Astounding Deeds, Signs, and Wonders

Synopsis Update: I have finished my Synopsis of the Four Gospels: King James Reader’s Edition! I’m excited to release it under a Creative Commons license, which means you can distribute the PDF and make as many copies as you like (as long as the contents remain unaltered). You can get the digital download at my personal website, https://davidgolding.com/#synopsis. I hope to have a print version ready on Amazon soon.

By this point in the collective narrative of the Four Gospels, Jesus performed the second-to-last type of miracle of all his miracles. (The final type of miracle would be resurrection, not just being raised from the dead.) The original text employs multiple terms that all end up as “miracle” in King James English:

• dynameis = “mighty deeds”
• sēmeia = “signs”
• terata = “wonders”
• paradoxa = “astounding deeds”
• thaumasia = “wondrous deeds”

If we made a deep study of these terms and the acts and results associated with them, we’d find four themes or genres of miracle stories that group Jesus’s mighty, astounding, and wondrous deeds, his signs and wonders, together along particular categories:

• Exorcisms
• Healings
• Raising the dead
• Nature miracles

Attested Miracles

I find it helpful to see all the miracle pericopes broken down by these genres. Taking that broad view, we can survey the overall narrative about Jesus as a miracle worker and discern some aspects to his ministry that might otherwise be hard to observe. Here’s an inventory of Jesus’s attested miracles with the corresponding pericope number from our synopsis:

Attested Exorcisms

• 34. Healing of a Demoniac in the Synagogue—afflicted man in Capernaum
• 78. Healings of Gadarene/Gergesene Demoniacs—man afflicted with “Legion”; possibly others also afflicted
• 81. Accusations of Colluding with Demons—a mute (perhaps blind?) demoniac
• 139. Healing of a Young Demoniac—a boy brought by his father
• 102. Women and the Twelve Accompany Jesus—mentions Mary Magdalene having been afflicted with several demons
• 127. Discourse with a Woman from Tyre—afflicted daughter of a Greek woman from Tyre

Attested Healings

People with Paralysis and Infirmities

• 40. Healing of a Paralyzed Man—a man lowered through the roof to meet Jesus
• 44. Healing of a Man with a Withered Hand—in a lakeside synagogue on the Sabbath
• 74. Healing of a Centurion’s Servant—a man with cerebral palsy
• 117. Healing at the Pool of Bethesda—a man in Jerusalem infirm for 38 years
• 189. Healing of an Infirm Woman—a woman in a Judaean synagogue infirm for 18 years who could not lift herself up

People with Blindness

• 80. Healings of Two Blind Men—called “Bartimaeus” in Mark; associated with Jericho
• 132. Healing of a Blind Man of Bethsaida—instance of Jesus performing two acts before person was healed
• 166. Healing of a Man Born Blind—Jesus anointed the eyes of the man with spittled clay

People with Leprosy

• 39. Healing of a Man with Leprosy—“If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean”
• 198. Cleansing of Ten Lepers—“Where are the other nine?”

Other Healing Incidents

• 35. Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law
• 36. Evening Healings of the Sick
• 79. Healings of Jairus’s Daughter and a Woman with a Hemorrhage—a woman who touched the hem of Jesus’s clothes to be healed
• 128. Healings along the Sea of Galilee/Mountain
• 192. Healing of a Man with Dropsy
• 269. Arrest at Gethsemane—ear of the high priest’s slave

Raising the Dead

• 75. Raising of a Widow’s Son at Nain
• 79. Healings of Jairus’s Daughter and a Woman with a Hemorrhage—“Talitha cumi”
• 204. Raising of Lazarus

Nature Miracles

• 20. Marriage Feast at Cana—water into wine
• 32. Call of Disciples—a catch of fish that broke nets
• 77. Calming a Storm
• 122. Feeding of the Five Thousand / 129. Feeding of the Four Thousand—likely a single miracle event of feeding a multitude with scant barley loaves and fish
• 141. Payment of Tax—coin found in the mouth of a fish

216. Cursing of the Fig Tree / 220. Fig Tree Withered

Mechanics of Miracles

James E. Talmage contemplated this whole inventory of miracles in chapter 11 of Jesus the Christ. His reasoning on this topic had a tremendous effect on Latter-day Saints broadly for the rest of the twentieth century. While Christian groups have affirmed (and often debated) the supernatural quality of Jesus’s miracles, Talmage grounded them in nature, something that became a common interpretive angle for Latter-day Saint readers of the Four Gospels.

Talmage’s interpretation of Jesus’s miracles goes like this: some scientific discoveries have enabled people to devise more complicated mechanisms and inventions, but once the engineering is seen and understood, the magic becomes plain old physics and nothing supernatural; Jesus did nothing that can’t someday be explained as consistent with nature, only we don’t have a complete understanding of such means of healing, raising the dead, and so on. So, to Jesus’s immediate audience (and to an extent, us), the miracles all get classified as miraculous. “Miracles cannot be in contravention of natural law,” Talmage wrote, “but are wrought through the operation of laws not universally or commonly recognized.” He cited a scientific journal article of 1909 that argued that the miracles of Jesus could be explained through science. Talmage indicated that science presently couldn’t completely explain the mechanics of all that Jesus accomplished, but he did anticipate whatever true explanation might exist would itself comport with scientific discovery, method, and understanding.

