12.6. Conclusion
One objection that some scholars raise against the Gospels containing significant historical information is that the Gospels report miracles.1 If multiple or recurrent attestation counts for anything, it seems significant that every layer of gospel tradition depicts Jesus as a healer and exorcist.
Surely this feature indicates widespread corruption in the gospel tradition? Yet all lines of evidence confirm that Jesus’s contemporaries experienced him as a healer and exorcist. Moreover, evidence does not compel us to exclude such reports from dependence on originally eyewitness material. Although we may debate their causes, it is incontrovertible that eyewitnesses do report experiences of healings and exorcisms even today, sometimes even in dramatic ways and on a massive scale. This chapter will remain concise not because the issue is insignificant but because I have treated it extensively (in more than 1,300 pages) in other works, to which I refer the interested reader for further documentation.2
12.1. Paranormal Experiences in Ancient Sources
Although they have not survived and this model does not appear often again until late antiquity, even some earlier biographic works about Pythagorean holy men (some reports about Pythagoras and Empedocles) united magic and philosophy.3 It may be doubted that this was a biographic type, but both features were occasionally attributed to the same persons, just as OT narratives also spoke of some miracle-working prophets. Even in late antique biography, however, miracles were not an essential motif of the divine man4 (important as they are in medieval Christian hagiography). The chief divine characteristic was wisdom,5 also often revealed in asceticism.6 Miracles came into play partly as pagan intellectuals sought “to neutralize Christian miracles” with miracles of their own.7
There is not space to digress at length here, but I must briefly treat objections against the Gospels being biographies based on their exalted views of Jesus8 or, the focus here, because of their accounts of miracles and exorcisms.9 Such objections usually start with the premise that the earliest witnesses would not have reported such elements, and then regard the gospel tradition as suspect because (or at least where) it includes such elements. Scholars sometimes dismiss the historical reliability of information behind miracle accounts or other anomalies without further consideration, lumping them all together as mythical or hagiographic. Some even appear to create a new, overarching and interpretive wonder-working category for the Gospels and much later sources potentially influenced by them.10 Although some supernatural claims ultimately do merit dismissal, this a priori approach for information about anomalies behind all supernatural claims too readily assumes what it may hope to prove.
Most ancient historians did attribute some events to deities or to providence;11 many reported prodigies or omens,12 and even two historians generally reluctant to report signs mentioned the report of two healings connected with Vespasian.13 Unlike the Evangelists, many ancient writers did avoid committing themselves either for or against supernatural explanations for some kinds of events that they found in their sources.14 The Gospels are closer in this respect to Israelite historiography, which did not object to reporting divine action.15
Livy includes reports of many prodigies, or omens, for each year.16 These are not Livy’s creation; he has them from official reports, which go back to various popular claims.17 Priests may have accepted many of these claims into their reports uncritically because they fit their role as not critical historians but as collectors and interpreters of omens. Some claims, such as lightning striking temples or the aurora borealis, were real phenomena but were gathered from anywhere in the whole of Italy.18 This contrasts with reports in the Gospels, associated with a single figure whose chief witnesses were known to the entire movement (cf. chs. 14–16).
One may or may not accept some of the miracle accounts as reflecting traditions or reports about genuine experiences, but rejecting them simply because they are miracle accounts, a common recourse in the heyday of rationalism, is less universally appealing in a multicultural, twenty-first-century world.
In one venue where I presented an early version of this book’s argument, an interlocutor replied that the Gospels are not comparable to other biographies, because the Gospels report miracles. Biographies of emperors relied on public information, he maintained, and biographies of sages relied on traditions within the sages’ schools. But Jesus was a healer and an exorcist, and (he argued) we lack biographies of such figures. I would respond in part by pointing out that Jesus was of course a sage with disciples, and he had already conceded that schools normally preserved information about their founding sages. That, however, is a discussion reserved for a later chapter (ch. 15), so let me for the moment address his central problem with the analogy.
It is not true that we lack biographic-style accounts of miracle workers, but it is true that we lack extant biographic works about miracle workers before the time of Jesus. This is not, however, because the genre is different; biographies of emperors, of sages, and of miracle workers—or for that matter of generals or orators—differ not in overall genre (a work about a historic person) but in subject (the kind of person, which affects the sorts of accounts presented).
That is, we lack biographies of figures like Jesus not because the genre is different but because Jesus himself is different: we lack many comparable figures prior to Jesus, in terms of the combination of sages who were also known as miracle workers (i.e., what was once generalized as the “divine man” type).19 Some viewed Pythagoras and Empedocles as both magicians and teachers,20 but no biographic type united these characteristics, at least not outside Pythagoreanism, where it subsequently emerges with a narrative about Apollonius. Nor even centuries later were miracles a motif in hagiographies of “divine men.”21
Biographies of sages were common enough, but not miracle-working sages. As classicist Mark Edwards points out, Mark “fills his book with miracles, more abundantly than any surviving pagan text.”22 There were alleged magicians and, in Jewish sources, figures more like Jesus such as Elijah, Elisha, and Onias (the rabbis’ “Honi the Circle-Drawer”).23 Indisputably the Elijah and Elisha narratives strongly influenced Jesus, the gospel tradition, and the Gospels.24 But Elijah and Elisha were not subjects of extant biographies, nor do most narratives about them stem from within living memory of them.
