The Savior
El Greco (c. 1610-14)

Click here for an explanation of the color-coding used in the sayings and acts of Jesus.

"For he [Jesus] was one who performed surprising works, (and) a teacher of people who with pleasure received the unusual."
     - Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.63-64

Surprising Works

An Inspired Prophet?

"The Hebrew word navi, the most common biblical designation for a prophet, has its roots in the northern kingdom, or Israel. The word may have originally described prophets who had ecstatic trances, but came to mean prophets who appealed to the people in God's name or on whom God called."
     - Reader's Digest ABC's of the Bible (1991), p. 108

"Those stories about Elijah and Elisha as prophetic magicians find no continuing tradition within the Hebrew Bible itself. The reason is obvious: the Temple, with its priesthood, was the place where sins were forgiven, rains were guaranteed, and healings were possible. But, at least by the centuries immediately before and after the common era, there is evidence that miraculous making of rain and miraculous healing of body were still a live tradition."
"Whether, therefore, by magic or miracle, by prayer or ritual, by prophet or Temple, control over rain and health was equally control over sin and evil."
     - John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991)

"Roeh and hozeh, Hebrew words meaning seer or visionary, apparently denoted professional prophets, who promised, for a fee, to summon a vision in which clients' questions would be answered by God. Many of them were disciples of Elijah and Elisha and were known as the sons of the prophets."
"When the Judean prophet Amos declared, 'I am no prophet, nor a prophet's son [Am. 7:14],' he may have been asking to be known by a title that was more respected in his native region, the southern kingdom. Some scholars suggest that he meant to dissociate himself from the professional prophets of Israel."
     - Reader's Digest ABC's of the Bible (1991), p. 108

"In 65 B.C.E., with the Hasmonean dynasty stumbling toward its own destruction by rival claimants, Hyrcanus II, one of the two sons of Alexander Jannaeus, had besieged the other son, Aristobulus II, in the Temple."
     - John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991)

(Click here for details of the bloody conflict between the two brothers.)

During this time, a miracle worker called Honi the Circle Drawer, or Onias as he was called by Josephus, gained renown for his ability to bring rain.

"Now there was a certain Onias, who, being a righteous man and dear to God, had once in a rainless period prayed to God to end the drought, and God had heard his prayer and sent rain; this man hid himself when he saw that the civil war continued to rage, but was taken to the camp of the Jews and was asked to place a curse on Aristobulus and his fellow-rebels, just as he had, by his prayers, put an end to the rainless period. But when in spite of his refusals and excuses he was forced to speak by the mob, he stood up in their midst and said: 'O God, king of the universe, since these men standing beside me are Thy people, and those who are besieged are Thy priests, I beseech Thee not to hearken to them against these men not to bring to pass what these men ask Thee to do to those others.' And when he had prayed in this manner the villains among the Jews who stood round him stoned him to death."
     - Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 14.22-24

"...Links with the Elijah-Elisha tradition appear among those later wonder workers: Honi brings rain using a circle, as Elisha did in two separate miracles on Mound Caramel, the rain in 1 Kings 18:41-45 and the circular trench around the altar in 18:30-38; Hanina prays with his head between his knees in Babylonian Talmud, Berakoth 34b, just as Elijah did in 1 Kings 18:42; and he controls the rain in Babylonian Talmud, Taanith 24b=Yoma 53b, just as Elijah and the Honi family had done."
     - John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991)

"...Jewish holy men (hasidim) from Galilee, like Honi the Circle-Drawer and Hanina ben-Dosa, have miracles attributed to them in the rabbinic literature. Thus, they might supply intriguing parallels to the traditions of Jesus as a Galilean holy man and miracle-worker....The problem is that such holy miracle-workers are only fleetingly mentioned in the Mishna, the earliest rabbinic corpus, which was written some 200 years after Honi lived. No indication that these holy men came from Galilee exists in the earliest stages of the traditions. The traditions then develop further into the Talmuds (5th-6th centuries), but the historical value of these later traditions is extremely doubtful.
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

(2) Jesus and the Prophetic Tradition

Cessation of Prophesy
Rabbinical Judaism has not accepted the legitimacy of anyone claiming to have been possessed by the Holy Spirit since the time of the latter prophets (4th c. B.C.E.).

"We are given no miraculous signs; no prophets are left, and none of us knows how long this will be."
     - Psalm 74:9

"Such a tradition was prohibited from developing because of the power of the rabbinic claim that scripture was written under the power of the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit left Israel with the latter prophets. Hence, the theology that explained the closing of the canon also prohibited the claim that Hillel, the greatest of the rabbis, received the Holy Spirit."
     - James H. Charlesworth, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Historical Jesus" in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1992), p. 60

"Whoever accepts one commandment in faith is worthy that the Holy Spirit should rest upon him'
     - Tanna R. Nehemiah, Mekbilta de-R. Ishmael, Massekhta de-Wa-yehi, vi, p. 114

"The rabbinic claim that prophecy ceased (in this case with the beginning of the rule of Alexander the Great) is affirmed with the words that up until that time the 'prophets prophesied through the medium of the Holy Spirit...'(Seder 'Olam Rabba, vi, ed. Ratner, P. 140). See Urbach, Sages, vol. 1, pp. 565, 943."
     - James H. Charlesworth, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Historical Jesus" in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1992), p. 61

"Jesus and the Essenes [Yahad] - unlike other Jews - affirmed the continuation of prophecy. Both Jesus probably and the Righteous Teacher possibly thought of themselves as prophets; both certainly saw themselves as the true heirs of the prophetic tradition. According to Luke 4 Jesus claimed that Isaiah's prophecy was being fulfilled in him; the Spirit of the Lord had anointed him to preach and act. According to the Habakkuk Pesher, God made known to the Righteous Teacher alone the exact meaning of the prophets ([Habakkuk Pesher] lQpHab 7.4-5); this passage may indicate that after the death of the Righteous Teacher the Qumranites portrayed him as 'a prophet' ",
     - James H. Charlesworth, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Historical Jesus" in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1992), p. 12

Jesus the "Teacher"
Celsus, the critic of Christianity, claimed in On the True Doctrine (178 C.E.) that the apocalyptic nature of Jesus' prophesies was familiar from Syro-Palestinian prophets, though there is little evidence of such prophets in Jesus' time:

"Many anonymous fellows both in temples and outside them, and some living as beggars around cities or camps, readily, form any chance cause, throw fits and pretend to prophesy. Each has the convenient and customary spiel, 'I am the god,' or 'a son of god,' or 'a divine spirit,' and 'I have come. For the world is about to be destroyed, and you, men, because of your injustice, will go [with it]. But I wish to save, and you shall see me again coming back with heavenly power. Blessed is he who has worshipped me now! On all others, both cities and countrysides, I shall cast eternal fire. And men who [now] ignore their punishments shall repent in vain and groan, but those who believed in me I shall preserve immortal.'"
     - quoted in Origen, Contra Celsus VII.9

Unlike Elijah and Elisha Jesus "made no claim - in fact, he reportedly refused to claim - that he was a prophet sent by 'the Lord' (Yahweh), or that what he said was 'the word of the Lord.'"
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 56-57

"...In the first century 'prophets' and 'teachers' were much more closely related. Qumran's Teacher of Righteousness did not claim to be a prophet, but he appears to have been regarded himself as such, as did his followers. A Qumran scroll refers to David as a wise man and a scribe who was inspired by God and who taught prophetically (11QPs a)."
"The evangelists all portray Jesus as a teacher. In his first comment on the teaching of Jesus Mark notes that Jesus taught in the synagogue at Capernaum 'as one who had authority, and not as the scribes' (1:22). Mark soon shows that unlike that of the scribes, the teaching of Jesus did not center on learned interpretation of the law (although he could and did dispute with scribes, e.g. 7:1, 5; 9:11). The teaching of Jesus was 'a new teaching, with authority' (Mark 1:27). The Greek word translated 'authority' includes (in this context) the notion of power which comes from God. So in these two verses we may translate: 'Jesus taught with prophetic authority'. The other passages in Mark in which reference is made to the 'authority' of Jesus confirm this interpretation. (See especially Mark 11:27-33; also 2:10; 3:15 and 6:7)."
     - Graham N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, The Oxford Bible Series (1989), paperback, p. 184

Teaching with Prophetic Authority
"The word Amen was the formula of affirmation to end a prayer, as in the farewell charge of Moses to the people of Israel, where each verse concludes (Deut. 27:l4-26): "And all the people shall say, 'Amen.'" In the New Testament an extension of the meaning of Amen becomes evident in the Sermon on the Mount: Amen lego hymin, "Truly, I say to you." Some seventy-five times throughout the four Gospels Amen introduces an authoritative pronouncement by Jesus. As the one who had the authority to make such pronouncements, Jesus was the Prophet. The word prophet here means chiefly not one who foretells, although the sayings of Jesus do contain many predictions, but one who is authorized to speak on behalf of Another and to tell forth.
"That is the basis of the title in the Book of Revelation, 'The Amen, the faithful and true witness'..."
     - Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries

"...A prophet is a messenger of Yahweh sent to declare to king or people 'the word of Yahweh.' Not so Jesus. In the synoptics he does not represent himself as a messenger, he never claims to declare 'the word of Yahweh,' and he is distinguished from the Old Testament prophets by many other traits."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 49

"The Old Testament prophets frequently introduce their proclamation with 'Thus says the Lord'. Although this formula is not found in the gospels, 'I say to you' is very common on the lips of Jesus and has been seen by some writers as a parallel expression. However, it is now clear that at the time of Jesus 'I say to you' was used in a wide variety of contexts. Although Jesus certainly used the formula as an expression of his authority, it is not necessarily an indication of his prophetic consciousness.
"In some passages in the gospels 'I say to you' is preceded by the Hebrew and Aramaic word amen (which is usually translated as 'truly' in the RSV)....Amen as an introduction is attested (thoug it is rare) in Judaism; the 'Amen, I say to you' sayings of Jesus do not differ significantnly from the more frequent sayings introduced by 'I say to you'. The former are usually tranlated in the NEB by 'I tell you this:...'; the latter by 'I tell you', or 'I say to you'. Most readers of the NEB will be unware of any distinction."
     - Graham N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, The Oxford Bible Series (1989), paperback, p. 181

"For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished."
     - Matthew 5:18 // Luke 16:17

"The complex Matthew 5:17-19 reflects a controversy in the early Christian community over whether the Law was still binding on Christians. Matthew's position is that the most trivial regulation, metaphorically represented by an iota (the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet) and by the serif (the tiny strokes added to the ends of letters) must be observed. Matthew thereby nullifies Jesus' relaxed attitude towards the Law, the centrality of the love commandment in Jesus' teaching, and Jesus' repeated distinction between the qualitative fulfillment of God's will and the formal observance of the Law, especially the ritual Law."
     - Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels

"That ringing affirmation of the permanent validity of the law of Moses as given to the people of Israel on Mount Sinai is followed by a series of specific quotations from the law. Each of these quotations is introduced with the formula 'You have heard that it was said to the men of old', and each quotation is then followed by a commentary opening with the magisterial formula 'But I say to you'. The sense of the commentary is an intensification of the commandment, to include not only its outward observance but the inward spirit and motivation of the heart. All these commentaries are an elaboration of the warning that the righteousness of the followers of Jesus must exceed that of those who followed other doctors of the law."
     - Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries

"For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven."
     - Matthew 5:20

"Acceptance or rejection of Jesus is equated with acceptance or rejection of God. Jesus implies that he bears prophetic authority, but he does not appeal to particular titles. Jesus speaks about God only indirectly as the 'one by whom he has been sent, but the implicit claim which lies behind this saying is bold, to say the least."
     - Graham N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, The Oxford Bible Series (1989), paperback, p. 234

A Prophet Magician
"In confirmation of the special status of Jesus as not only rabbi but also prophet, the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount reads:"
     - Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries

"When Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law. When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him."
     - Matthew 7:28-29

Jesus as an inspired prophet reflects the tradition that he was raised in, that of Galilean holy men who served directly as intermediaries between men and God. Jesus and his predecessors thus obviated the need for a Temple and priesthood as was practiced in Jerusalem.

The prophets Elijah and Elisha "both bypassed those in need in Israel in favor of non-Jews. Here Luke anticipates one of the major theses of his two volumes: as a result of Israel's rejection of Jesus, God's word is taken to the Gentiles."
     - Graham N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, The Oxford Bible Series (1989), paperback, p. 94

Morton Smith disagrees and argues that Jesus was more a magician (or miracle man) than a traditional prophet.

"Jesus' fundamental activities - exorcism and cures - are either unknown (exorcisms) or rare (cures) in the stories of the prophets. His getting the spirit had magical, not prophetic, analogs and consequences; so did his dealing with spirits and sayings about them, so did the majority of the miscellaneous miracles with which he was credited. He initiated his disciples and bound them to himself by magical rites unknown to the prophets, and his notions of their union with him and of his own divine nature are not prophetic but magical. Finally, the practice of telling stories about him so as to show his superiority to Moses and the other prophets explain why many stories have been told so as to parallel and contrast with Old Testament episodes."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 218-219

This lack of boundaries between prophet and magician/miracle man persisted into the Talmudic era (2nd to 5th c. C.E.)

"...A penetrating look into the acts of the sages of the Mishna and Talmud in this field reveals more than a little about the type of leadership in ancient times: a leadership that included charismatic authoritative (knowledge of Halacha) Shamanistic (miraculous deeds) and political components. It is thus recognized that in ancient times there was no distinction between religion and magic (as understood by modern man) and key people in the history of Mishna and Talmud dealt with Torah as well as miraculous deeds."
     - Meir Bar-Ilan, "Exorcism by Rabbis Talmud Sages and Their Magic"

In all cases power resided in the authority with which one spoke.

