Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

Another source reports that when two workers in Brazil prayed for a boy who had “a softball-sized hernia protruding from his abdomen,” it vanished in front of them, and he was healed.[216] After doctors sent Sylvia, a television news anchor with cancer of the thorax, home to die, she attended a healing conference. She was coughing up blood and weighed just eighty pounds. Nevertheless, she believed herself healed after an hour of prayer at the conference; no longer showing signs of the cancer, she quickly regained weight and resumed her broadcasting role. As of two years later, she remained well.[217] Such claims are not limited to Pentecostals; I am told that a Baptist church in Brazil, for example, reports many dramatic healings and has grown more than forty times over in less than a decade.[218]