The issue is thus not one of genre—biography—but of the role that Jesus filled. As noted earlier, there are ways that the Gospels differ from other biographies (as also many other biographies differ from one another). Yet, excluding literary analogies to the Gospels because Jesus’s role is distinctive excludes a sort of evidence that is too relevant on other grounds to dismiss. Using Jesus’s miracles to exclude the Gospels from the genre of biography contemporary in their period makes the Gospels’ genre unique (with speedy new legends about Jesus’s miracles) so that Jesus will not be. (And “If Jesus did nothing out of the ordinary,” memory theorist Barry Schwartz points out, “why did his contemporaries remember him at all?”)25
Granted, those who do not believe miracles possible, or at least not possible if associated with Jesus, may believe that they have other reasons to question such accounts. But the designation “miracles” involves a level of interpretation that different observers of the same sort of events or experiences describe as anomalies—and there is not much dispute as to whether anomalies occur. The strong majority of historical Jesus scholars affirm that, whatever the causes (e.g., psychosomatic or supernatural), Jesus was known as a wonder-worker. Because I have treated this subject extensively elsewhere, I survey it only briefly in this chapter here.26
12.2. The Early Christian Worldview
The earliest Christian sources never claim that healings and exorcisms were unique to Jesus. In fact, they report some non-Christian wonder-workers (e.g., Acts 8:9–11) and exorcists (e.g., Matt 12:27//Luke 11:19; Acts 19:13), as well as expectations of false prophetic or demon-inspired signs in the future (Mark 13:22; 2 Thess 2:9; Rev 13:13). They affirmed that some of Jesus’s followers continued to perform such signs (e.g., Acts 4:30; 6:8; 14:3; 1 Cor 12:9–10, 28–29), some reported by eyewitnesses (e.g., Rom 15:19), and they even recalled them to other eyewitnesses (2 Cor 12:12).
Their belief in paranormal activity is consistent with the wider ancient Mediterranean culture. Contemporary reports of anomalies from their era abound, though many of them are susceptible to varied explanations.27 We weigh these reports one at a time rather than dismissing them outright, giving more credence to public reports (e.g., lightning striking a deity statue) than to random and unprovenanced, isolated reports (e.g., a lamb said to be born with a human head).28 Biographies from the early empire do occasionally report healing experiences associated with recent public figures,29 though these figures were not typically known for wonder-working.
Their beliefs and reports of experience are also consistent with most cultures through history and today.30 However one chooses to explain them, anomalous experiences, often associated with cultic or spiritual activity, are widespread.31 Many traditional religious contexts report healing, especially in ritual settings.32 Some scholars thus compare Jesus with various other documented modern cases of shamans, folk healers, or other agents of numinous power reported, in historical documentation or anthropological field reports.33
The same may be said for the Gospel accounts of demonization and exorcism, although most Western readers today demur from the typical ancient understanding of such experiences.34 Anthropologists have documented that the strong majority of the world’s cultures report experiences indigenously understood as possession by spirits.35 For cultures that construe some such experiences negatively, some Western scholars find exorcism a culturally sensitive cure, whether or not they accept the indigenous belief in spirits.36
Likewise, some scholars have found here fertile bases for comparisons with NT accounts.37 Indeed, already nineteenth-century critic David Friedrich Strauss, who viewed many miracle accounts in the Gospels as much later legends, explored, and materialistically reinterpreted, possession accounts in the German countryside to help him understand the accounts in the Gospels.38 Insofar as we can compare any of the Gospels with their sources (here Matthew and Luke with Mark), the Evangelists do not seem to have transformed in significant ways the essential substance of the healing and exorcism accounts they received.39 (To claim that Jesus was not deemed a miracle worker in his own day and that miracle stories simply “grew”40 begs the question of what they grew from.)
12.3. Evidence for Jesus as a Healer
It would be difficult for scholars to dismiss the evidence that Jesus was experienced by his contemporaries as a healer. This evidence appears throughout the sources about Jesus and was acknowledged (though as sorcery) even by his earliest known detractors.
