9. Signs and Historiography

Some scholars who grant that Acts is a historical monograph containing considerable accurate historical information in its narratives find the miracle reports in these same narratives problematic. This apparent inconsistency in approach stems not from a change in genre but from philosophic assumptions about what is possible for intelligent people in other cultures and eras to believe they have seen.

Signs consume as much as a fifth of Acts. Luke claims that eyewitnesses and participants saw what they and Luke believed were miracles. Moreover, some of these claims appear in “we” material (Acts 20:9–12; 28:8–9), usually attributed to an eyewitness. Scholars can explain most such incidents in either naturalistic or supernatural terms, depending on their assumptions, but reducing them to novelistic flourishes or legendary accretions (as is usually the case for the nonhistorical, later apocryphal acts) requires reading them in a way different from much of the rest of Luke’s narrative.

This chapter therefore addresses two distinct issues. The first, which I believe this chapter will establish to most readers’ satisfaction, regardless of their philosophic assumptions, is that the kinds of healing reports in Acts are generally plausible historically. Similar claims, often from convinced eyewitnesses, circulate widely today, and there are no a priori reasons to doubt that ancient eyewitnesses could have made analogous claims. One may agree that such recoveries occur without attempting to explain all of them. The second, which challenges a worldview and hence will not likely persuade all readers, is that we are not obligated to begin with the a priori assumption that none of these events could involve intelligent, suprahuman causation.

My primary concern is to persuade readers of my first, less controversial point, since that is where any challenge to Luke as an ancient historian would lie. The second point, however, a philosophic issue, will be important for readers also concerned with Luke’s theology, since Luke attributes these miracles to divine causation. Because of this commentary’s social-historical focus, however, I concentrate much more on the former point than the latter, which I suggest, more than argue, here.

My book on miracles addresses these questions, especially the latter one, in far greater detail than is possible here. That book grew originally from this chapter, and in an effort to reduce duplication, I have removed about half of this chapter (including scores of healing reports and interviews from around the world, and some 270 secondary sources) and simply refer interested readers to that book, more sophisticated and now nearly a thousand pages longer than this chapter would have been.

Previous chapters have established Acts’ genre as a work of ancient historiography; we cannot leave this topic without examining the modern question of miracle claims in predominantly accurate historical reports. A section in below will examine Luke’s theology of signs, but here we must address the historical question, which, because of the complex philosophic, comparative, social, and theological questions involved in it, must consume a larger proportion of space. Studying this question, we must examine non-Christian miracle accounts from Luke’s era as well as the historic context of ancient and modern philosophic skepticism toward miracles. Finally (and at some length), we must confront the question of how modern Western readers can relate to such claims; I will suggest that many other cultures (and some religious subcultures within our culture) provide better paradigms for a sympathetic reading of Luke’s claims than do our dominant Western academic paradigms.

Historians of this period often include miraculous or other supernatural elements in their works (as was also the case earlier in much of ancient Israel’s historiography), and so acknowledging the presence of such claims does not shift the genre of Acts away from ancient historiography. Yet Luke reports signs more often, given the amount of space available, than typical extant historians from his period (though in a proportion comparable to certain sections of Israelite narratives and perhaps with a lower concentration than parts of the Elijah-Elisha cycle). Indeed, even among the earliest Christian sources, Acts emphasizes signs to a greater degree than usual. It portrays them as more unambiguously positive than the way that they appear in Mark or John and as more central than they appear in Paul’s letters (though the difference in the latter case may be one of genre).

Thus although many or most ancient historians mentioned paranormal phenomena, they rarely dwelled on them as Luke does. Yet most other extant historians were writing about political or social events, not the early history of a miracle worker and a “charismatic” movement known in that period for its signs. And as argued below, there is little reason to doubt that the first Christians (like some revival movements since that time) believed that signs were occurring among them, and that they could offer first-, second-, or thirdhand testimony to such events.

This chapter addresses only the questions specific to signs (comparing ancient sources, modern analogies, and the philosophic question behind the historiographic one), not questions about Luke’s historiography treated here earlier. That is, one may affirm that events such as these can occur, or even grant that they may sometimes occur supernaturally, but this does not mean that every purported case of a sign in history happened, still less that it happened supernaturally. Historical analysis cannot guarantee that Luke’s oral sources did not blur or exaggerate details over time. Moreover, even in eyewitness material, Luke presumably shaped the story to sharpen it for literary purposes, as historians normally did. But these are questions concerning Luke’s historiography more generally, addressed above, and hence will be addressed here only rarely. (Claims of dreams and visions, less often disputed, are treated in this commentary’s excursuses at Acts 2:17–18 and 16:9.)

Today, as in the first century, scholars can offer historical reconstructions on the basis of testimony, sometimes artifacts, and, frequently, critical evaluation based on intrinsic probability and the weighing of evidence. Two problems thus confront a discussion of miracles in earliest Christianity: the limitations of the evidence (some testimony; no first-century artifacts) and (for the probability argument) the long-standing (albeit declining) Western philosophic a priori denying the possibility of miracles (or at least raising the bar of skepticism so high that no individual miracle claim could ever be accepted). This second problem does not always translate into a denial that witnesses claimed to see phenomena that could be interpreted in such terms, but it has sometimes done so. We will return to the second problem below, but we focus at present on the first. Because much discussion has been centered on Jesus’s miracles and because Luke’s first volume is devoted to Jesus, I include here elements surrounding that discussion, deeming them relevant to this discussion of signs in Acts as well.

The former problem, namely, the limitations of kinds of evidence available, is not as serious as it might first appear; although the evidence is limited concerning most particular miracles, all of the many ancient sources that comment on the issue agree that Jesus and his early followers performed miracles: Q, Mark, special material in Matthew and Luke, John, Acts, the Epistles, Revelation, and non-Christian testimony from Jewish and pagan sources.

Most scholars today thus accept the claim that Jesus was a healer and exorcist. The evidence is stronger for this claim than for most other specific historical claims that we could make about earliest Christianity; miracles characterized Jesus’s historical activity no less than his teaching and prophetic activities did. If followers would preserve his teachings, how much more would they (and especially those who experienced recoveries) spread miracle reports? Because miracle claims attach to a relatively small number of figures in antiquity (itinerant or not), there is little reason to suppose that Jesus would have developed a reputation as a wonder-worker if he did not engage in such activities. As Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz put it, “Just as the kingdom of God stands at the centre of Jesus’s preaching, so healings and exorcisms form the centre of his activity.”

Among non-Christian sources, the rabbis and Celsus are clear, and Vermes also argues that the miracle claim in Jos. Ant. 18.63 is authentic, on the basis of Josephus’s style. Josephus calls Jesus a σοφὸς ἀνήρ, a wise man, who also “worked startling deeds” (παράδοξα; cf. Luke 5:26), a term by which Josephus also depicts the miracles worked by the prophet Elisha (Ant. 9.182). (Many later non-Christian sources attribute the miraculous works to sorcery, which probably constitutes the earliest anti-Christian explanation for Christian miracles.) This unanimity is striking given the conversely unanimous silence in Christian, Jewish, and even Mandaean tradition concerning any miracles of respected prophetic figures such as John the Baptist.

Thus most scholars today apparently grant the claim for Jesus, regardless of their philosophic assumptions about divine activity in miracle claims. E. P. Sanders regards it as an “almost indisputable” historical fact that “Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed.” Using traditional historical-critical tools, John Meier finds many of Jesus’s miracles authentic. Raymond Brown notes that “scholars have come to realize that one cannot dismiss Jesus’s miracles simply on modern rationalist grounds, for the oldest traditions show him as a healer.” Otto Betz regards it as “certain” that Jesus was a healer, a matter that “can be deduced even from the Jewish polemic which called him a sorcerer”; the miracles are central to the Gospels, and without them, most of the other data in the Gospels are inexplicable. Even Morton Smith similarly argues that miracle working is the most authentic part of the Jesus tradition, though he explains it along the magical lines urged by Jesus’s early detractors.

If such signs characterized Jesus, there is no reason to doubt that they could have also characterized those viewed as his successors. Perhaps Jesus even trained his disciples as his successors (as teachers normally trained their disciples to be), expecting them to be able to perform the same activity that he did (cf. Mark 9:18–19, 28–29; 11:23; Luke 9:40–41; 17:6). Indeed, most of the signs claimed in Acts, as in the Gospels, are healings and exorcisms—precisely the claims Christian sources in later centuries also offered from contemporary eyewitnesses.

Seeking to distinguish tradition from redaction in Acts’ miracles, Benjamin Williams compares Luke’s redaction of Markan miracles, identifying consistent redactional patterns relevant to Luke’s portrayal of miracles. Williams’s approach should follow, in a general way, from the logical premise that Luke would value historical tradition in his second volume (a historical monograph) no less than in his first (on its own terms, a biography). For example, while retaining the substance of Mark’s accounts, Luke feels free to compose audience reactions of astonishment, fear, and so forth if Mark lacks these (though one might well infer such reactions from human nature), and especially adds acclamations of praise to God. Luke nowhere adds discourses to his miracle stories, though he could abbreviate, “improve the vocabulary, or even omit discourses altogether.”

What we cannot be certain of, however, is the nature of Luke’s sources in the second volume; in contrast to many of his sources in the Gospel, many of his sources in Acts were probably oral, altering the character of the “editing.” At the same time, we might expect his historical interests in the second volume to remain analogous to those in the first and hence expect him, as Williams argues, to continue to shape, rather than begin to fabricate, his miracle stories in his second volume.

More tellingly, some of his miracle reports appear in eyewitness material much closer to Luke than his Gospel sources were (Acts 20:9–12; 21:11; 27:21–26; 28:3–6, 8–9). Luke is clearly convinced that miracles occur; Paul is likewise convinced that they happened through his ministry (Rom 15:19; 2 Cor 12:12); modern scholars are also usually convinced that Jesus and many early Christians (e.g., second-century exorcists) were believed to perform miracles. If Jesus and his first followers believed that they experienced miracles firsthand, how can modern hearers relate to these claims?

This evidence raises two kinds of questions from a modern perspective. First, although early Christian literature emphasizes an abundance of miracle workers not attested to this degree in other first-century movements, miracle claims were abundant in antiquity. How do the bulk of the Christian claims compare with analogous claims? Should all be explained psychosomatically, as deception, as misinterpretation, or in other nonsupernatural terms? Are some claims likelier than others, and in which circles?

Second, if modernist assumptions are incompatible with supernatural claims, does this incompatibility obligate us to a priori rule out the possibility of such activity? Or should we reevaluate some assumptions of modernity and hence leave open at least the possibility of nonnatural (in this case, most often theistic) explanations? Whatever answers we give to the second set of questions will not satisfy everyone, but we cannot address the historical question fully without at least raising them; the veracity of the events aside, the question of explanatory models remains a legitimate subject of historical inquiry, and causation (albeit, generally, human causation) is a common historical concern. Nevertheless, for purely historical purposes, in the final analysis, the question of whether eyewitnesses claimed such phenomena does not depend on the explanations or models proposed for these phenomena. Scholars may debate whether history as a discipline may ask questions of causation beyond the human level, but definitions of historiography technically belong to philosophers of history and are historically conditioned, arbitrary disciplinary boundaries. One may limit the focus of one’s inquiry, excluding questions of supernatural causation, without thereby declaring those questions illegitimate or out-of-bounds for other disciplines. Thus, although the questions may overlap when interpreters address causation, in principle these questions may be (and sometimes are) treated separately.

Luke reports signs more often, given the amount of space available, than typical ancient historians did. This greater proportion of miracle reports in Luke-Acts may stem from various factors, such as greater skepticism among other extant historians’ elite readers (who, naturally, account for the bulk of their audiences). It especially reflects, however, Luke’s focus: he writes not just general history but the history of a charismatic movement, especially its missions thrust (with which he particularly associates signs and wonders). Nevertheless, belief in, and reports of, miracles were widespread.

Belief in miracles was alive and well in the Roman imperial period. Most ancient “supernatural” healing accounts, especially in the first century, appear to involve particular healing sanctuaries, but we also have reports of pagan miracle workers.

Deities such as Asclepius and Serapis, who were believed able to provide practical benefits such as healings, often supplanted more traditional deities in popular devotion. Many ancients believed that Serapis brought healing dreams daily in Alexandria; he was also known for healing through dreams in his Corinthian sanctuaries. Some identified Serapis with Asclepius, since both specialized in healing (Tac. Hist. 4.84). Isis, associated with Serapis, was known as a healing deity. Late antiquity also honored other deities and heroes associated with healing powers. The Epidaurus inscriptions suggest that Apollo was honored alongside Asclepius; Apollo was also a deity traditionally associated with healing.

According to the usual version of the ancient myth, Asclepius was originally a mortal who was struck dead for raising too many fellow mortals (or for raising particular mortals) from death. But Asclepius was widely said to now continue to heal the sick, often through dreams in his temples. People expected him to be able to cure even blindness, and hence they might suggest that a blind person spend the night in Asclepius’s temple. Some traveled to Asclepius sanctuaries to entreat deities even to heal others. Like other deities, however, Asclepius could also exact judgment; a person who ordered this deity’s sacred grove cut down to build ships was killed.

Asclepius sanctuaries were most often situated near healthy springs. Because of its warmth, Epidaurus’s water had long been associated with healing (Xen. Mem. 3.13.3). Aelius Aristides credited a well in Asclepius’s temple for bringing him healing (Or. 39.14–15). (Entirely apart from healing sanctuaries, therapeutic springs were widely appreciated, including in Palestine.)

Asclepius’s cult was widespread. Strabo praises Asclepius’s healing power at Epidaurus, Cos, and Tricca (Strabo 8.6.15). Pergamum in Asia Minor was the leading cult center for Asclepius in the period of the empire. Its massive Asclepius temple was 425 by 360 feet, and it was known for the snake associated with Asclepius; like other sites, it featured healing through dreams. The sanctuary at Cos was also significant and renowned.

