Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

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]