The earliest sources about Jesus unanimously depict him as a healer and exorcist, even though there was no tradition that required prophets to perform such actions. Although each of the other Gospels include some additional accounts, our earliest Gospel, Mark, expends the greatest proportion of space on Jesus as a healer and exorcist. Writing probably within four decades of Jesus’s execution, Mark devotes some 40 percent of his narrative to these scenes.41 Even some frequently skeptical scholars support the plausibility of Mark’s “admission” that Jesus could not heal in one location where people refused to believe (Mark 6:5).42
Although Q does not include many narratives, it does include some summary statements by Jesus that confirm the sort of activity noted in Mark. In Q, Jesus presents his healings (Matt 11:5//Luke 7:22) and exorcisms (Matt 12:28//Luke 11:20) as signs of the kingdom. In a saying that surely stems from Galilee and probably from Jesus’s public ministry,43 Jesus expects God to judge Galilean villages that have not welcomed his miracles more fully (Matt 11:21//Luke 10:13). In all our traditions about Jesus, healing is as central to his activity as the kingdom is in his teaching.44 The healing of the centurion’s servant, placed at a similar location in the narratives of both Matthew (8:5–13) and Luke (7:1–10), also probably was in Q. Even if we had only our earliest sources devoted to Jesus’s ministry or teaching, namely (on the predominant view), Mark and Q, Jesus’s role as a miracle worker would remain paramount and include all the major forms of miracle stories in the Gospels.
So pervasive was the recollection of this dimension of Jesus’s ministry that no ancient authors seek to deny it. Jesus’s later detractors, including later rabbis and the hostile gentile writer Celsus, acknowledged Jesus’s healings and exorcisms, though denying that they were divine acts (see already Mark 3:22).45 (Later rabbis also associated Jesus’s followers with healings,46 as do the Book of Acts47 and second-century Christian sources.)48
More important (and more neutral), Josephus regards Jesus as a sage who “performed astonishing works,” using the same expression that he uses elsewhere for Elisha’s miracles.49 A majority of scholars thus agree with the Jewish expert Geza Vermes, an Oxford professor renowned for his work on ancient Jewish sources and Jesus, that Josephus depicts Jesus as a miracle-working sage.50
Although they were offered in a milieu far more open to supernatural claims than our own, such claims were not invented to conform to any cultural expectations. No such claims were offered for other well-known prophetic figures such as John. Josephus mentions some figures soon after Jesus who promised public signs, but they failed to perform them, and their signs did not involve healing or exorcism.51 All evidence also suggests that their movements, unlike that of Jesus, failed to outlive them.52
Because of such evidence, most scholars who research historical-Jesus questions agree that Jesus’s contemporaries experienced him as a miracle worker.53 To do otherwise would undermine all historical criteria used to evaluate other claims about Jesus. For example, E. P. Sanders considers it “almost indisputable,”54 and Morton Smith, skeptical about much of the Jesus tradition, regards Jesus’s miracles as the most certain memory about him.55 This verdict remains the consensus, despite the wide divergence of opinion on the causes of such experiences.
12.4. A Nonbiographic Alternative?
Mythography was not biography, although it recycled tradition, and historians and biographers sometimes lacked other material to depend on for the legendary period many centuries earlier.56 (Historians often noted this difference in the quality of such primeval materials.)57 But such mythography addressed the distant past, not recent historical persons.
Whether one believes in supernatural activity or not, the Gospels’ reports of healings and exorcisms differ starkly from the composite creatures and divine rapes that characterize so many myths in the engaging myth collections of Apollodorus or Ovid.58 They appear comparable only through the lens of a modernist Western conflation of all supernatural claims, from all cultures and eras. The Gospels take for granted a theistic worldview, but this factor no more diminishes their character as ancient biography than the works of ancient polytheistic historians (sometimes replete with scenes understood as divine judgments)59 exclude them from ancient historiography. Millions of people claim experiences today with what they consider miracles, but this does not make the genre of their claims, or even their collected claims, mythography.60
This observation is not meant to preclude the observation that legendary elements may grow in stories over time. Such elements may appear in infancy narratives about key figures61 or the apparition involved in Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon62 (missing in Caesar’s own account over a century and a half earlier). Yet I am aware of no instances of full-scale mythography in antiquity regarding figures within two generations; if exceptions exist, they are far from the norm.63
Although Jesus was distinctive in many respects, healing reports are not limited to him alone, as we have noted. Still, although we know of many sages and philosophic schools, we have few reports of itinerant individual healers. Most reports of healing in this period are connected instead with temples of Asclepius or the like. A more proximate model for Jesus, although not the subject of biographies per se, would be Elijah, who also provided the model for an eschatological prophet (cf. Mal 4:5; Sir 48:10).64
The closest Greek analogy is Apollonius, but our major account of Apollonius comes from the third century, in a period when the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus were already influential and circulating widely.65 Hero veneration led to hagiography in its late antique form, with a mythography in person-centered, biographic form less characteristic of earlier periods.66 Reading this evolving genre back into first-century biographies, however, would be like viewing Jesus as a Hellenistic divine man—anachronistic and sometimes reversing the direction of influence.67
Some scholars also point out that only Jesus’s miracles are explicitly associated with the kingdom68 (at least if we exclude Josephus’s subsequent prophets who failed to produce the promised signs) and that Jesus is a bearer, rather than just a petitioner, of numinous power.69
12.5. Miracle Reports Can Come from Eyewitnesses
Whereas the limited ancient analogies to Jesus’s miracles help illustrate how Jesus’s contemporaries understood him, modern analogies play a different role. By offering a sociological control, they challenge traditional hypotheses about how long it takes for miracle reports to develop.70 That is, they undermine David Friedrich Strauss’s nineteenth-century argument that miracle stories point up the Gospels’ legendary character.71 So far was Strauss captive to his philosophic assumptions that he failed to take adequate account of experiences about which he himself knew.72 Modern memory theory also challenges Strauss’s approach.73 (Still, although his insistence on lengthy development for accounts of miracles is implausible, it is at least more plausible than that of some rationalists of the era who thought that Jesus used secret Essene medicines!)74
Far from being merely legendary, reports of what observers construe as miracles can stem even from eyewitnesses and can be reported even on the very day of the experience.75 No one, of course, claims that the Gospels were composed immediately after the events they report, and virtually all scholars recognize that the Evangelists (and prior tradents) edited the traditions available to them. My point, however, is simply that their reports of healings and exorcisms need not be Markan or other inventions. Miracle stories can reflect imagination and legend, but especially in the first generation, they often reflect genuine recoveries.
