Conclusion
17
Miracles and History in Acts and the Jesus Tradition
This essay does not address Acts alone, but addresses an issue that impacts roughly one-fifth of the narratives in Acts: healing and exorcism reports. More of my past essays on this topic treat the Gospels, since, cumulatively there are more first-century Christian accounts about Jesus’s direct miracles than of those performed by his name in Acts. Nevertheless, what is relevant to Luke’s approach in his Gospel remains relevant to how we understand his approach in Acts.
Traditionally scholars have used the argument from historical analogy to deny the historical plausibility of extraordinary miracle claims in the Gospels and Acts, claims such as visible healings, instant cures of blindness or inability to walk, resuscitations from death and nature miracles. In view of a wide body of global reports available today, the analogy argument today instead shows that, for whatever reasons, eyewitnesses can and do report such experiences. While such analogies do not prove that any such reports from antiquity depend on actual experiences, they do challenge the a priori prejudice against that claim.¹³⁴²
The ancient sources about Jesus unanimously support these claims, and modern analogies allow us to treat such evidence as credible, in contrast to the more skeptical approach of scholars such as Strauss and Bultmann.¹³⁴³ Many experiences have been significant enough to convince those not starting with Christian assumptions; other experiences have included visible physical changes and the sorts of dramatic experiences sometimes reported in the Gospels that are not easily explained in purely psychosomatic terms (including resuscitations and nature miracles).
Potential contributions of such analogies
Given limited space, this essay will not address the philosophic and theological question of whether we should interpret some miracle claims as genuinely divine or superhuman action. Although from a theistic framework many of the examples in this essay would be viewed as miraculous, historically-focused scholars debate the extent to which this question may be addressed within a purely historiographic framework.¹³⁴⁴ I thus address only briefly, and confine primarily to the third point of this introductory section, possible implications of this research for philosophic and theological exploration.¹³⁴⁵
Here I offer instead a very modest challenge to a major traditional argument against the historical reliability of biblical miracle accounts, namely the argument from analogy.¹³⁴⁶ People today, and presumably also in antiquity, have extraordinary experiences analogous to the most often-dismissed experiences reported in the Gospels and Acts, however we explain the causes of those experiences. By “analogous,” I refer to the criterion that has often been used to dismiss as genuine experiences biblical accounts of miracles. Some contend that experiences such as sudden healings of blindness or raisings from the dead do not occur, and therefore have never occurred.
This challenge may contribute to biblical studies in several ways. First, and the area on which this essay focuses: the challenge calls into question the assumption of some scholars that the most dramatic early Christian reports of healings must reflect late, legendary accretions rather than allowing that much of this material could be genuine information ultimately derived from eyewitnesses.
Traditionally writers used the argument from historical analogy against the credibility of many early Christian healing claims; more recently, however, Gerd Theissen and others have shown that the argument from analogy actually suggests the contrary.¹³⁴⁷ Against some traditional Western critical assumptions, millions of eyewitnesses do offer claims comparable to those in the Gospels, however we evaluate them. If such claims can be credibly offered in the twenty-first century, we lack reason to assume that witnesses could not have offered them in the first.
Second, those interested in global readings, including myself, may learn from the way that many Christians in the Majority World read these accounts.¹³⁴⁸ As Yale’s Lamin Sanneh pointed out, through the Majority World western culture “can encounter . . . the gospel as it is being embraced by societies that had not been shaped by the Enlightenment,” and are thus closer to the milieu of earliest Christianity.¹³⁴⁹ In contrast to our typical Western penchant for allegorizing the accounts for exclusively spiritual meanings¹³⁵⁰ or viewing them as embarrassments, many Christians globally find in these accounts encouragement for faith and sometimes even models for ministry.¹³⁵¹
One need not treat such readings as normative to recognize where they challenge our own exegetical blind spots. As to which approach may be closer to the setting of earliest Christianity, we might consider how testimonies functioned elsewhere in antiquity. Surely healing claims posted in Asclepius’s sanctuaries, for example, were not designed solely to satisfy historical interest; instead they invited trust in the god’s power.¹³⁵²
Third, those interested in reading the accounts as Scripture may explore the theological dimension of such claims. We may discuss historical analogies without debating their causation: in fact, psychoimmunology shows that attitudes can affect recovery; many other recoveries reflect misdiagnosis, fraud, or various natural causes. Nevertheless, if one does not a priori exclude theistic explanations—that is, if one does not presuppose atheism or deism—philosophers often find theistic explanations compatible with other explanations, and sometimes more compelling than the alternatives.¹³⁵³
Much of the common modern academic assumption that miracles are impossible rests on David Hume’s essay On Miracles,¹³⁵⁴ the cogency of which is often challenged today among philosophers.¹³⁵⁵ Philosophic theologians and philosophers of religion might use some of the following reports to challenge Hume’s starting assumption that credible eyewitnesses do not report miracles, further weakening the traditional argument against miracles.
