Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

This first argument is that the miracle reports in the Gospels and Acts are generally plausible historically and need not be incompatible with eyewitness tradition. Similar claims, often from convinced eyewitnesses, circulate widely today, and there are no a priori reasons to doubt that ancient eyewitnesses made analogous claims.

area. I nevertheless think that, given the general canons of reliability for testimonial evidence, we have a greater degree of assurance regarding many extranormal healing claims than we have for many claims that we widely accept.

One theological concern I do have is that no one reading this book thinks that I suppose that spiritual cures happen invariably—they do not, and most of those who supplied testimonies for this book recognize that they do not.

In the theology of the Gospels, signs are foretastes of the kingdom, not its fullness.

Not everyone viewed all of these wonder workers in a positive vein; although miracle working tended to be public and magic secretive, miracle workers in the Greco-Roman world could easily be understood as sorcerers.

Josephus interprets the biblical prohibition of witchcraft as directed against those who poison others.

though it may be noted that the most significant apologetic on a popular level may have been the reports of continuing miracle workers among Christians (reports that I shall address later in the book;

with the strongest parallels in those sources;

The preoccupation to focus attention upon the miracles as primarily means of attesting the divinity of the miracle worker, either compared with the Rabbinic or the Hellenistic miracle-worker, obscures the more fundamental line of continuity with the Old Testament, and the corollary understanding of miracles in terms of Salvation-history, particularly their eschatological implications.[202]

It is intrinsically more likely that even the most Hellenized of Gospel writers, Luke, would have looked for his primary model for recounting Jesus’s miracles to the lxx, whose contents and style he knew thoroughly and which he cites regularly in explicitly marked quotations, than to inscriptions at a healing shrine or to oral reports of magicians or polytheistic miracle workers.

The Jewish historian Geza Vermes has even gone so far as to suggest that holy men like Hanina ben Dosa dominated first-century Galilean religious experience more than the priests or scribes did;

Consistent with such images, later rabbis taught that signs offered by biblical signs prophets anticipated the signs that would take place in the messianic era.

which could suggest an eschatological interpretation of his miracles as blessings of the future kingdom in the present.[231]

Most scholars recognize that in the Gospels, Jesus’s miracles function as signs of the kingdom (also Matt 12:28//Luke 11:20).[232] Such a perspective relates to traditional Jewish expectations while pressing beyond most of them[233] in affirming that the kingdom was already active in Jesus. I emphasize some contrasts with traditional Jewish models in the next chapter.

Christian miracles authenticating Jesus were problematic for later rabbis; Urbach suggests that this may be why the rabbis stressed that one should depend on the God of Abraham, not on Abraham as a miracle worker himself.

From Paul’s letters[267] through rabbinic literature,[268] Christians and outsiders alike continued to perceive the early Christian movement as confirming itself with signs like those of Jesus.

The Gospel writers do wish to authenticate Jesus as well as his message, but not as one sage among others. One Gospel writer, Luke, provides a second volume about Jesus’s agents. Here, in Acts, signs continue to attest Jesus more than his agents (except in the sense that it confirms that they are his agents); it is Jesus’s name that heals (Acts 3:6; 4:7, 10, 30; 16:18; 19:13, 17; cf. Acts 14:3; Luke 9:49; 10:17). The Jesus who healed in...

there is no indication that the signs prophets in fact did so

Nowhere else are so many miracles reported of a single person as they are in the Gospels of Jesus.

Some scholars have also pointed to “matter-of-fact restraint” rather than amplification in most miracle stories in the canonical Gospels,

Nor do the Gospel writers write like typical epic poets or mythographers; in contrast to Virgil’s Aeneid, for example, they offer no scenes explaining “what God is thinking or how God views the events unfolding in the human realm.”[21] The difference in genre is a key issue.

In Q’s temptation narrative, Jesus rejects the temptation to transmute stones into bread (Matt 4:3–4//Luke 4:3–4); changing one substance into another,[29] like changing one’s own form,[30] was characteristic of magicians. Luke is eager to absolve early Christians as well as Jesus from the charge, by way of contrast with those who misunderstood or opposed them

Pagan magicians typically sought to coerce deities or spirits by incantations; Jesus simply commanded as God’s authoritative agent.

But whereas the Gospel tradition provides many miracle stories, none involve incantations;[35] their paranormal claims do not fit dominant forms of ancient magic in such respects.

The miracles of Jesus and his followers in the Gospels and Acts resemble especially those of Elijah, Elisha, and Moses in the HB,[38]

The genre question is critical. Rabbis generally related accounts of rabbis who wrought miracles to make a homiletic point concerning a teaching; the Gospels and Acts recount miracles of Jesus and his followers primarily to validate Jesus’s person and mission rather than just a particular teaching.

By implication, this pattern about signs focusing on Jesus and his mission in the Gospel tradition also applies to Paul’s Gentile mission in Acts, which in Luke’s theology perpetuates Jesus’s ministry to the outsider.