"In contrast to the leadership of the people of Israel in the period of the Judges, a time when a charismatic leader led his people on the field of battle, the power of the charismatic leader in the Talmudic period was in his speech. The leader influenced God, spirits, humans, even foreign rulers (in any case his admirers thought so) by means of speech and dramatic talent. The religious leader was not necessarily a leader crowned by the establishment but an ascetic personality (by virtue of poverty) with ties to the other world; from a certain perspective he can be seen as a mystic (though he himself would deny it, just as he would deny that he is a prophet). The charismatic leader in the Talmudic period labored for the community without asking for anything for himself; the onlooker would see no small similarity between his personality and that of the prophet in the period of the Scriptures."
     - Meir Bar-Ilan, "Exorcism by Rabbis Talmud Sages and Their Magic"

There are reports of cures and exorcisms, as well as more traditional miracles, by a charismatic leaders in rabbinic tradition. (Shamanistic practices were reported well into the Talmudic era. Click here for details.)
Rabbi Simon was an important sage during the 2nd c. C.E..

"It is told of Rabbi Hanina that he cured the sick with his prayer, including among others the son of Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai; he lived for a week on a measure of carobs and a heavenly voice announced this and also that the world is sustained because of his merit; angels appeared to him in the form of humans; he denied that he was a prophet; as a consequence of his prayer the rain stopped and after a second prayer it began raining again; a miracle occurred to his wife and her oven filled with bread; a snake that bit him died; a miracle happened to him and vinegar burned as if it were oil; and so did various other miracles happened to him. It is indeed clear that his piety and righteousness exceeded his learning and his principal power was in being a miracle man recognized by all for his supernatural power, that is, divine."
     - Meir Bar-Ilan, "Exorcism by Rabbis Talmud Sages and Their Magic"

Click here for stories of exorcisms from the Talmudic era.

The Miracle Worker

An Eschatological Drama

"And also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out..."
     - Luke 8:2

The gospels differentiate between sickness and demon-possession (Mark 1:32) but the two share the same root cause.

"Jesus and the Essenes [Yahad] thought that the cosmos was full of demons and angels."
     - James H. Charlesworth, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Historical Jesus" in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (1992), p. 13

"Above the earth were heavens inhabited by demons, angels, and gods of various sorts (the 'many gods' whose existence Paul conceded in I Cor. 85, and among whom he counted 'the god of this age,' II Cor. 4.4). In the highest heaven was enthroned the supreme god, Yahweh, 'God' par excellence, who long ago created the whole structure and was about to remodel, or destroy and replace it. Beneath the earth was an underworld, to which most of the dead descended. There, too, were demons. Through underworld, earth, and heavens was a constant coming and going of supernatural beings who interfered in many ways with human affairs. Sickness, especially insanity, plagues, famines, earthquakes, wars, and disasters of all sorts were commonly thought to be the work of demons. With these demons, as with evil men, particularly foreign oppressors, the peasants of Palestine lived in perpetual hostility and sporadic conflict..."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 5-6

"...It was typical of Jewish popular religion, in Galilee particularly, at attribute disorders to 'unclean spirits'."
     - Ian Wilson, Jesus, The Evidence

"...The demons are subject to a 'ruler of the demons' or 'of this world.' Moreover, the demons are divided into classes and are characterized as causes of diseases, disabilities, etc. some of them are said to have these afflictions themselves - deafness and loss of speech, for instance, are caused by deaf and dumb demons. The basic notion that demons are the causes of insanity, disabilities, and diseases, or are themselves the diseases, is unquestioned, and is the chief reason for interest in demons. Similarly angels are of less concern as attendants of the highest god and agents in his cosmic administration that as helpers who can be called on to fight the demons."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 166-167

"Great teachers of the law were celebrated as having control over supernatural powers such as demons. The charismatic rabbi Hanina ben Dosa gave orders to Agrat bat Machlat, the princess of demons (b.Pes 112b/113a)."
     - Otto Betz, "Jesus and the Temple Scroll" in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (James H. Charlesworth, Ed. - 1992), p. 86

"...In Jesus' eyes his exorcisms are not individual acts of kindness, or even individual acts of power. They are part of the eschatological drama that is already underway and that God is about to bring to its conclusion."
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

"If by the finger of God I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you."
     - Luke 11:20 // Matthew 12:30; (Mark 9:39-40)

"When Jesus says...that experiencing his exorcisms is experiencing the kingdom already come, he is in effect making a startling identification: one of his powerful deeds is equated with the powerful action of God assuming his rightful control of Israel in the end time, an action that has already begun and will soon be completed."
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

"If, as seems likely, Mark considers that Jesus has overcome Satan in the Temptation, then the Prologue ends on a triumphant note. On this view...the exorcisms are the 'mopping-up operations' of isolated units of Satan's hosts; they are certain to be successful because Satan himself has already been bound and immobilized."
     - Graham N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, The Oxford Bible Series (1989), paperback, p. 46

A Demonized World

"Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, and the ears of the deaf will be unstopped. Then the lame will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the dumb will shout for joy."
     - Isaiah 35:5,6a

"Now at last Isaiah's prophesies of Israel's healing in the end time were being fulfilled (Matthew 11:5 par.): ''The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised' - all as part of Jesus' larger program of proclaiming the good news of salvation to Israel's poor. In particular Jesus saw his exorcisms as a striking sign that even now, in the lives of individual Israelites, Satan's hold over God's people was being broken."
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

"Happy the eyes that see what you see, and the ears that hear what you hear. For I say to you that many prophets and kings longed to see what you see and did not see it, and to hear what you hear and did not hear it."
     - Luke 10:23-24 // Matthew 13:16-17

"The emphasis on the fulfillment of prophetic expectations is more characteristic of Christian writings than of the genuine sayings of Jesus."
     - Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels

"All Four Gospels as well as Josephus speak of the large following that Jesus attracted, and all Four Gospels agree with Josephus in identifying the powerful combination of miracles and teaching as the cause of the attraction."
"...The early dating of the literary testimony to Jesus' miracles, i.e., the closeness of the dates of the written documents to the alleged miracles of Jesus' life, is almost unparalleled for the period. The common opinion of scholars places the writing of both Mark and the hypothetical Q document somewhere around AD 70. Thus, only about 40 years separates the supposed events from their being fixed in writing.
"By way of comparison, we know very little about the 1st-century pagan miracle-worker Apollonius of Tyana prior to the writing of his biography by Philostratus in the early 3d century."
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

After a man had been cured of leprosy, Jesus' reputation quickly spread beyond Capernaum.

The cured leper "went out and began to talk freely, spreading the news. As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places . Yet the people still came to him from everywhere."
     - Mark 1:45

As Jesus' reputation grew, he devised a strategy for to escape the crush of the crowds.

"When they heard all he was doing , many people came to him from Judea, Jerusalem , Idumea, and the regions across the Jordan and around Tyre and Sidon. So he told his disciples that a small boat should be kept ready for him because of the multitude, lest they should crush him . For he healed many, so that as many as had afflictions pressed about him to touch him."
     - Mark 3:7b-10

"Jesus is seen avoiding contact with the people who wanted to be healed. As a result, he was besieged in houses and some went to great pain (such as destroying part of the roof) in order to get in. Later on, these desperate people did not wait to be touched by Jesus (he was reluctant to do it); instead, they would try to touch him, showing little respect in the process."
     - Bernard Muller, "The Historical Jesus"

"Some see miracles as an implausible suspension of the laws of the physical universe. As signs, though, they serve just the opposite function. Death, decay, entropy, and destruction are the true suspensions of God's laws; miracles are the early glimpses of restoration. In the words of Jürgen Moltmann, 'Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly 'natural' things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.'"
     - Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (1995)

"But many who witnessed Jesus's miraculous feats, he said, drew the opposite conclusion: 'They said it was a display of magic art, for they even dared to say he was a magician and deceiver of the people.' To label someone a magician and a deceiver in antiquity, explains Graham N. Stanton, professor of New Testament Studies at King's College, University of London, England, 'was an attempt to marginalize a person who was perceived to be a threat to the dominant social order.'"
     - Jeffery L. Sheler, "Who was Jesus?", US News Online (12/20/93)

"And mendicant prophets go to rich men's doors and persuade them that they have a power committed to them by the gods of making an atonement for a man's own or his ancestor's sins by sacrifices or charms, with rejoicings and feasts; and they promise to harm an enemy, whether just or unjust, at a small cost; with magic arts and incantations binding heaven, as they say, to execute their will."
     - Plato, Republic, Book 2.7

(Of course, in the gospels Jesus did not promise to harm enemies nor did he take any money for his healings.)

"Given that Jesus possessed unusual gifts as a healer, why did he perform the particular miracle recorded in the gospels? It was very easy to 'write off' miracle workers in first century Palestine. Exorcism could be readily explained as the result of possession by the prince of demons (Mark 3:22). The miracles of a prophet could be dismissed as those of a false prophet (cf. Mark 13:22; Act 13:6). So why did Jesus run the risk of ridicule and rejection?"
"Many of the healings and exorcisms of Jesus enabled the individuals concerned to join the 'Jesus movement' in circumstances which directly violated Jewish (and especially Pharisaic) rules of separation. Jesus performed healings on the Sabbath in defiance of the ancient law against work on the seventh day (Mark 3:1-6). Jesus healed persons who were 'off-limits' by the standards of Jewish piety, by reason of their race (Mark 7:24-30), their place of residence (Mark 5: 1-20, in a tomb in pagan territory), or their ritual impurity (Mark 1: 40-5, a leper; 5:25-34, a woman with menstrual flow). Jesus carried on his healing activity outside the land of Israel, apparently mingling freely with non-Jews and allowing them to enjoy the benefits of his healing powers (Mark 7:31-7)."
"Like the parables, the miracles were 'signs' but not proof of the kingdom of God; 'outsiders' could 'see' and 'hear' but not perceive and 'understand' (Mark 4:10, 8:18). The miracles, like the parables, were intended by Jesus to convey the reality of God's kingly rule."
     - Graham N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, The Oxford Bible Series (1989), paperback, pp. 1217-218, 219

Faith Before Miracle or Miracle Before Faith
"In the Synoptics, faith precedes the miracle; in John, the miracle precedes faith, for Jesus' 'signs' are those things by which he 'revealed his glory [doxan] and led his disciples to believe in him' (John 2:1 1), doxa being the Septuagint word for the divine radiance, the glory of God, as in Isaiah 6:3. To see Jesus perform a miracle is to recognize his divinity; and for this reason John tells his miracle stories. Moreover, not to have seen Jesus in the flesh, and yet to believe in him, is even finer to John, who feels some ambivalence toward faith engendered by miracle:"
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) pp. 83-84

"Happy are those who never saw me and yet have found faith."
     - John 20:29

"He sighed deeply to himself and said, 'Why does this generation ask for a sign [semeia]? I tell you this: no sign shall be given to this generation'."
     - Mark 8:12

Yet, for the author of the Gospel of John, Jesus' deeds are symbolized by signs. The source of the signs in John is believed to have been independent of the Synoptic gospels. This hypothetical source has come to be known as the Signs Gospel.

"Will none of you ever believe without seeing signs and portents?'"
     - John 4:48

"The understanding of 'signs' in the Fourth Gospel, indeed the word itself, stems from the Septuagint: Moses 'wrought the signs [semeia] before the people. And the people believed' (Ex. 4:30-31 LXX). Moses' signs were transformations-a staff into a serpent and back again, his clean hand to leprous and back again, water into blood - all meant to engender belief."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 85

"'Now,' said the LORD, 'if they do not believe you and do not accept the evidence of the first sign, they may accept the evidence of the second. But if they are not convinced even by these two signs, and will not accept what you say, then fetch some water from the Nile and pour it out on the dry ground, and the water you take from the Nile will turn to blood.'"
     - Exodus 4:8-9

(2) Healing the Sick

Sickness vs Demonic Possession
The distinction between affecting a simple healing and performing an exorcism is determined by the method used to effect a cure.

"Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told Jesus about her. So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them."
     - Mark 1:30-31

"Luke understood this as an exorcism and made it more vivid."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 141

"Now Simon's mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked Jesus to help her. So he bent over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. She got up at once and began to wait on them."
     - Luke 4:38b-39

"The magical tradition has preserved an appropriate rebuke: 'Plague and fever flee from the wearer of this amulet.' That fevers are caused by demons is often supposed in the magical papyri; the notion that diseases actually are demons appears already in Sophocles. It is found again in Philostratus' story that Apollonius stopped the plague in Ephesus by recognizing it - a demon disguised as an old beggar - and having it stoned. [Seper ha-Razim - 'The Book of Secrets'] contains prescriptions or stories of cures for most afflictions cured by Jesus - fever, blindness, lameness, paralysis, catalepsy, hemorrhage, and wounds. In Lk. 10:19 Jesus gives his disciples the 'authority' (i.e. power, as usual) 'to walk over snakes and scorpions...and nothing will hurt you'; the postscript to Mark made the risen Jesus promise his believers immunity from snakes and poison. Spells against snakes, scorpions, and poison are frequent in the magical material and there were rites and amulets that promised protection from everything."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 141-142

"He [Jesus] also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was."
     - Mark 1:34

"...The Aramaic is that 'he did not allow the insane to speak,' after he had healed them, 'because some of these were his acquaintances,' and he did not want them to praise him."
     - George M. Lamsa (translator), The Four Gospels : According to the Eastern Version (1933) p. xiii

Mark also relates that Jesus told those who witnessed the healings not to tell others (i.e., Mark 5:43, 7:36). The implied understanding was that Jesus did not want to draw too much attention to himself. While scholars have understood this as concern for his safety in the politically charged atmosphere of the times, these instructions were probably written as an apologetic response to charges that Jesus was merely a traveling magician living off the gullibility of his audience.