This article’s focus, however, remains the first point. I address here primarily the question of historical analogy rather than the metahistorical question of explanations, valuable as the latter quest may be. Historians often confront healing claims, whether or not they wade into the area of extrabiological explanations. Thus Yale historian Ramsay MacMullen emphasizes that “To doubt [witnesses’] account of what they saw—to doubt that [the West African prophet William Wadé] Harris, or any saint, or Jesus himself” performed miracles, is theological interpretation, “good or bad.”¹³⁵⁶ With the healings attributed to Jesus and early Christians, MacMullen and other scholars have compared healing claims surrounding more recent figures.¹³⁵⁷
Analogies take us only so far in terms of historical inquiry, given the idiosyncrasies of distinct historical figures, but they do support the plausibility of the other evidence we have about Jesus as a healer.
Ancient sources about Jesus
Healing and exorcism accounts comprise perhaps one-third of Mark’s Gospel, which the majority of scholars today consider the earliest extant Gospel,¹³⁵⁸ yet they are also a major reason for many traditional critics suspecting the reliability of much of the gospel tradition. Despite a range of explanations for the experiences, however, most historical Jesus scholars today rightly affirm that Jesus’s contemporaries experienced him as a healer.¹³⁵⁹ As Bart Ehrman notes, scholars can recognize Jesus as an exorcist and healer without passing judgment on whether he acted supernaturally.¹³⁶⁰
Virtually all substantial ancient sources about Jesus, including those from his detractors, recognize that his contemporaries experienced him as a healer. This is true of all the layers most often postulated in the gospel tradition: Mark, “Q,” John, special M, and special L.¹³⁶¹ Josephus probably views Jesus partly in these terms.¹³⁶² Later rabbis and the pagan thinker Celsus acknowledge that Jesus performed healings but attribute them to sorcery.¹³⁶³ Compared to most other accounts of healers from antiquity (as opposed to healing shrines), the earliest reports are remarkably close in time to the events reported—many (in Mark and Q) from within a generation.¹³⁶⁴ Given the usual dating for the “we” material in Acts, these reports also stem from within a generation.
Some multiply-attested reports of Jesus’s activity appear particularly dramatic, including healing blindness, resuscitating some dead persons, and on rare occasions what modern scholars call nature miracles.
Strauss and Bultmann
David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) rightly reacted against the implausible naturalistic explanations of Jesus’s miracles offered in some earlier studies about Jesus, such as Jesus’s secret Essene medicaments.¹³⁶⁵ Strauss did not, however, question the radical Enlightenment’s rejection of special divine action on which such explanations were based.¹³⁶⁶ Strauss came up with a naturalistic explanation more critically plausible than the strained hypotheses of his predecessors: namely that our primary sources, the Gospels, were late and unreliable, reporting myths and legends that developed over a period of several generations.¹³⁶⁷ Few scholars today would attempt to date the Gospels as late as did Strauss, but, despite the more compact time frame, some retain Strauss’s conclusion that Jesus’s dramatic miracles reflect mostly legendary developments.
Strauss’s own friend Edward Mörike, virtually unable to walk, found himself cured after visiting the Lutheran pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt, who was known for a ministry of healing and deliverance. Not surprisingly, Strauss dismissed the healing as psychosomatic.¹³⁶⁸ Interestingly, however, he did not attribute it to legendary accretion developed over the course of generations.¹³⁶⁹
In contrast to Karl Barth, who highly respected Blumhardt,¹³⁷⁰ Bultmann dismissed stories of cures surrounding Blumhardt as legend,¹³⁷¹ consistent with his treatment of accounts of dramatic miracles in the Gospels and Acts. Today, however, using journals and letters, historians have shown that reports of dramatic cures, including those that contemporaries believed to be raisings from the dead, do go back to eyewitnesses of Blumhardt’s ministry. Far from being much later memories, witnesses often wrote these accounts immediately after the experiences.¹³⁷²
Widespread miracle beliefs and claims
Bultmann dismissed the need to argue against miracles by claiming that no one in the modern world believes in them.¹³⁷³ By contrast, Justo González retorts that “what Bultmann declares to be impossible is not just possible, but even frequent” in Latino churches.¹³⁷⁴ Hwa Yung, Malaysia’s former Methodist bishop, warns that Bultmann’s assumptions about reality are not shared by Christians in Asia.¹³⁷⁵ In his Oxford monographs on global Christianity, Philip Jenkins emphasizes that healing, visions, and so forth are greatly valued in the Global South.¹³⁷⁶ Even in the West, as many as 80 percent of Americans believe in divine healing.¹³⁷⁷ Such observations challenge the simple dismissal of accounts that seemed more plausible in Bultmann’s immediate context.
