Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

healing crusades;[27] a 2001 Methodist official report on a crusade in the capital recounted the deaf hearing and a leg instantly growing four inches in public sight, enabling the person to walk and jump.[28] This pattern

healing of a girl in Jesus’s name;[45] or the daughter of Swiss church planter Jacques Vernaud, permanently healed of leukemia through prayer at the age of three in Brazzaville, Congo. (I know both Jacques Vernaud and the daughter in question, with whom I attended college, and she remains alive and well today.

sight. Anna, in her nineties, had been virtually completely blind in her right eye for a number of years and had suffered irreversible macular degeneration there. After Onesimus prayed, she had a strange sensation in that eye, and some measure of vision returned to it. While the restoration is only partial as of the time of this writing, the doctor acknowledged that there was no medical explanation for the tested, physical changes in her eye.[53]

In Ethiopia, 83 percent of believers surveyed in a Lutheran (Mekane Yesus) church attributed their conversions to healings and exorcisms.

Although healing was most common among believers, many nonbelievers were also healed; MKC evangelist Daniel Mekonnen explained the latter as love healings rather than faith healings—God healing by love rather than believer’s faith. Thus on one occasion an atheist attended with a severely painful leg; when the evangelist announced that God wanted to heal a painful leg, the atheist was shocked, was healed, and became a believer.[65]

for the sick; those reported healed include persons who were blind or deaf or unable to walk, those with cancer, and so forth. In most cases, healings are visible; when they are not, he tells healed persons that they must get confirmation from the doctor before they are allowed to give their public testimony. His ministry in Ethiopia is now collecting for a book testimonies written by many of those who have been healed, to be published in Amharic and subsequently in English.[69] Ethiopian

He recounted that people who had tested HIV-positive and were already sick were healed; he said that new tests (on which he always insisted before they could testify) revealed a negative status, including two persons he identified in the West.

Because they had prayed before, the discouraged father had no hope that the outcome would be different this time. Nevertheless, during the week after the prayer, the girl began to recover fully, and now, after thirty years, she continues to walk well.[74] Bruce Collins is a leader in an international, interdenominational renewal group called New Wine, originally based in the Anglican Church. He told me of a young orphan in Ekwanda, Meseno District, western Kenya, where his group cares for some orphans. The boy was perhaps 90 percent blind, needing to be led around and unable to see even fingers held up in front of his face. After about ten minutes of prayer, he could count all ten fingers even ten meters away; after ten more minutes, he could see them thirty meters away. (That is better than my eyesight without glasses, by the way.) Bruce witnessed the healing himself, and when he returned that evening he nearly wept as he saw the boy playing football for the first time.[75] Lidetu Kefenie,

healing reports. Missiologists report that during the evangelism crusades of Jacques Giraud in Côte d’Ivoire in March 1973, disabled people discarded crutches and blind people claimed sight. Giraud had not witnessed many healings before this time but found that in this setting, as he preached Christ, supernatural things happened. Various denominations welcomed his ministry around the country, and some government officials were healed (for example, one whose leg had been paralyzed). As a result, even government officials organized more meetings, and entire villages were converted.

three children, all blind, and all three received their sight instantly. The next day, Kolenda’s team verified all the details in the family’s village.

Likewise during one of Apostle Numbere’s crusades, in January 1981, a medical student’s ulcerated arm, about to be amputated the next day, was healed, to his own initial astonishment;[113] in this case I was able to confirm the story with one of the eyewitnesses, Tonye Briggs, his fellow medical student at the time and now a medical doctor located in Texas.[114] Tonye noted that the wound had been about 10 to 15 centimeters (more than four inches) wide and very deep; because it continually oozed fluids, the bandage had to be changed every night. The wound closed up overnight after prayer, and nothing but a small black spot remained on the site. The entire campus saw it and was shaken, and Tonye witnessed the event himself.

experience in Emmanuel’s immediate family; I will recount a nature miracle in chapter 12 and mention another case of health against the odds in chapter 14, and there are other incidents regarding his father, Ladi, and others that I am not recounting. Some readers might dismiss one extraordinary occurrence as simply an anomaly, but when such experiences happen more often in the same circle, one might wish to look for some common factors.

