Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

occurring today (see chs. 7–12). The same texts reveal that Paul believed this claim not in some theoretical sense, but that he and in some passages the churches believed that they were participating in the experience of such phenomena.

Jesus’s miracles have little in common with magic as most frequently defined, especially the magic elaborately documented for us in the third-century magical papyri. Part of the debate about magic and Jesus’s miracles turns on one’s definition of “magic,”[26] discussed earlier, but to the extent that “religion” and “magic” are distinguished, the normal criteria readily distinguish Jesus’s most commonly reported activity from magic.[27] Granted, Jesus was accused of magic by his detractors (Mark 3:22, probably also in Q Matt 12:24//Luke 11:15).[28] This accusation was not, however, surprising, for it was the easiest charge to bring against wonder workers. 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 (Acts 8:9–11; 13:6–8; 19:11–19).

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

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.[45]

Jesus’s healing and exorcistic ministry, while exhibiting some parallels to its general Jewish framework, differs in serious respects from other early Jewish models.[52] As he notes, most of the miracles in non-Christian early Jewish sources differ in kind from those reported in early Christian sources.[53] Eve notes that most of the types of miracles in Josephus differ from those in the Gospels and Acts, with little interest in healings;[54] meanwhile, stories of postbiblical miracles are not very common outside Josephus,[55] and healings remain particularly rare.[56] Apart from some works like Lives of the Prophets, most early Jewish sources display only limited interest in miracles, far less than in our earliest Christian sources.[57]

Thus, Eve concludes, early Jewish parallels do not advance the closest parallels to Jesus’s signs: the biblical models of Elijah, Elisha, and (for the sea and feeding miracles) at least some links with Moses.[75] 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.[76]

Theissen and Merz appear representative of many today in concluding that while Jewish wonder workers offer closer parallels than pagan ones do, they differ significantly from Jesus, especially in working only through prayer and lacking eschatological miracles.[77]

No other early Jewish source reports as many miracles concerning an individual as the Gospels do regarding Jesus,[78] and Jesus stands alone among prior miracle workers in using miracles, in his case healings and exorcis...

In today’s academic climate, many who testify to miracles have much to lose even by testifying truly; but I shall first respond to Hume’s quantitative demand. In contrast to the environment assumed by Hume, today hundreds of millions of people claim to have witnessed miracles. Moreover, eyewitnesses claim what they believe are miracles even in the West, and this has been the case through most of history, even when Hume framed his argument within the theological framework of academic circles often reticent to acknowledge miraculous claims. Some of these eyewitness claims involve even the healing of blindness, the raising of the dead, and nature miracles.

Scholars sometimes have opined that miracle reports like those in the Gospels and Acts must depend on later legend or a writer’s imagination.[5] This premise, however, rests on culturally and intellectually narrow assumptions that read much of the world’s experiences through the nonexperiences of much of our Western academic culture.[6]

Whereas fewer than 18 percent of Christians in 1900 lived outside Europe and North America, today more than 60 percent do, and an estimated 70 percent will by 2025.[27] As the center of world Christianity has shifted to the Global South, the dominant Christian perspectives in the world have shifted with it.[28]

All Christian churches in China practice some form of healing, including Three-Self churches. In fact, according to some surveys, 90% of new believers cite healing as a reason for their conversion. This is especially true in the countryside where medical facilities are often inadequate or non-existent. —Edmond Tang[3]

One Western researcher in the Philippines interviewed people who were prayed for to see if any of them felt better and was astonished to learn “that 83% of them actually reported that they had experienced some dramatic healing from God in their bodies.”