Healing reports continue in various religious contexts, as already noted, including in Christian circles. When extrapolated in hard numbers, the results of a 2006 Pew Forum survey appear to suggest that hundreds of millions of Christians globally today claim to have directly witnessed divine healing.76 While no one thinks that all these claims represent genuine anomalies, they do challenge the traditional argument against miracle claims—the argument that no respectable eyewitnesses offer such claims.77
Moreover, the Christian reports do not involve only people starting with Christian premises. Around the world, vast numbers of converts report socially costly abandonment of centuries of traditions to become Christians because of healings they or those near them witnessed;78 presumably they considered such experiences different in kind from the natural recoveries with which they were familiar. Thus, for example, millions of conversions in China (not included in the above study) are attributed to what one official source deemed “faith healing experiences.”79 Large numbers of non-Christians in India report being healed through Christian prayer as well.80 As Yale historian Ramsay MacMullen points out, exorcism and miracles also constituted the primary causes of conversion that Christians noted even in the fourth century.81
Scholars vary in their explanations for such recoveries. The placebo effect,82 misdiagnosis83 and misunderstanding likely account for many unexpected recoveries; some researchers also find connections between unusual cures and altered-state-of-consciousness experiences.84 Some reports certainly involve fraud;85 some involving an earlier period in one’s life may involve memory distortions.86 Drawing on medical anthropology and psychoimmunology, John Pilch, considering the Gospels, helpfully emphasizes the cultural framing of illnesses and how beliefs affect immune responses.87 Psychiatrist Donald Capps also helpfully suggests that Jesus may have psychologically cured not only psychosomatic but also psychogenic disorders.88
Even such explanations, however, do not easily account for documented anomalous recoveries of infants or persons pronounced dead.89 They also would presumably not account for most instant cures of blindness.90 While Western prayer studies have remained inconclusive or even negative, some apparently organic prayer cures have been studied in their indigenous contexts with surprising results.91 I or my wife personally know and trust many of the witnesses I have interviewed, including some relatives, for some of these extraordinary claims, although again this observation does not resolve the question of interpretation. So-called nature miracles are much more debated, being less frequent in both the Gospels and modern reports, although experiences that eyewitnesses interpret as such events are reported today.92
Global perspectives on “miracles,” with some of which I am sympathetic, have also been much more open to supernatural explanations than are traditional modern Western approaches.93 Philosophy of religion has also become more open to theistic explanations than it once was.94 In any case, explanations may be treated separately from whether people had experiences such as those reported. Historians addressing religious cures may report them without passing judgment on their causes,95 sometimes relegating that question to theologians or philosophers.96
Again, this chapter remains brief because I have treated the topics at length elsewhere. Nevertheless, the vast majority of historical-Jesus scholars affirm that many of Jesus’s contemporaries experienced him as a healer and exorcist, however this is explained today. It is one of the most widely attested features of Jesus’s ministry throughout the primary sources. Likewise, the evidence is overwhelming that eyewitnesses report dramatic healings and exorcisms today, however we explain them. If Jesus’s contemporaries experienced him as a healer and exorcist, one would expect this element to feature in biographies of him, just as it does in modern biographies of modern healers. This focus thus does not count against the biographic character of the Gospels.
1. My focus here will be on healings and exorcisms. The modern definitions of miracles (on the often problematic character of which, see Horsley, Magic, 3–32; Johnson, Miracles, 21–43; a helpful alternative title for what is often intended could be “special divine action”; see, e.g., Gwynne, Action) often fail to correspond to biblical cases so classified, but I retain the conventional modern nomenclature for the sake of general intelligibility.