More relevant are the figures for those who claim to have witnessed divine healing. A Pew Forum survey of ten countries in 2006 offered percentages that, translated into hard numbers, suggest that in these ten countries alone, and among Pentecostals and charismatics alone, some two hundred million believe that they have witnessed divine healing.¹³⁷⁸ Another finding of the survey seems even more surprising: 39 percent of Christians who do not claim to be Pentecostal or charismatic also claim to have witnessed divine healing.¹³⁷⁹ Another 2008 Pew Forum study concluded that 34 percent of Americans claim to have witnessed divine healing.¹³⁸⁰
Such claims are not limited to Christians, although in this essay I draw especially from Christian claims, with which I am more familiar. Indeed, until recently anthropologists have focused almost exclusively on non-Christian claims.¹³⁸¹ Extraordinary reports from any similar religious contexts remain relevant for the point of historical analogy; how one approaches them theologically is a different question not relevant to the primary question at hand in this chapter.¹³⁸²
The point here is not what proportion of anomalous healing claims involve divine activity; even the most ardent theist would not propose that explanation for all these claims. The point—whether arguing for the possibility of miracles or more simply, as here, for historical plausibility of analogous experiences—is whether human experience regarding spontaneous healing in theistic contexts is as uniformly negative as Hume, Strauss, or Bultmann assumed.¹³⁸³
Experiences that convince non-Christians
As in the Gospels and Acts, not everyone interprets such experiences in the same way.¹³⁸⁴ Nevertheless, it is not only those who begin with Christian presuppositions who find such experiences convincing.¹³⁸⁵ Many, in fact, have found them so convincing that they have changed religious allegiances and often centuries of ancestral traditions on account of them.
As in the Gospels and Acts, the more dramatic experiences appear to be reported most often, though not exclusively, in settings where the Christian message about Jesus is spreading in areas with the least historic exposure to it.¹³⁸⁶ China was not listed in the survey of ten countries mentioned above, but near the turn of the twenty-first-century researchers estimated that between half and 90 percent of all conversions to Christian faith in the previous two decades stemmed from “faith healing experiences.”¹³⁸⁷ Although we lack means to verify any precise percentage, even the lowest estimates refer to millions of people.
Non-Christians also have affirmed healings associated with Christian prayer in India. For example, one survey already in 1981 concluded that one tenth of non-Christians in Chennai “had experienced an important cure through prayer to Jesus.”¹³⁸⁸ One of my seminary’s doctoral students from north India noted that his Baptist church had grown perhaps one hundred times over due to healings of non-Christians in answer to prayer, and there were many other non-Christians healed who appreciated the church but for social reasons did not join it.¹³⁸⁹ Similarly, a predominantly Hindu area in Nickerie, Suriname, that had long been resistant to the Christian message experienced a people movement with tens of thousands of converts after a well-known, aged skeptic was instantly healed of lifelong paralysis.¹³⁹⁰
Such experiences are not new. Irenaeus reports as occurring in his day nearly the same range of miracles that appear in the Gospels and Acts, noting that these were converting many pagans.¹³⁹¹ Tertullian provides names of well-known non-Christians cured from hostile spirits through Christian prayers.¹³⁹² Yale historian Ramsay MacMullen notes that the primary reasons for conversion to Christianity in the 300s were exorcisms and healings.¹³⁹³ In more recent times, such experiences have characterized massive periods of church growth in the 1800s and early 1900s in Asia, for example India,¹³⁹⁴ Indonesia,¹³⁹⁵ Korea,¹³⁹⁶ and China,¹³⁹⁷ as well as in West Africa¹³⁹⁸ and elsewhere.