church elder whom she knew who had medically incurable cancer; the pastor regularly visited and prayed for him until he was healed, greatly affecting those who knew him.[15] The pastor of Cathedral of Praise notes that during a church service his wife was fully healed from tuberculosis in both lungs; another member recounts that during a crusade his dying wife, who had a toxic goiter, was healed.[16] A sympathetic popular writer who observed healing meetings in the Philippines reports how a doctor attending one of the meetings confirmed that one of his own deaf patients had just been healed.[17] A close friend of mine from college also reports to me witnessing numerous instant and obvious healings in the Philippines.[18] Ma tells of events surrounding the beginning of the Christian movement among the Kankana-eys through Elva Vanderbout, a single woman missionary in the 1940s and 1950s. (Ma’s dissertation involves the history of this movement.[19]) Vanderbout helped the needy get medical help where possible[20] but also prayed for the sick. Ma notes the account of “an old man who had such a critical spinal problem that he could only crawl on his hands and knees like an animal.” In 1958, the man’s friends carried him to a revival meeting conducted by Vanderbout; at the close of the service, he was “instantly healed and he stood up and walked away,” testifying of God’s works.[21] Among the many persons healed of deafness and muteness was a young woman deaf and mute for twelve...

One seminarian in the Philippines, Ryan Hortizuela, told me that he saw his uncle pray for a girl of about nine, who could not speak or walk. After they had prayed for a few minutes in Jesus’s name, he attested, the girl suddenly jumped “up and began to talk.”[30] Dwight Palmquist, a Western missionary and pastor in Cebu City, shared with me a number of testimonies, such as the restoration of speech and facial movement in a stroke victim immediately after prayer (which is normally unexpected),[31] and the instant disappearance of a small but visible goiter on a woman’s neck during prayer. He also prayed for a twenty-two-yearold person with epilepsy who had been suffering seizures for most of his life; six years later he learned that the man had suffered no seizures from the day that the prayer had been offered.[32]

Many miracles had been taking place there, he noted, and he saw a blind woman visibly healed and a dead baby raised (I recount these reports in greater detail in ch. 12).

Although he prayed, he secretly feared that the son would die, so he left as quickly as possible. The next day, however, the mother found him and insisted that he come to their home. Once he got there, she pointed to a man fixing their roof and pressed, “Do you recognize that guy?” Chester asked if this was the brother of the young man he had prayed for. The mother declared that this was her son for whom Chester had prayed the previous day. Initially unable to believe it, Chester went and checked the room where the son had been lying, as the healed man smiled at him. Now healed, the young man immediately went back to his former line of work.[34]

She also shared her most recent experience, less than a week before our interview. She was working with a guest evangelist who prayed for a woman with a lump on her neck roughly a couple inches in diameter. As the evangelist touched it, Eleanor witnessed the lump disappear.[40]

Most of the residents of a village in Thailand became Christians after a chronically ill boy was instantly healed.[51] The healing of a child in Laos reportedly brought a village to believe in Yesu (Jesus), of whom one villager had heard, as a powerful “spirit” before any outsiders brought teaching about Jesus.[52] Churches in Vietnam often have been growing through signs and healings.[53]

In 1972, Bishop Chiu Ban It, Singapore’s first indigenous Anglican bishop, experienced a dramatic encounter with God through this movement[57] and unexpectedly found himself gifted in praying for healing.[58] The Reverend Dr. Michael Green, now adviser in evangelism to the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, notes what he witnessed firsthand there in 1973. As the bishop prayed, Green saw “physical healings of an incontrovertible nature—I think of a man throwing away his crutches, and another whose hearing was restored.”[59] The healing services became the catalyst for a new commitment to evangelism, with signs and wonders accompanying the evangelism,[60] and healings also continued as part of church life.[61] Such factors eventually contributed to the young Anglican Province of South East Asia being “one of the fastest growing parts of the Anglican Communion.”[62]

John Savarimuthu, the Indian bishop of the Anglican Church in largely Muslim West Malaysia, initially delayed a medically necessary, triple-bypass heart operation due to his heavy ministry schedule. His condition deteriorated, however, and the operation was finally scheduled. The night before the scheduled operation, he committed his condition to God and suddenly felt heat in his chest. The next day, testing confirmed that he had been healed, and after this experience many others were healed through his prayers. He even conducted a healing mission in Kuala Lumpur’s stadium, with government permission.[63]

One Baptist, Lang Do Khup, challenged by the village priest about the powerlessness of Christians to heal in contrast to the traditional spirits, began to pray for the gift of healing. He prayed for a lame girl, to no avail, but once home felt moved to return and pray again. As he did so, she “stood up and walked with no help.”[71] Such reports do not begin in this region only in the twentieth century; in the nineteenth century, a local Karen believer reported that his apparently dying son, who was roughly fifteen but had never been able to walk, was healed and walking after prayer. He said he had confidence to pray because in a previous generation he had often seen healings when a missionary prayed.[72]

Healings have been a major factor in the growth of the Christian movement in India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.