Creations of the Sacred Story Teller?
Some of the stories of Jesus' healing touch have precedents in the Old Testament.

Some biblical scholars dismiss most, if not all, of the miracles as literary creations in the tradition of the Jewish sacred story teller.

"Early Christians rummaged not only the stories of Elijah and Elisha in the Septuagint Books of Kings, but other stories as well."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 68

"In their original context in Mark and Q they [Jesus' healings] were not set out as the fulfillment of Scripture, but they are in Matthew."
     - Graham N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, The Oxford Bible Series (1989), paperback, p. 153

"This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet Isaiah: 'He took up our infirmities and carried our diseases.'" [17 Isaiah 53:4]
     - Matthew 8:17

"...We find parallel and related tendencies in the literary history of the Gospel miracles: (1) The miraculous element is heightened, and any hint of limitation in Jesus' power is removed; (2) there is an ongoing 'novelizing' process, a fleshing out of the stories to make them more 'realistic,' 'detailed,' 'believable.'"
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 70

This trajectory can be traced in the development of the story of Jesus healing the deaf man as one proceeds from Mark to the later gospels.

"He took the man aside, away from the crowd, put his fingers into his [the man's] ears, spat, and touched his tongue. Then, looking up to heaven, he sighed, and said to him, 'Ephphatha,' which means, 'Be opened.' With that his ears were opened, and at the same time the impediment was removed and he spoke plainly."
     - Mark 7:33-35

In the next chapter, Jesus is asked to cure a blind man:

"He spat on his eyes, and laid his hands upon him, and asked whether he could see any thing. The blind man's sight began to come back, and he said, 'I see men; they look like trees, but they are walking about.' Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; he looked hard, and now he was cured so that he saw everything clearly."
     - Mark 8:23-25

"For Matthew and Luke, who eliminated both these stories from their revisions of Mark, the notion that Jesus needed any kind of ritual (magic word) or medicinal (spittle) help, or even that he needed a little time and repetition of the treatment, was unthinkable. But having got rid of these hearings of the blind and deaf, Matthew and Luke had to supply their own accounts of such hearings, in order to satisfy the prediction of Isa. 35:5. Both went to the same non-Markan source to fill the need."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 72

"He was driving out a devil which was dumb; and when the devil came out, the dumb man began to speak. The people were astonished, but some of them said, 'It is by Beelzebub prince of devils that he drives the devils out.'"
     - Luke 11: 14-15

"Matthew [12:22-24] ensures his story replaces the two he removed from Mark by depicting the man as both mute and blind."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 72

"Then they brought him a demon-possessed man who was blind and mute, and Jesus healed him, so that he could both talk and see. All the people were astonished and said, 'Could this be the Son of David?' But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, 'It is only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons.'"
     - Matthew 12:22-24

Healing by Touch
Abram healing the Egyptian Pharaoh of a "baneful spirit" (perhaps gonorrhea) so that his wife Sarai would be restored to him.

"So I prayed for him, that blasphemer, and laid my hands upon his head. Thereupon the plague was removed from him, the evil spirit exorcised from him, and he was healed."
     - Tales of the Patriarchs (1QapGen) 21:28-29

"Major types of such healings involved persons with paralyzed limbs, persons suffering from blindness (or some impairment of vision), persons suffering from various skin ailments ('leprosy'), and persons who were deaf and/or mute. Individual stories that have a good chance of going back to some event in the life of the historical Jesus - however much they may have been reworked and expanded by Christian theology - include the stories of the paralyzed man let down through the roof (Mark 2:1-12 parr.), the paralyzed man by the pool of Bethesda (John 5:1-9), the blind Bartimaeus begging near Jericho (Mark 10:46-50 parr.), the blind man of Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26), the blind man who washed in the pool of Siloam (John 9:1-7), a deaf-mute (Mark 7:31-37), and the servant or son of a royal official (possibly a centurion) of Antipas:"
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

"Besides prayer magicians might - and Jesus did - resort to physical means. Most common was touching the patient, either fingering the affected area, or taking hold of the person; Jesus/the magician's hand was his most potent instrument. Fluid could help to make the contact closer; the readiest form of fluid was spittle, and both spittle and the act of spitting were commonly believed to have magical powers; so we find Jesus, like other magicians, smearing spittle on his patients or using a salve made with spittle."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) P. 169

(Click here for accounts in the synoptic gospels of Jesus' use of spittle in healing [above].)

"According to the gospel record, Jesus did not use any of the ingredients of traditional healing...While traditional healing did not use saliva, at least in the Bedouin culture, Jesus used it in other instances... It would appear then Jesus was more in conformity with the Graeco-Roman culture where it was believed that saliva had a healing virtue..."
     - John Rousseau, unpublished Jesus Seminar background paper, p. 12

In the gospel of John, Jesus used spittle mixed with mud.

"As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth....He spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man's eyes. 'Go,' he told him, 'wash in the Pool of Siloam' (this word means Sent). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing."
     - John 9:1, 6-7

"The direction by Jesus to the man born blind to wash his eyes in the pool of Silo made its way into John's pericope from the story about Elisha in the preceding chapter of Kings. There, Naaman the leper told to wash himself in the Jordan to be cleansed of his disease. Both healings have the same purpose: proof that 'there is a prophet [Esti prophetes] in Israel' (II Kings 5:8 LXX) and that Jesus 'is a prophet [prophetes estin]' (John 9:17). In both miracle stories, the one healed approaches the prophet and declares his faith, Naaman saying that he now knows 'There is no God in all the earth, save only in Israel' (5:13), while the once blind man declares, 'I believe, Lord' (John 9:38)."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) pp. 93-94

While spittle may have been used in a magical context (i.e., the Emperor Vespasian's cure of the blind man), the Romans and Greeks typically used medicinal salves to effect cures.

"To Valerius Aper, a blind soldier, the god revealed that he should go and take the blood of a white cock, together with honey, and rub them into an eye salve and anoint (epichreisai) his eyes three days. And he received his sight (aneblepse), and came and gave thanks publicly to the god."
     - Greek inscription (probably dedicated to Asclepius)

"The healing touch. Among the most common of Jesus's recorded miracles were his healings. Yet theologians point out that every culture -- before, during and after Jesus's time -- has had stories of healings. To declare, therefore, that Jesus was a healer, and to tell stories of healings by Jesus, says Stevan Davies, New Testament scholar at College Misericordia in Pennsylvania, is 'no more exciting than to say he was a carpenter.'"
     - Jeffery L. Sheler, "Who was Jesus?", US News Online (12/20/93)

The Withered Hand
"Third Kings in the Septuagint tells of an unnamed man of God who healed the withered hand of King Jeroboam. The man of God had just prophesied against the king's altar at Bethel, at which Jeroboam 'stretched forth his hand' (exeteinen ... ten cheira autou), commanding the arrest of the prophet. But at that moment 'his hand withered' (exeranthe he chair autou). The king repentantly pleaded with the prophet to restore the withered hand; so the man of God entreated the Lord, 'and he restored the king's hand' (III [I] Kings 13:4-6). This narrative became the basis for the pericope about Jesus' healing a man's withered hand on a sabbath (Matt. 12; Mk. 3; Lk. 6)."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 68

"And it came to pass when king Jeroboam heard the words of the man of God who called on the altar that was in Bethel, that the king stretched forth his hand from the altar, saying, 'Take hold of him.' And, behold, his hand, which he stretched forth against him, withered [exrranthe], and he could not draw it back to himself... And king Jeroboam said to the man of God, 'Entreat the Lord thy God, and let my hand be restored to me.' And the man of God entreated the Lord, and he restored the king's hand to him, and it became as before."
     - III (I) Kings 13 LXX

"Another time he went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled [exerammenzen} hand was there.....He said to the man, 'Stretch out your hand.' He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored.
Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus."
     - Mark 3:1, 5-6

"Both stories use the same words-'withered' (exerammenzen, Mark; exrranthe, Kings), and 'stretched forth his hand' (ten cheira...exeteinen, Mark; exeteinen....ten cheira autou, Kings). Moreover, the activities of the prophet in both accounts led the authorities to desire his arrest: Jeroboam ordered his men to seize the man of God; the Pharisees and Herodians plotted together against Jesus."
(Matt. 12: 10 changes 'withered' to the adjectival xeran, making it closer to the Septuagint)."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) pp. 91, 68

Healing as the Son of David

"And they came to Jericho; and as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great multitude, Bartimae'us, a blind beggar, the son of Timae'us, was sitting by the roadside. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, 'Son of David, Jesus, have mercy on me!' And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent; but he cried out all the more, 'Son of David, have mercy on me!' And Jesus stopped and said, 'Call him.' And they called the blind man, saying to him, 'Take heart; rise, he is calling you.' And throwing off his mantle he sprang up and came to Jesus. And Jesus said to him, 'What do you want me to do for you?'. And the blind man said to him, 'Master, let me receive my sight.' And Jesus said to him, 'Go your way; your faith has made you well.' And immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way."
     - Mark 10:46-52

"...The use of Son of David in this scene could be a reference to Jesus as an exorcist and healer like Solomon (David's son). It appears that in Jewish folklore in the first century Solomon was known for his miraculous powers."
     - Antonio Jerez (Crosstalk)

" There is hardly one Solomonic tradition that does not at least implicitly refer to this figures incredible ability to cast out and control demonic beings and spirits. The Testament of Solomon (TSol) expands this tradition into an elaborate tale of how Solomon, like a shaman, actually controls the evil spirits (whilst in a trance state induced by what seems to be spirit-possession) and enlists them to assist him with the building of his temple. This is indeed evidence of a shaman-like element in the figure of Solomon which can be paralleled in Jesus' control of and use of various demons."
     - James R. Davila, "Hekhalot Literature and Shamanism"

"Matthew actually sees Jesus as the exorcist and healer par excellence, the Son of David like Solomon (and greater than Solomon)...Almost all references to Son of David in the Gospel of Matthew occur when Jesus heals someone. There are four cases: 9:27, 12:23, 15:21, 20:29."
     - Antonio Jerez (Crosstalk)

"Then there was led to him a blind and dumb demoniac, and he healed him, so that the dumb man both spoke and saw. And all the crowds were amazed and said, 'Is not this the Son of David?'"
     - Matthew 12:22-24

"Here it appears that the people a clearly linking Jesus with another Son of David with healing powers (i.e Solomon). Given that Matthew have this Jesus-Solomon link throughout his gospel I think it is very probable that Matthew himself might have made the Q-pericope about 'Someone greater than Solomon is standing here'."
     - Antonio Jerez (Crosstalk)

"Leprosy"

"A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, 'If you are willing, you can make me clean.'
Moved with anger [later versions: filled with compassion], Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. 'I am willing,' he said. 'Be clean!' Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured."
     - Mark 1:40-42

"The two stories about Jesus healing people afflicted with some skin disease ('leprosy') are much more difficult to evaluate. Neither the story in Mark (1:40-45 parr.) nor the story in Luke (17:11-19), by itself, argues strongly for or against historicity. The best I can say is that, since three independent traditions (Mark, Q, and L) all speak of Jesus cleansing lepers, I incline to the view that Jesus was thought by his contemporaries to have cured lepers. But I do not feel sure enough to decide whether either story is based on a particular historical event."
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

"In the course of his journey to Jerusalem, he was traveling through the midst of Samaria and Galilee. As he was entering a village, he was met by ten men with leprosy. They stood some way off and called out to him, 'Jesus, Master, take pity on us.'
When he saw them he said, 'Go and show yourselves to the priests' - and while they were on their way, they were made clean. One of them, finding himself cured, turned back praising God aloud. He threw himself down at Jesus' feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.
At this Jesus said, 'Were not all ten cleansed? The other nine, where are they? Could none be found to come back and give praise to God except this foreigner.' And he said to the man, 'Stand up and go on your way; your faith has cured you.'"
     - Luke 17:11-19

"Based on both Mark [1:40-44 with parallels in Matthew 8:1-4] and the Septuagint account of the cleansing of the leprous Naaman by Elisha, the story arose in a Greek-speaking Christian environment. In the Kings version, the prophet tells Naaman to 'go' (poreutheis) wash in the Jordan and 'be cleansed' (katharistiese - IV [11] Kings 5:10 LXX), just as Jesus tells the ten lepers to 'go' (poreuthentes) to the priests, and they were cleansed (ekatharisthiesan). One of the lepers 'turned back' (hypestrepsen) after his cleansing to praise God, just as Naaman 'returned' (epestrepse) to Elisha to praise God after his cleansing ('I know there is no God in all the earth, save in Israel' - IV [II] Kings 5:15 LXX)."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 68

At least some of Jesus' healings evidently involved one-upmanship over Jesus' Galilean predecessors:

"Elisha treated a leper by telling him to go wash seven times in the Jordan; he did, and was cured after carrying out the prescriptions. Jesus told ten lepers to go to the priests; they did, and were cured on their way. The point: Jesus cured ten times as many as Elisha, and quicker."
"Of the many other afflictions cured by Jesus and the magicians - fever, ordinary blindness, lameness, paralysis, catalepsy, hemorrhage, wounds, and poison - the stories of Moses, Elijah, and Elisha say nothing."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 212, 213

"The person who has the leprous disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, 'Unclean, unclean'. He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean. He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp."
     - Leviticus 13:45-46

