By the Finger of God
It did not take long for the people of Capernaum to realize what they had in their midst. Jesus was surely not the first exorcist to walk the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In first-century Palestine, professional wonder worker was a vocation as well established as that of woodworker or mason, and far better paid. Galilee especially abounded with charismatic fantasts claiming to channel the divine for a nominal fee. Yet from the perspective of the Galileans, what set Jesus apart from his fellow exorcists and healers is that he seemed to be providing his services free of charge. That first exorcism in the Capernaum synagogue may have shocked the rabbis and elders who saw in it a “new kind of teaching”—the gospels say a slew of scribes began descending upon the city immediately afterward to see for themselves the challenge posed to their authority by this simple peasant. But for the people of Capernaum, what mattered was not so much the source of Jesus’s healings. What mattered was their cost.
By evening, word had reached all of Capernaum about the free healer in their city. Jesus and his companions had taken shelter in the house of the brothers Simon and Andrew, where Simon’s mother-in-law lay in bed with a fever. When the brothers told Jesus of her illness, he went to her and took her hand, and at once she was healed. Soon after, a great horde gathered at Simon’s house, carrying with them the lame, the lepers, and those possessed by demons. The next morning, the crush of sick and infirm had grown even larger.
To escape the crowds Jesus suggested leaving Capernaum for a few days. “Let us go into the next towns so I may proclaim my message there as well” (Mark 1:38). But news of the itinerant miracle worker had already reached the neighboring cities. Everywhere Jesus went—Bethsaida, Gerasa, Jericho—the blind, the deaf, the mute, and the paralytic swarmed to him. And Jesus healed them all. When he finally returned to Capernaum a few days later, so many had huddled at Simon’s door that a group of men had to tear a hole in the roof just so they could lower their paralyzed friend down for Jesus to heal.
To the modern mind, the stories of Jesus’s healings and exorcisms seem implausible, to say the least. Acceptance of his miracles forms the principal divide between the historian and the worshipper, the scholar and the seeker. It may seem somewhat incongruous, then, to say that there is more accumulated historical material confirming Jesus’s miracles than there is regarding either his birth in Nazareth or his death at Golgotha. To be clear, there is no evidence to support any particular miraculous action by Jesus. Attempts by scholars to judge the authenticity of one or another of Jesus’s healings or exorcisms have proven a useless exercise. It is senseless to argue that it is more likely that Jesus healed a paralytic but less likely that he raised Lazarus from the dead. All of Jesus’s miracle stories were embellished with the passage of time and convoluted with Christological significance, and thus none of them can be historically validated. It is equally senseless to try to demythologize Jesus’s miracles by searching for some rational basis to explain them away: Jesus only appeared to walk on water because of the changing tides; Jesus only seemed to exorcise a demon from a person who was in reality epileptic. How one in the modern world views Jesus’s miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates raged within the early church over who Jesus was—a rabbi? the messiah? God incarnate?—there was never any debate, either among his followers or his detractors, about his role as an exorcist and miracle worker.
All of the gospels, including the noncanonized scriptures, confirm Jesus’s miraculous deeds, as does the earliest source material, Q. Nearly a third of the gospel of Mark consists solely of Jesus’s healings and exorcisms. The early church not only maintained a vivid memory of Jesus’s miracles, it built its very foundation upon them. Jesus’s apostles were marked by their ability to mimic his miraculous powers, to heal and exorcise people in his name. Even those who did not accept him as messiah still viewed Jesus as “a doer of startling deeds.” At no point in the gospels do Jesus’s enemies ever deny his miracles, though they do question their motive and source. Well into the second and third centuries, the Jewish intellectuals and pagan philosophers who wrote treatises denouncing Christianity took Jesus’s status as an exorcist and miracle worker for granted. They may have denounced Jesus as nothing more than a traveling magician, but they did not doubt his magical abilities.
Again, Jesus was not the only miracle worker trolling though Palestine healing the sick and casting out demons. This was a world steeped in magic and Jesus was just one of an untold number of diviners and dream interpreters, magicians and medicine men who wandered Judea and Galilee. There was Honi the Circle-Drawer, so named because during a time of drought he drew a circle in the dirt and stood inside it. “I swear by your great name that I will not move from here until you have mercy on your sons,” Honi shouted up to God. And the rains came at once. Honi’s grandsons Abba Hilqiah and Hanan the Hidden were also widely credited with miraculous deeds; both lived in Galilee around the same time as Jesus. Another Jewish miracle worker, Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, who resided in the village of Arab just a few kilometers from Jesus’s home in Nazareth, had the power to pray over the sick and even intercede on their behalf to discern who would live and who would die. Perhaps the most famous miracle worker of the time was Apollonius of Tyana. Described as a “holy man” who taught the concept of a “Supreme God,” Apollonius performed miraculous deeds everywhere he went. He healed the lame, the blind, the paralytic. He even raised a girl from the dead.