2. Keener, Acts, 1:320–82; “Comparisons”; “Miracle Reports and Argument”; “Miracle Reports: Perspectives”; Miracles; “Miracles (2017)”; “Possession”; “Raised”; “Reassessment”; “Spirits.”
3. Cox, Biography, 31–33.
4. Cox, Biography, 48; cf. Edwards, “Genre,” 59.
5. Cox, Biography, 21–24.
6. Cox, Biography, 25–30.
7. Cox, Biography, 142; cf. also (cited by her) Dodds, Pagan, 109.
8. Answered somewhat in Keener, “Parallel Figures”; more fully, e.g., Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ; Hays, Reading Backwards; Gathercole, Son; Tilling, Christology; Fletcher-Louis, Christological Origins; Loke, Origin.
9. Addressed more fully in Keener, “Comparisons”; Miracles; “Possession”; “Reassessment.” Dismissal of Jesus’s miracles and status has been a frequent basis for rejecting gospel accounts that claim them (noted, e.g., in Schnabel, Jesus in Jerusalem, 3).
10. See, e.g., De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 17; Konstan and Walsh, “Biography,” 28; cf. William Hansen in Becker, Birth, 120–21.
11. See esp. Squires, Plan, 15–20, 38–51; e.g., Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1.209, 346; 2.174, 223, 236; 4.109; 17.353.
12. Tacitus, Annals 12.43, 64; 14.32; 15.22, 47; 16.13; Suetonius, Julius 81.3; Arrian, Alexander 4.15.7–8; Appian, Civil Wars 1.9.83; 2.5.36; 2.10.68; 4.1.4. See further Keener, Acts, 1:344–50; Keener, Miracles, 37, 80–82, 87–96; Squires, Plan, 78–84, 102; Edwards, “Introduction,” xviii–xix; Becker, Birth, 112.
13. Tacitus, Histories 4.81; Suetonius, Vespasian 7.3. For “signs” in histories, cf. Plümacher, Geschichte, 33–84, though against his understanding of tragic-pathetic history, see Rutherford, “Tragedy,” 513–14, following Walbank, “Tragedy” = Papers, 241.
14. See, e.g., Pliny, Natural History 28.5.29; Tacitus, Histories 2.50; Lucian, How to Write History 60; Aune, Environment, 134; McDonald, “Herodotus,” 87; see further discussion in Keener, Acts, 1:344–48.
15. Cf. Dormeyer, “Historii.”
16. E.g., Livy, History 21.62.1–5; 24.10.6–11; 24.44.8; 25.7.7–9; 26.23.4–5; 27.4.11–14; 27.11.2–5; 27.37.1–6; 29.14.2; 32.8.2; 33.26.7–8; 34.45.6–7; 35.9.2–4; 35.21.3–6; 36.37.2–3; 40.45.1–4; 41.13.1–2; 41.21.12–13; 42.2.4–5; 43.13.3–6; 45.16.5.
17. See Livy, History 21.62.1; 24.10.6; 27.37.2; 29.14.2.
18. See, e.g., Livy, History 21.62.5; 27.11.2–3; 27.37.1–4; 29.14.3; 32.1.10–12; 32.8.2–3; 35.9.2–4; Appian, Civil Wars 2.5.36; 2.10.68; 4.1.4; Orlin, “Religion,” 60.
19. See, e.g., Tiede, Figure; Holladay, Theios aner; Gallagher, Divine Man; Pilgaard, “Theios aner”; Keener, “Parallel Figures.”
20. Cox, Biography, 31–33.
21. Cox, Biography, 48.
22. Edwards, “Genre,” 59.
23. See esp. the concerns of Eve, Miracles, 274–95; Theissen and Merz, Guide, 307–8.
24. See, e.g., Meier, Marginal Jew, 2:1044–45; Meier, “Project”; Frickenschmidt, Evangelium, 127–28; Collins, Mark, 29; Ytterbrink, Gospel, 39, 227–28; Edwards, “Genre,” 59.
25. Schwartz, “Smoke,” 30; on Schwartz’s influence in contemporary memory studies, see, e.g., Thatcher, “Schwartz”; on Halbwach, Assmann and Schwartz, see Keith, “Social Memory Theory,” 354–76. On Jesus’s distinctive personality, which pervades the gospel tradition, scholars often cite Dodd, Founder, 21–22; see Dunn, Tradition, 200n3, 213n3; Neither Jew nor Greek, 213n12; “Remembering Jesus,” 204n48; also McIver, Memory, 181; Bird, Gospel, 81n23. Noting the remark’s subjectivity yet inclined to agree, see Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 75n292; Allison, Constructing Jesus, 23.
26. Keener, Acts, 1:320–82; “Comparisons”; “Historicity of Nature Miracles”; “Miracle Reports and Argument”; “Miracle Reports: Perspectives”; Miracles; “Miracles (2015)”; “Miracles (2017)”; “Raised”; “Reassessment.”