"What we call leprosy is caused by Mycobacterium leprae, a bacillus discovered in 1868 by the Norwegian physician Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen. That disease was, in fact, known in New Testament times but was then called elephas or elephantiasis. Ancient sara'at or lepra, on the other hand, covered several diseases, all of which involved a rather repulsive scaly or flaking skin condition - for example, psoriasis, eczema or any fungus infection of the skin."
     - John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994)

"Even without believing in the supernatural...one could conclude that Jesus successfully healed certain psychosomatic illnesses -- rashes, lameness and some types of blindness, for example. Some Gospel accounts of his healings seem to involve his use of primitive medical arts -- the application of mud to the eyes of a blind man, for instance -- and his appropriation of conventional religious practices, such as Jewish purification rites for those suffering from skin diseases."
     - Jeffery L. Sheler, "Who was Jesus?", US News Online (12/20/93)

"I presume that Jesus...healed the poor man's illness by refusing to accept the disease's ritual uncleanness and social ostracization. Jesus thereby forced others either to reject him from their community or to accept the leper within it as well."
     - John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994)

Healing at a Distance

"Once more he visited Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum. When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come and heal his son, who was close to death.
'Unless you people see miraculous signs and wonders,' Jesus told him, 'you will never believe.'
The royal official said, 'Sir, come down before my child dies.'
Jesus replied, 'You may go. Your son will live.' The man took Jesus at his word and departed.
While he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was living. When he inquired as to the time when his son got better, they said to him, 'The fever left him yesterday at the seventh hour.' Then the father realized that this was the exact time at which Jesus had said to him, 'Your son will live.' So he and all his household believed."
     - John 4:46-53 (Matthew 8:5-10, 13 // Luke 7:1-2 [3-6a] 6b-10)

"The two versions of this story - the account derived from the Sayings Gospel Q and the report preserved by the Fourth Gospel - differ in almost every detail, yet they agree that Jesus effected a cure at a distance....The two written reports (Q and John) were derived, in the view of a majority of the Fellows, from a common oral tradition (vote: pink). The Johannine story is derived from the Signs Gospel, a collection of wondrous deeds performed by Jesus underlying the Fourth Gospel. A reconstruction of that source suggests that Jesus simply told the official that his son or lave would live and coincidentally the lad recovered....Hanina ben Dosa, a Galilean healer who lived a little after Jesus, is reported to have effected a cure very similar to the one attributed to Jesus."
     - Robert Funk (Editor), Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus, pp. 45-46

"Once a son of Rabban Gamaliel (II) was ill. He sent two disciples to R. Hanina b. Dosa, that he might pray for mercy for him. When he (b. Dosa) saw them, he went up into the attic and implored mercy for him. When he came down he said to them, 'Go, for the fever has left him.'
They said to him, 'Are you a prophet then?'...They returned and noted the hour in writing.
"When they came back to Rabban Gamaliel he said to them: 'By the Temple service!...It happened exactly so in that hour the fever left him and he asked for water to drink.'."
     - Talmud of Jerusalem

"All these stories, the Synoptic, the Johannine and the rabbinical, ultimately go back to the Elijah cycle in I Kings. Note in the rabbinical narrative the disciples sent as emissary, the healer seeking privacy for his intercession, and the healing as a prophetic certification, all as in I Kings. Note in the New Testament stories the healing at a distance and the recovery in the very hour the intercession was made, just as in the rabbinical story."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 85

Mark relates another healing of a gentile by Jesus.

"Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre [many early manuscripts 'Tyre and Sidon']. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil [Greek 'unclean'] spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
'First let the children eat all they want', he told her, 'for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs.'
'Yes, Lord," she replied, 'but even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.'
Then he told her, 'For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.' She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone."
     - Mark 7:24-30; (Matthew 15:21-28)

These stories relate" the only two miracles that Jesus performed for Gentiles and performed at a distance. And, although this is not unique to those cases, they are performed for a child rather than the child's parent. It is hard not to consider those twin miracles, requested by a father for his son and a mother for her daughter, as programmatic defenses of the later Gentile mission, as Jesus' proleptic initiation of that process.....Early Christian communities symbolically retrojected their own activities back into the life of Jesus."
     - John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991)

(3) Techniques of Exorcism

Traditions in Palestine

[... I adjure you by the name of the Lord, 'He Who re]moves iniquity and transgression' (Exod. 34:7), O Fever demon and Chills-demon and Chest Pain-demon..."
     - An Exorcism 4Q560 1.4

"Exorcisms clearly were a part of the Jewish milieu in first-century Palestine. The Judaism of Jesus's time, observes Rousseau, had been influenced by Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian and Greek cultures. The Persian belief that demons could possess individuals and cause diseases, says [John J.] Rousseau [an archaeologist and member of the Jesus Seminar], 'had gained wide acceptance, and techniques of exorcism were used for the treatment of illnesses.' "Often those techniques involved use of magical devices such as amulets, rings, stones and other artifacts, which have recently been discovered at archaeological sites. One tradition, mentioned by both the first-century Jewish historian Josephus and the third-century Christian writer Origen of Alexandria, held that the ancient Israelite King Solomon, who lived in the 10th century B.C., was himself an exorcist."
     - Jeffery L. Sheler, "Who was Jesus?", US News Online (12/20/93)

"So they brought him. When the spirit saw Jesus, it immediately threw the boy into a convulsion. He fell to the ground and rolled around, foaming at the mouth"
     - Mark 9:20

Describing the possessed as "in convulsion" and "foaming at the mouth", "the succinct accounts of Jesus' relation to these events, his success and failure together with that of his disciples, as well as the particulars of his cures, coincide so exactly with what we know of these states from the point of view of present-day psychology that it is impossible to avoid the impression that we are dealing with a tradition which is veracious."
     - T. K. Oesterreich, Possession, Demoniacal and Other

"The phenomenon of split consciousness or of compulsive action against which the victim appears to be helpless appears primarily in Christian and Jewish cases of possession. In fact, in a review of the ethnographic literature on hundreds of societies, we have not encountered this phenomenon. Rather, we are more likely to find a total transformation, the apparent substitution of one personality for another."
     - Erika Bourguignon, Possession (1976)

"The exorcism is an exceptionally powerful cure among our own people down to the very day. As you may know, I have observed a man by the name of Eleazar free a demon-possessed victim in the presence of Vespasian [Emperor Rome from 69-79 C.E.], his sons and tribunes, and a host of other military personnel. This is how he went about it.
"He would hold a ring to the nose of the possessed victim - a ring that had one of those roots prescribed by Solomon under its seal - and then as the victim got a whiff of the root, he would draw the demon out through the victim's nostrils. The victim would collapse on the spot and (Eleazar) would adjure it never again to enter him, invoking Solomon by name and reciting the incantations Solomon had composed.
"Since Eleazar was always determined to captivate his audience and demonstrate he possessed this power, he would place a cup or basin full of water not far from the victim and would order the demon to tip these vessels over on its way out and thus demonstrate to the onlookers that it had actually taken leave of the victim."
     - Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 8.46-49

"Jesus's method of simple command over the demons differed greatly from that practiced by other holy men of his time. Most exorcists of the period relied on ritual, chants, signs and artifacts to expel evil spirits."
     - The Guinness Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits

Amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is a description of an exorcism that is strongly reminiscent of those performed by Jesus.

"So I prayed for him, that blasphemer, and laid my hands upon his head. Thereupon the plague was removed from him, the evil spirit exorcised from him, and he was healed."
     - Tales of the Patriarchs 1QapGen 21.28-29

"Of the seven references to individual exorcism in the Synoptics, the story of the (epileptic?) boy in Mark 9:14-29, the brief reference to Mary Magdalene's exorcism (Luke 8:2), and possibly the core of the story of the Gerasene demoniac (Mark 5:1-20) go back - sometimes through a number of layers of later Christian interpretation - to events in Jesus' ministry. That Jesus performed exorcisms is also supported by the Q tradition (Luke 11:20 par. in particular and Luke 11:14-23 par. in general)."
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

"Besides the several accounts of Jesus casting out demons, the Acts of the Apostles -- the New Testament book that chronicles the early growth of Christianity after the Resurrection -- notes that Jesus's disciples also performed exorcisms. Many scholars conclude that such a preponderance of reports indicates that Jesus probably did set the example for his followers. Yet as with healings, whether or not the specific exorcisms recorded in the Gospels are factual accounts of actual events remains a matter of dispute."
     - Jeffery L. Sheler, "Who was Jesus?", US News Online (12/20/93)

"He [Jesus] went on: 'What comes out of a man is what makes him "unclean." For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man "unclean".'"
     - Mark 7:21-23

Rebuking the Spirits

"When Jesus saw that a crowd was running to the scene, he rebuked the evil [Greek unclean] spirit. 'You deaf and mute spirit,' he said, 'I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.'
The spirit shrieked, convulsed him violently and came out. The boy looked so much like a corpse that many said, 'He's dead.' But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him to his feet, and he stood up. After Jesus had gone indoors, his disciples asked him privately, 'Why couldn't we drive it out?'
He replied, 'This kind can come out only by prayer.' [Some manuscripts prayer and fasting]"
     - Mark 9:25-29; (Matthew 9:20-29; Luke 17:17b-20a)

"Christ's method differed from other approaches because it "consisted neither in magical means nor in ritualistic rigmaroles, but in His own living word of infinite power. He spoke and the demons obeyed Him as Lord of the spirit world."
     - Prof. Merrill F. Unger, Biblical Demonology

"Some of the Prayers for exorcism in the magical papyri are long, elaborate compositions, but others are very brief, like the commands."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) P. 169

Jesus' method was similar to that of Apollonius of Tyana.

"He [Apollonius] commanded demons as he would evil men, solely by his spiritual authority."
     - Philostratus, Life of Apollonius IV.44

"Jesus ability to control the demons is described as his 'power' or 'authority'; both terms are also used in magical material. The 'power' was thought to be in him and to work of itself, like an electric charge, without his volition - a notion probably derived from actual cures of hysterical persons who succeeded in pushing through the crowds and touching the holy healer. Nevertheless, some of his more elaborate miracles or magical rites followed periods perhaps preparatory, and certain exorcisms are said to have presupposed prayer (and perhaps fasting), as they commonly did for other magicians.
"Jesus the magician's power, thus fortified, is divine and may be described as 'the finger of God.' The demons are sometimes aware of it as soon as - or even before - he comes in sight. They also know his true, supernatural titles ('Son/Holy One of god') and immediately call him by them, since calling a person by his true tittle or name is a common magical means of getting control over him. However, it doesn't always work; so with Jesus as with other magicians the demons are reduced to entreaties - 'Don't torture me! Don't send us out of the country!' - and try to make terms or secure favors in return for leaving."
"Sometimes, however, demons or diseases are recalcitrant, and then Jesus/the magician resorts to additional means to make his commands effective. First the demon may be questioned and made to declare his true name. If he resists or tries to use the magician's name or title in a counterattack, he may be silenced - the word is 'muzzled'. He must then be ordered out. Usually a command, 'a word' is enough. Orders short and to the point, like royal commands or the orders of a master to a slave, make the best impression."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 167-168

"Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an evil spirit cried out, 'What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are--the Holy One of God!'
'Be quiet!' said Jesus sternly. 'Come out of him!' The evil spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.
The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, 'What is this? A new teaching--and with authority! He even gives orders to evil spirits and they obey him.'"
     - Mark 1:23-27; (Matthew 17:18; Luke 9:42-43)

Compare the report of Jesus' method with Lucian's parody of an exorcism:

"...The Syrian from Palestine who is an expert [in exorcism, and] how many [demoniacs], falling down moonstruck and rolling their eyes, their mouths full of foam, he takes in hand and stands them up and sends them off in their right mind, ridding them of their great troubles - for a huge fee. For when, standing over [his] prostrate [patients], he asks [the demons] when they came into the body, the sick man himself is silent, but the demon answers, wither in Greek or in some foreign tongue, [telling] where he comes from and how and whence he came into the man. And [the exorcist], resorting to conjurations and, if the demon does not obey, also threatening [it], drives it out."
     - Lucian, Philopseudes 16 (165)

Shamans and psychologists both use similar methods to dealt with hysteria and possession. "In each case an authority or power - a 'belief system' - is imposed on the one in which is trapped, essentially hypnosis. Jesus is consistently described in the gospels as using a sharp, authoritative manner in dealing with cases of possession and similar conditions: 'Be quiet! Come out of him!' (Mark 1:26), 'Ephphatha!' ('Be opened!') (Mark 7:34), 'Talitha kum!' ('Little girl, I tell you to get up!') (Mark 5:41), leaving little doubt that Jesus' methods were similar."
     - Ian Wilson, Jesus, The Evidence

"However, talitha koum also circulated without translation as a magical formula: a partial misunderstanding of it became the basis of another phrase - if not an entire story - preserved in Acts 9.36ff. where Peter raises a dead woman conveniently named Tabitha by saying to her in Greek, 'Tabitha, get up.' (Tabitha is a mispronunciation of talitha, which the storyteller mistook for a proper name.)"
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 125

(Both Matthew 9:25 and Luke 8:54, which borrow from the story in Mark, omit the Aramaic phrase.)

Spirit Possession
The gospels report that Jesus was accused of demonic possession.