Not only from the scientifically naïve
Prior philosophic assumptions shape how miracle claims are interpreted, and an inflexible naturalist may always claim that even the least plausible naturalistic interpretation is more plausible than a supernatural one.¹³⁹⁹ Within the Gospels themselves, responses to healings of various sorts diverged widely.¹⁴⁰⁰ Nevertheless, some of these experiences are dramatic enough that they invite special consideration as unusual even from many of those trained, as many of us have been, in methodological naturalism.
A 2004 survey of 1,100 physicians in the United States concluded that 73 percent of doctors believe that miracles such as those in the Bible “can occur today.” More significantly, in the context of this question, over half of doctors also reported seeing “treatment results in their patients that they would consider miraculous.”¹⁴⁰¹
Medical journals rarely include such experiences because scientific journals address especially what is replicable, and purported miracles, as experiences within history, are neither replicable nor completely predictable.¹⁴⁰² (This limitation may be appropriate, restricting scientific inquiry to the scientific method; problems arise only when other useful epistemic approaches are deemed invalid.) Moreover, unusual events that are reported are normally reported as anomalies, not linked with theistic contexts that patients often unfortunately do not even share with their doctors.¹⁴⁰³ Within the limits imposed by a naturalistic method, such cases can be classified only as anomalies, unless sufficient such anomalies can be amassed as to observe any larger patterns among a significant number of them. This is not, however, to deny that any documentation of this sort exists.
The Medical Bureau at Lourdes has been most rigorous in documenting the sort of healings known to occur onsite.¹⁴⁰⁴ Although much more sporadically, since conditions outside specific locations are less predictable, doctors have sometimes offered medical evidence supporting healings in other religious contexts. Thus for example Dr. Rex Gardner, former President of the Newcastle and Northern Counties Medical Society, published case studies regarding anomalous healings that he deemed miraculous, both in a medical journal article and also a book.¹⁴⁰⁵ One case, for example, was the spontaneous healing, in the context of prayer, of a girl’s deafness that was due to auditory nerve damage.¹⁴⁰⁶
From the age of 15 to the age of 31, Barbara Cummiskey’s health was deteriorating due to a severe form of multiple sclerosis. She spent three-quarters of her life in the hospital. She went blind and her paralyzed diaphragm required a tracheostomy; her limbs were curled up and she was unable to move herself. As doctors sent her home from the hospital one last time, they warned that it was unlikely that she would live long enough to return to the hospital. On June 7, 1981, however, she heard a voice, saying, “My child: Get up and walk.” She found herself completely healed, and local media covered the story. The healing has remained; I have the story not only from Barbara but also from her physicians from the time, who concur that it was miraculous.¹⁴⁰⁷
Many witnesses have attested the healings of large numbers of deaf people in Jesus’s name in previously completely unchurched villages in Mozambique.¹⁴⁰⁸ These healings usually lead directly to the planting of churches in these communities that knew the prior and subsequent conditions of the people healed. Researchers documented that a significant proportion of people who received prayer there moved immediately from what would constitute legal deafness or blindness to hearing and sight.¹⁴⁰⁹ Although critics rightly pointed out the limitations of testing conditions in Mozambique, the explanation of the research in a more recent study demonstrates dramatic changes in the subjects’ auditory and visual acuity.¹⁴¹⁰
Other cases include Lisa Larios, a teenager dying from a degenerative disease who was suddenly healed during a religious service; testing showed that even her previously degenerated bones had been restored.¹⁴¹¹ Medical documentation shows that Bruce Van Natta’s mostly destroyed small intestine more than doubled in length after a prayer of faith.¹⁴¹² Nonyem Numbere, a medical doctor, attests the healing of a fractured spine during a worship service.¹⁴¹³ Tonye Briggs, also a medical doctor, provided his eyewitness testimony of a deep and oozing wound healing fully overnight after prayer, preempting the planned amputation.¹⁴¹⁴
In 2006, Carl Cocherell broke his ankle and was told that he would need months of therapy. He experienced God speaking to him and telling him that his foot was not broken, and the two radiology reports, one week apart, show that the fracture had disappeared without a single trace.¹⁴¹⁵ Likewise, Joy Wahnefried, whose vertical heterophoria was such a classic case of the condition that her portrait graced a brochure advertising the condition, was healed as a fellow college student prayed for her. Although from her doctor’s worldview this cure was merely a previously unattested anomaly, no one questioned the cure’s genuineness, which had to be medically verified to remove the visual impairment restriction on her driver’s license.¹⁴¹⁶ Medical documentation attests the healing of a sixteen-year, severe case of gastroparesis after proximal intercessory prayer.¹⁴¹⁷ Many other accounts are likewise documented medically.¹⁴¹⁸
Eyewitnesses’ accounts
Although doctors’ reports are particularly helpful for attesting a significant change in health, first-century reports lack such attestation. Physicians are uniquely competent to evaluate the etiology of diseases and cures, not addressed here, but for the historical argument from analogy, it is sufficient that eyewitnesses whose integrity we have strong reason to trust attest witnessing or experiencing cures in religiously charged contexts.
