Testimonies
Even if the gospels had not contained a single miracle story we would have known that miracles were an integral part of Jesus’ activity. For example, the Jewish historian Josephus (first c. CE) includes in his Antiquities of the Jews a note about Jesus (Ant. 18.63-64) that speaks of his miracles. This note was previously suspected of being a Christian interpolation from start to finish, but today most scholars believe that Josephus really did speak about Jesus at this point, though his statement received some Christian editing. There is much to favor this redactional hypothesis. It is true that we can scarcely reconstruct the whole of the original wording, but the substance of the note probably included the words, “He was a doer of startling deeds [paradoxōn ergōn poiētēs].” Josephus was referring to Jesus’ miracles.2
Luke 13:31-33 also speaks of Jesus’ deeds. In this little composition Luke takes up some of the oldest pieces of tradition. We can see this in the fact that here Jesus—contrary to post-Easter Christology—is called a “prophet.” What is it about? Pharisees are warning Jesus about Herod Antipas, suggesting he leave the region because Herod wants to kill him. In his response Jesus describes Herod with sharp irony as a “fox.” In antiquity the fox was regarded as sly but also as a creature that constantly overestimated its own cunning.3 Besides that, it smelled bad. We have to read Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees against that background:
Go and tell that fox for me, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.” (Luke 13:31-33)
This saying shows how realistically Jesus viewed his own situation, but at the same time it illustrates his determination. He will go on doing as he has done. Someone like Herod will by no means turn him aside from his path. For our context, what is important is that the discourse names Jesus’ central activities as driving out demons and healing. Both were the reason why news about Jesus spread rapidly and people ran after him.
We have other sayings in which Jesus speaks of his miracles, for example, the “woe” on the Galilean towns: “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes” (Luke 10:13). In this connection we should also refer to the beatitude Jesus spoke over his disciples, cited earlier: “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it” (Luke 10:23-24). What do the disciples see? Obviously, the mighty deeds now being done for the sick and the possessed, the outcasts and the socially isolated. But it was not only the disciples who saw all that. Jesus’ opponents did too. They were in no position to deny Jesus’ healings and exorcisms of demons. They had no recourse except to reinterpret them, which they did, with perverse results: “And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons’” (Mark 3:22).
Who is Beelzebul? We find the name in the second book of Kings (2 Kgs 1:2), where it is the name of the god of the Phoenician city of Ekron.4 The word is made up of Ba’al and zebul (= ruler). So this is the pagan god Ba’al, who is given an honorific epithet, zebul. Obviously, this Beelzebul was a horror to the Jews, like all pagan gods. For them he was a demon, and evidently they regarded him as the chief demon.
It is only against this background that it becomes clear what is going on here. Scribes—that is, theologians—explain that Jesus is not driving out demons with the aid of the God of Israel but with that of a foreign god who himself is nothing but a demon. This officially charges Jesus with apostasy from the faith of Israel. Indeed, as the Markan text correctly interprets, he is charged with being possessed himself. There could be no more effective slander of Jesus in Israel, especially in the eyes of simple, pious people. He was thus branded as an idolater and seducer of the people. But this compromising slander itself makes it clear that Jesus’ opponents could not deny that he drove out demons. All they could do was twist the facts and in doing so demonize Jesus.5
So the fact remains: even if the New Testament contained not a single concrete miracle story it would be evident that Jesus healed sick and possessed people. In addition, we have to conclude from the same evidence that healings and other miracles were frequent after Easter, in the early communities. Apparently something began with Jesus that continued seamlessly into the early church.
Miracle Stories
Now, of course, it is true that the gospels not only give indirect evidence of Jesus’ miracles. They describe them as well. In fact, they relate an unusually large number of miracles. Mark’s gospel in particular is positively stuffed with accounts of miracles.
The phenomenon of the numerous miracles in the gospels is quite often downplayed by saying that such things were simply the rule in antiquity. It is said that in that time stories of miracles were constantly being told, belief in miracles had grown greatly, and people told of miracles by many “divine people.” The miraculous was somehow “in the air,” and even in the Judaism of Jesus’ time things were not much different.
But it is not quite so simple.6 Obviously in antiquity people, especially simple people, believed in miracles. But there was also a strong skepticism about and a critique of miracles. There were indeed sanctuaries—the most famous being Epidauros, with its cult of Asclepius—to which people went in droves to be instructed by the god during their “temple sleep” as to the nature of their illness and the therapy to be applied. In Epidauros and other sanctuaries there was also a particular “temple medicine” that apparently evinced many successes. But major personalities who not only imparted therapies but actually performed miraculous healings were extremely rare in antiquity, and well-attested “miracles” were even more uncommon.