Harvey points out that at least eight of Jesus’s reported cures involved the deaf, mute, blind, or lame, but that such miracles, though noted at pagan healing shrines, are absent in Jewish accounts.[51]

To date, the most detailed comparisons and contrasts with other early Jewish sources have been those of Eric Eve, who concludes that Jesus’s healing and exorcistic ministry, while exhibiting some parallels to its general Jewish framework, differs in serious respects from other early Jewish models.

The miracles that most interested early Jewish sources were miracles of national deliverance,

In their respective sources, Hanina was a petitioner of numinous or divine power, whereas Jesus was its bearer.

He argues that the evidence “leaves Jesus as unique in the surviving Jewish literature of his time as being portrayed as performing a large number of healings and exorcisms,” and especially as a bearer, not just a mediator or petitioner, of divine power.

especially in working only through prayer and lacking eschatological miracles.

and Jesus stands alone among prior miracle workers in using miracles, in his case healings and exorcisms, to indicate the coming of the eschatological order.

Not only were some ancients not very credulous (see discussion in ch. 4) but also something distinctive about the cumulative force of early Christian claims rendered them more persuasive than mere myths about the past or claims about some particular folk healer. The movement did not spread simply because people liked fanciful stories, for fanciful stories were abundant elsewhere. The movement spread in part because the claims surrounded not only its founder but also many subsequent figures in the movement who claimed to represent him (see discussion in ch. 10).

but also included visions of celestial figures or armies.[109] The armies were sometimes heard rather than seen;[110] sights that were seen were often acknowledged as divine illusions rather than objects physically present;[111] and the apparitions of armies never drew near anyone.

Thus, without ruling out paranormal phenomena outside early Christian circles, we may also emphasize the dramatic and distinctive emphasis on miracles in the early Christian community.

Nevertheless, most writers in late antiquity, including Christian writers, applied the phrase “contrary to nature” only to people contravening moral law[11] or the norms of reason established by nature,[12] not to miracles.

Pliny the Elder emphasized that the wisest people rejected the efficacy of incantations, though he complained that mostly everyone else accepted them.

Similarly, Lucian approves of a historian reporting potential myths, so long as one does not affirm them but leaves their veracity to the audience to decide (

Whatever one’s response to such questions (normally based on our own philosophic assumptions), we should note that the presence of paranormal claims does not necessarily alter a work’s genre—such reports do appear in many ancient historians.

On the level of philosophic methodology, to start from a “guilty until proven innocent” skepticism toward claims in historical narratives reflects what logicians would normally view as the “poisoning the well” fallacy.

hence, it is a wider term than “suprahuman.” By “suprahuman” is meant, more narrowly, the claim for divine activity or that of other intelligent entities as allowed for in many ancient and modern religious and ancient philosophic systems.

Charles Talbert notes that some scholars, like Gerd Lüdemann, rule out any historical core of miracle stories, because miracles are assumed not to happen.

Those who challenge “the world-construction from within by introducing elements from other world-constructions or innovating . . . are either understood as deceived deviants (heretics, ‘uncritical’) and so tolerated or simply expelled from the conversation which has as its ultimate function” maintaining “the world-construction.”

Similarly, nt scholar Walter Wink, a member of the Jesus Seminar, notes that he once thought that his intellectual integrity was alienating him from the world he found in the book of Acts. In fact, he discovered, his difficulty was merely his materialist assumptions about reality.[115] Later he observed what he believed were divine healings, incompatible with the antisupernaturalistic assumptions he had once held; these included a large uterine tumor disappearing apparently immediately after prayer.[116] “Because of that, and many similar experiences with spiritual healing,” he concludes, “I have no difficulty believing that Jesus actually healed people, and not just of psychosomatic diseases.”[117] Scholars who would deny the truth of his story to defend their worldview, he charges, do so “not on historical grounds, but on the basis of their” materialistic worldview.

Wink claims that “historical research depends on analogy” to evaluate the plausibility of accounts about the past,[119] but warns that our limited experiences can unfairly constrict the analogies with which we work. “People with an attenuated sense of what is possible will bring that conviction to the Bible and diminish it by the poverty of their own experience.”[120]

Indeed, the argument that precise analogies are necessary for plausibility might challenge contemporary scientists’ affirmation of the big bang, since it is unique in some sense; nevertheless, most scientists believe that evidence is sufficient to overturn such skepticism, as many people believe that evidence is sufficient to overturn skepticism in the case of miracles.

In any case, as I note in the following chapters, the analogy argument today makes miracles more rather than less plausible.[129] That is, an argument once formulated against miracles would now, with our broader knowledge of human experience, support it.

Contrary to what appeared to be the case to many intellectuals one or two centuries ago, history does not support a linear evolution of all cultures toward this perspective.[3] One worldview expects miracles, whereas another doubts them, and each interprets experiences and phenomena accordingly. Both worldviews, however, are equally presuppositions.[4] Indeed, a stance critically open to the possibility of miracles allows for the most open-minded stance.[5]