cures
Five healings occur in only one gospel (that’s why I’m calling them “solitary” cures). And, without multiple attestation of either sources or literary forms, we don’t have a lot of evidence available to assess their historicity. I arrange them here in terms of their sources (Mark and L). In these stories, Jesus heals the following folks:
● Peter’s mother-in-law: Jesus cures this woman’s high fever in Peter’s home by simply touching her (Mark 1:29-31). And after the fever’s gone, she’s already up making dinner.
● A woman with a hemorrhage: This woman’s hemorrhage, which had lasted for 12 years, is cured when she touches the fringes of Jesus’s garment (Mark 5:24-34).
● A deaf-mute: Jesus heals this man by putting his fingers in the man’s ears, spitting, touching the man’s tongue, groaning as he looks up to heaven, and saying Ephphatha, or “Be opened!” (Mark 7:31-37).
● A man with dropsy (swelling in the connective tissues):
Jesus cures this man on the Sabbath in the house of a leading Pharisee (Luke 14:1-6).
● The high priest’s slave whose ear is sliced off when Jesus is arrested: Even though all four gospels note that this man loses his ear (Luke 22:49-51; Mark 14:47-52; Matthew 26:51-56; John 18:10-11), Luke’s gospel alone says that Jesus heals the ear before being hauled out of Gethsemane. The healing so clearly conforms to a preexisting story to Luke’s interests that it’s most likely his creation.
Raising the dead
A special type of healing Jesus performs is when he raises people from the dead and restores them to their normal lives. There are three occasions of this in the gospels, arranged here by their source (Mark, L, and SQ):
● The daughter of Jairus: This girl, who was 12 years old, had just died when Jesus reached her home (Mark 5:21-43). Jesus took her by the hand and said Talitha koum (“Little girl, arise”). She got up and began walking around, and Jesus directed her parents to give her something to eat.
● The son of the widow of Nairn In this gospel tale (Luke 7:11-17), Luke reworks a story told about the great Jewish miracle-working prophet Elijah, as told in 1 Kings 17:7-24. In Luke’s version, Jesus comes across a funeral procession. The dead man was the only son of his mother, and his mother was a widow (meaning that her son was her sole financial support in her old age). Jesus touched the coffin and said, “Young man, I say to you, arise!” He sat up immediately (we’ll presume that there wasn’t a lid on that coffin) and started speaking.
● Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha: Lazarus is in his tomb four days before Jesus arrives on the scene (John 11:1-45). Jesus tells the family to roll away the stone at the tomb’s entrance. Understandably, they’re reluctant — and you don’t have to watch CSI every week to guess why. Jesus cries out, “Lazarus, come forth!” and to everyone’s shock, he does! It’s this act of power that leads the Jewish authorities to plan Jesus’s execution in John’s gospel (see Chapter 14 for details).
On top of these three stories, there’s the Q saying in which Jesus tells John the Baptist’s disciples that “the dead are raised” (Q 7:22). Because each of the stories has only one witness, and because all of them shore up the gospels’ grand finale of Jesus’s resurrection, there’s some skepticism among scholars about how historical any one of these separate stories are. But as a group, the existence of this tradition in four separate sources (Q, Mark, L, and SQ) and in both stories and sayings suggests that Jesus’s reputation for raising the dead dates to the time before the gospels are finally compiled.
Demonstrating Power through Nature
Jesus’s nature miracles are always a fun topic. After all, who doesn’t love a story in which a man mass-produces bread and fish right before everyone’s eyes? These stories of Jesus’s deeds of power demonstrate his authority over nature. For the gospel authors, that authority signals, at the very least, that God’s power works through Jesus in a unique way. However, these stories are tough to substantiate because they rarely occur in more than one source.
Providing for the people
In the gospels, Jesus occasionally performs amazing deeds that we might call “gift miracles” — acts that provide some sort of material benefit like food, drink, or money for the people. I arrange these gift miracles here according to their original sources (Mark, M, L, and SQ; see Chapter 5 for details about these sources):
● Multiplying the loaves and fishes: In this story, Jesus prays over a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish, and suddenly there’s enough to feed 5,000 people (Mark 6:32-44; John 6:1-15). This miracle is the only one that’s reported in all four gospels (because Matthew and Luke follow Mark, you’re left with two independent sources, Mark and SQ). So, even though it echoes stories of manna in the desert (Exodus 16) and the prophet Elisha feeding people (2 Kings 4:42-44) as well as the language of the last supper, the rule of multiple attestation suggests that the story might trace to a historical event.