Eyewitness testimony counts as a form of evidence in sociology, anthropology, history, journalism, and law.¹⁴¹⁹ For most events, such as traffic accidents, we would weigh more heavily a normally trustworthy eyewitness’s claim about the event than the skepticism of a larger number of nonwitnesses who were not present at the event. Granted, various factors may distort the precision of memory, but a consistent core usually remains, especially in memorably significant events.¹⁴²⁰ The accounts in this essay include both some memories preserved over several decades, perhaps relevant to Mark’s Gospel (usually dated four decades after Jesus’s ministry) and accounts offered at the time of their occurrence.
Although examples of miracle claims could be multiplied, preference is given to particular kinds below. Because Hume’s now-traditional argument against miracle claims questioned the sufficiency of witnesses’ integrity, I focus especially on respected witnesses with something to lose. Because sources closest to eyewitnesses on average risk fewer layers of secondary elaboration, I give somewhat greater preference here to witnesses whose integrity I personally know or witnesses I have at least interviewed, allowing me to raise questions and observe responses.
Some ancient Christian writers such as Origen claimed to have witnessed healings.¹⁴²¹ For a time Augustine doubted that cures resembling those in the Gospels and Acts continued in his day, but he was present when his friend Innocent was healed of a painful fistula after prayer. Just two years after beginning to collect documents attesting healings in Hippo alone, Augustine reported seventy cases, not including those not yet formally documented. Some of these were dramatic, including raisings from death and cures of inability to walk.¹⁴²²
As noted earlier, respectable eyewitnesses also abound today, even for some cures at least as dramatic as most reported in the Gospels. Thus, for example, a number of people report witnessing the instant disappearance of goiters. Among them, scholars Wonsuk and Julie Ma report praying for a woman dying from a toxic goiter; they and others present witnessed the goiter’s immediate disappearance.¹⁴²³ I first met personally with Wonsuk, a PhD in Hebrew Bible, when he was executive director of the Oxford Center for Mission Studies, where Julie, a PhD in missiology, was also research tutor.
My close friend Danny McCain, a religion professor at the University of Jos, witnessed the complete and immediate healing of his younger brother’s skin from severe burns during a time of prayer.¹⁴²⁴ Near 1980, I myself involuntarily witnessed an anomalous event that most of those present regarded as divine healing. I had been helping with an evening Bible study at Rose Lane Nursing Home, where Barbara, always bound to her wheelchair, regularly complained about her inability to walk. One evening a middle-aged seminarian named Don took her by the hand and commanded her to rise and walk in the name of Jesus. She looked as horrified as I felt, but he walked her around the room, and from then on, Barbara began to walk, quite proudly.¹⁴²⁵
Due to space constraints, I survey below some examples from just a few categories of anomalies, especially of the sort immediately evident to observers and thus most likely to be dismissed through the traditional scholarly use of the analogy argument.
Cures of blindness
Multiple attestation supports the reports that Jesus cured blindness, and did so more than once.¹⁴²⁶ Whatever the explanations offered for such cures,¹⁴²⁷ they continue to be claimed by witnesses in religious contexts today.