Nor was Jesus the sole exorcist in Palestine. The itinerant Jewish exorcist was a familiar sight, and exorcisms themselves could be a lucrative enterprise. Many exorcists are mentioned in the gospels (Matthew 12:27; Luke 11:19; Mark 9:38–40; see also Acts 19:11–17). Some, like the famed exorcist Eleazar, who may have been an Essene, used amulets and incantations to draw demons out of the afflicted through their noses. Others, such as Rabbi Simon ben Yohai, could cast out demons simply by uttering the demon’s name; like Jesus, Yohai would first command the demon to identify itself, which then gave him authority over it. The book of Acts portrays Paul as an exorcist who used Jesus’s name as a talisman of power against demonic forces (Acts 16:16–18, 19:12). Exorcism instructions have even been found within the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The reason exorcisms were so commonplace in Jesus’s time is that the Jews viewed illness as a manifestation either of divine judgment or of demonic activity. However one wishes to define demon possession—as a medical problem or a mental illness, epilepsy or schizophrenia—the fact remains that the people of Palestine understood these problems to be signs of possession, and they saw Jesus as one of a number of professional exorcists with the power to bring healing to those afflicted.
It may be true that, unlike many of his fellow exorcists and miracle workers, Jesus also maintained messianic ambitions. But so did the failed messiahs Theudas and the Egyptian, both of whom used their miraculous deeds to gain followers and make messianic claims. These men and their fellow wonder workers were known by Jews and gentiles alike as “men of deeds,” the same term that was applied to Jesus. What is more, the literary form of the miracle stories found in the Jewish and pagan writings of the first and second centuries is almost identical to that of the gospels; the same basic vocabulary is used to describe both the miracle and the miracle worker. Simply put, Jesus’s status as an exorcist and miracle worker may seem unusual, even absurd, to modern skeptics, but it did not deviate greatly from the standard expectation of exorcists and miracle workers in first-century Palestine. Whether Greek, Roman, Jewish, or Christian, all peoples in the ancient Near East viewed magic and miracle as a standard facet of their world.
That said, there was a distinct difference between magic and miracle in the ancient mind, not in their methods or outcome—both were considered ways of disrupting the natural order of the universe—but in the way in which each was perceived. In the Graeco-Roman world, magicians were ubiquitous, but magic was considered a form of charlatanry. There were a handful of Roman laws against “magic-working,” and magicians themselves could be expelled or even executed if they were found to practice what was sometimes referred to as “dark magic.” In Judaism, too, magicians were fairly prevalent, despite the prohibition against magic in the Law of Moses, where it is punishable by death. “No one shall be found among you,” the Bible warns, “who engages in divination, or is a witch, an enchanter, or a sorcerer, or one who casts spells, or who consults spirits, one who is a wizard or a necromancer” (Deuteronomy 18:10–11).
The discrepancy between law and practice when it came to the magical arts can best be explained by the variable ways in which “magic” was defined. The word itself had extreme negative connotations, but only when applied to the practices of other peoples and religions. “Although the nations you are about to dispossess give heed to soothsayers and diviners,” God tells the Israelites, “as for you, the Lord your God does not permit you to do so” (Deuteronomy 18:14). And yet God regularly has his servants engage in magical acts in order to prove his might. So, for example, God commands Moses and Aaron to “perform a wonder” in front of Pharaoh by transforming a staff into a snake. But when Pharaoh’s “wise men” do the same trick, they are dismissed as “magicians” (Exodus 7:1–13, 9:8–12). In other words, a representative of God—such as Moses, Elijah, or Elisha—performs miracles, whereas a “false prophet”—such as Pharaoh’s wise men or the priests of Baal—performs magic.
This explains why the early Christians went to such lengths to argue that Jesus was not a magician. Throughout the second and third centuries, the church’s Jewish and Roman detractors wrote numerous tracts accusing Jesus of having used magic to captivate people and trick them into following him. “But though they saw such works, they asserted it was magical art,” the second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr wrote of his critics. “For they dared to call [Jesus] a magician, and a deceiver of the people.”