● Providing money for the Temple tax: This miracle takes place in Matthew 17:24-27, but take a look at Exodus 30:11-16, which is the passage where the tax is first prescribed. In this story, Jesus tells Peter to pay the tax by catching a fish that will have the required coin in its mouth. Many scholars believe that this miracle isn’t historical because it’s reported in only one source and it’s so patently folkloric (don’t we all wish our taxes would just pay themselves like that?).
● Filling the fish nets: In Luke’s gospel, Jesus commands Peter (his future disciple) to head out to sea after a fishless night; the skeptical fisherman is amazed when he hauls in a huge catch of fish, which he immediately leaves behind to follow Jesus (Luke 5:1-11). In John’s account, the scene plays out after Jesus’s resurrection (John 21:1-9). Because the story moves around in the tradition so dramatically, and because the story serves Luke’s purpose of explaining why Peter followed Jesus in the first place, scholars are skeptical that it actually happened.
● Turning water into wine: When the wine runs out at a wedding in Cana, Jesus saves the day by topping off everyone’s glasses (John 2:1-12). Because only one gospel carries this feat and it’s so heavily laden with John’s themes and theology, scholars are reluctant to treat it as historical.
Controlling the created world
A couple of the so-called “nature miracles” present Jesus controlling and cursing the forces of nature. These feats are important because they demonstrate in the gospel authors’ view that Jesus is in league with the Creator of this world. These miracle stories include
● Stilling the storm on the Sea of Galilee: In this story, Jesus is asleep in a boat with his disciples, sailing across the Sea of Galilee, when a violent squall comes up (Mark 4:35-41). The panicked disciples wake up Jesus, astonished that they’re about to die and he’s catching a catnap. Jesus rebukes the wind and tells the sea to quiet itself, and the squall stops. The story is in only one independent source, it’s heavily infused with Jewish scriptural references to God’s power over the waters of chaos, and Jesus even takes on God’s role, which is a loftier portrait of Jesus than Mark customarily provides. All these factors lead scholars to the conclusion that this miracle is a later overlay by post-resurrection Christians.
● Cursing the fig tree: In this story, Jesus curses a fig tree before he drives out the buyers and sellers in the Temple; the next day, the fig tree is toast (Mark 11:12-14, 20-21 || Matthew 21:18-20). This technique of splitting one story by putting a second story in the middle is called “sandwiching.” The “meat” in the middle of the sandwich seasons (or explains) the “bread” on either side. Because an act of judgment against the buyers and sellers in the Temple is in the center of the sandwich, it means that the surrounding passages about a barren fig tree relate to the Temple, too. And remember, Mark is writing right about the time that the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Romans (70 CE). This curse of the fig tree is the only punitive miracle in the gospels, and because it so clearly signifies a judgment about the Temple, most scholars think that it was added after the time of the historical Jesus.
Revealing Jesus
All of Jesus’s miracles reveal his power, but some of them are strictly epiphanies or manifestations of his identity, such as
● Walking on water: After multiplying the loaves and fishes (see the earlier section “Providing for the people”), Jesus’s disciples are rowing against a strong wind on the Sea of Galilee, and, to their surprise, he comes walking to them on the water (Mark 6:45-52; John 6:16-21). You’ve got two independent witnesses, but there are also heavy allusions to scripture. The story echoes passages about God’s walking in or on
the sea at creation (Job 9:8; 38:16; Habakkuk 3:15; Sirach 24:5-6) and the Israelites’ walk across the dried-up Reed (or Red) Sea in Egypt (Exodus 14:10-31; Psalm 77:19-20; Isaiah 51:10). Allusions like that suggest some heavy-duty post-resurrection reflection on Jesus.
● Morphing on a mountaintop: Jesus takes the disciples Peter, James, and John up a mountain where he is transfigured before their eyes (Mark 9:2-10). While Jesus is transfigured, Moses and Elijah show up and stand and talk with him. According to some old traditions, both Moses and Elijah ascended to heaven (Deuteronomy 34:5-6; the apocryphal Assumption [or Testament] of Moses; 2 Kings 2:11-12). Heavy resurrection foreshadowing makes the story, as narrated, historically unlikely. But it also demonstrates what the gospel authors were trying to indicate about Jesus through this story: that he is greater than Moses and Elijah (they aren’t in dazzling white!) and that he, too, will rise.
Tying Jesus's Message to the Miracles in the Gospels
Jesus was certainly known as a miracle worker during his lifetime. However, it’s difficult to establish that the gospel miracle stories even occurred, let alone that they’re miracles. It’s much easier to excavate what the gospel authors are trying to tell you through the miracles, and it has everything to do with Jesus’s message (see Chapter 11). Here are two of the main ideas that the authors are trying to get across with the miracles:
● The kingdom of God is in your midst: The miracles allow the gospel authors to express that God was working through Jesus in a special way. Jesus’s miracles established exactly what his teachings did — that God’s power was present on earth in a new and authoritative way through the unique figure of Jesus.