From accusations that he was out of his mind, "it seems that Jesus' exorcisms were accompanied by abnormal behavior on his part. Magicians who want to make demons obey often scream their spells, gesticulate, and match the mad in fury. This connection between magic and mania recurs in other forms of the charge against Jesus: in Jn. 7.20 and 8.52 for instance, when the crowd says to him, 'You have a demon,' they mean, practically, 'You're crazy'; but compare Jn. 10.20 where they distinguish the states, 'He has a demon and is insane.' Identification of the two conditions lies behind Lk. 4.23, where Jesus is made to anticipate that his townspeople, ridiculing his claim to be a healer, will tell him, 'Doctor, cure yourself.'"
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 42

In Aramaic "an insane man is called dewana, which literally means that he is possessed of a devil, or has become wild."
     - George M. Lamsa (translator), The Four Gospels : According to the Eastern Version (1933) p. xiii

Rabbinic tradition distinguishes between madness and demonic possession, however.

"The rabbis define 'a madman' as 'one who goes out by night alone and spends the night in a graveyard and tears his clothes and destroys whatever is given him' and they note that his condition my occur in transient fits; they also distinguish between such a madman and a magician who 'spends the night in a graveyard so that an unclean spirit will come upon him."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 102

According to Mark, other people believed Jesus was possessed by the spirit of John the Baptist.

"They [the disciples] drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them. King Herod heard about this, for Jesus' name had become well known. Some were saying, [some early manuscripts 'He was saying'] 'John the Baptist has been raised from the dead, and that is why miraculous powers are at work in him.'"
     - Mark 6:13-14

"One of the commonest forms of exorcism was to order the demon out 'by the name of' some more powerful being, usually a god whose 'true name' or 'true' title or function the magician knew. Use of this true name and designation not only enabled the magician to call effectively for the god to come and enforce his orders; it also was effective by itself, for the name both was an independent power and united the magician with the god he named. Thus it gave him, at least momentarily, both the god's power and its own. We have here another form of the notion of Jesus presupposed by the exorcism stories - the notion that he is, or is united with, a supernatural being, so that even his name is a power."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 46

This sense of being united with a spirit is also conveyed by Paul.

"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me."
     - Galatians 2:20

"Even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. And I have already passed judgment on the one who did this, just as if I were present. When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature [or that 'his body'; or that 'the flesh'] may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord."
     - 1 Corinthians 5:3-5

"Magicians did write spells and the like on their flesh; directions for doing so are given in the magical papyri, i.e., Papyri graecae magicae VII. 222-223; VIII. 65ff. Moreover, Paul claimed to be tattooed or branded with 'the marks of Jesus,' Gal. 6.17 - most likely, the same marks that Jesus had carried."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 64

"Finally, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus."
     - Galatians 6:17

"Ma'ase Merkava and other extracts from the Hekhalot, as well as from late Midrashic literature, show that seals [with the name of God] were actually inscribed on the body, and were not just referred to as metaphors. This clarifies the magic apotropaic aim of this practice, and the use of the seal as a 'password' into the Heavenly palaces as well as a shield on earth."
     - Meir Bar-Ilan, "Magic Seals on the Body Among Jews in the First Centuries C.E."

The belief that Jesus's name could heal continued long after his death in Jewish circles.

"A case [in point was that] of Rabbi Elazer ben Dama. A snake bit him and one Jacob of the village of Sama [in Galilee] came to cure him in the name of Jesus ben Pantera, but Rabbi Ishmael would not allow it. He said to him, 'You are not permitted, Ben Dama.' He said to him, 'I will give you a proof [that it is permissible] for him to cure me,' but before he could finish his proof, he died. Rabbi Ishmael said, 'You are lucky, Ben Dama, that you departed [this life] in peace and did not break through the scholars fence [around the Law]."
     - c. 100-130

"From the middle years of the third century comes an obscure curse by a Palestinian rabbi, 'Woe on him who makes himself alive by the Name of god.' This may reflect the belief (later widespread) that Jesus did his miracles and even raised himself from the dead by magical use of the diving Name, the greatest of all spells. About the same time another rabbi advised his pupils as to biblical verses they might use for refutation, 'if the whore's son veils you there are two gods' - the second god being Jesus himself. A generation later another Palestinian, Rabbi Abbahau, said, 'If a man tells you, "I am a god," he is a liar; "I am the son of Man," he will regret it; "I go up to the heavens," he promises, but he will not perform.' Here the reference to Jesus is unmistakable; evidence that he claimed to be able to go up into the heavens is also found in the New Testament. A blessing of the late third or early fourth century concludes with the assurance that you shall have no sons or disciples who publicly disgrace themselves 'like Jesus the Nazarene'."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 65

Click here for more on the role of the magician and magic in the Roman Empire.

Exorcisms in Talmudic Literature
"It can be generalized that in ancient times no distinction was made between religious life and magic - in accord with the thinking of modern ideas - but magic was an then integral part of religion. Indeed, among the various matters of magic mentioned in the Talmudic literature, three incidents of exorcism by rabbis are noted explicitly, though presumably many more incidents of this type occurred among Jews in ancient times."
     - Meir Bar-Ilan, "Exorcism by Rabbis Talmud Sages and Their Magic"

"Once Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa [1st c.] went to immerse himself in [the water of] a cave. Kuthim (Samaritans) came and placed a large rock over the mouth of the cave. The spirits came and removed it. Subsequently, an evil spirit haunted a poor woman in Rabbi Hanina's neighborhood.
His students said to him: Rabbi, see how this poor woman suffers grief from the evil spirit.
Rabbi Hanina addressed the spirit: Why do you cause grief to the daughter of Abraham ?
The spirit responded: Are you not the one who went down to dip in the cave, and so on, ...till I came with my brothers and my father's household and removed the rock. Is this how you pay me for the favor I did you ?
He answered her: I decree.."

"In spite of the abridged nature of the story, it probably ended with Rabbi Hanina ordering the spirit to leave the poor woman, notwithstanding that previously the spirit (and its family) had done him a favor. Indeed the spirit fled and the woman was cured, revealing the power of Rabbi Hanina. It is to be noted that this story is not known from Talmudic literature itself but from the writing of a twelfth-century Ashkenazi wise sage....The fact that the Jerusalem Talmud, and also various midrashic (sermonic) texts, have not been preserved intact shows that it is definitely possible that this text is authentic and was originally written in the Talmudic period."
     - Meir Bar-Ilan, "Exorcism by Rabbis Talmud Sages and Their Magic"

According to the Mishna and Talmud, Rabbi Simon was an important sage in Israel during the 2nd c. C.E.

"It is told about Rabbi Simon that beside his greatness in Torah study, spread through the entire Talmud, he was learned in miracles: he commanded a valley to fill with dinars, and so it happened; in his days the rainbow was not seen (for the world was sustained by his merit, and the mark of the covenant was not necessary); a carob tree and spring were created for him in the cave where he hid with his son; while in the cave he was nourished only by carobs, and in another connection it was said about him that his teeth blackened because of his fasts; he stared at one man and killed him (with the 'evil eye'); he raised bones of the dead from the land of Tiberias to purify it;27 and additional wonder stories were told about him."
     - Meir Bar-Ilan, "Exorcism by Rabbis Talmud Sages and Their Magic"

The Talmud tells of Rabbi Simon exorcising a male spirit called Ben Tamalyon.

"Once the kingdom issued a decree not to observe the Sabbath, not to circumcise the sons, and to have relations with menstruating women... They said: Who will go to abrogate the decrees? Let Rabbi Simon go since he is learned in miracles... He was greeted by Ben Tamalyon: Do you want me to come with you? Rabbi Simon wept and said: How is it that the maidservant of Father Abraham's household had an angel come three times and I not once; let the miracle come by any means. The first one he came to was the daughter of the emperor. When he came there, he said: Ben Tamalyon leave !, Ben Tamalyon leave ! And as he was called, he left. He was told: request whatever you want. Go to the storehouse and take whatever you want. He found the document, took it and tore it up."
     - Talmud, tractate Meila 17a-b

(The Bet-Hamidrash, from the collection of midrashim 'Beth Midrash', gives a longer version of the same story wherein the spirit is female and her name not given.)
An exorcism is attributed to Rabbi (Abba) Yossi Man of Zeitur, who lived in the fourth century. ('Abba' [father] was a title for miracle men.)

"Abba Yossi man of Zeitur (apparently a place in Galilee) informed the residents of the city of the presence of a spirit in their water spring, a good spirit that appeared to him and informed him that an evil spirit wanted to chase him from the water. And so, this Abba Yossi succeeded at first in bringing the residents of his city to the spring, led them in their battle (his battle) against the evil spirit and finally succeeded in exorcising the evil by means of agricultural implements."
     - Meir Bar-Ilan, "Exorcism by Rabbis Talmud Sages and Their Magic"

"Rabbi Berachya ben Rabbi Simon: an incident in our town with Abba Yossi son of Yochanan man of Zeitur who was sitting studying at the opening of a spring. The spirit dwelling there revealed itself to him and said: do you know how many years I am dwelling here and you go about, you, your wives and children in the evening, dawn and noon unharmed. And now you should know that an evil spirit dwells here and he harms people. He said: what should we do ? He said: go warn the people of the town and tell them to gather their various agricultural implements here tomorrow at dawn. Let them observe the water and when they see stirring of the water they should beat the iron (implements) and say: ours triumphed, ours triumphed! And they should not leave the place until they see a blob of blood on the surface of the water. He went and warned the residents of the town telling them: gather your various agricultural implements and go there at dawn tomorrow. Observe the water and when you see stirring of the water beat the iron and say: ours triumphed, ours triumphed ! Do not leave until you see a blob of blood on the surface of the water. And so we learn a fortiori, if spirits who were not created to need assistance now need assistance, how much more so we who were created to need assistance. We proclaim 'He sends help from the holy place'."
     - Vayikra Rabba (Aramaic)

(A slightly shorter version translated into the Hebrew can be found in Tanhuma Buber. Even to this day many Jewish and Moslem residents believe that good and evil spirits inhabit the springs of Israel.)

Raising the Dead

Current Practices and Expectations
"The Qumran Community [more properly the Yahad, a group described in the Dead Sea Scrolls who did not necessarily live at Qumran] believed religiously that 'life' could only happen in the Community and according to some Jews, it could only occur in the land of Palestine if it was freed from Roman rule. We found it was common practice at that time for one Jewish sect to believe that all Jews of other sects were religiously 'dead'."
When Jesus "initiated a new candidate into his core group, they were 'raised from the dead'. This two tier structure was recorded by early Christians, who said that Jesus offered simple teaching to 'the many' but gave a secret teaching to 'the few'."
     - Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas, The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus

"Both Elijah and Elisha raised boys (one each) from the dead by the drastic method of lying on tip of them (Elijah three times, Elisha only twice) and praying to Yahweh (I Kings 17.21f.; II Kings 4.34f.). Jesus raised at least three persons, a girl by taking her hand, two young men by mere orders. This is clearly intended to show Jesus' superior power."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p 214

Jarius' Daughter

"And Elisaie went into the house, and, behold, the dead child was laid upon the bed. And Elisaie went into the house, and shut the door upon themselves, the two, and prayed to the Lord.... And he went up, and bowed himself on the child seven times; and the child opened his eyes.... And the woman went in, and fell at his feet, and did obeisance to the ground; and she took her son."
     - IV [II] Kings 4:3237 LXX

Healing of Jarius' Daughter

"While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler's house some who said, 'Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?" But ignoring what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue [Jairus], 'Do not fear, only believe.' And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James. When they came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, he saw a tumult, and people weeping and wailing loudly. And when he had entered, he said to them, 'Why do you make a tumult and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.' And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside, and took the child's father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. Taking her by the hand he said to her, 'Tal'itha cu'mi'; which means, 'Little girl, I say to you, arise'. And immediately the girl got up and walked (she was twelve years of age), and they were immediately overcome with amazement. And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat."
     - Mark 5:35-43; (Matthew 9:23-26; Luke 8:49-56)

"The story stays close to the Old Testament original; in both, the prophet, on the way to the child, receives the message that it is dead, but continues resolutely. In both stories the prophet seeks privacy for the miracle: 'After turning all the others out, [Jesus] took the child's father and mother and his own companions and went in where the child was lying,' just as Elisha shut the door upon himself and the child. And in both, the prophet touches the child and speaks, and the child awakes. In Mark, the parents were 'ecstatic with great ecstasy' (exestesan...ekstasei megale - Mark 5:42); in Kings, the mother of the child is 'ecstatic with all this ecstasy' (exestesas ... pasan ten ekstasin tauten - IV Kings)."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 66

"...Aramaic was the language Jesus regularly used in addressing his fellow Palestinian Jews; but only a few traces of his Aramaic words have been preserved in our Four Gospels. In fact, talitha koum ['Young girl, arise'] and ephphatha ('be opened' in the story of the deaf-mute in Mark 7:34) are the only cases of Jesus' Aramaic words of command appearing in miracle stories of the Four Gospels."
"...The story [of the raising of Jairus' daughter] had a remarkably long life in the oral and written tradition: from Mark's redaction it reached back, probably through a collection of miracle stories in Greek, to a still earlier stage as an individual story in the Greek oral tradition, and prior to that to an existence as an Aramaic story circulating in Palestine."
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

"In Mark 5, Matthew 9, and Luke 8, the president of an unnamed synagogue, one Jairus (whose name, 'He will awaken,' betrays the representative and fictional nature of the account), comes to Jesus, like the Shunnamite woman to Elisha, 'falls at his feet and entreats him many times,' saying, in both Mark and Luke, that his only daughter was dying. In Matthew, to align more closely with the story's Old Testament source - as is typical of the careful and knowledgeable first evangelist - the child is already dead. At this point all three Synoptics intercalate the story of the woman with the issue of blood. After that miracle:"
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 66

"...While he was still speaking, a message came from the president's house, 'Your daughter is dead; why trouble the Rabbi further?' But Jesus, overhearing the message as it was delivered, said to the president of the synagogue, 'Do not be afraid; only have faith.'"
     -Mark 5:35-36

A similar feat of raising a girl was credited to Jesus' contempory, Apollonius of Tyana.