Note that these enemies of the church did not deny that Jesus performed wondrous deeds. They merely labeled those deeds “magic.” Regardless, church leaders, such as the famed third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria, responded furiously to such accusations, decrying the “slanderous and childish charge [that] Jesus was a magician,” or that he performed his miracles by means of magical devices. As the early church father Irenaeus, bishop of Lugdunum, argued, it was precisely the lack of such magical devices that distinguished Jesus’s miraculous actions from those of the common magician. Jesus, in the words of Irenaeus, performed his deeds “without any power of incantations, without the juice of herbs and of grasses, without any anxious watching of sacrifices, of libations, or of seasons.”
Despite Irenaeus’s protestations, however, Jesus’s miraculous actions in the gospels, especially in the earliest gospel, Mark, do bear a striking resemblance to the actions of similar magicians and wonder workers of the time, which is why more than a few contemporary biblical scholars have openly labeled Jesus a magician. No doubt Jesus uses a magician’s techniques—incantations, rehearsed formulae, spitting, repeated supplications—in some of his miracles. Once, in the region of the Decapolis, a group of villagers brought a deaf-mute man to Jesus and begged him for help. Jesus took the man aside, away from the crowd. Then, in a bizarre set of ritualized actions that could have come directly from an ancient magician’s manual, Jesus placed his fingers in the deaf man’s ears, spat, touched his tongue, and, looking up to the heavens, chanted the word ephphatha, which means “be opened” in Aramaic. Immediately the man’s ears were opened and his tongue released (Mark 7:31–35).
In Bethsaida, Jesus performed a similar action on a blind man. He led the man away from the crowds, spat directly into his eyes, placed his hands on him, and asked, “Do you see anything?”
“I can see people,” the man said. “But they look like walking trees.”
Jesus repeated the ritual formula once more. This time the miracle took; the man regained his sight (Mark 8:22–26).
The gospel of Mark narrates an even more curious story about a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had seen numerous doctors and spent all the money she possessed, but had found no relief from her condition. Having heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in a crowd, reached out, and touched his cloak. At once, her hemorrhaging ceased and she felt in her body that she had been healed.
What is remarkable about this story is that, according to Mark, Jesus “felt power drained from him.” He stopped in his tracks and shouted, “Who touched my cloak?” The woman fell down before him and confessed the truth. “Daughter,” Jesus replied. “Your faith has healed you” (Mark 5:24–34).
Mark’s narrative seems to suggest that Jesus was a passive conduit through which healing power coursed like an electrical current. That is in keeping with the way in which magical processes are described in the texts of the time. It is certainly noteworthy that Matthew’s retelling of the hemorrhaging-woman story twenty years later omits the magical quality of Mark’s version. In Matthew, Jesus turns around when the woman touches him, acknowledges and addresses her, and only then does he actively heal her illness (Matthew 9:20–22).
Despite the magical elements that can be traced in some of his miracles, the fact is that nowhere in the gospels does anyone actually charge Jesus with performing magic. It would have been an easy accusation for his enemies to make, one that would have carried an immediate death sentence. Yet when Jesus stood before the Roman and Jewish authorities to answer the charges against him, he was accused of many misdeeds—sedition, blasphemy, rejecting the Law of Moses, refusing to pay the tribute, threatening the Temple—but being a magician was not one of them.
It is also worth noting that Jesus never exacted a fee for his services. Magicians, healers, miracle workers, exorcists—these were skilled and fairly well-paid professions in first-century Palestine. Eleazar the Exorcist was once asked to perform his feats for no less a personage than Emperor Vespasian. In the book of Acts, a professional magician popularly known as Simon Magus offers the apostles money to be trained in the art of manipulating the Holy Spirit to heal the sick. “Give me this power also,” Simon asks Peter and John, “so that anyone I lay my hands upon may receive the Holy Spirit.”
“May your money perish with you,” Peter replies, “for you thought you could purchase with money what God gives as a free gift” (Acts 8:9–24).
Peter’s answer may seem extreme. But he is merely following the command of his messiah, who told his disciples to “heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, and cast out the demons. You received [these gifts] without payment. Give them out without payment” (Matthew 10:8 | Luke 9:1–2)
In the end, it may be futile to argue about whether Jesus was a magician or a miracle worker. Magic and miracle are perhaps best thought of as two sides of the same coin in ancient Palestine. The church fathers were right about one thing, however. There is clearly something unique and distinctive about Jesus’s miraculous actions in the gospels. It is not simply that Jesus’s work is free of charge, or that his healings do not always employ a magician’s methods. It is that Jesus’s miracles are not intended as an end in themselves. Rather, his actions serve a pedagogical purpose. They are a means of conveying a very specific message to the Jews.
A clue to what that message might be surfaces in an intriguing passage in Q. As recounted in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, John the Baptist is languishing in a prison cell atop the fortress of Machaerus, awaiting his execution, when he hears of the wondrous deeds being performed in Galilee by one of his former disciples. Curious about the reports, John sends a messenger to ask Jesus whether he is “the one who is to come.”
