ABSTRACT
At the time of Jesus and the apostles, people were seeking truth among many competing deities. How could one know which deity offered true hope and salvation? In fact, what most people in the Roman Empire (and perhaps today) sought was a way to bridge what seemed a huge chasm between humans and their deities. The second-century writer, Plutarch, called this search a “longing for the divine,”1 but how would one know that the separation between this world and the next had been spanned? For many (both educated and not), the proof of the presence of the divine lay in magic that briefly seemed to overturn the rules of this world, proving that the gods had intervened. (At this point, I do not draw a distinction between magic and the miraculous-both overturn the rules of nature,2 but as we shall see, the difference between miracles and magic was defined during early centuries of Christianity.)
Jesus himself combined the miraculous with his message as he traveled and preached. As the gospel of Matthew says, “And he went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every infirmity among the people” (Matt. 4:23-25). This pattern of proving the message by the magic continued after Jesus’ crucifixion.