Closer to a center of the Pauline mission, near Corinth, the sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidaurus (Paus. 2.26.1–2.27.6) was also well known. The Epidaurus cult claimed that Asclepius was born at that sanctuary. Romans claimed that Asclepius at Epidaurus cured a Roman plague, and the Romans enticed the god to come to Rome. Epidaurus continued to be associated with successful healings.

Not far from Epidaurus, Corinth’s Asklepieion, built near the city’s northern wall, was one of that city’s more prominent cult sites, situated so as to have its own water supply. It was not comparable to the great Asclepius sanctuaries at Epidaurus, Cos, or Pergamum but resembled those at Troezen and Athens. For this reason, it is likely that it was used mainly for locals; it did not house supplicants from far distances for sometimes months at a time as the great sanctuaries did.

The Asclepius sanctuary in Ephesus venerated Asclepius and Hygieia. Apparently, at Dor an Apollo temple became an Asclepius temple before its later transformation into a Byzantine basilica. Asclepius also was said to reveal himself in dreams at his sanctuary at Aegae in Cilicia; he had also long had a sanctuary at Agrigentum in Sicily and eventually had a very popular shrine on Mount Ida in Crete.

Various records of cures in the Epidaurus inscriptions were stylized into standard forms for posterity. The introductory notes that are present in discrete accounts at Epidaurus and in the Talmud would be dropped when miracle stories were incorporated into connected narratives like those we find in the Gospels.

The most basic format of a miracle story is, as one would expect, a description of (1) the circumstances of the healing, (2) the healing itself, and (3) its confirmation or effects on the audience. The exact format varies somewhat, depending on the situation addressed by a particular collection’s editors. A sampling of Epidaurus inscriptions, for instance, could yield the following steps in description:

Statement of the suppliant’s original infirmity (sometimes including the infirm person’s name and home city, probably for documentation).

The suppliant comes to the sanctuary.

(Optional: the suppliant sometimes mocks the cures listed in the inscriptions.)

(Usually) the suppliant sleeps in the sanctuary.

(Usually) Asclepius appears to the suppliant in a dream.

When day arrives, the person emerges cured.

Some features, such as the suppliant coming to the sanctuary and the practice of incubation (sleeping in a deity’s sanctuary to receive a dream), specifically characterize a local healing shrine as opposed to a traveling miracle-working teacher.

Recourse to such sanctuaries did not entail rejection of physicians. Whereas Epidaurus has turned up votive tablets announcing miraculous cures, Asclepius’s shrine on Cos turned up medical instruments, suggesting that no barrier separated physicians from divine activity. Pliny the Elder even records an antidote for venomous bites preserved on the wall of the Asclepius temple at Cos (N.H. 20.100.264). Doctors trained at Asklepieia.

Probably more relevant for Acts than healing sanctuaries, but less often documented for this period, are stories of individual wonder-workers in Greek tradition. One may take as an example the later fictitious account of an Egyptian prophet-magician who performs a resuscitation of someone dead.

The widely recited powers of Asclepius before (as well as after) his apotheosis refute in advance any possible suggestion that pagans had no pre-Christian stories of healers. Certainly, stories of the distant past abounded with regular divine interventions in heroes’ lives; compare, for instance, the Argonautica of the second-century B.C.E. poet Apollonius Rhodius. But apart from their shared supernaturalist worldview and belief that divine activity could be mediated through human agents (more common than not among human societies in general), such stories about the mythical past offer weak parallels for historical works about recent persons. In virtually contemporary sources, perhaps the best example of healing through a divinely blessed person included two cures attributed to Vespasian; although these may reflect genuine cures (albeit utilized for political propaganda), Vespasian was not a miracle worker per se (such reports do not recur).

By contrast, the most significant pagan parallels to Christian miracle-worker stories (such as the extant literary account of Apollonius of Tyana) first appear in third-century literature, after Christian miracle stories had become widely known and Christian and pagan expectations had influenced each other more generally. The older “divine man” hypothesis for Jesus has fallen on hard times, primarily because the combination of traits that scholars once found in this composite category were blended together only in much later sources, which were potentially influenced by Christianity, were not likely to have influenced early Christianity, and were still less likely to have influenced the historical Jesus and his immediate Galilean followers. This problem is discussed further below.

Not everyone viewed all of these wonder-workers in a positive vein; although miracle working tended to be public and magic secretive, miracle workers in the Greco-Roman world could easily be understood as sorcerers. Magicians were generally feared and usually detested (hence the antimagical apologetic in Acts 8:9–11; 13:8–11; 19:13–19). The Pythagorean Empedocles reportedly “performed magical feats” (γοητεύοντι)—a term that generally had unpleasant connotations. Ferguson is probably right that “behind Philostratus are two older views of Apollonius—as a magician and charlatan or a wonder-worker”; the magical character of some of the deeds still frequently surfaces in Philostratus, although he is trying to clear Apollonius of the charge. Apollonius is discussed further below.

Many scholars have interpreted the NT accounts of Jesus’s miracles, and sometimes those of his agents, in light of a Hellenistic category they call the “divine man.” The title did not make the person a deity per se but drew attention to the person’s divine qualities. To a lesser extent, this category might be applied to miracle-working leaders in Acts.

Yet, as some other scholars point out, structural similarities between Christian and pagan tellings of miracles hardly make the NT accounts representatives of divine-man ideology. This is true for two reasons. First, the applicability of the very category “divine man” to first-century miracle workers is a matter of considerable dispute. Second (as will be explored below), Judaism already had a miracle-working tradition in the Elijah-Elisha cycle, a tradition that it did not accentuate for Hellenistic apologetic; this relative indifference in Judaism diminishes the likelihood that the Gospels, which are less hellenized than some of our other Jewish sources, would have appealed to divine man ideology. The supposed connections between aretalogies and divine men are also inadequate.

In the past, many scholars have argued that the divine man was a composite type in antiquity with specific characteristics, but most scholars now recognize that the various characteristics derive from many diverse sources and have been unified in a single type only by the creativity of modern scholarship. The ancient use of the phrase is too broad to delineate a specific type; it can refer to a literal “divine man,” an “inspired man,” a man somehow related to deity, and an “extraordinary man.” The sense in which such a phrase appears in the third-century Life of Apollonius by Philostratus did not yet exist in the first century.

Thus earlier scholars blended too many disparate features in pictures of the “divine man.” The individuals who fit the category best are Pythagoras (of whom relatively little is known historically), Apollonius (for reports of whom we are largely dependent on third-century C.E. Philostratus), and Empedocles (like the other two, associated with Pythagoreanism). Although Pythagoras and Empedocles lived centuries before early Christianity, the attribution of wonders to them apparently derives from long after their own lifetimes.

Significant differences must be taken into account; magical texts and Philostratus provide little “historical evidence for events reported by writers of the first century, who were operating within a very different life-world.” Healing accounts had already become more detailed and began to appear in literary texts in the imperial period, a period in which magic also began to acquire greater prominence. “Fantastic tales” and other fictitious elements in works with historical settings apparently grew popular, especially beginning in the literary revival of Nero’s reign. Nevertheless, such ideas are more characteristic of third-century sources.

That third-century miracle narratives are much more complete than accounts in earlier historians probably suggests that pagan propagandists suited their accounts to existing Christian parallels. Thus parallels between first-century Christian stories of Jesus raising the dead and third-century accounts of first-century Apollonius of Tyana doing the same may tell us more about Christian influence on paganism in late antiquity than about the reverse.

As suggested above, some sources—possibly the majority—before Philostratus associated Apollonius with magic. Philostratus seeks to counter this accusation in his portrayal. The antimagical apologetic in Philostratus resembles that in Acts and other sources: ethical and communal criteria were important in distinguishing benevolent miracles from harmful magic. Thus, for example, magic could seek to manipulate the divine for personal advantage. For Apollonius (Philostratus Vit. Apoll. 1.34), various criteria distinguish magic from miracle working, but most important among them is the issue of greed; the most effective answer to miracle workers’ critics was to keep using miraculous power without seeming to desire it or to be greedy. Good intermediaries might also put themselves in danger to benefit others. Such beliefs about ancient magic probably helped shape both Luke’s and Philostratus’s apologetic.

Philostratus’s own portrait suits a second- or third-century setting (i.e., his own) much better than a first-century setting (i.e., Apollonius’s); his accounts of Apollonius even resemble reports from Christian gospels, though especially of the “apocryphal” variety. By the fourth century, pagan writers used Apollonius as an alternative to Jesus, claiming that the pagan world offered its own healers.

Use of stories about Apollonius and others as rivals to Jesus invited Christian apologetic responses, though it may be noted that the most significant apologetic on a popular level may have been the reports of continuing miracle workers among Christians (see discussion below). Although scholars today often doubt the nineteenth-century view that Philostratus tried to offer Apollonius as an alternative to Jesus (apart from the cases of the strongest parallels), it seems clear that Christian stories at least were among the serious influences on his storytelling approach (offering literary fodder for miracle stories).

Thus, for example, Apollonius stops a bier and raises a dead girl (Philostratus Vit. Apoll. 4.45)—like Jesus (Mark 5:41–42; Luke 7:14–15). His exorcisms reflect a different understanding of demons from that found in the Gospels and Acts (cf. excursus at Acts 16:16) and are more dramatized, but some similarities appear here as well. Response to Christian claims is likely in Apollonius’s promise to his disciple that he will meet him at a designated location alive though, in the disciple’s view, risen from the dead (Philostratus Vit. Apoll. 7.41). When he appeared to followers in a distant location (8.10–11) and they supposed him a ghost, he urged them to take hold of him and see that he was not a ghost, and they embraced him (8.12; cf. Luke 24:39). Some other elements are quite different—for example, getting a formerly mad dog to lick the wound it had inflicted, thereby healing the boy (Vit. Apoll. 6.43), and even incantations in some of the above stories. Yet it is interesting that the parts of the story most apt to be confirmed by Apollonius’s letters exhibit the least parallels with the Gospels.

Against the contentions of some scholars, it does not appear clear that Hellenistic Jewish writers accentuated the miraculous for Hellenistic audiences. Jewish sources do not consistently portray Moses as a divine man; he is a miracle worker in Artapanus and a philosopher for Philo and Josephus, but the two ideas are not brought together under a single category. Although some Diaspora Jewish writers emphasized the miraculous powers of historic Jewish heroes, they do not seem to have heightened miracle-working motifs for Hellenistic consumption. Thus Philo seems to diminish Moses’s miracles, and Artapanus’s embellishments of Moses do not focus on miracles.

So different are the Jewish portraits of past heroes from Philostratus’s third-century picture of Apollonius of Tyana that one is forced to question “just how attractive the miracle-worker motif was to pagans” in the first and second centuries, a fact that “may explain why this aspect of the Jesus tradition is non-existent in the apostolic fathers” and why emphasis on miracle working tends to decrease as sermons in Acts become more Hellenistic.

Jewish miracle workers, magicians, and fortune-tellers were not “divine men.” Carl Holladay, who has written in detail on the divine-man question, warns that the divine-man approach “obscures” clearer connection with OT models and Jewish eschatology. By dramatic contrast to the lack of clear allusions to any specific Hellenistic miracle workers, in Luke’s narrative, allusions to the exodus traditions and Elijah-Elisha cycles recur throughout the Gospel miracle narratives. The expression “divine man” never appears in the LXX or NT and is rare in any Jewish sources. (Josephus’s single use of the term may be roughly equivalent to “man of God”; Philo’s use is closer to a Stoic conception but is unrelated to miracles.) If anything, hellenization may have made Jewish conception of a “divine man” more, rather than less, problematic.

Application of the title to Jesus is problematic, despite suggestions of some scholars that Mark addresses this image. It is not impossible that the crowds in Mark followed Jesus because he was a wonder-worker and that Mark opposes reducing Jesus’s ministry to such terms, insisting that the suffering aspect of his ministry must also be taken into account. Although Mark is himself charismatic rather than anticharismatic, it is possible that he opposes a Christology or, more likely, a pneumatology that emphasizes Jesus’s miracles above his passion. The term θεῖος ἀνήρ, however, is too broad to designate such a category helpfully. It is no more appropriate in Luke-Acts.

As noted above, Jewish parallels to early Christian miracles appear to offer closer models than most Gentile analogies. Jewish people, after all, attributed healing to the one true God (Exod 15:26) and prayed to God regularly for healing Israel’s sicknesses. Some pre-Christian Jewish parallels, especially those in the OT, likewise resemble the miracle forms used in the Gospels. Some miracle stories in Acts display clear intertextual links with OT accounts (see, e.g., comments on Acts 9:36–42). It is intrinsically more likely that even the most hellenized of Gospel writers, Luke, would have looked to the LXX for his primary model for recounting Jesus’s miracles (he knew its contents and style thoroughly, and he cites it regularly in explicitly marked quotations) than to inscriptions at a healing shrine or to oral reports of magicians or polytheistic miracle workers.

Granted, some analogies resemble the common model that ancients often attributed to sorcery, a model available in many Jewish circles. Jewish magicians (with whom some of early Christianity’s detractors polemically associated it) became common in the Diaspora (see comments on Acts 8:9–11; 13:8), especially through their supposed access to the secret name of God (secret names were considered powerful in magic; see comment on Acts 19:13). Although the rabbis were officially opposed to magic, magical practices infiltrated even rabbinic circles. By and large, however, the teachers of the law who addressed signs in a positive way emphasized miracles wrought by God for the pious, eschewing what they or others considered magic.