Healing and exorcism offer the primary appeal of Pentecostalism there,[83] and statistics show that the majority of new converts to Pentecostalism in South India come in response to healings and exorcisms.[84] Reported healings usually follow a brief prayer, often simply, “In the name of Jesus, be healed!”[85] One new pastor with no members prayed for a woman with cancer, on whom doctors had apparently given up; “within a few days, when she began to recover,” people began attending his new church, which grew and became very successful.[86] Another new pastor with no members just felt impressed to lay hands on a visitor and pray; the man left, saying nothing. The man, however, had felt heat and found himself healed of a nervous breakdown that had incapacitated him for more than four years; the next day the doctor cleared the man to work, and that Sunday thirty-five people attended the church, which eventually became

For example, in 1992 Nivedita Ghosh received surgery and radiation treatment for brain cancer in its final stages, destroying her salivary glands and ability to talk and eat. Nevertheless, doctors concluded that she would not survive beyond five months, nor would she ever be able to speak. When Nivedita was nearly unconscious, a Christian prayed; to the family’s astonishment, Nivedita’s fever broke and she was able to speak. The family got rid of their deity statues and talismans and became Christians; over the following months Nivedita became able to swallow, within six to eight months becoming normal. The neurosurgeon wanted to test her and could not even find scars where he had operated.[119]

Claims of supernatural activity are not simply the domain of the modern non-Western world. They appeared frequently in early Christian sources that the West traditionally counted in its cultural heritage, in church history, including but not limited to the West, from early to current times.[3] Egypt, Carthage, Syria, and other early Christian spheres of influence in Africa and Asia were not Western, geographically or culturally, but the entire church draws on such sources as part of its general Christian heritage.[4]

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.[10] Second- and third-century Christian apologists depict not only apostolic leaders but also ordinary Christians as miracle workers.[11] Before the 300s, exorcisms proved to be a major factor in the spread of Christianity;[12] in the 300s, exorcisms and miracles are the most explicit cause of conversion to Christianity mentioned in early Christian sources.[13]

Christians themselves appealed to exorcisms and miracles for evidential value in public discourse. Thus Origen, arguing against Celsus and addressing pagans, claimed that Christians were still expelling evil spirits and performing cures and that he had witnessed some of these incidents.[14] Similarly, Athanasius in the 350s portrays the Egyptian hermit Anthony as confronting skeptics by challenging them either to cure these demoniacs with their ideas and idols or to just observe Christ’s power healing them; then, Athanasius declared, Anthony himself cured them.[15]

Far from being merely incredulous about a distant and unverifiable past,[16] various church fathers noted that miracles and heal...

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.[20] Cyprian complained that the church’s worldliness had sapped its spiritual power in his day,[21] but elsewhere he too affirmed continuing healings.[22]

Reports continued among church fathers like Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus,[23] Gregory of Nyssa,[24] John Chrysostom,[25] and also among the desert monks.[26] Irenaeus and Athanasius used claims of healings and exorcisms apologetically to defend the orthodox as God’s movement.[27] Likewise, Athanasius invites skeptics to come witness the efficacy of exorcism for themselves.[28] Strange as it appears to many readers today, though, church fathers like Basil, Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Augustine believed that the healing often was mediated through relics.[29]

Personal fourth-century letters that have survived from Christians in Egypt testify that Christians were seeking healing from God through the prayers of trusted holy men.[31] Other probably fourth-century sources likewise indicate that a ministry of healing continued in other parts of the church, although this activity may have become a clerical rather than a lay prerogative.[32] We have no way to verify these reports today, but they do illustrate continuing belief in miracles and in many cases first- or secondhand claims of having witnessed them.