Hundreds of claims of divinely cured blindness are available,¹⁴²⁸ but I will cite only a few examples here. Dr. Rex Gardner reports a case of restored sight through prayer so complete that the man no longer even needed the glasses he had been wearing for twelve years before his accident.¹⁴²⁹ When a medical trainee was healed of a deadly disease, Gardner notes, even her eye scarring disappeared, an event the physicians deemed extraordinary.¹⁴³⁰
Many witnesses report the visible disappearance of white eye coatings or cataracts during prayer.¹⁴³¹ In 2004, Flint McGlaughlin, now director of Enterprise Research at the Transforming Business Institute, Cambridge University, prayed for a blind man in India who could see only shadows. The man’s eyes suddenly cleared and he began shouting that he could see; for days the man walked around, joyfully pondering everything around him.¹⁴³²
Accounts abound in Africa. For example, I received several reports of miracles from Cameroonian Baptist pastor Paul Mokake, previously my MDiv student and afterward a DMin student at the same seminary.¹⁴³³ When another MDiv student close to our family, Yolanda McCain, was visiting Cameroon, she personally witnessed a blind man receive sight when Paul prayed for him, an encounter that Paul confirmed afterward when I inquired.¹⁴³⁴
Dr. Bungishabaku Katho, president of Shalom University in Bunia, Democratic Republic of Congo, notes that in 1993 he and his coworkers, who were evangelizing some villages, prayed for an elderly blind woman. After about two minutes she began shouting that she could see, and she remained sighted for the rest of her life, another decade.¹⁴³⁵ One of my recent students shared his surprise when a blind woman he prayed for in Zambia, on March 14, 2017, was healed when he and a friend prayed.¹⁴³⁶
Such accounts also appear in the United States, where medical documentation is easier to obtain. Suffering from macular degeneration, Greg Spencer was on disability; his vision was 20/400 in the right eye and 20/200 in the left. On April 20, 2002, he was praying for cleansing of his mind from horrible images related to his past work investigating crimes, when he experienced not only a cleansing of his mind, which he deems the greater miracle, but a sudden restoration of his physical sight (to the level of 20/30). Medical reports attest “a remarkable return of his visual acuity.” Since macular degeneration does not normally reverse, the Social Security Administration launched a lengthy investigation, but concluded that he was in fact remarkably restored, free to work, and no longer qualified for disability.¹⁴³⁷
Resuscitations
Multiple attestation supports the belief that Jesus sometimes raised the dead.¹⁴³⁸ An argument from analogy technically cannot undermine this claim because subsequent history reports numerous cases of persons believed dead reviving, including a quite significant number in the context of direct prayer.¹⁴³⁹ John Wesley, for example, prayed for one Mr. Meyrick, who was believed dead, and the latter revived.¹⁴⁴⁰
Scores of accounts of such resuscitations appear today as well, although again I offer merely samples.¹⁴⁴¹ In August 1991, observers and medical staff in Romania had every reason to believe that sixteen-month-old Marius Mada was dead for at least seven hours; his raising and complete healing, regarded by the lead physician as a miracle, precipitated the family’s faith. Years later, Marius remains well.¹⁴⁴² Among many reports from Indonesia, Yusuf Herman, a minister and friend from Indonesia, connected me with his friend Dominggus whose neck had been cut. Journalists’ photographs in my possession attest Dominggus’s apparently dead condition, but he is now alive. Although his neck required medical intervention, once doctors realized that he was now alive, and although Dominggus still bears the scars, he recounts a postmortem experience before his return to life.¹⁴⁴³
According to the former General Secretary of Evangelical Church Fellowship of Ethiopia, Assayehegn Berhe, raisings often occur in Ethiopia.¹⁴⁴⁴ Because of three summers in Nigeria and my wife being from Congo-Brazzaville, we know well some people who have experienced what are believed to be resuscitations. Two of my coworkers in Nigeria attest raisings, one after praying for “a few hours” until a corpse revived and another himself reviving about nine hours after his fatal accident, most of the time spent in a morgue.¹⁴⁴⁵ We interviewed several eyewitnesses of resuscitations in the context of prayer in the mainline Protestant church of Congo-Brazzaville, including my mother-in-law, who reports that she could detect no breathing for three hours in my sister-in-law until a minister friend prayed.¹⁴⁴⁶ After I shared some of these reports in an SBL session, suggesting that listening to Majority World voices could help us better appreciate such accounts in the Gospels, Dr. Ayo Adewuya, an IBR member, shared his own account of his son’s resuscitation after half an hour of prayer.¹⁴⁴⁷