It is against this background that we have to read the gospels, especially Mark’s, which may ultimately rest on the witness and tradition of Simon Peter. Mark relates the following healings and exorcisms:7
The possessed man in the synagogue (1:23-26)
Peter’s mother-in-law (1:30-31)
The leper (1:40-45)
The lame man (2:1-12)
The man with the withered hand (3:1-6)
The possessed man of Gerasa (5:1-20)
The woman with the hemorrhage (5:25-34)
The daughter of the Syrophoenician woman (7:24-30)
The deaf man with the speech impediment (7:31-37)
The blind man at Bethsaida (8:22-26)
The possessed son (9:14-29)
Blind Bartimaeus (10:46-52)
But Mark’s gospel contains other miracles that cannot simply be summarized under “healings and exorcisms”:
The stilling of the storm (4:35-41)
The raising of Jairus’s daughter (5:21-43)
The feeding of the five thousand (6:35-44)
Walking on the lake (6:45-52)
The feeding of the four thousand (8:1-9)
The withered fig tree (11:12-14, 20-25)
Add to these some ten miracle stories in Matthew’s and Luke’s special material, as well as seven miracle narratives in John. Thus Jesus is depicted as definitely a miracle worker, and a great many miracles are attributed to him, something that is unique in antiquity.
Biblical scholarship has long regarded these miracles analytically. As early as the Enlightenment a distinction was made between “healing miracles” and “nature miracles”; the latter included, for example, the stilling of the storm on Lake Gennesareth. Today, a still more careful distinction is made between “healings” and “exorcisms” on the one hand and “raising the dead,” “epiphany miracles” (walking on the lake), “gift miracles” (multiplication of the loaves), “rescue miracles” (stilling of the storm), “normative miracles” (Sabbath healings), and “punishment miracles” (the withere
d fig tree) on the other.
Nothing can be said against such distinctions in themselves. Cataloging is part of scholarship, and it is the joy of many exegetes to create more and more subtle and difficult classifications. But there are also problems with the sharp classification of gospel miracles, for it is unmistakable that this classification in New Testament exegesis was created also, and perhaps primarily, in order to be able to evaluate the miracles historically. It goes like this: there were healings and exorcisms; there were no raisings of the dead, epiphany miracles, gift miracles, or rescue miracles. Thus the cataloging of the miracles very obviously serves the purpose of historically disqualifying a number of the miracle stories.
But there is a second problem as well: the various genres of miracles thus created are much more closely related than at first appears:
Should we classify the story about Jairus’s little daughter (Mark 5:21-43) as a healing or a raising of the dead? Christian tradition has always regarded it as the latter, but the narrative itself is ambivalent—in contrast to the story of the raising of the young man at Nain (Luke 7:11-17). Her relatives consider the girl to be dead, but Jesus apparently does not. The text leaves it all in the air. Here we can see how fluid things are in such stories.
Healings and exorcisms cannot be sharply distinguished. In Judaism, and in antiquity as a whole, “normal” illnesses were often attributed to demonic influence.8
• Luke 13:10-17 speaks of the healing of a woman who has been bent over for many years. Jesus interprets her illness as Satan’s binding (13:16).
• Matthew 12:22 speaks of a person who is blind and has a speech impediment. His blindness and inability to speak are explained in demonological terms. Jesus heals him, and he can once again speak and see.
• The servant of the Gentile centurion “is lying at home paralyzed, in terrible distress” (Matt 8:6). The Greek expression for being “in terrible distress,” deinōs basanizomenos, is the language of antiquity, and we must expand it: he is being distressed by the demons of sickness. When, in the course of the narrative, the centurion tells Jesus that his soldiers obey him to the letter and expects the same from Jesus he is obviously referring to the demons that cause illness. The centurion is convinced that the demons must also obey Jesus to the letter.
• Within the narrative about the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law Luke alters his Markan model. While Mark had written “he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up” (Mark 1:31), Luke instead has: “then he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her” (Luke 4:39). Thus Jesus shouts at the fever as if it were a demon. He speaks a word of power, as in an exorcism. He yells at the illness as once God had yelled at the powers of chaos (Pss 17:16; 67:31; 75:7; 103:7; 105:9, LXX).
• Paul too attributes his illness, which apparently was accompanied by painful distortions of vision (Gal 4:13-15), to a “messenger of Satan” who repeatedly beats him with its fists (2 Cor 12:7-9).
It makes very good sense to distinguish the stilling of the storm on the lake (Mark 4:35-41) from the healing of demoniacs, and yet we must see that in this narrative Jesus acts like an exorcist. He “shouts at the wind” and commands it as if it were a demon: “Peace! Be still!” (cf. Mark 1:25). And then the lake becomes calm, just as possessed people become quiet, even comatose, immediately after their healing (cf. Mark 9:26). Jesus’ action was altogether plausible to people in antiquity: water, especially deep water, was regarded as the residence of demons, just as the desert was. Therefore, in Mark 4:35-41, the narrative types of “rescue miracle” and “exorcism” are intermingled.
It could not be otherwise. For people in Israel, as for people everywhere in antiquity, chaos threatened from all sides. It revealed itself in a variety of illnesses, in lameness, in disfigurement, in wounds, in social isolation, in the powers of nature, and above all in death. People in ancient Israel would have said that the underworld threatens us everywhere. In Jesus’ time people were convinced that demonic powers were a constant danger. The most horrible power of all was death—and it too was occupied by demons. Hebrews 2:14 says that the devil has the power of death.
