Elijah-like Signs
Elijah-like Signs
Nevertheless, Vermes’ suggestion of a Palestinian Jewish model for Jesus appeals ultimately to a source earlier than Honi or Hanina. The miracles of Jesus resemble especially those of Elijah, Elisha, and Moses in the Hebrew Bible.88 Jesus and his early followers, like some other Jewish wonder-workers,89 may have deliberately emulated these models; the use of such patterns is probably deliberate (for Jesus; for those who reported the tradition orally; and for those who recorded the pattern in the Gospels and Acts). 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 to those who told, wrote, and heard about him.
We need not place Jesus’ emulation of Elijah (a sign-working prophet) and acting as an end-time prophet in contradictory categories. As we noted at much greater length in an earlier chapter, people were looking for Elijah precisely because they were expecting the end, with which Elijah was associated (Mal 4:5-6; Sir 48:10).