Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

Anabaptists, Quakers, and Pietists all claimed healings.[178] English Baptists cited a dramatic deathbed recovery from this period.[179] Eighteenth-century Moravians also reported miraculous healings;[180] instantaneous miracle cures are especially reported in 1731, several years into the famous revival at Herrnhut. Count Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf accepted such experiences but insisted that they be treated no differently than other gifts occurring among the Moravians.[181]

Claims of supernatural phenomena accompanied the First Great Awakening in Britain’s American colonies.[185] In the 1740s, evangelical leaders were emphasizing the Spirit’s activity, and a few even allowed for instant physical healings.[186] Although earlier Reformed thinkers, including Puritans, had largely embraced forms of cessationism, some ideas began to shift during the later phase of the Great Awakening. Recognized events like the healing of Mercy Wheeler from her disabled state caused some critics of present miracles to rethink their views.[187] Bedridden since 1726,[188] she was instantly healed on May 25, 1743.[189] She trembled, shook, and could speak only what hearers regarded as gibberish as she felt God’s presence. The shaking began with her hands but finally racked her whole body, until when it passed she felt the first strength she had experienced in many years.[190] Feeling then a compulsion to act, she got up and walked sixteen feet, crying out, “Bless the Lord Jesus, who has healed me!” to the amazement of all present.[191] The preacher attempted to calm her, but she walked around the room a few more times, and over the next five months she kept walking farther and farther.[192] Other healings in the revival included those reported by Presbyterian pastor John Moorhead,[193] and a number of evangelical ministers from this era noted their own remarkable recoveries.[194] Jonathan Edwards observed that a season of mental and physical health accompanied the re...

Although particularly famous, Mercy Wheeler’s case was not isolated. On July 24, 1769, after Mary Read had been bedridden for three years, she heard a voice that seemed audible, repeating three times that she should rise and walk, and suddenly she found herself well.[205] On July 10, 1794, Mary Spaulding, sick for many years, felt an overwhelming impression that as Jesus healed the woman with the flow of blood, she too would be healed. Praising God, “I immediately arose from my bed of sickness,” she testified, and “felt free from all my infirmities.”[206] Also in the 1700s, Hannah Coleman of New Jersey, disabled after a fall from a horse, one day felt touched by God and ran around the house, carrying her bed, moving furniture, and praising God.[207] Not all who hoped for healing, however, experienced it.[208]

His journal reports many healing miracles, often in response to his own prayers.[210] On one occasion, for example, a man apparently dead returned to life when Wesley prayed for him.[211] Wesley’s brother Charles was raised from a debilitating attack of pleurisy and apparently unconsciousness when a woman moved by a dream declared, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth arise and believe, and thou shalt be healed of all thy infirmities.”[212] A doctor denounced the emotion in Wesley’s meetings until one of his own patients, convulsed by emotion, emerged completely cured.[213] One of his Methodist preachers, John Valton, cited both healings and rainfall that occurred in response to prayer.[214] Three different early Wesleyan sources recount the recent healing of Ann Brookes’s blind eye after she prayed for healing and dreamed that Christ touched it.[215] Wesley expected signs of the Spirit regularly in his meetings, though these were often anguished outcries or falling to the ground under the Spirit’s conviction.[216]

Some modern writers argue that raising the dead, unlike most miracle claims, would involve a true miracle, but that no one today even claims that such events occur.[246] This argument, however, proves severely flawed, since raising claims are in fact fairly numerous today (though of course still extremely rare proportionate to the number of deaths). Presumably some such claims today, like some claims about many subjects, will prove deceptive, but I am fully convinced that a number of other claims reflect genuine eyewitness experience. That the writers of the Gospels and Acts believed that the resuscitations they reported took place should no more be doubted than the confidence of many people later in history and today who believe that they have seen, and have offered eyewitness evidence for, analogous experiences.

In some of the following raising accounts, the person remained weak or ill, requiring further medical attention; whether weakness or sickness remained in any biblical raisings we cannot be certain, but it is possible in some of them (e.g., 2 Kgs 4:37; Mark 5:42–43; Acts 20:10–12). The primary issue for the biblical comparisons is what is explicit in most of those passages: someone dead, insofar as any observers present could detect, returned to life.

More astonishingly, in the Journal of Anthropological Research[263] one anthropologist reported that during a shamanic funerary ritual in northwestern Ghana, he witnessed a corpse that had been dead for a few days dance and play drums for at least several minutes. “I saw the corpse jolt and occasionally pulsate” in reaction to the shaman’s movements; streams of light invaded the room, and “the corpse, shaken by spasms, then rose to its feet, spinning and dancing in a frenzy. . . . The corpse [of a drummer] picked up the drumsticks and began to play.” Soon it was again a motionless corpse, propped against the wall.[264]

It has been said that during the Scottish Reformation, John Welch, son-in-law of John Knox, prayed for a youth whom the doctors had verified as dead. The youth began speaking, completely well, and went on to become Lord Castlesteuart of Ireland.[297]

Second Kings 13:21 seems to presuppose power still in the bones of Elisha, and other passages may imply power through contact, as in Luke 8:46; Acts 5:15; 19:12. Cf. also Gaiser, Healing, 166. The question of faith in God aside, there do remain serious questions of how many of the purported relics actually belonged to the saints to whom they were attributed.