When Jesus heals sick people, drives out demons, calms the waters, and raises the dead, the basic happening is the same in all cases: he confronts the powers of chaos, conquers demons, heals the damaged and distorted world, so that the reign of God may become visible and creation attain to the integrity and beauty God intends for it.
We are already—it was pretty much inevitable—involved in the history of how people have dealt with Jesus’ miracles. That is a broad field, but it cannot be altogether avoided. Precisely from the way in which people have dealt with the miracle stories in the four gospels over the last three hundred years we can learn a great deal about how to approach these miracles in appropriate fashion. How have people treated Jesus’ miracles?
Enlightenment
Biblical miracles have lived a hard life since the European Enlightenment. While before that they were almost a matter of course, something that illuminated Jesus’ divinity, afterward they became an embarrassment. Nowadays they are sometimes simply disputed. The principle of analogy is applied; it can be formulated, somewhat simplified, as: “What does not happen now did not happen then either. If no one today can walk on a lake, Jesus did not walk on water.”
The theologians of the Enlightenment period found the matter somewhat more difficult, of course. Since they did not want to frivolously deny the miracle stories found in the Bible, some of them undertook to explain those stories “rationally” and make them “understandable” for enlightened people. With authors such as K. F. Bahrdt (1740–1792), K. H. G. Venturini (1768–1849), or H. E. G. Paulus (1761–1851), this could take abstruse forms.9 Since “secret orders” had been growing in Europe since the eighteenth century, it seemed plausible that there were such “secret orders” in Jesus’ time as well. And who might have belonged to such a society? Obviously, the mysterious Essenes. So Jesus belonged to the Essenes and shared their goal: bringing the superstitious people to a genuine religion of reason.
Of course, in doing so Jesus had to use some slick means in order to reach the people to begin with. Therefore, even though he only wanted to be a wise enlightener, he appeared in the role of Messiah and worked with well-organized and skillfully applied staging. For the multiplication of the loaves, for example, bread had already been collected in a cave; it was then handed to Jesus out of the darkness by Essene assistants and distributed by the disciples. The Syrophoenician woman’s daughter received medicine from a disciple who took it from Jesus’ portable medicine chest while Jesus himself engaged the mother in conversation. To walk on the lake Jesus used floating planks. And so on.
We smile at this, and yet the rationalizations of Jesus’ miracles have continued until today. How often do we still hear that the miraculous multiplication of loaves consisted in the fact that, after Jesus’ table prayer, some of those assembled reached into their pockets, took out some bread, and shared it with their neighbors. That was infectious. Because eventually all shared their bread with one another, everyone was satisfied. Or we read with astonishment that the calming of the storm was nothing more than that after Jesus’ word of command the storm simply subsided, not in nature, but in the perception of the disciples. Jesus took away their fear.
As much as all that falls short of the essence of Jesus’ miracles, the attempts at explanation are right about one thing: reason may not be dismissed when we are faced with miracles. Rationality must also have access to Jesus’ miracles.
History of Religions
Does this rational access consist in the application of the techniques of comparative religion? Yes and no! Obviously, Jesus’ miracles must be compared to all those reported in the Old Testament, in Judaism, and in antiquity. As a result we see that, in fact, there are a few well-attested miracles there as well, and their historicity cannot be doubted. These include, for example, the healing of two men by Vespasian (9–79 CE), recounted for u
s by Tacitus and Suetonius.10 According to Tacitus (ca. 58–120 CE) this happened in the year 70.
Vespasian had just been named emperor, but his rule was not yet secured. While he waited in Alexandria for favorable weather in order to be able to sail for Rome he was badgered by two sick men who wanted him to heal them. One was blind and the other scarcely had the use of one of his hands any longer. The blind man begged Vespasian to spread the imperial saliva on his eyes and eyeballs. The other asked the emperor to touch his crippled hand with the sole of his foot. At first Vespasian found the idea ridiculous, but as the two sick men continued to bother him he began to like the idea. Of course, he did not want to embarrass himself, so first he obtained a medical opinion. The doctors were ambivalent. A healing might be possible, and it could be brought about by natural causes. But it might also be that the gods wanted to help Vespasian. Ultimately, the emperor attempted the healing in the presence of the assembled crowd. “He was convinced,” Tacitus writes, “that there were no limits to his destiny: nothing now seemed incredible.” And behold: the hand was healed and the blind man could see again.
There can be no doubt about this event. The charism of healing was expected of a new emperor or king, and not only then. The idea endured in Europe beyond the Middle Ages and into the nineteenth century: in France and England it was part of the ritual that a newly anointed king should touch sick people. Apparently, from time to time, the special circumstances and the sick person’s expectations released healing powers.
Josephus tells another story in his Jewish Antiquities.11 He has just been speaking of the wisdom of Solomon and his power to banish demons. Then he continues:
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