"It seems a girl had died just as she was getting married. The groom was walking along beside her bier mourning over his unfulfilled marriage, and all Rome was in mourning with him since the girl came from a consular family. When Apollonius happened on this sad scene, he said, 'Put the bier down, and I will put an end to the tears you are shedding for this young woman'. Then he asked what her name might be. The crowd of course assumed he was launching into a eulogy of the sort given at a funeral to induce mourning, but he did not such thing. Instead, he touched her and pronounced something inaudible over her. All of a sudden the young woman awoke from what looked like death. The girl uttered some sounds and returned to her father's house. This is reminiscent of Alcestis when she was brought back to life by Hercules."
     - Flavius Philostratus (ca. 170-245), Life of Apollonius IV.45

The Youth of Nain

"And it came to pass [kai egeneto] that the word of the Lord came to Eliu saying 'Arise, and go to Sarepta of the Sidonian land: behold, I have there commanded a widow-woman [chera] to maintain thee.' And he arose and went [eporeuthe] to Sarepta, and came to the gate of the city [te pyle te poleos]...
And it came to pass afterward, that the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, was sick; and his sickness was very severe, until there was no breath left in him....
And Eliu said to the woman, 'Give me thy son.' And he took him out of her bosom....
And he breathed on the child thrice, and called on the Lord, and said, 'O Lord, my God, let, I pray thee, the soul of this child return unto him.' And it was so, and the child cried out, and he brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother [kai edoken auton te metri autou]."
     - III [I] Kings 17:8-10, 17, 19-23 LXX

"The revival of the widow's son at Nain closely resembles the story of Elijah's resuscitation the son of the widow of Zarephath..."
     - Robert Funk (Editor), Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus, p. 91

"Soon afterward [[kai egeneto], Jesus went [eporeuthe] to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went along with him. As he approached the town gate [ton pylona tes poleos], a dead person was being carried out--the only son of his mother, and she was a widow [chera]. And a large crowd from the town was with her. When the Lord saw her, his heart went out to her and he said, 'Don't cry.' Then he went up and touched the coffin, and those carrying it stood still. He said, 'Young man, I say to you, get up!' The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother [kai edoken auton te metri autou]."
     - Luke 7:11-15

"Both stories begin with a favorite Septuagintal formula, 'And it came to pass' [kai egeneto], Both concern the dead son of a widow (chera). In both the prophet 'went' (eporeuthe) to the town, where he met the woman at the 'gate of the city' (ton pylona tes poleos - LXX; te pyle te poleos - Luke), even though archaeological study has shown that the village of Nain in Galilee never had a wall; Nain's fictional gate is there for literary reasons - Sarepta's gate transferred. In both stories the prophets speak and touch the dead son, who then rises and speaks. In both stories it is declared that the miracle certifies the prophet (Behold, I know that thou art a man of God' - LXX; 'A great prophet has arisen' - Luke). And both stories conclude with precisely the same words: 'and he gave him to his mother' (kai edoken auton te metri autou).""
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 64

(2) The Raising of Lazarus

The Young Man in Secret Mark
The classic story in this genre is Jesus raising Lazarus in the Gospel of John. Both Jairus' daughter and Lazarus were said by Jesus to have been "sleeping", suggesting that they only appeared to be dead. The raising of Lazarus can also be found in Mark, with an expanded version in Secret Mark, quoted in a lost letter by Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150-215) , "To Theodore"

"And they came into Bethany. And a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And, coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and says to him, 'Son of David, have mercy on me.' But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightway a great cry was heard from the tomb. And going near Jesus rolled away the stone from the door of the tomb. And straightway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and raised him, seizing his hand. But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him. And going out of the tomb they came into the house of the youth, for he was rich. And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And thence, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan."
     - Secret Gospel of Mark 1v20-2v11a

"This is a miracle story of the synoptic type, based, like the narratives of the raising of Job's daughter and the widow of Nain's son, on the stories of Elijah's and Elisha's raising of dead sons. Just as the dead man's sister in the Secret Gospel approaches Jesus and prostrates herself before him to ask for help, so the Shunnamite woman whose son has died approaches Elisha and falls at his feet (II Kings 4:27). In the Secret Gospel, when the woman bows before Jesus, his disciples try to rebuke her for her precipitous act, just as in Kings, when the woman prostrates herself before Elisha, his disciple Giezi tries to thrust her away (II Kings 4:27). In both stories the prophet grows angry or speaks harshly to those attempting to stop the woman: Jesus being 'angered'. Elisha saying to Giezi, 'Leave her alone' (II Kings 4:28). In both, the prophet approaches the deceased, makes appropriate movements, and the dead arise. Elijah's resurrection of the widow of Sarepta's son in I Kings seems also to have influenced the story in the Secret Gospel of Mark: on the dead son's awakening, he 'cried out' (I Kings 17:22), just as the dead man in the Secret Gospel 'gave a great cry'."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 94

Precedents in the Mystery Religions
The sequence of events in the burial of the young man follows the progression of the Mystery religions - fasting, seclusion in darkness, birth into a new identity, and finally the secrets revealed. In the Jewish tradition similar procedures, reflected in the baptismal rite, were used to promote union with the deity. (Note that Secret Mark originated in Alexandria, which was also the home of the mystical and monastic Therapeutae and well as a center for Gnostic beliefs.)

"Smith concludes that the Secret Gospel resurrection and the story of Lazarus' resurrection both stem from some 'common source which both [Secret] Mark and John used...'"
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 95

"That some such teaching was to be understood is indicated by the longer text's report of the youth's coming at night in the costume - a linen cloth over his naked body - that was standard for participants in magical rites, especially for boys to be possessed by spirits and made to see the gods. Canonical Mark reports that another young man in the same costume was with Jesus late at night at the time of his arrest (14.51). Nothing is said of what he was doing; we may suppose that he too was being taught 'the mystery of the kingdom of God'."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 177

"...The linen cloth worn as the sole garment...was a common costume for ancient religious, especially mystery, ceremonies; it was customary for magically induced visions, and it became the standard costume for Christian baptism, the initiatory mystery of the church."
     - Morton Smith, "Two Ascended to Heaven - Jesus and the Author of 4Q491" in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (James H. Charlesworth, Ed. - 1992), p. 291

Click here for rituals used by initiates to "ascend to heaven".

Secret Baptismal Rites?
Jesus' disciples also were said to have access to secrets unavailable to outsiders.

"The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables..."
     - Mark 4:11b

"...Canonical Mark is a censored version of Secret Mark, so that [the quotation above] was present in the first edition of Mark, the one that Clement calls Secret Mark. Second, it was probably used in the nude baptism practice of his community and thereby received an erotic interpretation among some believers. The second-century Carpocratians known to Clement were not, in other words, the only or even the first early Christians with homosexual understandings of such baptisms. Proto-Carpocratians existed, as it were, within the immediate time and place of Mark's first composition."
     - John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991)

"...It now seems possible and, given the Gospel reports, even likely that Jesus taught a 'mystery of the kingdom of God' in which, by means like those known from contemporary magic, initiates were given what they thought was an experience of entering the heavens and they were thus trained to have such visions as those reworked in the transfiguration and resurrection stories."
     - Morton Smith, "Two Ascended to Heaven - Jesus and the Author of 4Q491" in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (James H. Charlesworth, Ed. - 1992), pp. 298-299

"Jesus, unlike John, was not a baptizer but a healer. The tradition, therefore, had no baptism-by-Jesus stories that could be used in the baptismal liturgies. But a story about a miraculous or physical raising from death could be used or created as a symbol for baptismal or spiritual raising from death. In church practice, then, the convert would hear that story and experience its reenactment during baptismal preparation in the night and nude baptism in the dawn."
     - John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991)

Morton Smith, who discovered Secret Mark, "held that the best explanation for the literary and historical evidence surrounding the miracles of Jesus was that Jesus himself actually performed--or meant to and was understood to have performed--magical feats. Among these was a baptismal initiation rite through which he was able to ' give' his disciples a vision of the heavenly spheres. This was in the form of an altered state of consciousness induced by ' the recitation of repetitive, hypnotic prayers and hymns,' a technique common in Jewish mystical texts, Qumran material, Greek magical papyri and later Christian practices such as the Byzantine liturgy."
     - Shawn Eyer, "The Strange Case of the Secret Gospel According to Mark" [originally published in Alexandria: The Journal for the Western Cosmological Traditions, volume 3 (1995), pp. 103-129]

"'After six days' is not from the historical life of Jesus but the baptismal practice at Alexandria..."
     - John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991)

"A peculiar aspect of the Coptic tradition is that it identifies the baptismal day, the sixth day of the sixth week, with a tradition which asserted that that was the day on which Jesus baptized his disciples."
     - Thomas Talley, "Liturgical Time in the Ancient Church: The State of Research", Studia Liturgical 14:34-51(1982)

Secret Mark, therefore, is more germane to early Christian practices in Alexandria than any actual incident from the life of Jesus.

Bethany, "destroyed when the Romans attacked Jerusalem in A.D. 70, was later rebuilt and was renamed by the Arabs who settled there. 'The Israelis today call it Bethanya but the Arabs call it el-Azariyeh, "the place of Lazarus",' says [Paul] Maier [professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University]. 'I find that fascinating. Why would they change the name of the town unless something spectacular happened there?"
     - Jeffery L. Sheler, "Who was Jesus?", US News Online (12/20/93)

The Women

"When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home. "
     - John 11:20

"The Lazarus story in John contains a rather strange sequence that has Martha coming from the Lazarus house to greet Jesus, whereas her sister, Mary Magdalene, remains inside until summoned by Jesus. But in contrast to this, the original Mark account said that Mary Magdalene actually came out of the house with Martha and was then chastised by the disciples and sent back indoors to await Jesus' instruction. This was a specific procedure of Judaic law, whereby a wife in ritual mourning was not allowed to emerge from the property until instructed by her husband."
     - Sir Laurence Gardner, "The Hidden History of Jesus and the Holy Grail" (from a lecture given at the Ranch, Yelm, Washington, 30 April 1997)

"There was a man named Lazarus who had fallen ill. His home was at Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus had fallen ill, was the woman who anointed the Lord with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair.)"
     - John 11: 1-2

"The woman in Bethany did not wipe Jesus' feet with her hair; rather she took a bottle of oil of nard, 'broke it open and poured the oil over his head' (Mark 14:3). John has misremembered his sources, confusing this story with one in Luke, set at Nain, about another unnamed woman:"
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 97

"A woman who had been living an immoral life in the town had learned that Jesus was at table in the Pharisee's house and had brought oil of myrrh in a small flask. She took her place behind him, by his feet, weeping. His feet were wetted with her tears, and she wiped them with her hair, kissing them and anointing them with the myrrh."
     - Luke 7:3738

"Jesus came to a village where a woman named Martha made him welcome in her home. She had a sister, Mary, who seated herself at the Lord's feet and stayed there listening to his words."
     - Luke 10:38-39

"Thus, the Mary who sat at Jesus' feet becomes the woman who anointed Jesus' feet, who was already misidentified with the woman at Bethany who anointed his head. Lazarus comes, of course, from another story in Luke, Jesus' parable of Dives and Lazarus (16:1931), neither of whom is related to Mary or Martha, or to Bethany."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 97

Jesus' parable of Dives and Lazarus is based on an earlier Egyptian tale. Click here for details.

Parallels with the Myth of Osiris
"Unlike the account of the young man in Secret Mark, there are two sisters in John, for example, and the dead man gains a name. The differences, I suggest, stem from the story's having been first mediated through a pre-Christian myth before reaching John, for these aspects of the story of Jesus' raising of Lazarus are borrowed from the Egyptian myth of the resurrection of Osiris by Horus.
"Of course the most famous narrative of Osiris is to be found in Plutarch, but the author of the Fourth Gospel seems not to have been aware of this version; his story is much closer to the mythology of the pyramid texts."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) pp. 95-96

"The chief features of the Egyptian religion remained unchanged from the Vth and VIth dynasties down to the period when the Egyptians embraced Christianity, after the preaching of St. Mark the Apostle in Alexandria, A.D. 69, so firmly had the early beliefs taken possession of the Egyptian mind; and the Christians in Egypt, or Copts as they are commonly called, seem never to have succeeded in divesting themselves of the superstitious and weird mythological conceptions which they inherited."
     - E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Opening of the Mouth (1972), p. xlix

"In the Egyptian myth, Osiris, who dies, has two sisters, Isis and Nephthys. Osiris lies dead at Annu, the Egyptian necropolis, known in Greek as Heliopolis and in the Old Testament as Beth-shemesh (Jer. 43:13) 'City of the Sun' and 'House of the Sun,' respectively. This necropolis had a variety of formulaic names in Egypt: 'the mansion of the Prince in On,' 'the House of the Aged Prince who dwelleth in An,' the 'great house of Anu.' Just as Heliopolis was readily semitized as Beth-shemesh, the House of Anu is readily semitized as Beth-anu [Bethany]. Likewise 'Lazarus' (the Greek form of the Hebrew name 'Eleazar) readily associates itself with the name of the god Osiris (semitized as El-Osiris)."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 98

More precisely, Eleazar, "whom God helps", etymologically corresponds to the Egyptian Ele-asar-u, the "Mummy's Constellation", which was linked to Osiris. We now know Osiris' constellation as Orion. These stars "resurrected" in the eastern sky just before sunrise during the same time of year that the floodwaters of the Nile overflowed and deposited their fertile mud.
As recounted in the Pyramid Texts, the soul of a dead pharoah ascended the stairway to heaven to become ritually identified with Osiris/Orion or join the never-setting, never-dying, circumpolar stars. The parallels between the accounts of the resurrection of Osiris in the Pyramid Texts, and the raising of Lazrus in the Gospel of John are striking.

