Is there historical evidence of Jesus' miracles?
The Gospels describe Jesus' ministry including
miraculous healings and other wonders like walking on water, multiplying bread, and commanding storms to cease all at once. Such extraordinary acts are just one part of the larger testimony in scripture that Jesus is indeed the promised
Messiah and the
Son of God. Critics will claim that there are insufficient historical grounds to believe such spectacular accounts, but the reality is that all the historical evidence points to the fact that Jesus really did perform miracles. Obviously, there are no videos or photographs of Jesus bringing about these signs and wonders. It is also true that giving blind men sight or turning water into wine is not the kind of event that leave behind archaeological remains for us to unearth. If we relied
only on these kinds of evidence, however, we would know very little about anyone in ancient history. What we do find is exactly what we would expect to find if Jesus really was a miracle worker: a large body of unanimous, diverse, and widespread ancient testimony on the matter not only from those who revered Jesus but also from those who scorned Him.
The Testimony of the Gospels
If we are going to talk about the miracles of Jesus, the first and most important place for us to look is the four New Testament Gospels. These detailed accounts of Jesus' earthly ministry were written
during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses. They represent the gathering of that first-hand testimony which was so central to the early Christian community.
1 It is uncontroversial to say that these are the earliest surviving accounts of Jesus' life, and equally uncontroversial to say that they present Jesus as working many miracles. Any examination of Jesus' life has to start here, which means it must start with very early accounts that plainly report Jesus as performing extraordinary, supernatural deeds.
While critics of the New Testament have spent two millennia attempting to discredit the Gospels by accusing them of numerous
discrepancies and hopeless
contradictions, any objective reader of these four works will be struck by their remarkable consistency. Yes, there are difficulties when comparing the texts, but most of the alleged conflicts between them are easily explained as natural differences between different people telling the same story from different perspectives, with different emphases, or limited to different portions of the total information. Certainly, there are a few examples where the details in each version are more challenging to reconcile, but none of these cases represent an
inherent logical contradiction nor do any of them undermine the weight of their overall agreement on the events of Jesus' life and His wise and miraculous ministry. Even the most skeptical scholar who is seeking to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus turns to the Gospels as sources of reliable information. We need not, however, share their skepticism and reduce the Gospels to mere minimalistic sources of a few raw facts. The Gospels really are
reliable sources of truth on the life and purpose of Jesus and are completely worthy of the Christian's faith in them as the true and inerrant Word of God. They are also our earliest surviving sources of Jesus' life and work, were written in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses of Jesus, and are based on that eyewitness testimony.
Not only do the Gospels all report Jesus performing many miracles, but they also agree on the sorts of miracles Jesus performed. In a few cases, they all even describe precisely the same miracle, such as the feeding of the 5,000 (
Matthew 14:13-21,
Mark 6:33-44,
Luke 9:12-17,
John 6:1-14). They all agree that He cured illnesses, gave sight to the blind, and even restored life to some individuals who had recently died. It doesn't do any good to object that these are incredible things that don't usually happen. Of course they are! That's what makes them miraculous signs! To ask for evidence of a miracle and then rule out all positive testimony because the testimony reports miracles is not scientific or rational. It is prejudicial bias based on a dogma against miracles. The fact is that our earliest and clearest accounts of Jesus' life and ministry offer us a consistent testimony that Jesus performed these kinds of miracles. That is evidence.
The Testimony of Acts and the Epistles
There are other biblical references beyond just the Gospels that affirm Jesus' miraculous works. In
Acts 2:22, we have an early sermon by Peter recorded in which he says:
"Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst, just as you yourselves know."
One might object that this sermon is reported in Acts, which is written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke and so doesn't
really count as an additional source. This, however, ignores the fact that Luke is utilizing previous sources. Even Bart Ehrman, one of the leading scholarly critics of Christianity today, defends the idea that:
"Some of the speeches in Acts contain what scholars call preliterary tradition: oral traditions that had been in circulation from much earlier times that are found, now, only in their written form in Acts."
2
Ehrman goes on to explain:
"These traditions are quite emphatic that Jesus was a Jewish man who lived, did spectacular deeds, taught, and was executed"
3
So even from the perspective of critical scholarship, the book of Acts does preserve additional very early testimony that Jesus was a miracle worker. Ehrman himself, of course, does not affirm Jesus' miracles as historical. He is open, however, about the fact that his reason for not doing so is that they are miracles and are, therefore, (he contends) by definition improbable, if not impossible.
4 His presupposition against the acceptance of miracles by historians is what drives him rather than any actual evidence against the miracles. The point here, again, is that the earliest traditions themselves all attest that Jesus worked miracles.
Another example of this is in the Book of Hebrews, which likewise reports to us that:
"After it was at the first spoken through the Lord [Jesus], it was confirmed to us by those who heard, God also testifying with them, both by signs and wonders and by various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit according to His own will," (
Hebrews 2:4).
We also have the report of Jesus' miraculous transfiguration on the mount in
2 Peter 1:16-18:
"For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to Him by the Majestic Glory, 'This is My beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased' - and we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain,"
And this is, of course, leaving aside all of the testimony about Jesus' greatest miracle,
His resurrection. While the early church was not writing letters back and forth to one another needlessly regurgitating references to Jesus' miracles, it is evident from the testimony that we have that they believed Jesus had done these great works and that they believed it based on the first-hand accounts of those who had seen these miracles themselves. The New Testament books, therefore, present us with a strong body of early testimony from multiple sources that unanimously agree that Jesus did perform these miracles.