Jul 21, 2012

Jesus and Miracles

  
"A study of the life of Jesus that excludes the miraculous is destined from the start to produce a Jesus who is an aberration. He will be a stranger both to his opponents, who acknowledged his miracles (compare Mk 3:22; b. Sanhedrin 43a), and to his followers, who will no longer be able to identify him as the object of their faith. There is  a certain wholeness about the Jesus who preached the arrival of the kingdom of God, who ate with tax collectors and sinners, who healed the sick and raised the dead, who dies sacrificially on the cross and rose triumphantly from the dead. This wholeness produces an overall portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth that is convincing to a sympathetic reader of the Gospels. Attempts to strip the supernatural from Jesus' life can only produce a Jesus so radically different that he is unrecognizable and his impact on history unexplainable."

Robert H. Stein, Jesus the Messiah: A Survey of the Life of Christ (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), 24.

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