"They come to Osiris the King at the sound of the weeping of Isis, at the cry of Nephthys, at the wailing of these two spirits."      - Utterance 670	"At Bethany, Jesus saw "Mary weeping and the Jews her companions weeping."      - John 11:33
"O Osiris the King, you have gone, but you will return; you have slept, [but you will awake]; you have died, but you will live."      - Utterance 670	"Jesus says, 'Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I shall go and wake him.'."      - John 11:11
"The tomb is opened for you, the doors of the tomb-chamber are thrown open for you."      - Utterance 665A	"Jesus approaches the tomb and says 'Take away the stone.'"      - John 11:39
"Osiris speaks to Horus, for he has removed the evil [which was on the King] on his fourth day."      - Utterance 670 "O flesh of the king, do not decay, do not rot, do not smell unpleasant."      - Utterance 412	"Martha says, 'Sir, by now there will be a stench; he has been there four days'."      - John 11:39
"I am Horus, 0 Osiris the King, I will not let you suffer. Go forth, wake up."      - Utterance 620	Then he raised his voice in a great cry: 'Lazarus, come forth.'"      - John 11:43
"O King, live, for you are not dead. Horus will come to you that he may cut your cords and throw off your bonds; Horus has removed your hindrance."      - Utterance 703	"The dead man came out, his hands and feet swathed in linen bands, his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said, 'Loose him; let him go.'"      - John 11:44

"Nature Miracles"

"Turning the Nile into blood was the first of the great plagues caused by Moses; John emphasizes that the turning of water into wine was the first of Jesus' great miracles (2.11)."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 215

"On the third day there was a wedding in Cana-in-Galilee. The mother of Jesus was there, and Jesus and his disciples were guests also. The wine gave out, so Jesus' mother said to him, 'They have no wine left.
He answered, 'Woman, what have I to do with you? My hour is not yet come.'
His mother said to the servants, 'Do whatever he tells you.' There were six stone water-jars standing near, of the kind used for Jewish rites of purification; each held from twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus said to the servants, 'Fill the jars with water,' and they filled them to the brim. 'Now draw some off,' he ordered, 'and take it to the steward of the feast', and they did so.
The steward tasted the water now turned to wine, not knowing its source; though the servants who had drawn the water knew. He hailed the bridegroom and said, 'Everyone serves the best wine first, and waits until the guests have drunk freely before serving the poorer sort; but you have kept the best wine until now.'"
     - John 2: 1-10

"An examination of the account of Elijah's providing flour and oil in III Kings LXX reveals some direct verbal sources for the story of Jesus' miracle at Cana. One of the most puzzling aspects of this first miracle in the Fourth Gospel is Jesus' rudeness to his mother: 'Woman, what have I to do with you? [Ti emoi kai soi, gunai].' As has been seen before, the statement is here not a historical report but an antitype of Elijah: for the woman [gune] in need of food says to that prophet, 'What have I to do with thee? [ti emoi kai soi]' (III [I] Kings 17:18 LXX). In both stories the prophet instructs those in need of sustenance to take empty pitchers (hydria, LXX; hydriai, John) and remove from them the needed provision, which miraculously appears. This and the succeeding miracle in Kings, Elijah's resurrecting of the woman's son, lead her to place her faith in him as a prophet: 'I know that thou art a man of God' (III Kings 17:24 LXX), just as Jesus' act leads his disciples to put their faith in him."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 86

Before the story reached its final form, it was evidently also influenced by the mythology of Dionysus

"The Johannine story of Jesus' turning water into wine (2.1-11) was modeled on a myth about Dionysus told in a Dionysiac festival celebrated at Sidon [Phoenicia]. A first- or second-century A.D. report of the festival shows striking similarities, even in wording, to the gospel material and makes its polemic purpose apparent."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 158

"As a god associated with the vine, grapes, and wine, Dionysus naturally was believed to perform wonders in connection with wine. Ancient worshipers of Dionysos from various locales claimed that Dionysos effected miracles with wine on holy days. It was said, for instance, that a fountain of wine flowed by itself from the ground and that spring water from the temple of Liber (identified with Dionysos) has the flavor of wine of festival days. (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 3.66. 1-2; Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 2.106, 31:13; cp. the springs of cool water and wine that come forth when a Bacchante strikes the ground with her thyrus in Euripides Bacchae."
     - Marvin W.Meyer (Editor), The Ancient Mysteries - A Sourcebook (1987) pp. 94-95

"Between the market-place and the Menius is an old theater and a shrine of Dionysos. The image is the work of Praxiteles. Of the gods the Eleans worship Dionysos with the greatest reverence, and they assert that the god attends their festival, the Thyia. The place where they hold the festival they name the Thyia is about eight stades from the city. Three pots are brought into the building by the priests and set down empty in the presence of the citizens and of any strangers who may chance to be in the country. The doors of the building are sealed by the priests themselves and by any others who may be so inclined. On the morrow they are allowed to examine the seals, and on going into the building they find the pots filled with wine. I did not myself arrive at the time of the festival, but the most respected Elean citizens, and with them strangers also, swore that what I have said is the truth. The Andrians too assert that every other year at their feat of Dionysos wine flows of its own accord from the sanctuary."
     - Pausania, Description of Greece, Book 6: Elis 2, 26.1-2

"This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed at Cana in Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him."
     - John 2:11

This miraculous sign, turning water into wine, is not mentioned in any of the synoptic gospels.

"In the synoptic gospels the 'glory' of Jesus is, as it were, glimpsed by Peter, James, and John only temporarily at the Transfiguration (Mark 9:1-8 and parallels), and even then they fail to grasp the significance of this disclosure. In John the 'glory' of Jesus is revealed openly at the very outset of his ministry at the wedding in Cana in Galilee : this is the first of the 'signs' which Jesus does and in his concluding comment the evangelist notes that its outcome was that 'his disciples believed in him' (2:11)."
     - Graham N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, The Oxford Bible Series (1989), paperback, p. 106

"According to the ritual described in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the relevance of this is plain. At (the equivalent of) Communion, only fully initiated celibates (presided over by a priest) were allowed to partake of wine. All others present were regarded as unsanctified and were restricted to a purifying ritual with water - these included married men, novices, Gentiles, and all lay Jews. The Gospel text continues, 'There were set there six water-pots of stone, after the manner of the purifying of the Jews'. The great significance of Jesus' action is that he took it upon himself to break with tradition: he abandoned the water entirely and allowed the 'unclean' guests to take the sacred wine. The 'ruler of the feast' (in Greek, the arcitriklinoV) who tasted the wine 'knew not whence it was (but the servants which drew the water knew)'. He did not comment on any marvelous transformation, but simply remarked that he was surprised the good wine (as against the water - poor wine) had made its appearance at that stage of the proceedings."
     - Laurence Gardner, Bloodline of the Holy Grail, pp. 60

"Tellingly, John notes that the wine came from huge (twenty- to thirty-gallon) jugs that stood full of water at the front of the house, vessels that were used by observant Jews to fulfill the rules on ceremonial washing. Even a wedding feast had to honor the burdensome rituals of cleansing. Jesus, perhaps with twinkle in his eye, transformed those jugs, ponderous symbols of the old way, into wineskins, harbingers of the new. From purified water of the Pharisees came the choice new wine of a whole new era. The time for ritual cleansing had passed; the time for celebration had begun."
     - Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (1995)

"It is strange that both Mary and Jesus, guests at a wedding in a town not their own, proceed without further ado to give orders to the servants, Jesus' orders being especially demanding and puzzling, if not outright bizarre. Likewise strange for a house in a small hill-town in Galilee would be the large number of massive stone water jars within or right outside the house. In general, one wonders about the large number of servants (for many would be needed to fulfill Jesus' command in any speedy fashion) under the direction of a headwaiter [ arcitriklinoV - the chief slave who responsible for managing a banquet]. Is this a likely scenario in a Galilean hill-town? Has perhaps a Greco-Roman urban setting familiar to the Evangelist been imported into this story?"
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

"We discovered that the term 'turning water into wine' was common parlance, equivalent tot he English expression 'making a silk purse out of a sow's ear'. In this context, it really referred to Jesus using baptism to turn batches of ordinary people into those fit to enter into the 'Kingdom of Heaven', in preparation for the 'end of the age'. In Qumranian terminology the uninstructed were the 'water' and the trained and refined were 'wine'."
     - Christopher Knight & Robert Lomas, The Hiram Key: Pharaohs, Freemasons and the Discovery of the Secret Scrolls of Jesus

(2) Loaves and Fish

Parallels in 2 Kings

"A man came from Baal Shalishah, bringing the man of God twenty loaves of barley bread baked from the first ripe grain, along with some heads of new grain. 'Give it to the people to eat,' Elisha said.
'How can I set this before a hundred men?' his servant asked.
But Elisha answered, 'Give it to the people to eat. For this is what the LORD says: "They will eat and have some left over."' Then he set it before them, and they ate and had some left over, according to the word of the LORD."
     - 2 Kings 4:42-44

After the execution of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas, "a large crowd 'like sheep without a shepherd', who, with scant thought for provisions, immediately journeyed to a 'lonely place' to seek out Jesus."
     - Ian Wilson, Jesus, The Evidence

"And taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. The number of the men who had eaten was five thousand."
     - Mark 6:41-43, 45; (Matthew 14:19-21, 15:36-38; Luke 9:16-17)

"The disciples, though they have presumably just witnessed Jesus feed five thousand with five loaves, naively ask, 'How can anyone provide all these people with bread in this lonely place?' - Mark 8:4."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 75

"These stories about Jesus are modeled on the close parallel in II Kings 4.42ff. where the social setting and dialogue are also similar; the magical parallels are remote and unrelated. This is a clear case in which Old Testament material has been used for secondary expansion, to prove Jesus greater than Elisha; Elisha fed only a hundred, Jesus four or five thousand."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 156-157

A Symbolic Meal
The imagery of the five loaves suggests the Torah (with its five books) and the two fish the arrival of the new age of Pisces (c 18 CE).

"...The Fellows found it highly implausible as the report of an actual event. Mark states that the place they were in was 'desolate' (a wilderness, v.35), yet it was possible for them to go to nearby farms and villages and buy something to eat (v.36). Nowhere in the story is it claimed that Jesus wrought a miracle; there is no acclamation or expression of wonder at the end, as one expects n the standard miracle story."
     - Robert Funk (Editor), Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus, p. 91

"...The multiple attestation of sources and the coherence of the story with Jesus' habit of holding joyful meals fraught with eschatological significance argue for a historical basis to the feeding of the multitudes. The story seems to go back to some especially memorable and symbolic meal Jesus celebrated with a large crowd by the Sea of Galilee."
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

"Whatever the background truth of this story, its origins are undoubtedly early: Mark had evidently drawn on two even earlier accounts of the event, one referring to five thousand people, the other to four thousand."
Jesus "seems to have displayed that same reluctance to become involved in politics that had caused charismatic Honi, the Circle Drawer, to be stoned a century before. According to the John gospel, immediately after the left-over food had been gathered up in baskets, 'Jesus could see they were about to come and take him by force and make him king' (John 6:15). His response was to make a swift diplomatic exit to the hills."
     - Ian Wilson, Jesus, The Evidence

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Pharisaic Connections
The communal meal was important to both the Pharisees and the Yahad of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

According to the Temple Scroll (15.9-14), "the first feast during the year to be celebrated at the sanctuary was the feast of Millu'im, a dedication of the Temple and the priesthood during the first seven days of the month of Nisan (see Ex 29; Ezek 43:18-27). On each day of the celebration a basket of bread had to be offered together with a ram as a wave offering in the Temple. This offering of seven baskets of bread, not mentioned in the Bible, must have been characteristic of the Essenes [Yahad] and referred to by Jesus in the conversation with his disciples reported in Mk 8:14-21.
     - Otto Betz, "Jesus and the Temple Scroll" in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (James H. Charlesworth, Ed. - 1992), p. 76

Re: Jesus feeding the four thousand people in the wilderness:

"'Be careful,' Jesus warned them.'Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod.'
'When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?'
'Twelve,' they replied.
'And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?'
They answered, 'Seven.'
He said to them, 'Do you still not understand?'"
     - Mark 8:15, 19-21 (Matthew 16:9b-11)

The meager amount of "bread" that failed to feed the multitudes was produced by the yeast of the Pharisees and Herod. What Jesus offers is bread that takes away hunger without having to be consumed.