Coptic texts regarding Christian cures there thus address a range of symptoms, usually those issues that doctors had not been able to treat: demon possession; migraines; breast inflammation; pains in various parts of the body; hemorrhoids; and also “nine instances of crippled persons, lame and infirm, fractures, dislocations, one case of gout, skin diseases . . . one case of fever, and a snakebite.”[33] Most of these recoveries are believable even from a purely naturalistic perspective, since people naturally recover from many health problems, though some recoveries, such as those of persons unable to walk, appear at least potentially more dramatic.

The North African theologian Augustine at one point sounded like he thought that miracles had ceased, but he later retracted that view, or at least the way that he had articulated it. True, he now granted, not everyone today speaks in tongues when hands are laid on at baptism, nor are the sick always healed.[34] Yet he notes that even when he had written his apparent denial he knew of a blind man healed in front of many witnesses by approaching martyrs’ bodies when he was in Milan, and countless other miracles.[35] In City of God 22.8, Augustine notes that they had established a depository of documents recording miracles in Hippo only two years earlier, and already they had more than seventy published documents. He further knew of many miracles not recorded among these. Moreover, another shrine in the area, having kept records longer, had a much larger collection.[36] Previously more skeptical, through experience he had grown to affirm continuing healings.[37]

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.[39]

the first bishop of Arbil in Mesopotamia was converted through witnessing a Syrian evangelist raising someone from the dead in 99 C.E.[40]

Healings were said to follow Martin of Tours,[44] the early fourth-century Northumbrian saints,[45] Benedict,[46] and others. Undoubtedly, many of these reports are shrouded in hagiography, but one modern doctor accepts many of them because he can cite as parallels to such reports analogous accounts of recoveries in answer to prayer today.[47]

late antiquity witnessed a general transition away from emphasis on current miracles by living intercessors, especially on the official level.[53] This diminution of reports perhaps not surprisingly also coincided geographically with regions where new evangelism was less emphasized.[54] Signs claims do appear most commonly in history in the context of groundbreaking evangelism;[55] this pattern has persisted through history, for example, in the cases of earlier Christian missionaries like Augustine of Canterbury;[56] Columba, missionary to Scotland;[57] Willibrord, missionary to the Frisians and Denmark;[58] Boniface, missionary to Germany;[59] in the early twentieth century;[60] more recently;[61] and even in some relatively neglected nineteenth-century missions reports.[62] While the early medieval West was not fully schooled in Christian faith, many treated it as Christianized.[63] The emphasis generally shifted from healings and concern to improve health toward exalting affliction “as a discipline from the hand of God.”[64]

Around 1100, Bernard of Clairvaux (1091–1153) reportedly placed a boy’s withered hand on a dead saint’s hand and the boy’s hand was healed.[68] Bernard wrote about Malachy (1094–1148), whom he knew and whose coworkers he consulted, recounting twelve healings attributed to him.[69] Traditions have often attributed miracles to St. Francis (1182–1226),[70] such as the immediate cure of a leper’s flesh.[71] Sometimes descriptions of the conditions healed are detailed enough to allow tentative diagnoses by modern specialists.[72]

Critics uncomfortable with power in the relics themselves, including many modern readers,[79] might nevertheless allow that they sometimes served as a contact point for supplicants’ faith in God.[80]

Over the course of several centuries, people believed that the touch of the divinely appointed English and French monarchs could produce healing.[88] Many of the cures that are described as occurring through the royal touch were probably simply natural recoveries, and apparently a number of the rulers themselves doubted this power. Nevertheless, at least some extraordinary cures are reported, including a cure of blindness after three days, where the supplicant desperately invoked Jesus.[89]

“One man claims to possess a feather from the wings of the angel Gabriel, and the Bishop of Mainz has a flame from Moses’s burning bush. And how does it come to pass that eighteen apostles are buried in Germany when Christ chose only twelve?”[108] His opposition to relics influenced his approach to supernatural claims more generally. Luther did not oppose all revelations in principle (especially in visions and dreams), but severely tested all such claims in view of his antipathy to the proliferation of medieval revelations purporting to stem not from Christ but from Mary, the saints, and the deceased.[109]

