Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

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]