He reports numerous incidents of women who after years of being unable to bear children now were able to bear.[125] Among other unexpected acts of grace, he experienced divine help during earlier research travels (travels that we sometimes discussed some years ago). “For example,” he noted, “among some tribes in Adamawa and Taraba State, I had instances where no interpreter was available and the Lord gave me understanding and ability to speak the people’s languages, a feat I never performed before or since after that incident.” (Other accounts of this phenomenon exist, though many of these are secondhand.[126]

also characterize the ministry of Rolland and Heidi Baker, especially in their work with thousands of orphans in Mozambique.[129] Unless one works from controlling presuppositions that miracles cannot occur, most would consider the Bakers credible sources: Heidi Baker holds a PhD in systematic theology from King’s College, University of London; they work with doctors;[130] and they openly and sympathetically acknowledge the many who are not healed.[131]

started the next day. Presumably the locals who knew those who were cured believed that something dramatic had happened. The probability of an alternative explanation seems abysmally low: Would a village, though already committed to a particular religion, fake all these healings and then contribute so many members to a permanent new church, just to fool some visiting Christians? More recently, a research team has discovered surprising medical confirmation of claims of healings of blindness and deafness taking place there.

so afterward she asked him why he had not requested prayer. She prayed simply, “God, why did you show me his sickness? If it was so that he would be delivered, heal him.” About a month and a half later, he noticed that he had not experienced the abscesses since her prayer. He never suffered with the mouth sores again.

through its emphasis on healing;[209] 86.4 percent of Brazilian Pentecostals in one study claimed that they had experienced divine healing.

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]

Suriname is a multicultural nation in South America whose national language is Dutch. When I met with Dr. Douglass Norwood in 2006, he recounted his eyewitness experience with an aged skeptic instantly healed of a lifelong paralysis, without human intervention, during his preaching in Nickerie, Suriname, in November 1994. The skeptic had no faith or psychological factors contributing to the healing; he had never been a Christian and was defying the Christians at the moment he was healed. Nevertheless, he recognized that it was the name of Christ that healed him and he became a Christian immediately after his unexpected healing. This event contributed to sudden and massive church growth in a region that previously had few Christians.

In another case, Atabacdora, a Motilone Indian from Colombia, broke his neck in a fall and was ordered to lie still for three months. As a hunter, he found it difficult to lie still even for a week. His friend Bobarishora, who like Atabacdora was fairly new to the Christian faith, insisted on praying for him. He and their friend Bruce Olson anointed him and prayed a simple prayer, then left. When they learned that Atabacdora was up and about, they hurried to reprove him, convinced that his neck would never heal with such behavior. Since Atabacdora had no pain, however, they persuaded the doctor to take another X-ray. The doctor was astonished, because there was now not even a sign of the slightest fracture; he could only describe it as “some kind of miracle.” To Bobarishora, it was no different

Byron Klaus, a U.S. seminary president whom I know personally, prayed for a four-year-old girl in Caracas, Venezuela, with a deadly “immune deficiency similar to HIV”; so convinced was the widowed mother that the child had been healed that she took her for another blood test. In contrast to previous tests, the child’s immune system was now normal (he sent me the improved test results); she is now sixteen.

For example, Mirtha Venero Boza, a Baptist, has been a Christian for six years and reports that she has seen many miracles in her evangelistic crusades. She chose to share with me especially a story close to her, however. The hand of her baby granddaughter was severely burned by a hot iron; it was swollen and skin was peeling off. Within less than half an hour of prayer, and without medical intervention, the baby’s hand was restored completely, as if it had never been burned. Because Mirtha is a medical doctor, who would recognize the severity of burns, her observations appear especially striking.

Bonnie Ortiz, a Latina Pentecostal and trusted colleague at my seminary, tells me that she was present when a Puerto Rican evangelist told a close friend of hers that two of this friend’s teeth had just been miraculously filled. Bonnie witnessed the shock on her friend’s face and examined the teeth, finding two of them filled—although the friend was convinced that she had never had any teeth filled by natural means.

On the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, a twenty-one-month-old boy named Adé Lewis had his left index finger partly amputated in an accident in May 1986. The nail was ripped out, and the tip and part of the bone were severed. To the mother’s horror, no accessible medical facilities had the requisite resources to sew it back on. Father Ralph DiOrio, a figure in the Catholic healing ministry, prayed and urged them to give glory to God. The mother testified that not only the nail but also the rest of the finger grew back quickly until it was almost as long as his right index finger.[275] People from the African and

One of the converts at this time was a professor of educational research at Quito’s Central University of Ecuador, Dr. Luis Flores. Although he had been an atheist, Flores experienced the permanent healing of a number of chronic conditions, including “deviation of the fifth lumbar vertebra, chronic pharyngitis,” allergies “and a duodenal ulcer.” He joined the movement and became a pastor in 1985, a position in

enthusiastically invited a woman with uterine cancer for prayer, assuring her that God would heal her also. Steve Heneise was one of the ministers praying; Pastor Bernabe Amigo led the prayer and afterward asked her “if she had felt anything.” She said that she felt heat in her abdomen. A month later, Pastor Job Isla returned to Pisagua, and the young woman shared with him that further medical tests found no cancer.