Judaism knew of both biblical and postbiblical miracle workers. Some biblical prophets, such as Elijah and Elisha, were particularly emphasized as healers; some others, such as Isaiah, might heal occasionally (Isa 38:21); and Jewish sources continued to link miracles with many of the biblical prophets. According to third-century Palestinian tradition, Abraham had the gift of healing. Other miracle workers, such as Hanina ben Dosa, appeared closer to the contemporary period, healing, according to tradition, the sons of Johanan ben Zakkai and Gamaliel II. The Jewish historian Geza Vermes goes so far as to suggest that holy men such as Hanina ben Dosa dominated first-century Galilean religious experience more than the priests or scribes did; although this suggestion certainly goes too far, it rightly emphasizes the popular nature of charismatic leaders and the degree to which they could become influential in first-century Galilee.

Josephus is more interested in (though disparaging of) purported eschatological-sign prophets, some of whose promised activities may evoke Moses, in their attempts to secure eschatological deliverance. (Signs and wonders were often associated with Moses, who used “wonders and signs” to withstand kings.) Many Jewish people probably not only expected significant signs before the final deliverance and special miracles at the end but also pondered the promised signs of the messianic era offered by Isaiah, Ezekiel, and other biblical prophets. Consistent with such images, later rabbis taught that signs offered by biblical signs prophets anticipated the signs that would take place in the messianic era.

Jesus’s reported miracles accord well with the Q allusion to Isa 35:5–6 (Matt 11:5//Luke 7:22), which could suggest an eschatological interpretation of his miracles as blessings of the future kingdom in the present. This conception of an eschatological renewal of signs suits the way Luke identifies the Christian movement from Pentecost forward (Acts 2:17–18). Most scholars recognize that in the Gospels Jesus’s miracles function as signs of the kingdom (also Matt 12:28//Luke 11:20).

Among Luke’s social circle in early Christianity or among God-fearers steeped in the LXX, Luke’s supranormal claims would hardly seem implausible. Elite historians might well despise his historiographic approach on this point as sensationalistic, given the unusual abundance of miracles and divine communications (which we would expect to this degree only in works, historical or otherwise, concerning miracle workers, works such as Luke-Acts); but this was a price Luke would have to pay to remain faithful to the sources (such as Mark) and traditions that he considered normative. Modern Western readers usually concur with elite historians’ negative estimate of popular historiography concerning wonder-workers’ signs and portents, but this preference may partly reflect a coinciding of our cultural bias with theirs.

Some scholars, pointing to the parallels between early Christian and other ancient miracle accounts, have suggested that both are fabricated. While the conclusion need not follow from the premise—either because both kinds of accounts could sometimes be true or because similar form could reflect cultural options for expression rather than identical activity—the premise itself may be open to some question. Parallels are clear, but observers must also take account of the differences among the various kinds of miracle stories, including the Christian miracle stories. That all the accounts strike many modern Western readers as very similar may stem partly from our cultural assumptions, in view of which all miracle reports diverge starkly from our construction of reality.

Distinctive as well as more common features characterize most of the miracles in our earliest Christian sources. An analysis of the miracle stories collected by Theissen shows that some motifs (especially those intrinsic to miracle narrations in any setting) were widespread. At the same time, such an analysis will reveal that some other NT miracle motifs exhibit rare, perhaps only coincidental, parallels. Likewise, some repeated accounts of pagan miracle workers (albeit in sources much later than the objects of their comment) have few early Christian parallels; for example, Musaeus, Calais, Zetes, Abaris, and a Hyperborean magician in Lucian could fly, but the only possible early Christian parallel (Acts 8:39; see comment there) apparently specifically borrows biblical language (drawing on Ezek 8:3; 11:1, 24, where, however, the experience was visionary).

Similarly, one account reports that Pythagoras taught in two places at the same time. Love magic, a continual fast, a fifty-seven-year nap, magicians’ self-transformation into animal forms, and revealing golden thighs are among other sorts of miracles unparalleled in the Gospels, which generally stress healings and exorcisms as benevolent acts of compassion (see the section on signs in below). Some scholars also emphasize “matter-of-fact restraint” rather than amplification in most miracle stories in the canonical Gospels, though this may be partly because there are so many of them to narrate in so little space!

Nor does Luke write like a typical epic poet or mythographer; in contrast with Virgil’s Aeneid, Luke offers no scenes explaining “what God is thinking or how God views the events unfolding in the human realm.” Luke does not report fictions about exotic lands, does not report internal workings of divine courts, and does not report monsters or other fabulous creatures. He does report healings and prophecies, but we know from Paul’s own writings that early Christians truly believed that these events were genuinely occurring in their time (Rom 15:19; 1 Cor 12–14; 2 Cor 12:12; Gal 3:5; 1 Thess 5:20), just as probably the majority of Christians in most parts of the world believe they are occurring today. (The same texts reveal that Paul did not believe this claim in some theoretical sense but believed that he and, in some passages, the churches participated in the actual experience of such phenomena.)

Moreover, although pagans naturally understood Jesus’s works as those of a (possibly malevolent) magician (Mark 5:15–17), Jesus’s miracles have little in common with magic as normally 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,” but to the extent that “religion” and “magic” are distinguished, the normal criteria readily distinguish Jesus’s reported activity from magic.) Pagan magicians typically sought to coerce deities or spirits by incantations; Jesus simply commanded as God’s authoritative agent. (Of course, pagans could also articulate such a difference when it served their interests; Jewish rabbis also had to seek to distinguish the two.) I have already addressed comparisons with Apollonius above.

Clearly, the Galilean sage and prophet Jesus moved in an environment quite different from the Hellenistic environment that formed the magical papyri. Nevertheless, his detractors accused him of magic (Mark 3:22, probably also in Q Matt 12:24//Luke 11:15), the easiest charge to bring against wonder-workers. 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 (see comment on Acts 8:9–11; 13:6–8; 19:11–19).

One may also note differences between the kinds of sources claiming the performance of various miracles. After carefully comparing the accounts of Jesus’s miracles with those of others, Meier concludes that “the early dating of the literary testimony to Jesus’s miracles, i.e., the closeness of the dates of the written documents to the alleged miracles of Jesus’s life, is almost unparalleled for the period.” His conclusions for the Gospels’ testimony to Jesus would apply a fortiori to Acts, which reports some miracles even roughly thirty years after Jesus’s public ministry, possibly within fifteen years before Luke wrote (Acts 28:8–9).

The miracles of Jesus and his followers in Luke-Acts resemble especially those of Elijah, Elisha, and Moses in the Hebrew Bible (see, more extensively, comment on Acts 1:9–11), and the use of such patterns was probably deliberate (for Jesus, for those who reported the tradition orally, and for those who recorded the pattern in the Gospels and Acts). This comparison does not, however, affect the question of authenticity if one grants that the miracle workers themselves could have looked to the earlier biblical accounts for examples (the early Christians would have viewed the correspondences as favorable and, certainly, as counter to the magic charge). Jesus and his early followers, like some other Jewish wonder-workers, may have deliberately emulated these models. Unlike other models that some propose, these biblical examples are clearly earlier than our early Christian accounts and were clearly known to Jesus, his audience, and those who told, wrote, and heard about him.

Nevertheless, we turn to some other comparisons. In some respects, comparisons of Jesus’s miracles with those attributed to the rabbis are more difficult than even comparisons with some Greco-Roman accounts because of striking differences in genre in the sources that report them. Some writers have debased rabbinic miracles as more magical than Jesus’s; but despite some activities whose only parallels occur in magic, not all rabbinic miracles were magical. Although Morton Smith somewhat exaggerates the contrast between the gospel tradition’s interest in a miracle worker and the rabbinic tradition’s interest in teachers, he is correct that the two kinds of accounts describe different kinds of characters and communicate different sorts of information about them. (At least some rabbinic miracle stories are simply homiletic illustrations.) The differences between the two kinds of accounts are considerable. Correspondingly, miracle stories are common in early Christian texts but proportionately quite rare in rabbinic texts.

The genre difference is critical. Generally, accounts of rabbis who wrought miracles were related by rabbis 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. (By implication, this pattern about signs focusing on Jesus and his mission in the gospel tradition also applies to the Gentile mission in Acts, which perpetuates Jesus’s ministry to the outsider.) Moreover, most of the leading protagonists in the Gospels and Acts (Jesus, his apostles, and some others) are miracle workers; the rabbinic protagonists who appear most often in rabbinic literature are not miracle workers, especially not in the earliest sources about them.

Although genre affects the focus of miracle stories, their content also offers another specific contrast. Although first-century Christian texts recount other miracles (most of which also function as benevolent acts helping those in need), they especially claim healings and exorcisms. Rabbinic stories, by contrast, address the procurement of rainfall more often than healing. (Miracles are not even constrained by such biblical models. In the Mishnah, God even temporarily expands space in the temple to accommodate prostrated worshipers.) Later Jewish stories often recognize the particular association of healing miracles with Christians.

Indeed, when one surveys Jewish tradition in general, it provides few parallels to the characteristic ways Jesus and his followers healed; perhaps the closest parallel is Jesus’s relatively rare use of saliva. A. E. Harvey points out that at least eight of Jesus’s reported cures involved the deaf, mute, blind, or lame but that such miracles, though noted at pagan healing shrines, are absent in Jewish accounts.

The most detailed Jewish comparisons and contrasts to date have been those of Eric Eve, who concludes that Jesus’s healing and exorcistic ministry, though exhibiting some parallels to its general Jewish framework, differs in serious respects from other early Jewish models. As he notes, most of the miracles in non-Christian early Jewish sources differ in kind from those reported in early Christian sources. Eve notes that most of the types of miracles in Josephus differ from those in the Gospels and Acts, with little interest in healings; meanwhile, stories of postbiblical miracles are not very common outside Josephus, and healings are particularly rare. Apart from some works, such as Lives of the Prophets, most early Jewish sources display only limited interest in miracles, far less than in our earliest Christian sources.

The miracles that most interested Jewish people were miracles of national deliverance, which are not the category of miracles most often associated with Jesus’s ministry. Meanwhile, some of the sign prophets that emerged in the decades following his ministry could each announce a major eschatological sign, but they did not perform it. Unlike them, Jesus “healed and exorcized, but seems not to have promised a particular spectacular sign.”

Although Honi the Circle-Drawer (Onias the Righteous) was undoubtedly known for obtaining answers to prayer regarding rain (Jos. Ant. 14.22), most of the details we hear about him surface only in Amoraic tradition—perhaps half a millennium after he lived. At the very least, much of the rabbinic characterization of Honi is later. Eve contends, against Vermes, that it is not clear that Honi represents a class of people beyond himself.

Hanina ben Dosa is usually assigned to the first century and, like Jesus, was Galilean, though he is the only other Galilean we know of to whom signs are attributed. He appears several times in Tannaitic sources, where he could tell, when he prayed, whether or not the sick would recover (m. Ber. 5:5) and where a lizard who bit him as he prayed died (t. Ber. 3:20). Amoraic material about Hanina is much more abundant but was transmitted and developed over the course of three or four centuries. Moreover, even if the tradition is reliable, it differs from Jesus: whereas Jesus was itinerant, people came to Hanina for prayer, and few of the divine interventions mentioned included healing. In their respective sources, Hanina was a petitioner of numinous or divine power whereas Jesus was its bearer. We cannot know much about other Galilean folk healers, but Jesus was no ordinary one.

Thus, Eve concludes, early Jewish parallels do not advance beyond 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. 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.

Eve is not alone in his observations. Theissen and Merz appear representative of many scholars today in concluding that although Jewish wonder-workers offer closer parallels than do pagan ones, they differ significantly from Jesus (especially in working only through prayer and lacking eschatological miracles). No other source reports as many miracles concerning an individual as the Gospels do regarding Jesus, and Jesus stands alone among prior miracle workers in using miracles, in his case healings and exorcisms, to indicate the coming of the eschatological order.

None of this rules out the relevance of these parallels in helping us understand how Palestinian Jews would have viewed Jesus or his first disciples; Vermes has clearly shown that one need not look to more geographically distant Gentile healing traditions for the historical Jesus. Moreover, the Jewish activity of Elijah is an early source, and in view of Mal 4:5–6, it can be construed as a valid model for an eschatological prophet as well. Jesus may have combined relevant elements from models followed by any other claimed signs workers and eschatological prophets. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that Jesus (and his followers who emulated him) were also distinctive in many respects. Ideally, critical historiography observes individuals’ distinctive characteristics as well as those identifying them with their context.

Parallels in form (or even function) need not imply the inauthenticity of the accounts in the Gospels and Acts, as some scholars have argued; ancient healing stories usually share the same form because they necessarily follow the same course. As Pierre Benoit asks, “Is there any other way of relating a miracle?” He concludes that “it is not the literary form which distinguishes one from the other; it is the substance, the external authentication, the internal probability.” (For that matter, many supplicants at ancient healing shrines probably did recover, a point that I will briefly revisit below.)

The nature of the accounts is not altogether the same. As our survey of ancient pagan accounts above suggests, most pagan claims fall into one of several categories: healings at healing shrines, often involving dreams; direct intervention of deities; mythographers’ tales regarding the semi-prehistoric past; secretive magic; and, at most, perhaps occasional reports of the traveling sage-healer, a form not clearly dominant till the third century (and perhaps affected in part by the growing challenge of Christian claims by that period). Nor in the case of healing sages is healing necessarily the sage’s dominant supernatural activity to the extent found in the Gospels and Acts, and where it appears to be, some of the accounts clearly reflect the literary influence of the Gospels and Acts (as noted above). Although we have some dream revelations and direct intervention of the deity in first-century Christian sources, by far the vast majority of Christian “parallels” in the texts are with the last and (outside Christian sources) rarest category.