● God saves people: The message that Jesus demonstrated through his miracles wasn’t some entirely new revelation. Instead, it was a Jewish vision of salvation that was embedded within the Law of Moses and the prophet Isaiah. Because of God, the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news preached to them (Exodus; Leviticus 25; Isaiah 26:19; 29:18-19; 35:5-6; 61:1).
There’s a reason that Luke’s gospel has Jesus begin his public ministry by reading from the scroll of Isaiah 58:6 and 61:1-2: Healing, restoration of creation, and good news for the weak were the signs that God’s kingdom had begun to come to power. The gospels don’t just show Jesus teaching this message. They want to show that Jesus embodied the message, that he himself brought healing and good news to the Jewish people.
Examining Modern Perspectives on Miracles
The gospel authors all present Jesus as a doer of amazing deeds, a kind of adult Harry Potter battling the forces of illness, chaos, and death. But while everyone knows that Harry is a bona fide wizard, Jesus’s acts of power didn’t convince everyone of his bigger message (see the preceding section). In fact, there are still a lot of skeptics today.
Questioning miracles during the Enlightenment
Ever since the Enlightenment in the 18th century, and even as far back as Jesus’s time (witness the skepticism of the Epicurean philosophers of the Greco-Roman world; see the earlier section “Working Wonders in Jesus’s Day”), a lot of people have questioned whether miracles are possible. If you think the universe runs by fixed rules or “natural laws,” as many Enlightenment thinkers did, those rules simply can’t be broken — not even by God.
That’s why many Christians after the Enlightenment tried to figure out “natural” explanations for the miracles in the Bible. For example, perhaps Jesus didn’t feed 5,000 men by actually multiplying five loaves of bread and two fish; maybe, instead, he encouraged everyone to share their loaves (you can read about this so-called fish tale in Mark 6:32-44 and John 6:1-15). Tweaking the account in this way preserves the “truth” of the story by taking out what’s presumed to be untrue, namely those things that don’t make sense in terms of modern science. Some people went further and discarded Jesus’s miracles altogether, thinking them to be flat-out impossible. For these folks, Jesus’s enduring reputation is based on his ethical teaching rather than on these “overblown” acts of power.
Historians who study the historical Jesus often inherit the Enlightenment’s skepticism. After all, if a historian is going to argue that something happened, she wants to show you evidence for it. And some of the issues that historians come across simply can’t be proven with evidence. For example, I can prove to you that there are grounds for saying that people believed Jesus performed certain healings and exorcisms. What I can’t prove to you is the cause of these cures, particularly if you want proof of a supernatural cause. For one thing, matters divine lie beyond the mundane realm where historians work. You need theologians and philosophers to deal with those issues. But more importantly, remember this: To prove anything today, you need evidence that everyone can agree on, and according to the gospels, even Jesus himself couldn’t produce that (Mark 3:20-22; 8:11-13; 15:29-32; Luke 16:19-31). To believe something is an act of God is a matter of faith, not a matter of fact, and no matter how secure and certain one’s faith is, it’s best not to confuse the two.
Deciding whether Jesus's miracles are historical
If you apply the ground rules of historicity from Chapter 3 to Jesus’s miracles, you find that the miracles in general, and the healing miracles in particular (see the earlier section “Holy Healer! How Jesus Helped Bodies and Restored Lives”), are among the most well-attested events associated with Jesus’s life. Reports of healings and exorcisms occur in miracle stories and in sayings — two different forms. On top of that, these stories occur in multiple independent sources, from Q and Mark to the special Matthean and Lukan material and John’s “signs source” (often referred to as M, L, and SQ; see Chapter 5 for more on these sources), as well as the Jewish historian Josephus. And finally, these reports are consistent with other historical details of Jesus’s teaching, such as his emphasis on God’s action to restore people and raise the poor.
Not every scholar agrees with this judgment. Many begin with the assumption that miracles are impossible (see the preceding section) and read the gospel miracles as post-resurrection myths that were inserted into the story of Jesus. This group believes that as the early church came to view Jesus as the son of God, it added miracles to make Jesus resemble the divine men of the Greco-Roman world.
There’s no doubt that the gospels magnify Jesus’s miraculous power. But with miracle references occurring in every source and in every type of gospel material, it strikes me that there’s some historical fire behind this miraculous smoke. As a historian, I can’t tell you that Jesus’s acts of power were miracles, but I can tell you that Jesus performed deeds of power that were (and are) viewed by some people as miracles, and that the gospels present these acts as central to his life’s work.