Ninety-eight percent of Chilean Pentecostal pastors reported that God had used them in healing, even though only 57 percent had “spoken in the ‘tongue of angels.’”

A miracle that happened at Milan while I was there, when a blind man had his sight restored, succeeded in becoming more widely known because Milan is an important city. . . . In contrast with this, there are surely only a very few at Carthage who know about the healing of Innocentius, sometime counsellor of the vice-prefecture. But I was present as an eyewitness. —Augustine of Hippo[1]

Christians were widely associated with claims of healings and exorcisms in antiquity. Not only early Christians but also rabbinic sources associated some Christian contemporaries with healing miracles.

Tertullian named prominent pagans who had been cured from evil spirits and became grateful to Christians.[19] Irenaeus gives the fullest list of signs, almost the same range as in the Gospels and Acts, noting that such signs were converting pagans.

skeptical, through experience he had grown to affirm continuing healings.[37] Augustine’s many examples of miracles of which he was certain include dramatic cases like healing of long-term paralytics; he freely cites eyewitnesses. Sometimes he expresses his annoyance when someone healed had not yet publicly given testimony to what God had done, because they were acting as if the healing were only for their private edification and not also for God’s glory. He recounts a less dramatic recovery of his own that he regards as miraculous. He reports his own suffering for several days from tooth pain so severe (perhaps due to an abscess, in the days before root canals) that eventually he could not speak. No sooner had his friends prayed for him than it vanished (Conf. 9.4.12).[38] He elaborates at special length on a case involving one of his friends, citing also another close friend who, along with Augustine, was a witness of the event. A former official named Innocent was suffering from a long-term painful anal abscess that a previous surgery and ointments had failed to correct. As anesthesia was not available in those days, patients suffering painful surgeries sometimes went into shock and died, and Innocent was terrified at the prospect of another surgery. Augustine and others prayed for him, but Augustine found himself unable to concentrate on prayer, distracted by

Innocent’s wailing to God. If the Lord did not respond to such desperate cries as Innocent’s, Augustine wondered, what sort of prayers might move him? The next morning Augustine and the others returned for Innocent’s surgery. The doctors removed the bandages and then began searching for the abscess that they had repeatedly observed—only to discover completely healthy tissue.

three days, where the supplicant desperately invoked Jesus.[89] At this remove it is difficult to evaluate these stories, except to say that many supplicants undoubtedly believed in the divine efficacy of the royal blessing, at least some were depending on God to work through it, and, according to some contemporary reports, a number of supplicants notably recovered.

from the three decades immediately before the Reformation.[125] Luther and especially Bucer blamed Catholic miracles on the devil,[126] and later Protestants carried this reproach even further.[127] The Reformers’ antisupernaturalism, never adopted by Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christians, served their immediate polemical situation against Catholic apologetic use of miracle claims.[128] Early Protestants sought to discredit medieval miracles, for the most part wholesale; while critical inquiry might have proved more helpful, the reaction against miracles associated with the traditional Roman church was predominantly polemical.

walk unaided suddenly found herself cured as a preacher was speaking about “the miraculous power of Jesus’s name.”[161] One of the best documented cases for a person through whose prayers many were healed is the previously obscure Valentine Greatrakes (1628–83). Starting in 1661, he began curing various disorders, including deafness and paralysis. He became so effective that thousands flocked to him, with hundreds of claimed cures in London alone. Some cures took weeks to complete, and his own wife remained skeptical; moreover, Greatrakes himself did not understand how the healings were occurring. A contemporary eyewitness viewed the cures as psychological, regarding Greatrakes as sincere but uneducated.[162] The witness nonetheless admitted witnessing “deafness cured by his touch,” “running sores . . . dried up,” “cancerous knots in the breast dissolved,” and so forth.[163] The results astonished even a number of skeptics, many of whom were themselves cured. Invited to demonstrate healings before the king’s court, however, he accepted quickly—and failed there. Shaken, he spent the rest of his life in obscurity.

though, made counterclaims, charging that her cure was gradual and producing testimony that she had never been blind.[175] In this polemical situation, civil discourse naturally degenerated and Jansenist sympathizers produced increasingly weak or unsubstantiated claims, as well as convulsions.[176] Referring to the earlier miracles, however, John Wesley (in both 1750 and 1762) regarded the evidence of genuine Jansenist healings as compelling, undeniable “without invalidating all human testimony.”