This is quite a contrast for a scientist such as Talmage was (he graduated with a doctorate in geology and was the first Ph.D. in Latter-day Saint history) from other Bible-reading scientists. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, considered himself a statesman and a scientific philosopher—and he famously took scissors (yes, literal scissors) and cut out the miracle stories about Jesus from his Bible. The “Jefferson Bible” presented Jesus as a genius philosopher and attributed the miracle stories to the realm of fantasy devised by the first Christians wishing to portray Jesus as larger than life. Talmage offered readers a scientifically grounded interpretation of the miracles, scientific in its confidence that all the miracles could on all levels eventually be explained by natural processes and operations.

Emphasis by Narrators

If we’re locked in the science-versus-religion debate (as many people in Talmage’s time were), then these discussion points about the compatibility of science and the miracle narratives about Jesus speak to how someone like Talmage might reconcile science as non-threatening to devotion and Christian belief. But, we might also consider what the communities of Jesus’s followers who gave us the gospels intended with their reports of the miraculous—the mighty deeds, the astounding wonders and signs on display during Jesus’s ministry.

I confess, that’s the kind of question historians like me tend to ask. John Meier who wrote a deep series on the historical Jesus contended against those historians who wished to excise the miracle stories from Jesus’s history. While we might consider with care and earnestness the evidence of bishops and other early Christians potentially inventing or embellishing a miracle story here and there, robust historical analysis can’t conclude that all miracle stories were fabrications. “Any historian who seeks to portray the historical Jesus without giving due weight to his fame as a miracle-worker is not delineating this strange and complex Jew, but rather a domesticated Jesus reminiscent of the bland moralist created by Thomas Jefferson.”1 In other words, collectively, this inventory of attested miracles argues for Jesus having performed exorcisms; healings of infirmities, sicknesses, and death; and interventions over nature.

Titans among the Prophets

Some figures loomed larger than others within the prophetic traditions of Jesus’s Jewish audiences. Here is the A-list of prophets and others (excluding patriarchs like Abraham and Jacob/Israel) that common folk all recognized and apparently discussed more frequently than others in the Old Testament:

• Moses
• Elijah
• Elisha
• Isaiah
• Jeremiah
• Ezekiel
• Daniel
• Joshua
• David

And of these, the miracle-working prophets were Elijah, and Elisha; the sages who could predict the future and communicate the mind of God were Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel; and the royal figures who led God’s armies on the battlefield were Joshua and David. Moses, of course, was in a class all his own for being all three of these in one prophet: the miracle-worker, revealer, and leader of Israel.

I mention this for how Jesus’s contemporaries regularly associated Jesus’s miracle-working with figures like Moses, Elijah, and Elisha, sometimes quite overtly prefiguring a miracle story with the same narrative elements as stories of Moses, Elijah, and Elisha exerting power over nature, over illness, and over infirmity. This Old Testament context to the miracle stories factors prominently, such that one could argue the earliest Christians wanted to present Jesus as a new Moses, a new Elijah, and a new Elisha.

Jesus’s Unique Mode

Other miracle-workers of Jesus’s time were said to have cured famines, levitated, struck enemies dead, and performed other kinds of supernatural feats. It’s important to note how such “astounding deeds” are not attributed to Jesus, but rather a few types. What strikes me about this “signature” of miracle-working is how it shows Jesus concentrating on the human beings immediately in front of him, not aggrandizing himself or making a spectacle to attract followers. No, the fame that spread was a side-effect of Jesus ministering personally to people, not the objective of Jesus’s actions. He wanted audiences to glorify God rather than praise and admire him. This contrasts with miracle-workers of the period, like Honi, Hanan, Hilkiah, Eleazar, Simon Magus, and others who drew attention to themselves as career charismatics.

Alma’s sermon to the people of Gideon in the Book of Mormon says it so well: “And he shall go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind; and this that the word might be fulfilled which saith he will take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people. And he will take upon him death, that he may loose the bands of death which bind his people; and he will take upon him their infirmities, that his bowels may be filled with mercy, according to the flesh, that he may know according to the flesh how to succor his people according to their infirmities” (Alma 7:11–12). If we view the miracles with Alma’s interpretive lens, we’ll see Jesus as a co-participant in the afflictions, infirmities, and even death that he relieves in others.

Even better, if we take Jesus’s own words to heart, we’ll see that cooperation play out in the miracles: “Come to me all you who are worn out and weighed down and I will give you relief! Take my yoke on yourselves and learn from me, for I am tame and low in heart, and you will find relief for your life, for my yoke is the highest quality and my load is effortless.”2 Jesus offers relief by himself coming to us, something we see in the miracle events. Whether an exorcism, a healing, or raising someone from the dead, Jesus directly engages the infirmity, touches it even, and delivers a pathway to relief with the person—asking only for their trust.