It is possible that this model (along with exorcism) was more dominant in the East in this period than our extant sources alone would suggest; although most Jewish parallels are later, traditions about Honi (or perhaps the Jewish exorcist in 4Q242 1–3 4) are suggestive. (Certainly, Elijah’s model predates Jesus and was widely known among Jewish people.) But our extant evidence does not support the claim that the Gospels and Acts imposed a preexisting pagan model on the Jesus movement’s founder and early leaders.

In fact, the primary “parallel” between the earliest Christian sources and the dominant pagan models here is that both envision “supernatural” activity, a premise unobjectionable and not very distinctive for most societies in history. The “parallel” seems striking to modern Western culture only because it is foreign to us, yet it is our culture that is most distinctive in this regard; we hardly dare assume genetic links among supernatural claims in all cultures that offer them. In all cultures people need health, healing, and so forth, and most cultures seek suprahuman assistance for these needs. Those reputed as miracle workers or healers of some sort would be popular in most cultures (except rare ones such as much of Western academia) because such figures meet a central felt need. The need is transcultural, and anthropological studies show that such figures (e.g., shamans) arise in cultures without any necessary external influence.

When one moves beyond such generalities, NT stories of Jesus and the apostles have more in common with earlier Elijah and Elisha stories (models available for Jesus and the apostles to imitate) than with later stories of Philostratus and others. This observation does not rule out all value in the latter comparisons, but it certainly does invite us to keep them in perspective.

Benoit contrasts the miracle stories of the canonical Gospels with some pagan accounts (such as the woman, pregnant for five years, bearing a five-year-old at Epidaurus, though this is an exceptional case), many Jewish accounts (a reported conversation between God and the angel of the sea), and most accounts in the apocryphal gospels and acts. Of course, these other accounts are not all of a kind; some reports do come closer to resembling the dominant examples in the Gospels and Acts. But Benoit is correct that even if we argue for parallels in narrative methods of recounting miracles, this literary form has no bearing on the authenticity of the events it reports. In contrast to Benoit, however, who rejects the authenticity of the pagan accounts, many early Christians, though monotheistic, would have accepted the reality of many of the pagan healing claims (cf. 1 Cor 10:20; 2 Thess 2:9; Rev 13:13; Did. 16.3–4). Dunn is probably right that the Jewish accounts of Honi and Hanina are probably also rooted in genuine tradition.

By purely historical means, we cannot a priori exclude the possibility of some eyewitness claims of sudden, unexpected recoveries that the beneficiaries believed were caused by deities (indeed, both inscriptions and votive offerings of body parts at some Asclepius sanctuaries indicate that many people did believe this). We might reject the usual ancient interpretation of such an event, but this rejection involves a theological rather than a historical judgment. The distinctiveness of Christian accounts is, indeed, noteworthy, but this does not by itself rule out the more general observation that others also made some healing claims attributed to “supernatural” agencies.

While granting that most ancient historians included supernatural claims, modern critics often use supernatural elements as a criterion for distinguishing what is genuinely historical in ancient histories from what is not. For example, some earlier scholars, eager to underline the greater historicity of the later chapters of Acts where Luke himself was an eyewitness, sought to do so in part by emphasizing that angels and signs dominate the first part of Acts much more than the Pauline portions (excepting Acts 27:23), just as they appear rare in Paul’s epistles. These scholars’ simple method of counting pericopes neglects the shorter span of time covered by later chapters and the level of detail devoted to the defense speeches; signs remain central in Paul’s later ministry both in Acts (19:11–12; 28:6–9) and his epistles (somewhat in the content of his teaching, 1 Cor 12–14; but especially in descriptions of his ministry, Rom 15:19; 2 Cor 12:12; cf. Gal 3:5). Luke devotes more space to describing visible signs of the Spirit’s work than does Paul, but this hardly means that they were less significant in the latter’s evangelistic ministry; this difference is largely a question of narrative versus occasional genre.

Some ancient writers shared modern critics’ concerns about undue interest in the paranormal, though not for exactly the same (radical Enlightenment) reasons. Although lacking knowledge of empirical science, some ancient writers came up with naturalistic alternatives for explaining natural phenomena, alternatives that differed from traditional religious explanations in polytheism. Thus, for example, some viewed the winds as divine; others presented them as under divine or angelic authority; but still others viewed them as purely natural phenomena. Likewise, many thought that violent winds created thunder and lightning; others, that wind is air flowing in a single direction. (Compare further the naturalistic explanations for earthquakes mentioned at Acts 16:26.) Naturally, such explanations among ancients could go only so far from the perspective of modern knowledge—for example, the views that the planets and stars cause rain, that the fire from stars falling into clouds causes lightning storms, or that wind can be caused by the stars moving in a direction opposite to that of the earth.

Yet skepticism applied not only to supernatural interpretations of what we would call natural phenomena; it often applied to paranormal phenomena. Such skepticism appears both among characters in fiction and in historical writing. Ovid makes some of his characters more believable by having them doubt the supernatural, while others affirm that deities can do anything, before they are all changed into bats for disbelieving in Bacchus. Unlike most authors, Hermippus suspected that Pythagoras was a phony; Diognetus taught Marcus Aurelius not to believe miracle workers, magicians, and exorcists. Pliny the Elder emphasized that the wisest people rejected the efficacy of incantations, but complained that mostly everyone else accepted them. Cicero, though a member of “the priestly college of augurs” (presumably for political reasons), regarded such practices as superstitious, although probably only a small minority of people shared his skepticism. Even Philostratus accommodates some of the skepticism of his day, perhaps to refute associations with magic.

Various writers satirized gullibility and tall tales, and one deliberately generated some. Lucian reports that he embellished stories of Peregrinus’s death with fabulous claims to have fun at the expense of his unlearned hearers, discovering that some not only believed his report but went out claiming to have witnessed such phenomena (Peregr. 39–40). In histories Lucian approves of reporting potential myths so long as one does not affirm them, but he leaves their veracity to the audience to decide (Hist. 60). The most thoroughgoing critique of including paranormal events in histories, however, comes from the historian Polybius, whom I noted (in , , above) as a particularly critical historian.

Polybius complains about historians who focus too much on marvels (πολλήν τινα διατέθεινται τερατείαν) or prodigies (σημεῖα) and use tragic coloring (Polyb. 7.7.1). In view of the existence of such writers, Plümacher contends that Luke follows this sensational form of historiography with the goal of stimulating readers’ pleasure and passion; it was a recognized form of history, but one that, though interested in what happened, was not interested in that alone. (This suggestion is addressed below.) Some reports of signs serve such functions; for example, Valerius Maximus reports many miracula, simply as collections of unusual phenomena (Val. Max. 1.8.praef.; 1.8.1–2; 1.8.ext. 1–19); he justifies one report as believable simply because it appears in his sources (1.8.7). (The dangers of magic also added intrigue to novels.)

Polybius’s complaint about historians who focus on unusual phenomena is part of his longer complaint about those who focus on such a narrow range of events that they must exaggerate and focus on irrelevancies rather than on important characters (Polyb. 7.7.1–8). This is partly Polybius’s way of again distinguishing and marking the superiority of his work, which covers a broader span of history and geography. (That Thucydides covers a shorter span yet is a careful historian may escape Polybius’s notice, but Thucydides also eschews the fantastic.)

Many elite historians proved skeptical of the paranormal, including Thucydides, Polybius, and usually Tacitus. Thucydides, in fact, promises to include fewer accounts “of the fabulous” than poets who focus on myths; he prefers, he claims, to deal with probable events, namely, the sorts of events that are historically repeatable (Thucyd. 1.22.4 [LCL]). One orator opines that poets could use mythical language because they wrote about the gods, but historians, who wrote about people, had to keep close to their sources (Men. Rhet. 1.1, 333.31–334.5). Pliny the Elder apparently believed that stories of marvels would sell better than his dry research treatise could (N.H. pref. 12–13).

Surely, however, not all the historians whom Polybius characterizes as sensationalist would have agreed with his description. By the imperial period, historians often included “miraculous and fantastic elements,” and not every writer who included paranormal events was generally “sensationalist.” Whereas Lucian and Polybius are skeptical, many Greek and Roman historians reported curiosities in their sources, ambivalent “between skepticism and credulity.” Others allowed both natural and divine factors side by side.

Livy is among the writers after Polybius who chronicle reports of unusual events (prodigies) for each year; some of these we would regard as natural phenomena and others as originally fabricated, but they undoubtedly stemmed from Livy’s sources. Livy often warns, however, that many of the reported prodigies may have been accepted too readily by their contemporaries; the more that such reports were believed, the more that further reports of this nature were generated. Still more reliable historians also provide reports of such phenomena (such as of signs attesting Vespasian in Tac. Hist. 4.81; Suet. Vesp. 7.2–3) or signs surrounding Jerusalem’s fall (Tac. Hist. 5.13, possibly following Jos. War 6.288–310), though they may do so with distancing sufficient to retain the appearance of objectivity. Sometimes the reports include a preceding generation’s events about which most of us today would be skeptical; Tacitus avers that dignified historians ought not “to collect fabulous tales” merely to “delight” their readers, but “cannot . . . dare to deny the truth of common tradition.” (Tacitus himself apparently did believe at least in gods and in sacrificing to them.)

Although Diodorus Siculus accepts some major supernatural feats, he often prefers nonsupernatural accounts and “demythologizes” them, depicting how he thinks such accounts were reworked into mythical ones. Eunapius recounts a barely believable event only with hesitation, noting that none of the supposed eyewitnesses had written anything down. Although Arrian accepted the possibility of divine interventions (Alex. 5.1.2), he was not extremely gullible; he complains that some writers tell of various wonders at the ends of the earth (ants that mine gold for the Indians, and water monsters and griffins also in India) only because they can get away with inventing entertaining stories about matters that their readers cannot check. Plutarch accepted some reports but could also exercise critical discretion and reject a tale as incredible. He cautiously reports various views about the activities of statues, noting the frequency of the reports (Plut. Cam. 6.1–4) and concluding that one should avoid either believing too much (superstition) or disbelieving too much (irreligion; 6.4).

Many historians sometimes qualified reports with “It is said” or similar cautionary devices. Freely reporting wonders in their sources, they nevertheless distanced themselves from seeming too credulous by warning readers to evaluate the veracity of such reports for themselves. Yet despite a higher level of skepticism fashionable among the intelligentsia than among many others, ancient historians were not products of the radical Enlightenment.

Although this practice means that the most careful historians by other standards were also sometimes the least credulous, we should note that the differences also usually correspond to the expectations of the audiences for which they wrote, the epistemological presuppositions of which are not a matter of historical research per se. Most were critical of some reports while accepting the possibility of others (i.e., they did not a priori decide the possibility of all paranormal events). Early Christians, as followers of a miracle worker, members of a charismatic movement, and usually not members of the Greco-Roman elite, were more open to miracle claims than were most elite historians. While Plümacher does not rank Luke among “sensationalist” historians lightly, critical historians were not averse to signs; Luke records more because he writes about miracle workers and follows an Israelite and Jewish tradition, not because he follows a sensationalist Hellenistic one. Moreover, an emphasis on signs in such works need not lead to a particular assignment of genre (and certainly not to all the particulars often associated with it).

Certainly, not all ancient intellectuals were skeptical of “supernatural” phenomena. Thus, for example, Stoics (despite their disdain for immoral mythology) were known for defending the gods and divination; thinkers influenced by the Pythagorean tradition clearly affirmed tangible, divine supernatural activity.

Hellenistic histories often included portents as signs of divine action, just as Luke did. Paranormal events could be viewed as the occasional activity of divine persons or heroes (and hence no less repeatable than those of mortals). Arrian notes that the early stories about Dionysus are difficult to believe but that what would normally be improbable cannot be dismissed when one is dealing with a divine element.

These writers normally employed signs “not solely for entertainment value, but as illustrations of divine guidance.” We may choose to dispute the veracity of their reports, but this dispute would not suggest that they simply invented the reports rather than derived them from sources. This observation is true also of early Christian reports. Celsus and other later critics of Christians sought not to deny their miracles but to challenge the value of these phenomena by questioning their source (sorcery) or the social status of Christians. Lucian was more skeptical, accusing Christians of “believing” without evidence and hence being easily exploited financially by charlatans (Peregr. 13), but his account also thereby appears to confirm our other sources’ reports that Christians were associated with (and did not simply invent for literary purposes) such paranormal phenomena.

In contrast to some elite Hellenistic historians, Jewish sources not composed for Greek intellectual consumption usually show no reticence about reporting wonders. (Popular second-century Christian accounts and later rabbinic accounts depict spectacular miracles even more lavishly.) Josephus, writing for a more Hellenistic audience, sometimes follows the cautious conventions of his Greek contemporaries, adding a noncommittal remark after reporting biblical miracles (e.g., Ant. 1.108; 2.348; 3.81, 322; 4.158). He plays down Elijah’s miracles and some other miracles. Nevertheless, Josephus did believe in miracles and wanted his audience to do so also. Among “signs” (σημεῖα) he also used portents. It appears that Josephus, like some Greek and Roman historians (as well as more than a few modern NT scholars), approved of belief in some paranormal phenomena but, in writing about them, mostly acceded to the conventions long established for the historical genre.

Luke, writing for Christians who believe in a powerful and historically active Deity, is not reticent at all to report miracles. He is, however, sensitive enough to some critics’ skepticism that he distinguishes his own claims for Jesus’s resurrection from more incredible popular stories by citing “proofs” (Acts 1:3) and acknowledging that some find the resurrection claim unbelievable (26:8). Likewise, Luke does not seek to report all sorts of wonders and prodigies; his focus is signs (sēmeia)—“signs, that is to say, of the inbreaking of the kingdom of God (cf. Luke 11:20).” Luke’s story focuses on miracle workers along the lines of Elijah and Elisha; he also writes for a community that, in contrast to some readers of elite histories, already believed that Luke’s protagonists performed signs. Luke thus diverges from the norm of elite histories by reporting miracles more lavishly than they do. Nevertheless, to link these miracles with a wider range of exotic reports in “sensationalist” historiography and then to further attribute all the wider traits of that historiographic category to his work, neglecting OT models, collapses too many categories. The subject of Luke’s history, rather than elaborate rhetorical license, drives his accounts.