On the other hand, he averred that any Christian can work miracles where needed, “especially in a missionary situation”;[112] God will still do miracles “whenever they are required.”[113] In practice, he thought them unnecessary in his time, but acknowledged that extraordinary times might require them.[114] On one hand, he regarded sickness and suffering as normal and a means of grace.[115] On the other, he notes miraculous healings of himself, his wife, and Melanchthon in answer to prayer; Melanchthon returned from apparent death following Luther’s own prayer.[116] A year before he died, Luther taught on prayer for the sick, both privately and in churches, following Jas 5:14–15. In a letter he noted “prayer for healing by the laying on of hands” occurring in Wittenberg.[117]

Calvin rejected the cult of the saints,[118] yet it is said that he “believed that prayers to St. Genevieve had saved his life when he was stricken with fever.”[119] Believing that apostolic miracles had ceased did not make him doubt that God could still answer prayer for healing.[120] Before the influence of the radical Enlightenment, many Protestants did continue to affirm and experience miraculous healings (e.g., in the first generation of Scots Reformers;[121] note also Friends and early Baptists).[122] Some have also cited healing claims for reforming groups before Luther, such as the Waldensians and Hussites.[123]

Today, in a very different sort of environment,[130] the majority of Christian scholars, Protestant as well as Catholic, recognize as tenuous putative biblical grounds for assuming that God stopped healing people at the close of the first century.[131] For some to deny the possibility of current miracles based on particular Reformation traditions (rather than “always reforming” based on Scripture) would place some of Luther’s heirs in a hermeneutically and epistemically ironic position—though not a novel one—of making tradition normative for interpreting Scripture.[132]

Developing the magisterial Reformers’ reaction against abuses, some Protestants eventually selectively adopted the dogmatic antisupernaturalism of the radical Enlightenment (addressed in chs. 5 and 6). It proved convenient for them to embrace thoroughgoing naturalism in the present era, in order to reject the miracle claims of “papists” and “enthusiasts” while excepting those recounted in Scripture.[140] Belief that miracles had ceased offered a way to accommodate belief in biblical miracles with a current “orderly and rational universe,”[141] though it could never ultimately satisfy a uniformitarianism that demanded the same hegemony of natural law in the past.[142] This cessationist concession to deism was an internally inconsistent position philosophically.[143] Ironically, opposition to current miracles was one point at which early modern fundamentalism and modernism found common cause, often employing the same arguments, except that cessationists excluded (often comparable) biblical miracles from the critique.[144]

As Protestants and Catholics dismissed miracles, no matter how well attested, that violated their theological constraints,[146] skeptics about miracles altogether, like Voltaire and Hume, felt no compulsion to recognize the evidence for any of them.[147] Conyers Middleton, for example, in his famous anti-Catholic work, dismissed all postbiblical evidence for miracles, rejecting the accuracy of the church fathers as well as more recent eyewitness testimonies. He prudently avoided discussion of nt miracles.[148]

Whereas postbiblical miracles might be disallowed, Calvinists allowed for special providence as well as general providence, the former potentially accommodating miracles under another title.[152]

In the seventeenth century, Presbyterian Richard Baxter claims his own healing from a sizable tumor, as well as knowledge of others’ healings.[159] Scottish Covenanters report many miracles.[160] In 1644, a young woman unable to 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.[164]

For example, in 1707 Anglican Josiah Woodward noted that French Huguenot refugees, who emigrated to England in the 1690s, claimed a number of miracles, including that of Mary Maillard in 1693. Her left leg had been weak from birth, but as she heard the account of the healing of a disabled man in Mark 2:1–12 being read, “‘she thought she heard a Voice saying, “Thou art healed,”’” whereupon she found herself cured. While conceding that such events remained rare in his time, Woodward also noted other healings, “including one as recent as 1705 near Leicester.”[165] These accounts were well known; thus, Cotton Mather, recounting Huguenot miracles, in 1696 speculated that miracles, once restrained because of Catholic “Apostasy,” might now be being renewed in a new “age of miracles.”[166]