27. Celestial phenomena were public, but their interpretation was usually as subjective as it remains today (e.g., I write this a few hours after viewing an old friend’s Facebook account on which she had posted a photograph of a cloud formation that she took to be an angel, a judgment that I do not share).
28. For such mismatched heads and the like, aside from some modern tabloids (or misconstruals of actual congenital cephalic malformations), see, e.g., Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 1.6.5; Livy, History 32.8.3; Appian, Civil Wars 1.9.83; fictitiously, Phaedrus, Fables 3.3.4–5. Cf. even Livy’s warnings in his History 21.62.1; 24.10.6.
29. Claims associated with Vespasian in Tacitus, Histories 4.81; Suetonius, Vespasian 7.2–3; later, Dio Cassius, Roman History 65.8.1.
30. See, e.g., comments in Pilch, Visions, 17; Pilch, Dictionary, 81–82. Emic explanations are no more biased than etic ones (cf. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 196–97); emic explanations are usually better informed about their local culture, whereas etic ones are informed about more cultures.
31. See, e.g., Cardeña, Lynn, and Krippner, Varieties; McClenon, Events; McClenon, Healing; McClenon, “Shamanic Healing”; McClenon and Nooney, “Experiences.”
32. See, e.g., Barnes and Sered, Religion and Healing; Barnes and Talamantez, Teaching Religion and Healing; Turner, Experiencing Ritual; Turner, Hands; Turner, Healers, 39–50, 60–69, 76–82, 93–96, 96–100, 142–46; Scherberger, “Shaman,” 59–64; and, though overlooked by a couple of critics who neglected to survey the table of contents, Keener, Miracles, 242–49. In Christian settings, see, e.g., Brown, Healing.
33. See, e.g., MacMullen, Christianizing, 7; Ashton, Religion, 32–40; Eve, Miracles, 357–59; Craffert, “Healer”; Craffert, Life; Klutz, Exorcism Stories, 196–97; McClymond, Stranger, 83; Pilch, “Usefulness,” 100.
34. For ancient reports and conceptualizations, see esp. Ferguson, Demonology; Keener, Miracles, 769–87; Keener, Acts, 3:2429–41.
35. See, e.g., Bourguignon, “Spirit Possession Belief,” 18–21; Bourguignon, “Introduction,” 17–19; see further Bourguignon, “Appendix”; Lewis, Ecstatic Religion; Zaretsky, Bibliography; Crapanzaro and Garrison, Case Studies; Ward, “Possession,” 126; Boddy, “Spirit Possession,” 428–34; Behrend and Luig, Spirit Possession; Keller, Hammer.
36. Martínez-Taboas, “Seizures”; Singleton, “Spirits,” 478; Heinze, “Introduction,” 14; Goodman, Demons, 125.
37. Borg, Vision, 62; Borg, Jesus, 149–50; Crossan, Historical Jesus, 315–17; Loubser, “Possession”; more extensively Davies, Healer, 22–42; Witmer, Galilean Exorcist, 22–60; Keener, “Possession”; Keener, Miracles, 788–856; esp. Keener, Acts, 3:2441–56; Tibbs, “Possession”; Crooks, “Psychology”; Keener, “Spirits”; Vaughn, “Possession.”
38. See Fabisiak, Side, esp. 69–102, on his critique of miracles, and 103–39, on “the nocturnal side of nature.” I am grateful to Prof. Juan Hernandez for bringing this work to my attention.
39. See McCasland, Finger, 51, 53; Williams, Miracle Stories, 53–54. Luke may add observers’ reactions; Plutarch does the same, apparently with Thucydides (Pelling, Texts, 48).
40. Ehrman, Before Gospels, 221–22, conceding that his “is a minority position.”
41. See, e.g., Placher, Mark, 76.
42. Cf. Funk and Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus, 85.
43. Few outside Galilee knew Chorazin, and Bethsaida’s consistent name in the Gospels was probably consistently its name only until roughly 30 CE (the likeliest date that it became the city Julias); see further Theissen, Gospels, 49–52; Charlesworth, “Sketch,” 97; cf. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.28; Adinolfi, “Lago”; Strickert, “Founding.”
44. Betz, Jesus, 60; Theissen and Merz, Guide, 281 (see more fully 281–315).
45. See, e.g., Loos, Miracles, 156–67; Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 79.
46. See, e.g., Herford, Christianity, 103–17; Pritz, Nazarene Christianity, 96–97.
47. See discussion in Keener, Acts, 1:320–82.
48. See, e.g., Quadratus, Apology frag.; Keener, Miracles, 361–63, 543–44; the fuller surveys of ancient Christian healing in Woolley, Exorcism, 13–25; Frost, Healing, 61–110; Kelsey, Healing, 135–99; Young, “Miracles in History,” 106–8; Kelhoffer, “Miracle Workers.” The ascendancy of unbridled hagiography makes many Christian reports from the fourth century and following less dependable, except where (as in Augustine’s diocese; City of God 22.8) they were better documented. Whatever else might be debated in Knapp, Dawn, the centrality of miracle claims in early Christian expansion is clear.
49. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 9.182; 18.63.
50. See esp. Vermes, “Notice”; Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 79; Meier, Marginal Jew, 2:621; Theissen and Merz, Guide, 74.
51. On the sign prophets, see, e.g., Barnett, “Sign Prophets”; Gray, Prophetic Figures, 112–44; Eve, Miracles, 296–325. For the contrast with Jesus, see, e.g., Theissen and Merz, Guide, 308–9.
52. Cf. also the distinctive continuing of OT-like claims among Jesus’s followers regarding the prophetic experience of the divine Spirit and miracles; cf. discussion in Keener, Acts, 1:519–28, 537–49.
53. For this summary of consensus, see also Brown, Death, 143–44; Blackburn, “Miracles,” 362; Eve, Miracles, 16–17; Welch, “Miracles,” 360; Green, “Healing,” 758; Dunn, Remembered, 670; Hultgren, “Stories,” 134–35; Twelftree, “Message,” 2518–19; Le Donne, Historiographic Jesus, 175–76.
54. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 11; cf. similarly Betz, Jesus, 58; see the detailed work of Meier, Marginal Jew, 2:617–45, 678–772.
55. Smith, Magician, 16.
56. Many spoke of “myths” (or particular myths) negatively for being untrue, e.g., Plato, Republic 2.377C–383C; Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods 2.28.70 (a Stoic); Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 4.7.4; Lucian, Amber 3, 5–6; Sacrifices 5; Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 2.1.554; Heroicus 34.4; 50.1–2; Iamblichus, Pythagorean Life 32.218; Libanius, Anecdote 3.27; Syncellus, Chronography, p. 73 (discussing Manetho, Aegyptiaca frag. 2.3). Others contended that myths communicated truth in pleasurable ways (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 1.2.2; Maximus of Tyre, Philosophical Orations 4.5–6); cf. comments about poetry in ch. 7.
57. See, e.g., Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 1.6.2; Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 139, noting Quintilian, Orator’s Education 2.4.18–19, and Livy’s repeated warnings in the first ten books of his History.
58. Only later, and perhaps in response to the Gospels, do we see mythical figures treated individually in something like a biographic manner (perhaps in Philostratus’s Heroicus).
59. See, e.g., Polybius, Histories 31.9.1–4; 32.15.3, 10–14; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 14.63.1; 14.69.2; 27.4.3; Appian, Roman History 3.12.1–2; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 12.358–59; cf. Pausanias, Description of Greece 3.23.3–5; 9.33.6; in biography, see Cornelius Nepos, On Great Generals 17 (Agesilaus), 4.8.
60. See “Spirit and Power: A 10–Country Survey of Pentecostals,” Pew Forum Survey (October 2006), a 231-page report available at http://pewforum.org/surveys/pentecostal; Alexander, Signs, 17; Keener, Miracles, 237–39; cf. Woodward, “Miracles”; Währisch-Oblau, “Healthy,” 92–93; Oblau, “Healing,” 313; Tang, “Healers,” 481.
61. Cf., e.g., Suetonius, Augustus 94.4; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 6.1.2–4; Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 1.4–5; Menander Rhetor, Epideictic Treatises 2.1–2, 371.5–6; Hermogenes, Progymnasmata 7.15; Shuler, Genre, 94; Klauck, Context, 300; Keener, Matthew, xxix, 84–85.
62. Suetonius, Julius 32; cf. discussions in Beneker, “Crossing”; Rondholz, “Rubicon.” This apparition could have originated as political propaganda from Caesar’s faction, but it does not appear even in Velleius Paterculus, History 2.49.4, composed ca. 30 CE, roughly eighty years after the crossing. Caesar’s postmortem comet was a genuine astronomical event.
63. More generally, myths usually appear in other genres than in a work about a person in any case, but historians and biographers did treat mythical figures, albeit with the reservations noted in ch. 9.
64. For OT models, see Koskenniemi, Miracle-Workers.
65. See discussion in Keener, Miracles, 53–56; Keener, Acts, 1:330–33; cf. Klauck, Context, 170; Cangh, “Miracles,” 224–26.
66. Thus contrast Philostratus, Life of Apollonius (on Apollonius) and Heroicus (on Protesilaos) with earlier works such as Apollodorus, Library, and Ovid, Metamorphoses. On Apollonius, see, e.g., Keener, Acts, 1:329–33.
67. See Tiede, Figure; Holladay, Theios aner; Gallagher, Divine Man; Pilgaard, “Theios aner”; Koskenniemi, “Background,” 105–7; Lane, “Christology”; Blackburn, “ΘΕΙΟΙ ΑΝΔΡΕΣ.”