Many ancient thinkers’ determination to exercise critical judgment in particular cases (whether their conclusions were usually right or wrong) contrasts with the few ancient thinkers and many modern ones who a priori reject supernatural phenomena wholesale. It also contrasts with some modern readers’ skepticism that eyewitnesses or sources ultimately dependent on them can offer miracle claims.

Modern scholars sometimes treat wonders as fictitious elements in ancient historiography, including in Acts. We should recognize, however, that ancients with different plausibility paradigms may well have experienced genuine events that modern Western interpreters would simply attribute to different causes.

Moreover, and more to the point in this section, modern Western interpreters who are skeptical of all such events or must read all of them through a purely naturalistic paradigm are hardly “neutral” in their assumptions. Antisupernaturalism emerged from specific historical circumstances no less than did ancient or modern, Western or non-Western, supernaturalist approaches. This is not to say that it must therefore be logically wrong; it is to say that we need not assume antisupernaturalism as an a priori and, even more important from a literary standpoint, that we must beware of simply assuming its unsympathetic reading of ancient texts, so different from how the first audiences would have heard them. It is a bias that can hinder us from entering Luke’s narrative world as fully as his first audience could.

Thus this section will survey the historical context of modern Western philosophic assumptions regarding supernatural phenomena. We will deal afterward with miracle claims in the modern world and some of their varied interpretations in the Majority World and in the West. A purely naturalistic paradigm that a priori excludes the possibility of divine causation is not the only interpretative approach to reality held by intelligent people, nor is it self-evident to observers in all cultures.

Assumptions about reality are often culturally formed, and events that function as “reality” by the criteria of one culture can shape its history even if these assumptions are foreign to other cultures. Ramsay MacMullen, a noted historian of Greco-Roman antiquity, warns that history proper does not pass judgment on whether ancients believed rightly or wrongly about their miracle claims; history proper simply describes these beliefs. “To doubt their account of what they saw—to doubt that [the West African prophet William Wadé] Harris, or any saint, or Jesus himself truly suspended the laws of nature—could only be theology, good or bad. To doubt that Asclepius worked miracles back then would likewise be theology.”

Scholars today sometimes emphasize the importance of cultural sensitivity to the differences between ancient and modern medicine for avoiding ethnocentric evaluations of ancient perspectives. Likewise, taking into account the differences between our modern Western critical perceptions about miracles and those of the first century can help broaden our understanding of what appears “realistic” in a given epistemological framework. Numerous examples of a different cultural and philosophic understanding are addressed below.

Ancient historians’ perceptions of paranormal events that they reported are a different question from the perceptions of modern historiography, but one that is legitimate to ask. If some individuals are tempted to despise ancient Mediterranean historiography as significantly inferior to our own genre simply because it defines its task differently than we do, however, we should remain cognizant of our own philosophic and existential horizons: aside from the susceptibility of such a methodological bias to some scholars’ postmodern critique, it is historically naive when elevated from a working assumption to an ontological affirmation.

It is difficult for those working from a Western Enlightenment paradigm to appreciate ancient claims of paranormal events, and all the more so when such claims are attributed to supernatural causation. Yet if we are to read Luke sympathetically, entering imaginatively into his narrative world and understanding the presuppositions that he shared with his ideal audience, it will be helpful for us to find other models for reading his texts than the modern radical Enlightenment paradigm.

As Peter Berger notes, true relativism must allow for the possibility of the supernatural. In the wake of postmodernity, the collapse of traditional Western paradigms has led to the reevaluation of a number of long-held interpretations of reality. As noted below, readers in many cultures (perhaps especially those least trained in Western paradigms) approach Luke’s reports of signs not as problems but as a model for ministry. I suspect that this wider, global Christian reading is closer to that of Luke’s ideal audience than is our usual Western approach.

After examining the context of modern skepticism about miracles, we will sample some perspectives from other worldviews. From the historical standpoint, the issue is simply whether eyewitnesses can claim such events (for which the decisive answer must be “Yes”), rather than resolving the nature of causation. Nevertheless, putting in context our culturally informed interpretations of causation helps us to read the ancient interpretations more sympathetically, and historians do often explore questions of causation.

We should pause to distinguish among some terms. The usual modernist prejudice is against what is “supernatural,” but this way of defining the question may bias the case, since the ancient worldview allowed for suprahuman activity that was nevertheless part of the natural order. (In an Israelite worldview, only the Creator was supernatural.) “Paranormal” activity is that which is inexplicable in terms of current knowledge of the natural order, but it need not presuppose the activity of suprahuman personal entities (such as divine activity) and hence is a wider term than “suprahuman.” (I use it in a broad sense, not the frequent, narrower popular sense of “occult.”) By “suprahuman” I mean, more narrowly, the claim for divine activity or for that of other intelligent entities as allowed for in many ancient and modern religious and ancient philosophic systems. Because what is at issue today is especially encompassed in the term “supernatural,” however, I often accede to this language in my discussion.

Charles Talbert notes that some scholars, such as Gerd Lüdemann, rule out any historical core of miracle stories because miracles are assumed not to happen. By contrast to such approaches, some writers question whether a priori dismissal of all claims for evidence of supernatural activity is a genuinely open-minded, objective approach. As Talbert notes, the question as to whether miracles are possible reflects the understanding of possibility in one’s worldview, and “worldviews are highly resistant to disconfirmation. The materialistic worldview, represented by Lüdemann, dictates that the world was and is ruled by iron physical laws that not even God could or can bend.” This is, however, a worldview, not an argument. Scholars differ in their evaluations of what is possible, evaluations that in turn shape “their evaluations of the historicity of Acts.”

Nearly all ancient historians report some phenomena (or at least relate others’ reports of such phenomena) that most of us would find dubious. No one seriously dismisses the wholesale value of these works simply because they stem from writers whose philosophic (or religious, political, or moral) perspectives differ from our own. Perhaps more telling with regard to our presuppositions, what we tend to dismiss is the credibility of those reports not susceptible to alternative (i.e., in this case, naturalistic) explanations. In general, our suspicions are undoubtedly well founded, grounded as they are in a fuller understanding of scientific reality and the “ordinary” course of events than was available to our ancient counterparts.

Yet before one dismisses all possibility of suprahuman intervention, one must make explicit and evaluate the presupposition on which such a wholesale dismissal would be based. If we take into account the historically conditioned presuppositions favored in antiquity, we must also consider those of modern academia; these too constitute a context of the discussion and will be taken into account by subsequent interpreters of current scholarship if the worldview of our own era proves as transient as those of its predecessors. We cannot evade being explicit concerning presuppositions informing much traditional modern historiography if we are to hear the ancient narratives sympathetically, and much less can we do so if we are to honestly examine the possibility that any ancient miracles could reflect genuinely suprahuman causation.

Modern Western interpreters typically ground our critique of supernatural phenomena in a modern Western worldview, but unexamined assumptions provide questionable criteria for claiming authoritative metanarratives. As children of the Western Enlightenment, many Western biblical scholars reject all reports of supernatural activity out of hand without critically examining the philosophic prejudices they themselves bring to the table. Despite postmodern critiques of the radical Enlightenment’s approaches to dominant perspectives and other cultures’ challenges to the hegemonic assumptions of Western tradition, some scholars equate “critical thinking” with dismissing other societies’ worldviews without even evaluating the bases for their own.

Some critics may simply dismiss without consideration challenges to examine their worldviews (and they may perhaps likewise dismiss parts of this chapter), but I believe that most such critics act this way on the basis of historically conditioned a prioris that they have never seriously examined personally and that some hold inflexibly. If those in circles where purportedly supernatural experiences are unknown or even ridiculed charge with bias those who take some such claims seriously, those in whose circles such occurrences are believed to occur will be no less apt to return the charge, undercutting any basis for cross-cultural and cross-philosophic dialogue.

Thus some sociologists whose field studies noted extensive claims of miracles, many from purported eyewitnesses, warn that their research might feel threatening to Western scholars “who live out their existence within the shelter of the academy, where everything but faculty politics operates on assumptions of rationality and empirical verifiability.” They suggest that, for all scholars’ talk about willingness to challenge the status quo, a real challenge to the dominant paradigms of academia would be to allow consideration of such phenomena, for which the “supernatural” explanation is sometimes the most “parsimonious.”

Similarly, NT scholar Walter Wink notes that he once thought that his intellectual integrity was alienating him from the world he found in the book of Acts, when in fact it was merely his materialist assumptions about reality. Later he observed what he believed were divine healings, incompatible with the antisupernaturalistic assumptions he now rejected; these included a large uterine tumor disappearing apparently immediately after prayer. “Because of that, and many similar experiences with spiritual healing, I have no difficulty believing that Jesus actually healed people, and not just of psychosomatic diseases.” Scholars who would deny the truth of his story to defend their worldview, he charges, do so “not on historical grounds, but on the basis of their” materialistic worldview.

Wink claims that “historical research depends on analogy” to evaluate the plausibility of accounts about the past but that our limited experiences can unfairly constrict the analogies with which we work. “People with an attenuated sense of what is possible will bring that conviction to the Bible and diminish it by the poverty of their own experience.” Not only medical research regarding mind and body connections but especially the new physics have expanded the range of what is now considered possible. Others also point out how cultural or other experiential limitations sometimes compromise the usefulness of the analogy argument for historiography, since history is full of apparent anomalies. As noted below, however, the analogy argument today makes miracles more, rather than less, plausible.

The assumption that suprahuman activity is impossible is an interpretive grid, not a demonstrated fact; contrary to what appeared to be the case to many intellectuals one or two centuries ago, history does not support a linear evolution of all cultures toward this position.

A limited methodological naturalism—interpreting phenomena as natural when possible and plausible (with or without possible divine providence at work) and looking for natural causes and effects—is useful heuristically. This tool should not, however, be confused with a thoroughgoing philosophic naturalism that a priori rejects the possibility of activity reflecting suprahuman intelligent activity, including the possibility of some claims that might be empirically verified or falsified.

As many scholars note, antisupernaturalism is little more than a presupposition, rarely actually argued and rarely marshaling evidence. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rational philosophy, rather than any specific evidence, is mainly responsible for the usual summary dismissal of belief in supernatural phenomena in the modern academy. Spinoza argued that miracles are self-contradictory, because, on the basis of his monistic identification of God with the natural order, he saw “laws of Nature” as identical with God or God’s will. Ironically, much subsequent thought has assumed Spinoza’s thoroughgoing naturalism while rejecting his pantheism. It was metaphysical presuppositions, not empirical evidence, that drove scientism in a reductionistically naturalistic direction.

One of the most influential voices was the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, usually regarded as the starting point for modern discussion of miracles. Hume provided the basis for most Enlightenment arguments against miracles. Indeed, those who claim that science or historiography denies the possibility of miracles are actually repeating not scientific but philosophic premises stemming from Hume. Scientists are experts about the normal happenings of nature, but when asking whether something outside the norm happens, they no longer speak as scientists per se because this is a philosophic question. Likewise, the question of whether there can be exceptions to natural law “is a philosophical rather than a narrowly scientific issue.”

Hume regarded miracles as a violation of natural law, in contrast to some earlier thinkers. But even granting this definition, a substantial part of Hume’s argument depends on his conception of natural law, and these ideas of natural law are now recognized as outmoded in view of more recent developments in physics. Thus J. Houston, in a recent Cambridge monograph, challenges Hume on two fronts: first, his claim “that the evidence for the relevant law(s) of nature is . . . undeniably relevant to an assessment of the probability” of alleged miracles; second, his claim that the general improbability of events in a particular class of event prejudges “the probability of the truth of an actual report of the event.”

Hume’s first argument is not neutral as to the possibility of supernatural or divine activity; it a priori excludes the possibility and hence prejudges the conclusion. A theistic response need not (as Hume poses as the alternative) exclude a basic regularity in the universe (hence abandoning the value of analogy and experience); one can postulate a normal order in the universe yet allow the hypothesis of “a characteristically order-giving yet occasionally miracle-working god” or other supernatural agent. That is, one need not postulate a forced choice between a deistic/atheistic orderly universe and a universe without order, ignoring alternative views even held by the majority of the founders of modern science themselves. In a truly neutral starting point, one does not have to presuppose the existence of a deity to allow the hypothesis of a deity’s action; one need only not rule it out. Yet this is precisely what Hume’s argument must effectively do. “It is only by presupposing a conclusively justified atheism, or presupposing belief in a non-miracle-working god . . . that you are entitled to adduce with any cogency” natural laws against miracles. Presupposing without argument that there can be no intelligent agency elevates “ontological economy to a supremacy which not even Occam accords it.”

Interestingly, Hume cites strong testimony for some miracle reports, then uses the very strength of this testimony to argue that even strong testimonies are useless in favor of miracles, since (he asserts without argument) these particular miracles may be dismissed! Others have noted the circularity of his denial of these reports of miracles (particularly among Jansenists), which he offered on the basis that miracles cannot happen.

Hegel, with his long-standing influence in German thought, followed by David Strauss and other Hegelians, was particularly effective in redirecting the course of modern Western thought, stressing his antithesis “between ancient religion” and nineteenth-century “intellectual sophistication.” This vantage point solidified into an uncontested consensus until relatively recent times without an adequate impartial, massive empirical investigation into diverse miracle claims. Modern Enlightenment thought has often identified “scientific” as “true” and “unscientific” as false; its simultaneous a priori “exclusion of the supernatural from the domain of science” taints supernatural approaches with the suspicion of “falsity and irrationality.” Yet such identifications unfairly load the deck epistemologically.