“Go tell John what you hear and see,” Jesus tells the messenger. “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor are brought good news” (Matthew 11:1–6 | Luke 7:18–23).
Jesus’s words are a deliberate reference to the prophet Isaiah, who long ago foretold a day when Israel would be redeemed and Jerusalem renewed, a day when God’s kingdom would be established on earth. “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped, the lame shall leap like deer, and the tongue of the mute shall sing for joy,” Isaiah promised. “The dead shall live, and the corpses shall rise” (Isaiah 35:5–6, 26:19).
By connecting his miracles with Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesus is stating in no uncertain terms that the year of the Lord’s favor, the day of God’s vengeance, which the prophets predicted, has finally arrived. God’s reign has begun. “If by the finger of God I cast out demons, then surely the Kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12:28 | Luke 11:20). Jesus’s miracles are thus the manifestation of God’s kingdom on earth. It is the finger of God that heals the blind, the deaf, the mute—the finger of God that exorcises the demons. Jesus’s task is simply to wield that finger as God’s agent on earth.
Except that God already had agents on earth. They were the ones clothed in fine white robes milling about the Temple, hovering over the mountains of incense and the ceaseless sacrifices. The chief function of the priestly nobility was not only to preside over the Temple rituals, but to control access to the Jewish cult. The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and to what degree. The sick, the lame, the leper, the “demon-possessed,” menstruating women, those with bodily discharges, those who had recently given birth—none of these were permitted to enter the Temple and take part in the Jewish cult unless first purified according to the priestly code. With every leper cleansed, every paralytic healed, every demon cast out, Jesus was not only challenging that priestly code, he was invalidating the very purpose of the priesthood.
Thus, in the gospel of Matthew, when a leper comes to him begging to be healed, Jesus reaches out and touches him, healing his affliction. But he does not stop there. “Go show yourself to the priest,” he tells the man. “Offer him as a testimony the things that the Law of Moses commanded for your cleansing.”
Jesus is joking. His command to the leper is a jest—a calculated swipe at the priestly code. The leper is not just ill, after all. He is impure. He is ceremonially unclean and unworthy of entering the Temple of God. His illness contaminates the entire community. According to the Law of Moses to which Jesus refers, the only way for a leper to be cleansed is to complete the most laborious and costly ritual, one that could be conducted solely by a priest. First the leper must bring the priest two clean birds, along with some cedarwood, crimson yarn, and hyssop. One of the birds must be sacrificed immediately and the living bird, the cedarwood, the yarn, and the hyssop dipped in its blood. The blood must then be sprinkled upon the leper and the living bird released. Seven days later, the leper must shave off all his hair and bathe himself in water. On the eighth day, the leper must take two male lambs, free of blemish, and one ewe lamb, also without blemish, as well as a grain offering of choice flour mixed with oil, back to the priest, who will make of them a burnt offering to the Lord. The priest must smear the blood from the offering on the leper’s right earlobe, on his right thumb, and on the big toe of his right foot. He must then sprinkle the leper with the oil seven times. Only after all of this is complete shall the leper be considered free of the sin and guilt that led to his leprosy in the first place; only then shall he be allowed to rejoin the community of God (Leviticus 14).
Obviously, Jesus is not telling the leper he has just healed to buy two birds, two lambs, a ewe, a strip of cedarwood, a spool of crimson yarn, a sprig of hyssop, a bushel of flour, and a jar of oil and to give them all to the priest as an offering to God. He is telling him to present himself to the priest, having already been cleansed. This is a direct challenge not only to the priest’s authority, but to the Temple itself. Jesus did not only heal the leper, he purified him, making him eligible to appear at the Temple as a true Israelite. And he did so for free, as a gift from God—without tithe, without sacrifice—thus seizing for himself the powers granted solely to the priesthood to deem a man worthy of entering the presence of God.
Such a blatant attack on the legitimacy of the Temple could be scorned and discounted so long as Jesus remains ensconced in the backwoods of Galilee. But once he and his disciples leave their base in Capernaum and begin slowly making their way to Jerusalem, healing the sick and casting out demons along the way, Jesus’s collision with the priestly authorities, and the Roman Empire that supports them, becomes inevitable. Soon, the authorities in Jerusalem will no longer be able to ignore this itinerant exorcist and miracle worker. The closer he draws to the Holy City, the more urgent the need to silence him will become. For it is not just Jesus’s miraculous actions that they fear; it is the simple yet incredibly dangerous message conveyed through them: the Kingdom of God is at hand.