Researchers attribute the beginning of a people movement among the Nishi tribal people in northeast India to the resuscitation through prayer of an official’s son.¹⁴⁴⁸ Two Western sociologists interviewed local eyewitnesses elsewhere in India, including non-Christians, who attested resuscitations through Christian prayer.¹⁴⁴⁹ A pastor from Mumbai shared with me the resuscitation of a Hindu boy, Vikram, after more than an hour of prayer.¹⁴⁵⁰ I interviewed a coworker in the Philippines who gave me her own account of being resuscitated in 1984 immediately after a Baptist minister’s hesitant prayer for her in the morgue.¹⁴⁵¹ Dr. Mervin Ascabano also reports a resuscitation there in 2009, although after a much briefer interval.¹⁴⁵²
In the West, Deborah Watson, my colleague in Greek at my previous seminary, recounted the resuscitation of her younger sister, elaborated for me more fully by Deborah’s father.¹⁴⁵³ Local news media widely reported the resuscitation of John Smith, whose heart started immediately after his mother prayed, after doctors had given up; he required further treatment, but the two doctors who treated him called his restoration a miracle.¹⁴⁵⁴ Cardiologist Chauncey Crandall reports his own experience with the resuscitation of Jeff Markin after forty minutes with no heart activity.¹⁴⁵⁵ Similarly, Sean George, a consultant physician in Kalgoorlie, Australia, attests his own extraordinary resuscitation and recovery, albeit more gradually and with more medical help, and provides full medical documentation online.¹⁴⁵⁶
Irreparable brain damage sets in after six minutes with no oxygen, but none of these cases yielded brain damage. Ten eyewitnesses (not all mentioned above) come from my wife’s immediate family circle or my own immediate circle.¹⁴⁵⁷ If one case is merely an anomaly, the coincidence of ten such anomalies in our immediate circle—the compounding of improbabilities ten times over—seems remarkably anomalous.¹⁴⁵⁸ Granted that mistakes in detecting death are made, one could seek to argue the same for the biblical accounts; that is, the experiences are believable regardless of the explanations we assign to them. The frequent coinciding of these events with prayer, however, seems suggestive, especially when multiple cases appear in the same circle.
Nature miracles
Accounts of nature miracles are less frequent than many other kinds of accounts, but they are more common than most of us in the West would expect. Here again I offer merely samples.¹⁴⁵⁹ Thus, for example, some citizens of one village challenged the Christian witness of a young Watchman Nee and his colleagues, claiming that for two hundred eighty-six years it had never rained on the scheduled day of their local god’s festival. Because one of the Christians announced that this year would be different, the team prayed concertedly, and torrential rain ruined the festival on both its original and rescheduled dates, leading to many conversions.¹⁴⁶⁰
Emmanuel Itapson, who was my colleague in Hebrew Bible at Palmer Seminary, recounts an experience he witnessed in his youth. Ridiculed in the village where he was trying to establish a church, Emmanuel’s father, Anana Itap, angrily warned that it would not rain in the village for the next four days. As his critics left laughing, Itap fell on his face, fearing that he had gone too far. It was, after all, rainy season. For the next four days, rain poured down around the village, but none inside it. At the end of those four days, only one person in the village had not become a Christian, and the local people still relate this account of how it became a Christian village.¹⁴⁶¹
In addition to some students and colleagues who offered me eyewitness accounts of nature miracles¹⁴⁶² I myself was present when a storm, predicted to continue all day, stopped within seconds of a group’s prayer for it to stop.¹⁴⁶³
Conclusion
However explained, surveys suggest that hundreds of millions of people today claim to have witnessed what they consider divine healing. Moreover, millions of people with different starting assumptions have changed centuries of ancestral allegiances on the basis of such experiences. As in the gospel tradition, these experiences do include even healing of blindness, resuscitation of some dead persons through prayer, and occasionally what their reporters consider nature miracles. Some experiences even go beyond the gospel tradition and Acts in reporting instant or nearly instant visible changes such as vanishing goiters.
Scholars will continue to debate the reasons for such experiences. That even firsthand witnesses can claim to experience them, however, should not be denied. The traditional argument from analogy against cures occurring in Jesus’s ministry was designed in a different era, with quite different information available than we have available today.
Reports such as these may challenge conventional skepticism concerning dramatic cures recounted in the Gospels and Acts. Depending on how they are understood, some experiences might also be used to challenge Hume’s presumption against sufficient credible witnesses regarding genuine miracles. For the purposes of this essay, however, what matters most is that, to whatever explanations scholars attribute such experiences, “legendary accretion” is not a necessary assumption even for the most dramatic miracle reports. The presence of such reports in the Gospels and Acts, then, do not compel the assumption that tradition must have developed wildly in the decades before the Evangelists began writing, or that the Evangelists composed such accounts from whole cloth. Those who wish to make such a case should not include the analogy argument against miracles in their arsenal.