Many scholars complain that the common reduction of what is real to what is material is not empirical science per se but a philosophic construct; much of the argument comes down to simple assertions based on plausibility structures dominant in the era in which they originated. Much of the empiricist refutation of earlier supernaturalist worldviews rested on philosophic premises that have since been abandoned in light of subsequent scientific and philosophic developments. Thus, as physics professor Stephen Barr observes, a century ago physics was entirely materialistic and deterministic and faulted religion for suggesting that the physical universe was not “causally closed.” Unexpectedly, however, “that determinism did in fact give way in the face of new discoveries,” and it was traditional religion instead of the physics of the era that made the successful prediction about the nature of the universe.

Science as science concerns repeatable events and cannot as science pronounce judgment on specific, unique events in history, such as miracles by definition would be. Some philosophers of science have pointed out that “the action of agency (whether divine or human) need not violate the laws of nature; in most cases it merely changes the initial and boundary conditions on which the laws of nature operate.” That is, human or divine agents can also function as causes. Theistic religion and science overlap in interests, though often asking different questions.

Some define “history” in such a manner as to exclude the possibility of genuine miracles in history, but on a popular level this definition risks collapsing two meanings of “history,” namely, history as a limited methodology that as history cannot pronounce judgment concerning claims of supernatural causation, and history as “events” that may have actually happened. Such a confusing of meanings further risks (and sometimes produces) the assumption that history as a discipline rejects the possibility of miracles. History as history does not pass judgment on whether an occurrence (such as the resurrection) was a miracle (a theological judgment involving philosophic questions about God’s existence and activity). As history, it can attempt to address only whether an event literally happened. If an event happened, it can be subject to historical investigation. To a priori deny that such events happen is to prejudge the conclusion before doing objective investigation—and this is a philosophic issue, not a historical one.

Miracles are unique events, but history (unlike science) is full of events that are unique in some respects. Were historians to begin excluding unique or unusual events, they would have to rule out much of history; in 1819, one scholar demonstrated that one could explain away a large measure of Napoleon’s life by this method. Some argue that miracles are too unique, belonging to a category that differs too much from normal experience to ever be deemed probable. Yet this appeal to analogy and experience today is more apt to cut the other way than when it was formulated, since (as argued at some length in this chapter) claims about extranormal events reflect the widespread experience of much of humanity today.

The particular arguments once used by Spinoza, Hume, and others to form the modern consensus against miracles made sense only on the philosophic and scientific presuppositions of their era, not those of our own. The assumption that only atheistic or deistic approaches can be objective (i.e., epistemologically neutral) presupposes that atheism or deism is self-evidently true; it does not prove them, and it is certainly not neutral. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig contends:

The presupposition of the impossibility of miracles should, contrary to the assumption of nineteenth and for the most part twentieth century biblical criticism, play no role in determining the historicity of any event. . . . The presupposition against the possibility of miracles survives in theology only as a hangover from an earlier Deist age and ought to be once for all abandoned.

Other scholars have become less and less comfortable with such unproved postulates of the Enlightenment era; as Leonhard Goppelt remarks regarding the assertion that miracles are historically impossible, critical reflection must question this proposition because “there is no such thing today as a complete and generally accepted philosophical understanding of reality.” “History” in the sense of “what happened” may be distinguished from “history” in the theoretical sense of “what can be explained by natural causes without recourse to supernatural causes.” Marcus Borg also rightly points out:

The primary intellectual objection to it [supernatural activity] flows from a rigid application of the modern worldview’s definition of reality. Yet the modern view is but one of a large number of humanly constructed maps of reality. It is historically the most recent and impressive because of the degree of control it has given us; but it is no more an absolute map of reality than any of the previous maps. All are relative, products of particular histories and cultures; the modern one, like its predecessors, will be superseded.

Indeed, theoretical science has already abandoned “the modern worldview in its popular form.”

Charles Talbert notes that the antisupernaturalist, materialistic worldview is less dominant today, not because “of new evidence” but because of “shifting evaluations of what is possible.” Acts scholar Rick Strelan also notes that scholars are moving beyond the old paradigms and becoming more open to examining supranormal-phenomena claims in early Christian sources, albeit most often in exclusively scientific (e.g., neurophysiological) terms. Scholars increasingly reckon with their own “post-Enlightenment Western” worldview in seeking to grapple with miracle and magic claims in ancient sources foreign to our understanding.

Some scholars point out that utterly paranormal events occur that cannot be attributed to the Christian God. Thus Eduard Schweizer notes a documented case of a guru who allowed his heart to be stabbed, without dying, on more than one occasion. First-century Christians might have explained such an occurrence in supernatural but not divine terms, on the basis of biblical precedents (cf., e.g., Exod 7:12; Acts 13:6–10); others might prefer other explanations. The minimal point on which there should be agreement here, however, is that some paranormal events do occur in reality and not merely in fiction.

Some older modern theologians, such as Bultmann, declared that “mature” modern people do not believe in miracles and that “no one can or does seriously maintain” the NT worldview. Yet as John Meier points out, a 1989 Gallup poll showed that 82 percent of the people in the United States believe in miracles today, with only 6 percent categorically rejecting this view. Although numbers would be lower in some regions, such as Europe, they would be higher in some other regions, such as most of Africa and Latin America. Orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims, as well as followers of traditional tribal religions, spiritism, and, in fact, most worldviews not derived from Western rationalism (including its specifically atheist versions), affirm the reality of supernatural phenomena.

Indeed, a more recent, 2006 Pew Forum survey of Christians in ten nations estimated the percentage who believe they have witnessed healings; translated into hard numbers, this is well more than 300 million persons and does not even include figures from many of the nations with particularly abundant claims, such as China. Yet Bultmann’s position summarily dismissed such worldviews—easily the majority of the world’s population—as not part of the modern world. Such summary dismissal of the supernatural without appeal to satisfying contemporary philosophical arguments or concrete scientific data may have succeeded among those who shared the assumptions held by Bultmann’s mid-twentieth-century Western academic setting but apparently does not satisfy most of those outside that elite subculture.

By defining modernity ethnocentrically in terms of a mid-twentieth-century academic Western elite, Bultmann simply restated as universal his own philosophic presuppositions, many of which are no longer fashionable in the academy. Some have observed that Bultmann was obsessed with a now out-of-date worldview, one that Anthony Thiselton attributes to Bultmann’s neo-Kantian roots. Regardless of how fashionable in some circles the consensus may remain that genuine supernatural activity by a deity, deities, or spirits may simply be dismissed, it is uncritically naive, in today’s multicultural world, for otherwise critical scholars to accept and propagate this consensus without inductively examining data.

In view of current trends, some postmodern observers may well accept claims of supernatural phenomena without moral judgments on their sources (e.g., neither the early Christian claim that Jesus’s miracles were from God nor the opposing claims that they were works of sorcery would be a priori privileged). Whether or not one approves of such cultural trends, the days when supernatural phenomena can be dismissed without discussion may well be numbered. This trend toward greater openness will probably continue and grow in light of the larger context of global thought (see discussion below). Philosophic approaches from the Majority World will bring to the table many interests, but the Western Enlightenment antipathy to suprahuman activity will not likely be among them.

Western academia has hardly been neutral in its worldviews; those who a priori rule out any “supernatural” claims effectively deny the worldviews and religions held by the majority of the world’s population. We may regard this assumption as right or wrong, but as a starting assumption, it is hardly neutral. On atheistic or deistic premises, divinely driven supernatural phenomena cannot exist; on the premises of many faiths, they must exist; on the agnostic premises from which critical intellectual inquiry claims to begin, one must investigate the evidence to determine, if possible, whether they do exist. This “neutral” starting point does not mean that those who engage in the discussion do not already have some personal views, but for the purpose of academic dialogue, they agree to suspend judgment (or at least to listen respectfully), while considering and presenting evidence. The point here is simply that we must be honest with ourselves and our students about the philosophic grid through which we sift the evidence. We must not confuse our presuppositions with the evidence, nor dare we confuse them with “neutrality.”

Scholars sometimes opine that miracle reports such as those in Luke-Acts must depend on later legend or a writer’s imagination, but this premise 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. Many other cultures (as well as much of Western culture historically) have worked from other assumptions, and the labels traditionally employed by Western modernity to denigrate those assumptions are no longer suitable in an emphatically multicultural, postmodern world. For this reason, some NT scholars today argue, for example, that comparisons with shamans (and how analogous figures functioned in the first century) would be more helpful in understanding Jesus’s miracles than anachronistic modernist readings of Western skeptics.

Elsewhere I survey a much larger range of miracle claims in the Majority World, in the premodern West, and in popular culture in the West as well. I will not seek to repeat all of that survey here. Nevertheless, the claim that no one in the modern world believes in miracles (once seriously offered by some scholars as an answer to the question of miracles, as noted above) can no longer be seriously entertained. I mention only a few sources here. Although I give greater attention to academic sources, some of my “primary” sources are popular, as is usual in the academic study of popular religion. (A fuller comparative study would also examine the massive number of modern non-Christian supernatural-activity claims, but given that this discussion already strays beyond the usual contours of NT scholarship and that the material included below should be sufficient to flesh out the basic analogy I am making, I have restricted my focus. Many of the non-Christian claims are also less analogous to those in Acts, though also less potentially derivative.)

Even if they are outside the experience of most scholars, today’s world is full of firsthand claims to have witnessed miracles (some sincere, others not), and there is no reason to suppose that the ancient world was any different. One may readily dispute observers’ explanations for such experiences, but when some scholars deny that such experiences ever belong to the eyewitness level of historical sources, they ignore the social reality of a sizable proportion of the world’s population, and millions of intelligent but culturally different people will feel compelled by their own experience, or that of others close to them, to dismiss such scholarship as an experientially narrow cultural imperialism.

Thus Theissen and Merz, although reluctant to attribute the phenomena to purely supernatural causes, point out that the plausibility principle of analogy used in historiography “obliges us to recognize the possibility of healings and exorcisms. For in many cultures there is an abundance of well-documented analogies to them—and even in the ‘underground’ of our culture, although that may be officially denied.” The principle of analogy, traditionally used against miracle reports in the wake of the radical Enlightenment, now favors their probability.

As Justo González remarks in his commentary on Acts, the frequent denial of narratives’ historicity on account of miracle reports employs a questionable epistemological criterion. Bultmann denies that modern people who use scientific inventions can believe in miracles, yet “what Bultmann declares to be impossible is not just possible, but even frequent.” Miracles are, González points out, affirmed in most Latino churches despite the influence of the mechanistic worldview from much Western thought.

Western scholar Philip Jenkins notes that, in general, Christianity in the global South is quite interested in “the immediate workings of the supernatural, through prophecy, visions, ecstatic utterances, and healing.” Referring to the different issue of hostile suprahuman forces, John S. Mbiti, a scholar of African religion, complains that most Western scholars “expose their own ignorance, false ideas, exaggerated prejudices and a derogatory attitude” that fails to take seriously genuine experiences pervasive in Africa. Asian theologians like Malaysian Methodist bishop Hwa Yung have also critiqued Western Enlightenment approaches toward claims beyond Western expectations.

Regardless of how we interpret miracle reports and other supernatural claims, their frequency in today’s world indicates that large numbers of intelligent, sincere people believe that such cures are occurring today, including through their own prayers. How much more likely would this be in a culture generally less skeptical than is common in the modern Western world? There is no intrinsically historical reason to think that Luke had to invent such miraculous claims (especially in the eyewitness “we” material, Acts 16:18; 20:10; 28:4–6, 8–9; cf. 21:4, 11, 19) or for us to attribute them to deception.

The danger of reading biblical narratives through the grid of solely modern Western assumptions is not a merely theoretical one. Traditional Western academic approaches to other cultures have often proved ethnocentric, including through derogatory Western assumptions about “religion.” If research is guilty of ethnocentric assumptions when addressing cultures contemporary to us, we run an even greater risk of compounding this ethnocentrism with anachronism when we study ancient cultures. This danger seems particularly relevant in academic approaches to miracles, which have traditionally been shaped by Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. One of his arguments against miracles was that most reports stemmed from what he derided as “ignorant and barbarous nations.”

By contrast, following an approach more consistent with the rise of global awareness and the increase in voices from the Majority World, postmodernity rejects the privileging of Western cultural assumptions. In an example of the trend toward cultural openness, medical anthropology now rejects “medicocentrism,” the ethnocentric view that maintains that only current Western views of sickness and healing are authentic and that disputes the many claims to cures outside Western views. Medical anthropology, John Pilch argues, “could help the exegete to adopt a transcultural stance.” (Indeed, some physicians now partner with some “spiritual healers” because of the observed effectiveness of some of the latter, regardless of views of the causes.)

Similarly, cross-cultural anthropological studies suggest that people in a variety of cultures experience visions or other altered states of consciousness and that vision reports in Acts therefore would appear perfectly plausible to much of the world’s population both at the time of Acts and today. As noted above, there has also been a shift away from dogmatic antisupernaturalism, so that even the interpretation of such claims (as well as the existence of the phenomena themselves) is more open to discussion than in the past.

Some modern critics have complained that early Christianity spread by claiming signs and wonders, playing on the fears of superstitious people. Yet most Christians in the Majority World, less shaped by the modern Western tradition of the radical Enlightenment, find stories of miraculous phenomena far less objectionable than do their Western counterparts. These other cultures offer a check on traditional Western assumptions; as Yale scholar Lamin Sanneh points out, it is here that Western culture “can encounter . . . the gospel as it is being embraced by societies that had not been shaped by the Enlightenment” and hence are closer to the milieu of earliest Christianity.