"The Pharisees emphasized the offering of twelve loaves of bread of the Presence each week in the Temple, loaves that were eaten by the priests, while for the Essenes [Yahad] the seven baskets of bread to be offered during the seven days of the feast of Dedication were characteristic. In the eyes of Jesus, the bread of the Pharisees and the Herodians was 'leaven,' that is, bread not suited for a sacrifice (cf. 1 Cor 5:6-7). On the other hand, the bread distributed by him at the feeding of the multitudes originated from God, pointing to the 'bread of life': it is the Son of God, sent by the Father in order to save humanity by offering eternal life (Jn 6:33-35)."
     - Otto Betz, "Jesus and the Temple Scroll" in Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls (James H. Charlesworth, Ed. - 1992), pp. 76-77

The Trajectory of Change
"Throughout his life Jesus performed healings and exorcism for ordinary people. He performs what are usually called nature miracles only for his disciples. Except here: this is the single case where a nature miracle is performed for ordinary people. Yet the disciples keep appearing as mediators and are commanded by Jesus to act in that capacity."
     - John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994)

"...The bread and fish Eucharist was originally a postresurrectional confession of Jesus' continued presence at the ritualized meals of the believing community. Open commensality survived as ritualized meal. Once narrative Gospels were composed that tradition was placed both before the resurrection, in the common source for Mark 6 and John 6, and after the resurrection, in Luke 24 and John 21. Even more fascinating, however, are those fleeting but tantalizing glimpses we catch across the bread and fish tradition as it moves from general community toward leadership group and on to specific leaders."
     - John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991)

"Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to his disciples to set before the people. He also divided the two fish among them all."
     - Mark 6:41; (Matthew 14:19, 15:36; Luke 9:16)

"Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish."
     - John 6: 11

"...The question comes from the disciples in Mark 6:35 but from Jesus in John 6:5; the food comes from the disciples in Mark 6:38 but from 'a lad' in John 6:9; the preparation comes from Jesus directly in Mark 6:39 but from Jesus through the disciples in John 6:10; the distribution comes from Jesus through the disciples in Mark 6:41 but from Jesus directly in John 6:11; and the collection of fragments comes from an unidentified 'they' in Mark 6:43 but from Jesus through the disciples in John 6:12....There must have been a trajectory of change from action by Jesus directly toward action by Jesus through the disciples along both branches of the transmission."
     - John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991)

(3) Miracles on Water

Stilling of the Storm

"At his command the storm-wind rose
and lifted the waves high.
Carried up to heaven, plunged down to the depths, tossed to and fro in peril, they reeled and staggered like drunken men,
and their seamanship was all in vain.
So they cried to the LORD in their trouble,
and he brought them out of their distress.
The storm sank to a murmur
and the waves of the sea were stilled.
They were glad then that all was calm,
as he guided them to the harbor they desired."
     - Psalm 107:25-30

(This Psalm also served as the prototype for the story of the stilling of the storm in the Book of Jonah.)

"A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, 'Teacher, don't you care if we drown [apollumetha]'?'
He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, 'Quiet! Be still!' Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, 'Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?'
They were terrified and asked each other, 'Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!'"
     - Mark 4:37-41

"Matthew recognized as a partial source of the disciples' 'We perish [apollumetha]' in Mark 4:38, the speech of the sailors in Jonah 1:14 LXX: 'Forbid it, Lord. Let us not perish [medamos, Kyrie. me apolometha].' But Matthew also observed that the ship's captain says to Jonah, 'Call upon thy God, that God may save us, and we perish not [hopos diaso se ho Theos hemas, kai ou me apolometha]' - Jonah 1:6 LXX. Thus Matthew, taking key words from Jonah-'Lord,' 'save us,' 'we perish' - rewrites Mark: a fictional correction of a fictional account, each of which is based in its own way on the Old Testament."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 79

"The disciples went and woke him, saying, 'Lord, save us! We're going to drown!'"
     - Matthew 8:25

"If it seems strange that Jesus could sleep in the stem of a small open fishing-boat in the middle of a storm so violent that waves were breaking over the vessel and filling it with water, Jesus' sleep should be seen not as a description of an event but as a literary necessity, the fulfillment of a typological foreshadowing: 'Jonah had gone down into a corner of the ship and was lying sound asleep when the captain came upon him.' That the disciples should speak rudely to Jesus is likewise accounted for in the captain's speech: 'What, sound asleep?... Get up' (Jonah 1:5-6). When Mark does not observe that the disciples were afraid during the storm, but only after the storm had been stilled, he is recounting an antitype, not an event, a literary fiction built from a supposed prefigurement: after the storm is stilled in Jonah, the men 'feared [ephobethesan] the Lord with great fear [phobo megalo]' - 1:6 LXX, just as in Mark, after the sea is calmed, the disciples 'feared very greatly [ephobethesan phobon megan]'' - 4:4 1."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) p. 79

"About the fourth watch of the night he went out to them, walking on the lake. He was about to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost. They cried out, because they all saw him and were terrified. Immediately he spoke to them and said, 'Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid.'
Then he climbed into the boat with them, and the wind died down. They were completely amazed, for they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened."
     - Mark 6:48-52

The Christian Sibylline Oracles, a work which is likely independent of the canonical Gospels, includes both wind and waves in the same story and inverts the sequence of meal then sea.

"With a word shall he make the winds to cease, and calm the sea
While it rages walking on it with feet of peace and in faith.
And from five loaves and fish of the sea
He shall feed five thousand men in the desert,
And then taking all the fragments left over
He will fill twelve baskets for a hope of the people."
     - Sibylline Oracles 8:273-278

Mark's Boat Source
"If one were to gather all the material in Gospel of Mark which told of voyaging in a boat except for the Walking on the Sea, itself a resurrection appearance, and the Riddle of the Loaves of Mk.8.14-21 which was a Markan composition requiring a knowledge of both Feedings in the Gospel, one would find that the voyage took Jesus from:

a. the pressure of a crowd, (Mk.3.7-12)
b. to a teaching from the boat (Mk.4.1) to
c. a Feeding of a multitude with 'five loaves' and 'two fish' (i.e. the Law for the New Age of Pisces)
d. to the healing of a Gerasene demoniac, excluding the pigs embellishment, (Mk.5.1-20)
e. to Magdala where a woman with a hemorrhage was healed, (Mk.5.24b-34)
f. and finally to the conclusion of the voyage now in a ship not a boat, (Mk.4.35-41) with the Stilling of a Storm, presumably debarking at Capernaum."

"What have we covered with this tale of a voyage in a 'boat' which concludes in a 'ship?' E. Schmidt [Rahmen], wrote that Ps.107.1-32 was the LITURGY followed in the Temple service as votive offerings were presented at Rosh Hashana, the New Year 'time of accounting.' The four event-interpretations of Gospel of Mark's Boat Source are obviously the haggadoth [free rabbinical interpretations of Scripture] narrating the four stages of that Psalm. As a written composition the Boat Source probably began with the Tishri introduction recaptured in Mk.1:14-15 (Vs.15 [The kingdom of God is near. Repent...] echoes Rosh Hashana, the ten penitential days concluding in Yom Kippur, and the promised Kingdom which lies at the root of the Feast of Booths). Possibly the original List of the Twelve, which has gone through three stages of narration in Gospel of Mark, was part of the Boat Source as well."
     - Philip B. Lewis (CrossTalk)
(See "Indications of a Liturgical Source in the Gospel According to Mark", Encounter, pp.385-394, of the Journal of Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, IN, Vol.39, No.4, in Autumn of 1978]

Walking on Water
"Moses divided the sea and walked through (Ex. 14.21ff.), Jesus simply walked over it (Mk. 6.48f.p.; Jn. 6.19) - another brilliant piece of one-upmanship, but not likely to have occurred to the evangelists had there not been a story of Jesus' walking on the water, as magicians were expected to..."
"Walking on water (Mk. 6.45-52p.; Jn. 6.19ff) is one of the feats attributed to a 'Hyperborean' magician by Lucian's dupes (Philpseudes 13). A magical papyrus promises that a powerful demon will enable his possessor to walk on water."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) pp. 215, 158-159

"When evening came, the boat was in the middle of the lake, and he was alone on land. He saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. About the fourth watch of the night he went out to them, walking on the lake. He was about to pass by them, but when they saw him walking on the lake, they thought he was a ghost. They cried out, because they all saw him and were terrified. Immediately he spoke to them and said, 'Take courage! It is I. Don't be afraid.'"
     - Mark 6:47-50

"Early Christians knew from Job 9:8 that the Lord 'walks on the sea [peripaton epi tes thalasses] as on dry ground'. thus they also presented Jesus 'walking upon the sea' (peripaton epi tes thalasses - Mark 6:48). But for the basis of their narrative about this 'predicted' event, they went to the Septuagint Psalms, as may best be seen by comparing Mark's and John's versions of the pericope. The latter's account begins at 6:16: 'At nightfall, his disciples went down to the sea [katebesan... epi ten thalassan] and got into their boat [ploion],' echoing the Septuagint: 'They that go down to the sea in ships [hoi katabainontes eis thalassan en ploios] ... these see the works of the Lord, his wonders in the deep' (Ps. 106 [107]:23-24 LXX). Mark 6:49-50 contains another echo of Psalm 106: When the disciples saw Jesus walking on the water they 'cried out [anekraxan],' for 'they were troubled [etarachthesan]'. in the Psalm, those who go down to the sea in ships become 'troubled (etarachthesan)' in a storm and 'cry [ekechraxan] to the Lord in their distress' (Ps. 106: 27-28 LXX). Their prayer brings deliverance, and the Lord 'guides them to their desired haven' (v. 30), just as he does in John, where 'immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going' (6:21)."
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) pp. 79-80

"Peter called to him: 'Lord, if it is you, tell me to come to you over the water." 'Come," said Jesus. Peter stepped down from the boat, and walked over the water to Jesus. But when he saw the strength of the gale he was seized with fear; and beginning to sink, he cried, 'Save me, Lord." Jesus at once reached out and caught hold of him, and said, "Why did you hesitate? How little faith you have!" They then climbed into the boat; and the wind dropped. And the men in the boat fell at his feet, exclaiming, 'Truly you are the Son of God."
     - Matt. 14:28-33)

"Matthew's embellishment was probably borrowed from a Buddhist legend which appears to have made its way into the Christian oral tradition. One of the stories told by Buddhist missionaries, who were in Syria and Egypt as early as the second century B.C., similarly concerns the power of faith granted to a disciple of Buddha:"
     - Randal Helms, Gospel Fictions (1988) pp. 80-81

"When the world-honored Buddha had left Savatthi, Sariputta felt a desire to see the Lord and to hear him preach. Coming to the river [Aciravati] where the water was deep and the current strong, he said to himself: 'This stream shall not prevent me. I shall go and see the Blessed One', and he stepped upon the water which was as firm under his feet as a slab of granite. When he arrived at a place in the middle of the stream where the waves were high, Sariputta's heart gave way, and he began to sink. But rousing his faith and renewing his mental effort, he proceeded as before and reached the other bank."
     - "Walking on Water" from Life of the Buddha

"When evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, where they got into a boat and set off across the lake for Capernaum. By now it was dark, and Jesus had not yet joined them. A strong wind was blowing and the waters grew rough. When they had rowed three or three and a half miles [Greek 'rowed twenty-five or thirty stadia' (about 5 or 6 kilometers)], they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on epi the water; and they were terrified.
But he said to them, 'It is I; don't be afraid.' Then they were willing to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading."
     - John 6:16-21

"It is not even certain...that Jesus walked on the sea in this story. The Greek word is epi, and that is translated as 'upon the sea' in John 6:19 but 'by the sea' in John 21:1. Thus John 6:16-21, apart from its parallel version in Mark 6:45-52, can be taken to mean that they were forced along the shore by the contrary winds until they finally picked up Jesus 'three or four miles' from where they had started. The point is not to diminish the miracle but to keep the focus where it should be, not on the general power of Jesus but on the specific impotence of the disciples without him. In Mark, however, the emphasis has shifted to underline the majestic power of Jesus, hence, of course, to increase their culpable misunderstanding."
     - John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant (1991)

"Dennis MacDonald, a professor of New Testament and Christian origins at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, sees a connection between stories of Jesus walking on water and calming the seas and Homer's Odyssey, in which the god Poseidon is depicted as walking on water and controlling the wind and waves. The Gospel writers, says MacDonald, would have been familiar with Homer's writings, which were in common use as school texts in the ancient world. The Christian writers drew upon the familiar motif, argues MacDonald, to construct stories 'in which Jesus revealed his divine identity.'"
     - Jeffery L. Sheler, "Who was Jesus?", US News Online (12/20/93)

"In stories like the walking on the water Jesus is becoming the very epiphany of God; what the OT tests said of God displaying his power in theophany is being applied directly to Jesus in his public ministry. When the OT material, especially the OT portrayal of Yahweh, enters so massively into a NT miracle story, we have a fairly good indication that we may be dealing with a theological creation of the early church....It is actually a symbolic representation of one way in which the church experienced the risen Christ in its celebration of the eucharist....that begins in the story of the feeding of the five thousand."
     - John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew - Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2.

Royal or Heavenly Messiah?

"Again the high priest asked him, 'Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?'
'I am,' said Jesus. 'And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven.'"
     - Mark 14.61a-62

"...It is only here (14.61f.) in the whole gospel of Mark that we find united, in a single question and answer, Jesus' three 'official' Christian titles: Christ (Messiah), Son of Man, and Son of God. Each one usually appears by itself. This suggests that they came from different traditions, perhaps originally from groups that had different notions of Jesus' nature."
     - Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God? (1978) p. 51

Schonfield says that the passage reflects a single tradition hidden by Jesus' public reference to himself as a "son of man".

"Of necessity, at the outset of his public activities, he [Jesus] could not openly claim to be the Messiah or even admit it privately to his disciples (though John's gospel conveys the contrary). Had he declared himself king of the Jews, or allowed others to hail him as such, he would have invited arrest and execution for high treason against Caesar. His mission would have ended when it had hardly begun."
"...Jesus had to operate in disguise under the ambiguous designation Son of Man (i.e., The man), which in Jewish eclectic circles had certain messianic implications. In his occupation of preaching repentance in view of the speedy advent of the Kingdom of God, he presented himself much more as a religious than a political figure. This was not a mask, since Jesus believed his immediate mission was to seek and save the lost sheep among his people. On the dangerous topic of the Kingdom of God, Jesus expressed himself largely in parables, which contained nothing that a spy or informer could seize upon as seditious."
     - Hugh J. Schonfield, After the Cross

Jesus' Christian Titles Son of David Son of God Son of Man