68. Theissen and Merz, Guide, 290.
69. See Eve, Miracles, 289, 295, 378.
70. Cf. Derico, Tradition, 249–50, for parallels in independent accounts of a miracle report from during the reporters’ lifetimes; and see numerous accounts in Keener, Miracles.
71. Many form critics applied Strauss’s approach regarding miracles to the larger Synoptic tradition (Collins, Mark, 34).
72. See Ising, Blumhardt, 92–94, 222–23. Strauss did, however, recognize possession experiences and the like, while interpreting them differently; see Fabisiak, Side. For theologians who honor Blumhardt’s legacy, see Barth, Letters, 251; Heim, Transformation, 173–74; Moltmann, “Blessing,” 149.
73. See Schwartz, “Smoke,” 29–30.
74. As also noted in Dunn, “Quest,” 304. For accounts of such eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century claims, see Schweitzer, Quest, 39–45. Aside from misrepresenting the Essenes, these critics grossly overestimated the capacities of ancient medicine (on which, see, e.g., Keener, Acts, 1:416–19).
75. E.g., my personal journal reports my eyewitness experience of a serious storm that stopped within seconds after a college student prayed for it to stop, November 6, 1993; an apparent resuscitation in John Wesley’s journal for December 25, 1742 (cf. Kidd, “Healing,” 159; Tomkins, Wesley, 106).
76. The United States was among the ten nations polled. The 231-page report, “Spirit and Power,” includes not only percentages of Pentecostals and charismatics in the ten countries (the direct subject of the survey) who claim to have witnessed divine healing (totalling perhaps 200 million), but also an average of more than one-third of other Christians.
77. The argument of Hume (Miracles), which followed some earlier deists (Burns, Debate, 9–10, 70–95, 141). Although Hume retains philosophic defenders (see esp. Fogelin, Defense), a majority of philosophers today seem to reject Hume’s argument; see, e.g., Swinburne, Miracle; Swinburne, “Evidence,” 198; Ward, “Believing”; Evans, Narrative, 153–54; Parikh, “Argument” (cf. also discussion in Keener, Miracles, 107–70); esp. Houston, Miracle; Johnson, Hume; Earman, “Bayes”; Earman, Failure; Earman, “Hume.”
78. See, e.g., Yung, “Integrity,” 173–75; Bomann, Faith, 62; Knapstad, “Power,” 78; Ma, “Encounter,” 136; earlier, and particularly extensively, De Wet, “Signs.”
79. Währisch-Oblau, “Healthy,” 92–93, citing an estimate of half of all conversions; the estimate in Tang, “Healers,” 481, is 90 percent.
80. Bergunder, Movement, 233; cf. Bergunder, “Miracle Healing,” 298.
81. MacMullen, Christianizing, 61–62.
82. See Droege, Faith Factor, 15–33; Matthews and Clark, Faith Factor, 179–81; Benson, Healing, 34, 36–37, 45, 107–10, 117; Remus, Healer, 109–13; Davies, Healer, 77.
83. Cf. Remus, Healer, 109; Downing, Death, 61.
84. See the sources in McClenon, Healing, 67.
85. See, e.g., Frost, Healing, 183; Naswem, “Healing,” 30–31.
86. Pekala and Cardeña, “Issues,” 52–53; Slade, “Reports.” On memory frailties and strengths, see ch. 14.
87. See, e.g., Pilch, Healing; cf. Craffert, Life, 260–80.
88. See Capps, Village Psychiatrist; cf. Davies, Healer, 70–72, 76; Gaztambide, “Psychoimmunology”; Gaztambide, “Role,” esp. 303–6.
89. Cf. McNamara and Szent-Imrey, “Learn,” 213.
90. For raising claims, see, e.g., Jenkins, New Faces, 114; Miller and Yamamori, Pentecostalism, 151–52; Ma, “Encounter,” 137; Gaztambide, “Mission,” 31; Sánchez Walsh, Identity, 43–44; Bomann, “Salve,” 195–96; Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil, 86; reports and interviews in Keener, Miracles, 545–79; Keener, “Raised.” For reports of healed blindness, see, e.g., Ramirez, “Faiths,” 94–95; Ma, “Vanderbout,” 130, 132; Ma, “Encounter,” 137; Wiyono, “Timor Revival,” 286; De Wet, “Signs,” 103–4, 121–23; Castleberry, “Impact,” 108, 112; Keener, Miracles, 512–22.
91. See, e.g., Brown et al., “Effects”; earlier, Gardner, “Miracles.”
92. For various views, including my own, see Twelftree, Nature Miracles.
93. E.g., González, Acts, 84–85; Martell-Otero, “Satos,” 31–32; Yung, Quest, 7.
94. Quentin Smith, himself not a theist, notes this change in “Metaphilosophy,” 197. See further Quinn, “Epistemology” (noted in Deines, Acts of God, 9n20).
95. E.g., Porterfield, Healing; Opp, Lord for Body; discussion in Twelftree, “Historian.”
96. MacMullen, Christianizing, 24.