As is elaborated further below, many of these Majority World voices, in fact, can recount reports (including at times their own eyewitness testimony) of phenomena, both associated with Christianity and not associated with it, that seem difficult to explain, if taken at face value, without recourse to the activity of suprahuman entities. Hundreds of millions of sincere people around the world believe that suprahuman forces are at work or that they have experience with miraculous healings; whether one likes it or not, it is neither charitable nor plausible to simply dismiss the existence of such claims, however one chooses to explain them. By analogy, it is plausible that many ancient claimants also sincerely believed that they reported such experiences accurately, rather than that they simply invented them for the purposes of propaganda.

Even should volumes of such claims be collected by researchers (which would not be difficult), the collection would not prove that any given claims to miracles in the past were authentic (we have evidence and other reasons to affirm that many claims, in fact, are inauthentic), but such research at least empirically refutes the claim that such experiences cannot be sincerely reported by eyewitnesses.

My primary purpose is to highlight the fact that eyewitness claims to healings are widespread; secondarily, I hope that some examples will support the plausibility of a theological explanation for some miracle claims. In the latter case, I hope that the number and geographic range of claims available today will give pause to those who think that by challenging the authenticity of a few miracle claims, they can readily dismiss all of them. Granted, many claims prove false, and in many other cases the medical evidence cannot render a conclusive verdict whether claims involve supernatural activity (since remissions do occur without prayer). But it is a logical fallacy to rule out the paranormal authenticity of all miracle claims based on either point; one cannot inductively prove a negative (a weakness in Hume’s argument), but a single, certain positive case would refute a claim that miracles cannot happen.

Even some readers who reject all nonnaturalistic explanations may have difficulty explaining some of them on purely naturalistic terms. Nevertheless, although I will venture comments about potential explanations later, scholars can agree that claims are firsthand without needing to agree about explanations. What is more critical from the historical standpoint of our discipline is to note that such experiences are widely claimed by firsthand sources and hence that it is not necessary, whatever the proposed explanations, to deny the possibility of firsthand claims for such experiences in the first century. The next subsection offers as examples a small number of Majority World claims and then surveys a few proposed explanations for the claims.

Luke’s claims of signs and attendant church growth (notwithstanding his attendant reports of skeptical resistance to such signs) seem much less “novelistic” in parts of the world where such claims and attendant church growth occur today. If its accounts of dramatic signs make Luke-Acts a foreign and foreboding work to segments of modern Western academia, it is nevertheless a work welcome in many of the dynamic churches (including, though not limited to, those of the Pentecostal and charismatic varieties) of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which claim to share its experiences. (This observation is relevant beyond the question of miracle reports. Although willing to study other sorts of sociological analogies, scholars often fail to consider the experiences of those who have lived in many situations most similar to those described in Luke’s narratives, such as experiencing boldness during persecution; cf. comment on Acts 4:8. Out of deference to Western scholarly practice, I will rarely draw such analogies here, but I do suspect that we sometimes neglect too quickly the value of some popular readings within potentially analogous frames of spiritual experience.)

Some scholars have complained how quickly Western commentators have tended to pass over signs claims in Acts, often in embarrassment. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs has propelled many to look to other eras and cultures for helpful parallels.

When MacMullen compares with Christian claims in the Roman Empire Simon Kimbangu’s healings from 1921 in the Belgian Congo, he warns against extrapolating too much from anthropological parallels. Nevertheless, he believes that Kimbangu’s “story might alert us to points in the evidence from antiquity which deserve special attention.” Although the movement changed over time, even Kimbangu’s earliest followers affirmed that he “raised the dead, caused the paralyzed to stand upright, gave sight to the blind, cleansed lepers, and healed all the sick in the name of the Lord Jesus.” MacMullen contends that rapidly expanding movements such as Kimbangu’s and William Wadé Harris’s healing ministry in West Africa (starting in 1914) can be helpful in expanding the parameters of Western readers unaccustomed to think in terms of such experiences. Into the same category might fall the African Christian prophet Garrick Braide, who healed the sick and caused rain to fall in the name of Israel’s God, until the colonial authorities arrested him in 1916 for cutting into their liquor profits in West Africa.

Other scholars have compared the documented successes of the “‘mad monk’ Rasputin,” which affected the course of Russian history and thus cannot be omitted from historical inquiry. Still others have compared Don Pedrito Jaramillo, a Mexican folk saint active from 1881 till 1907, who achieved more notoriety than other healers of his era. One critic of Western commentators’ embarrassed silence about miracles has compared literature about shamans from around the world. Despite often significant differences among the objects of comparison, the comparisons do highlight the contrast between beliefs about suprahuman enablement in most of the world (not limited to Christian systems, despite our focus here) and the Western Enlightenment assumptions that help make these texts so foreign to us.

Global experience challenges the Western academic prejudice against the sort of experiences that the West traditionally construed as supernatural activity. Thus, for example, Michael Green (at the time of his writing, a senior research fellow at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford) reports that a disabled minister in Malawi, unable to walk, asked him to pray for healing. Reluctant but unable to avoid the challenge, Green prayed for him, and “the man got up and started dancing around, just as the Lystra cripple is recorded as doing.” The parallel to Acts is not coincidental; missionaries in various contexts continue to look to Acts for a model of miraculous ministry and power encounters.

Elsewhere I follow the lead of MacMullen and these other scholars in such examples but seek a wider array of examples in view of the long history of claims of such experiences throughout the past and their pervasiveness today. Because such analogies remain unusual in commentaries, I refer the reader to that other publication and offer merely a very brief summary below. Yet even my fuller treatment, which cites hundreds of examples, many from firsthand interviews, offers merely samples of a much wider sphere of experience.

In contrast to the period when many of the plausibility structures for modern critical NT scholarship were defined, Two-Thirds World Christians are now the majority; moreover, expectation of healings is common among many Majority World churches. Likewise, estimates of global figures even for specifically charismatic and Pentecostal Christians (groups traditionally known for expecting healings) are in the hundreds of millions (projected by some as approaching even half a billion), making the charismatic branch of Christendom second in size only to Roman Catholicism (with which it overlaps). Historian Robert Bruce Mullin observes that already by the end of the twentieth century, there were “more Pentecostals worldwide” than mainline Protestants.

Most of these Christians are economically poor, and they are not as widely represented among academicians as their numbers might otherwise suggest, but they do represent a significant voice. These Christians do not represent a single theological approach to the miraculous, but the majority of them do affirm miraculous phenomena. Popular sentiments cannot define scientific or historical plausibility, but charity toward others’ worldviews can invite us to at least reevaluate the primacy of old philosophic assumptions that we have often taken for granted without consideration.

Supernatural phenomena are compatible with most African worldviews, and reports of miraculous healings are frequent in Africa, especially where normal medical resources are difficult to come by. Some standard reference works on global Christianity indicate the pervasiveness of healing claims, from Catholic to Pentecostal, in Latin America. Researchers offer many reports on signs and church growth in Latin America; because of the limits of most of my current sources, I will focus, for concrete examples, especially on evangelicals and Pentecostals here. Already a generation ago healing campaigns were catalyzing evangelical-church growth in Latin America. One of the most common factors in persons’ joining Pentecostal churches in Latin America is the experiencing of healing after prayer. When urban migrants in one Argentinian church were interviewed, 37.7 percent of them claimed that healings had led to their accepting the gospel message; among the ailments they reported healed were blindness, cancer, deafness, heart disease, paralysis, and tuberculosis. In another study, 86.4 percent of Brazilian Pentecostals claimed that they had experienced divine healing, and one scholar has reported that every Colombian Pentecostal she interviewed claimed miraculous experiences. Ninety percent of Ecuadorian Pentecostals in another study claimed to have been miraculously healed.

Reported miraculous healings have abetted church growth in much of Asia, including India, where two sociologists of religion note that “healing was viewed as commonplace.” For example, it is said that church growth among the Nishi tribals began when an important official’s son was raised from death after an experimental prayer to Jesus, leading to hundreds of conversions. Likewise, Thomas Mathews of Kerala and his coworkers in the Filadelfia movement witnessed significant church growth in Rajasthan through healings and other anomalous experiences. Even in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indigenous Indian revival movements (often challenging missionary control) included claims of supernatural phenomena.

A Korean missiologist with the Oxford Center for Mission Studies observes that Pentecostal Christians in northern Luzon in the Philippines experience healings as in Acts. One Western researcher in the Philippines interviewed people who were prayed for, to see if any 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.” Healing has also characterized Korean Christianity since the Korean revival of 1907.

Many scholars have noted the emphasis on, and many testimonies of, healing and exorcism in the Chinese church; although more overt in the house churches, it also appears in Three Self churches. “In fact,” one researcher notes, “according to some surveys, 90% of new believers cite healing as a reason for their conversion.” Other estimates are more conservative, at roughly 50 percent, but either estimate suggests a remarkable proportion. Such testimonies are so common that it is said that even a number of government officials recognize that many become Christians in response to claims of prayers resulting in healings. Some reports concern even raising of the dead (see comment on Acts 9:40). Miracle claims spurred the growth of indigenous Chinese churches in the early twentieth century, including the famous ministry of Dr. Shang-chieh Song (Dr. John Sung), who engaged in the sort of apostolic evangelism portrayed in Acts. Such examples appear to reflect the Lukan evangelism paradigm in a manner foreign to traditional modern Western approaches.

The “West” (and areas it counts in its heritage, many of which are technically in Asia and Africa) has a long supernaturalist tradition of its own. (Rather than retrace in detail my work elsewhere, I merely offer several examples and sources here.) More noteworthy for the purposes of our treatment of Luke’s historiography is the observation that modern historians writing for major university presses have increasingly been reporting historical healing claims without expressing prejudice against those claims. That is, historians today can allow that such claims often rest on genuine observations without feeling the need to arbitrate their interpretation.

Luke’s claims about signs and attendant church growth hardly seemed novelistic to most Christian readers in history, including most believers on a popular level after the Enlightenment. Our tendency is to regard most cultures in history and in today’s world as “precritical” without so much as undertaking a critical analysis of any of their claims. Yet such disdain for vast numbers of claims from other cultures, purely on the basis of unproved presuppositions, risks the charge of ethnocentric elitism. Most reading communities in history could accept Luke’s signs as authentic indications of divine activity, and many sincere eyewitnesses claimed to see such activity. There is thus no transcultural reason to suppose a priori that Luke must have either fabricated his miracle stories or depended on sources that must have done so.

Rabbinic sources associated some Christian contemporaries with healing miracles. Before the 300s, exorcisms proved to be a major factor in the spread of Christianity; in the 300s, exorcisms and miracles are the most explicit cause of conversion to Christianity mentioned in early Christian sources. Christians appealed to them for evidential value in public discourse. Thus Origen, arguing against Celsus and addressing pagans, in the first half of the third century claimed that Christians were still expelling evil spirits and performing cures and that he had seen some of these incidents (Cels. 1.46, 67). Similarly, Athanasius in the 350s (Vit. Ant. 80) portrays Anthony confronting skeptics by challenging them either to cure these demoniacs with their ideas and idols or to just observe Christ’s power; Anthony himself then cured them.

Far from being merely incredulous about a distant and unverifiable past, various church fathers noted that miracles and healings continued in their own day. Cyprian noted that Christians were sometimes cured by baptism (Ep. 75.15); Tertullian named prominent pagans who had been cured from evil spirits and became grateful to Christians (Scap. 4). Irenaeus offers the fullest list of signs, almost the same range as in Acts, noting that such signs were converting pagans. We have no means to verify such reports today, but they do illustrate continuing belief in miracles and, in many cases, first- or secondhand claims to having witnessed them. On a popular level, Coptic texts report a range of Christian cures in Egypt. Most of these are believable even from a purely naturalistic perspective, since people naturally recover from many ailments, though some appear potentially more dramatic.

Augustine initially sounded as if he thought that miracles had ceased, but he later retracted this way of putting his view. True, he said, not everyone today speaks in tongues when hands are laid on at baptism, nor are the sick always healed; but even when he had written his apparent denial, he knew of a blind man healed by approaching martyrs’ bodies, and countless other miracles. In City of God, Augustine noted that a depository of documents recording miracles in Hippo had been established only two years earlier, that it already had more than seventy published documents, and that he knew of many miracles not recorded among these. Another shrine in the area, having kept records longer, had a much larger collection. Augustine recounts numerous healings, including some where he was an eyewitness. Previously more skeptical, he had grown in his openness to continuing healings. Although I abbreviate here, such reports continued through the centuries.

Documentation is more abundant in recent centuries. Despite the radical Enlightenment’s influence on both deism and cessationism, healing claims continued to abound—for example, those surrounding Valentine Greatrakes (1628–83) and the Wesleyan revival in Britain; Dorothea Trudel in Switzerland (1813–62); and Johann Christoph Blumhardt in Germany (1805–80). They proliferated still more abundantly in evangelical Holiness and interdenominational circles in the late nineteenth-century United States. Such signs also appeared in Christian movements outside the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Although I have been arguing here especially concerning perspectives of the non-Western world (i.e., the majority of the world) and the premodern world (i.e., most of the world’s history to date), it should be observed that a significant subculture even in the twentieth-century West continued to dissent from antisupernaturalistic assumptions, emphasizing paranormal phenomena and interpreting them with reference to theological or other spiritual causes. From a sociological perspective, Peter Berger several decades ago challenged many religion scholars’ views that the modern world no longer harbors much belief in the supernatural. Thus the “lack of contemporary analogies” used to rule out supernaturalism restricts the source of “acceptable” human experience not simply to the West but (as Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd put it) “to the secular academic subculture within this single culture.”

Some Western academicians may sometimes tend to discount and ignore miracle claims not only for cultural reasons but also, unconsciously, for class reasons. Many of the Western claims, especially in the first half of the twentieth century (before the spread of the charismatic movement in the mainline denominations), come from the very poor. This is not surprising, since the poor have less access to medical care and are less influenced by Western academic philosophic presuppositions of antisupernaturalism; education was also less widely available in the larger culture at that time. Many of us academicians tend to view the apostles as academically “rational” (or rationalistic) people like us; yet in some respects, the Twelve, in contrast to elite leaders such as the Sadducean high priests, may have been more like leading figures in some popular healing movements appealing especially to the socially disenfranchised.

