Understanding Jesus’ Miracles

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17 That Jesus was a miracle worker is central to the Christology of the New Testament Gospels and Acts. In Mark, the earliest Gospel, 17 stories of miracles appear in the first eight chapters. Most of the stories are repeated by Matthew and Luke. In Peter’s Pentecost speech, he recalls Jesus’ ministry by saying that Jesus was “a man designated … by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him” (Acts 2:22). Some scholars tell us that a so-called Signs Source was incorporated into the Gospel of John, according to which 12 signs or […]

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Endnotes

Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 8.46–47.

Josephus, Antiquities 14.22.

Mishnah, Ta‘anit 3:8.

Babylonian Talmud, Berakot 43b.

Babylonian Talmud, Berakot 34b.

H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, seventh edition (Berlin: Weidmann, 1954), Fragment 112.

Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 4:20 (transl. by C.K. Barrett, The New Testament Background: Selected Documents, revised edition (San Francisco: Harper, 1989), p. 83).

For hypnotism’s relevance to the healing practice of Jesus, see the survey by Ian Wilson, Jesus: The Evidence (San Francisco: Harper, 1988), pp. 102–113.

The text is usually taken to mean that it is the man being healed who “looked intently.”

10.

To the nature miracles must be reckoned the effective cursing of the fig tree (Mark 11:12–14, 20–25), a story that appears to embarrass the pious believer and the critical scholar alike.

11.

See Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible (New York: Oxford Univ., 1991), p. 634 (Old Testament) note z. Compare 5:13 with annotation.

12.

Compare Isaiah 51:9–11 with annotation in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, p.937 (Old Testament).

13.

For the idea of the “messianic banquet,” see Isaiah 25:6 55:1–2, etc. In 2 Baruch 29:8, it is said that the “manna will come down again from on high” in the messianic age. Here, in a text from the beginning of the second century C.E., there is a reference to the feeding of the people in the wilderness.

14.

See, for example, Rudolph Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, 3rd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1957), pp. 233–241

15.

Bultmann, Jesus (Tubingen: Mohr, 1926), p. 146.