Others allowed that such events occurred but hesitated to call them miracles lest Protestants stray into the “superstitions” of Catholics.[196] Puritan theologians typically described such events as special providences, though the line between these providences and miracles was often thin.[197] Following Jas 5:14–15, contemporary Protestants regularly prayed for people’s healing, but they expected recovery “through providential means,” not an instant miracle.[198]

Critics of the Great Awakening rejected its bodily “enthusiasm,” so that one critic in 1744 denounced the healing of Mercy Wheeler as mere enthusiasm and Catholic-like superstition.[201] In response, the Boston Gazette noted that her healing was “‘well known and attested,’” and cited the 1693 healing of Mary Maillard noted above.[202] The critic then conceded that the cure was genuine, but protested the application of the biblical label “miracle,”[203] despite the obvious similarity to biblical accounts of paralytics’ healings (e.g., Mark 2:10–12; Acts 9:33–34). As historian Thomas Kidd observes, “Cessationism was so deeply rooted that evangelicals struggled with how not to call such astonishing experiences miracles.”

provisions had to be made for some of the pilgrims.[224] An associate for fifteen years remarked that he witnessed miracles virtually every week: “Often a paralytic would be cured, or one blind, or someone who had to be brought here on a stretcher.” Like some other healers we have noted (e.g., John Sung), Brother André himself was not immune to affliction. In his nineties, Brother André suffered considerable pain and noted that he could not cure himself.[225] The Medical Bureau established there considered many cases exaggerated or psychosomatic, but for others they lacked naturalistic explanations.[226]

Church authorities relaxed their disapproval of Bernadette’s visions.”[240] A number of leaders in the hierarchy of the church “viewed the activities there as too much like paganism to be condoned,” yet Bernadette’s corroboration of the recent dogma of the “immaculate conception” won favor. Both church leaders and physicians cooperated in the investigation.[241] Starting in 1883, a medical bureau consisting of physicians with priests as advisors took over the process of certifying miracles, though “requirements were stiff and certification fairly rare.”[242] When miracle claims did survive this rigorous process, they normally commanded widespread interest.

I offer merely samples here of some of the other reports: in 1845, a dying woman, vomiting large quantities of clotted blood, began recovering within a few minutes of prayer, still tired but regaining strength.[256] In 1846 a physician certified the healing of a previously incurable skin rash.[257] Other eyewitness reports of cures include blindness,[258] paralysis,[259] epilepsy,[260] and the like. When a woman whose “hand closed by seizures” found no help from her Tübingen physicians, she was cured after her first service at Blumhardt’s church; her physicians initially refused to believe that she was the same woman.[261] In 1872, after a young man clubbed a boy in the head, the

States.[282] Although Christians had often prayed for healing, the new movement often emphasized more specifically that healing was in the atonement, hence, many argued, available to all.[283] This movement reacted against the previously dominant nineteenth-century religious consensus that Christians should passively submit to suffering without resisting it.

Boardman reports some early cures. For example, in an accident, the son of another physician broke both bones in his forearm; the physician’s brother, a surgeon, set the bones and required that the splints and sling would be necessary for at least six weeks. That night, the child asked Jesus to make his arm well, and the next day asked for the sling to be removed. The father and uncle reproved him, but the boy was so insistent that the surgeon uncle finally undid the sling to show the boy that the arm was not yet healed—only to discover that it was. The uncle, who had wandered from the faith, was reconverted.

[312] Such signs also appeared in Christian movements outside the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including in Africa.[313] Healings and exorcisms are well documented even among many early twentieth-century missionaries supported by denominations or movements in which most Western members believed that all spiritual gifts ended in the apostolic era.

Beckwith, “History and Miracles,” 93–94. This does seem to be Hume’s

approach in the one passage where he seems to allow for exceptions to known natural law—so long as they are not granted supernatural attribution

Hume, Miracles, 47–48, acknowledges the abundant testimony for the cure of Pascal’s niece, then merely dismisses without much argument its value because it is miracle testimony.

), but to my knowledge no one has yet begun collecting the many case studies of healings that could be gathered even from the circles in which I move, except on an anecdotal level. [7]. O’Connor,

This would answer the argument of Ehrman, Prophet, 193, that history involves only “events that are accessible to observers of every kind.”

Arguing for theism from indirect inference should be no more problematic than the analogous inference of entities in physics