Indeed, such claims of widespread healings commanded the attention of much of U.S. popular culture at various times in the past century. Likewise, in British Anglican circles, healings were associated with Dorothy Kerin and James Moore Hickson. Not surprisingly, early Pentecostalism, birthed in a context of Holiness and other evangelical circles praying for healings, augmented the quantity of healing testimonies. By the mid-twentieth century, a significant proportion of pastors in mainline churches reported incidents that they attributed to divine healing. Even popular magazines cited medical documentation for paranormal recoveries associated with prayer, and some doctors provided medical verification of organic changes.

Such claims have continued in recent decades, including among the well educated. Other writers have collected so many claims, albeit often on a popular level, that I can refer readers to them only in passing here. As historians of popular religion recognize, most sources for popular religion remain nonacademic; many are also anecdotal (though the latter can be employed as case studies). The work of Rex Gardner, a physician, recounts numerous healings verified by eyewitnesses, some with significant medical documentation. An increasing number of sociological studies with major university presses are examining global healing movements.

Though one might explain some such claims as reflecting psychosomatic elements, others—such as raisings from the dead; the immediate and nonmedical healing of a child’s medically attested broken neck; the healing of broken bones; instant and visible changes such as a withered arm growing out, or more commonly the immediate disappearance of goiters or other lumps; and the healing of irreversible organic damage in a baby—require different explanations. To summarize, such claims are plentiful, and in some of these cases the evidence supporting them is substantial.

Such reports do not compel scholars to adopt a uniform interpretation of them; they do, however, require us to allow, following the usual historiographic principle of uniformity, that dramatic recoveries may have occurred in the first century in the context of prayer and that early Christians might well associate these with divine activity. It is, of course, precarious, for a variety of reasons, to compare the apostles in Acts to many modern ministers emphasizing healing, even when we restrict the discussion solely to claims of healings. But since we lack access to contemporary, extrabiblical accounts concerning the first-century apostles, modern analogies at least provide an additional, minimal sociological control that can be checked with modern sources.

On the basis of such analogies, we can aver at the least that probably a number of people in apostolic times found themselves cured. If some others did not, these negative cases would not dampen the spreading movement’s enthusiasm over the cases that were accepted and recited. Since Paul expects that apostles exhibit signs (2 Cor 12:12) and he also seems to have anticipated signs in local congregations (1 Cor 12:8–10; 14:24–26), many undoubtedly offered eyewitness claims of healings, and Luke offers only a summary of what he probably could have reported.

Some scholars will accept those paranormal claims in early Christian sources for which we have analogies today (such as healings and exorcisms), yet reject those that they regard as unparalleled and that cannot easily be explained purely naturalistically, such as raisings from the dead. (We do, however, have a significant number of modern claims for resuscitating dead persons; in addition to several sources sampled above, see comment at Acts 9:36–42.) Such scholars’ approach by analogy is sufficient to allow the possibility that most of the miracle reports in Acts could be based on eyewitness sources.

Because historians normally ask questions about causation, however, and theological interpreters are interested in Acts’ implications of divine causation, we should note the range of possible explanatory options. Virtually everyone will regard some miracle claims as fallacious, sometimes through deception. But extrapolating from a number of fraudulent claims to the conclusion that all miracle claims are fraudulent would entail a logical fallacy. Some recoveries may be due to merely positive suggestion or the placebo effect. In some cultures “indigenous folk-healers” offer a higher cure rate than Western medical practitioners there, especially in treating the many mental causes of ailments. Nevertheless, this analogy is, at best, of limited relevance for many ailments reported cured in the NT and which cannot usually be merely psychosomatic (such as immediate cures of leprosy or most cases of paralysis and blindness). The accounts in the Gospels and Acts also do not easily allow time for the sort of “folk psychotherapy” attested in these other accounts. Some writers who favor theological explanations further warn that attributing all medically unexplained recovery claims to exclusively psychological causes risks reductionism.

Avoiding a reductionist approach, one recent academic work in the sociology of religion notes that some of the reports of miracles that the authors collected could involve spontaneous remission, psychosomatic illnesses, or exaggerated rumors, yet others defied such naturalistic explanations and would be regarded by believers as supernatural. They allow that many cases may permit “complementary explanations”—both social and theological, both human and suprahuman elements.

Although we cannot hope to reconcile such competing perspectives here, we should note that the broader approach is the one that allows all the evidence to be heard. Those who rule out miracles today based on Hume’s epistemology must follow him in dismissing miracles partly on the grounds that no credible witness claims miracles; yet hundreds of millions of people claim to be witnesses, so it seems odd to dismiss their testimony (rather than critically sifting it) based on what is essentially a circularly argued presupposition. Hume’s approach demands “overwhelming evidence” before accepting the validity of a miracle, but at such a rigorous level of skepticism that if applied consistently it would necessarily exclude even most nonmiraculous historical events. Many scholars employ an antisupernaturalistic interpretive grid that may well dismiss significant evidence. Thus one supposedly objective study in 1925, still sometimes cited as authoritative, dismissed as exaggerated or deceptive 350 Pentecostal healing claims. Yet historian James Opp has recently shown the severe bias that pervaded the study, which did dismiss significant evidence for medically inexplicable cures. Moreover, even some investigators who use the most stringent criterion (i.e., of no possible alternative natural explanation) have noted a few cases that meet it.

The discussion “is complicated,” one scholar notes, “by the simple fact that the historian must work with historical probabilities, while miracle stories are concerned by definition with the occurrence of historical improbabilities.” It is also limited, as noted above, by the interpreters’ presuppositions. “The assessment of probability,” another scholar points out, “is in no small measure a function of one’s epistemic base.”

Those who are committed to an antisupernatural worldview can find alternate explanations for virtually any purportedly suprahuman phenomenon (and virtually everyone, including those who affirm suprahuman intervention in human affairs, recognizes that natural explanations are the more plausible ones in many cases). What I do not believe is intellectually legitimate is to simply dismiss the sincerity of all those who claim to have witnessed such phenomena or to insist that such claims could arise only gradually in legend or through a writer’s imagination. Such insistence flies in the face of an extraordinary amount of evidence, denying voluminous and cross-cultural testimony on the basis of a dogmatic theory forged in a very different era and context (one dependent on a much narrower range of evidence as well as on now questioned epistemological and cosmological assumptions). In view of such extensive evidence, I would consider such insistence (or the insistence that “no one in the modern world believes in miracles”) as impossibly naive and misinformed.

Collections of limited firsthand observations are, technically, “anecdotal,” but those who insist that they have seen some unusual dramatic recoveries immediately following prayer are surely no more biased than are those who, not having seen them, deny that anyone else could have seen them either. Their a priori skepticism appears plausible when forged in contexts where such phenomena are not observed, but it seems less than charitable when they presuppose universal nonexperience on the basis of their own. Whatever the value assigned to testimony in some disciplines, historiography would be impossible without it.

One can evaluate Luke as historian without engaging theological and philosophic disputes about the possibility of miracles, but engaging Luke as a theologian also invites the question as to whether we can agree with his interpretation of his reports. The primary critique here has been against those who deny that credible eyewitnesses can report paranormal events, not against those who simply reduce the question to one of interpretation of the observations. Yet if we do turn to the interpretation of such events, the denial of suprahuman causation is, as we have noted, no more neutral a premise than its affirmation.

The radical Enlightenment (as opposed to early Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke) excluded even the hypothesis of divine intervention from consideration in explaining the data of even the best-attested miracle claims. But should we not regard as culturally elitist an approach that simply dismisses from consideration the credibility of traditions stemming from most cultures and eras in history, on the basis of a presupposition for which those who hold it rarely seek to offer evidence? Granted, as noted, many individual claims (especially those far removed from eyewitnesses) are inauthentic or misinterpreted, but critical thinking does not require an all-or-nothing approach. Science and history address whether some people genuinely recovered; they do not need to rule out the question of why they recovered or the option of divine causation, although this theological question remains distinct from those normally asked in their own disciplines. Some cases noted above are difficult to explain on naturalistic grounds currently known.

If theism is not a neutral assumption, neither is its exclusion; in fact, the vast majority of philosophers of religion addressing the question in scholarly literature today write in support of theism. Contrary to the belief of some outside academic philosophy, theism remains an acceptable subject of discussion in that discipline; simply dismissing this hypothesis as an option on the basis of uninformed antisupernaturalistic assumptions is thus intellectually questionable. Historical evidence for particular miracle claims should thus be admitted as possible instead of being dismissed as a priori impossible. Likewise, Luke’s theology should be engaged respectfully, whatever the interpreter’s own starting assumptions.

below will briefly examine some aspects of Luke’s theology of signs; this chapter has focused on the question of healing claims and Luke’s historiography. Following the approach of some recent social studies of early Christianity, this commentary will, on occasion, offer further analogies with claims of signs, exorcisms, and power encounters in various cultures today to illustrate that such claims are fairly common where such events are expected. To acknowledge the frequency of such claims is not to pass judgment on their accuracy, but it does at least bring into question some traditional critics’ suppositions that any such claims reflect a lengthy period of legendary accretion; most of the claims cited above are from sources claiming to represent eyewitnesses or voices at most one remove from eyewitnesses.

Often Luke simply summarizes that many miracles were performed and reports explicitly only the most extraordinary or significant among them (Acts 5:12–16; 19:11–12). For Luke to keep his Gospel and Acts to manageable size required that he include only a portion of the accounts undoubtedly available to him (just as, e.g., he does not include all of Mark or Q). There is no reason to assume that Luke invents Paul’s miracles; his accounts cohere well with Paul’s claims, which seem to point to miracles pervading Paul’s public ministry (cf. Rom 15:19; 2 Cor 12:12). In fact, given Paul’s own claims that such signs characterized his evangelizing of new areas, we have greater reason to believe instead that Luke selects only a few incidents and periods in Paul’s life in which to describe miracles, from a much broader base of tradition available to him.

Whereas Luke does not describe miracles in Corinth, Paul reports these as a dramatic and observable part of his ministry there (2 Cor 12:12). Luke mentions miracles in fewer locations than Paul seems to believe that they occurred, since the latter seems to believe that miracles happened virtually wherever he preached (Rom 15:18–19). If some modern critics must attribute all descriptions of allegedly supernatural phenomena to fabrication, they ought to attribute them to Luke’s sources—such as Paul, who claims to have been present and personally involved in the events—rather than to Luke himself. Despite the opportunity to parallel Paul’s experience in a storm with that of Jesus, who stilled one (Luke 8:24–25), Luke does not bring a miraculous end to the storm, though he does recount that all miraculously survived it (Acts 27:24–26, 44).

If one counters that most of the signs that Paul claims are more plausible historically because they might have been effected psychosomatically or coincidentally, one could, if one wished, provide the same response for most of those that Luke reports about Paul. But one should note that the expectations of both authors concerning signs (Rom 15:19) seem to have exceeded those of their non-Christian contemporaries, with the possible exceptions of any signs prophets or magicians underlying the later depictions of Apollonius of Tyana and others like him. That Paul anticipated noticeable miraculous phenomena in the Christian communities (1 Cor 12:9–10, 28–30; Gal 3:5) distinguishes these communities from other synagogues and religious associations in antiquity (as distinct, e.g., from temples of Asclepius, where healings were expected). If modern critics have a problem with the supernatural, the same reservations cannot be attributed to early Christians.

Granted, accounts of unusual phenomena can grow over time; even a third-generation oral tradition with exact attributions could report dramatically paranormal events such as apparitions. But most scholars do not date Luke this much later than Paul, and certainly, on the view of authorship suggested in below, a three-generation duration of transmission will not suffice as an explanation for Luke’s accounts in Acts.

In the climate of current scholarship, one might do well to merely write like Josephus, urging caution with particular miracle claims while leaving open the possibility that some could occur. Several statements, however, are possible and, it is hoped, widely agreeable:

Most ancients believed that miracles occurred, and early Christians believed that many among their own number witnessed miracles on a regular basis.

Modern scholars may entertain a range of interpretations concerning such events yet regard some of them as genuine experiences for those who claim them. (That many others were fraudulent, of course, no scholar in antiquity or today would deny.)

The a priori modernist assumption that genuine miracles are impossible is a historically and culturally conditioned premise not shared by all intelligent or critical thinkers and, notably, not by many non-Western cultures. The assumption is an interpretive grid, not a demonstrated fact; contrary to what appeared to be the case to many intellectuals one or two centuries ago, history does not support a linear evolution of all cultures toward this position.

Even the vast majority of those who always reject suprahuman interpretations of ancient miracle reports do not uncritically otherwise reject the value of ancient historians who include them.

Without prejudice based on one’s views regarding the possibility of divine causation, we must recognize that enormous numbers of eyewitnesses claim to have witnessed such phenomena, and hence many such claims (certainly regarding cures during prayer) can belong even to the eyewitness level of our sources and need not be attributed to imagination or a long process of oral development.

Whether or not in the end one shares the early Christian worldview concerning signs, it is ethnocentric to simply despise it. And whether or not in the end one despises it, one cannot objectively expunge from the record the clear evidence that early Christians (and many people since then) believed that they experienced or witnessed these phenomena.

Oxford scholar G. B. Caird long ago remarked,

Luke has often been accused of credulity because he has packed his narrative with signs and wonders, but it would be more in keeping with the evidence to commend him for his faithful reproduction of one of the major constituents of early Christianity. For the Epistles bear their concurrent witness that the preaching of the Gospel was everywhere accompanied by exorcisms and healing and by other forms of miracle.

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