ABSTRACT

This chapter emphasizes rather heavily aspects of 'popular belief' in miracles, that is not because the author wish to suggest that there isn't a large body of people for whom the modern world has effectively ruled them out of existence. Suppose somebody was to claim that they were Christ returned two millennia on. Let people imagine that this person claims to work miracles and that thousands claim to have witnessed these wonders whilst others condemn them as tricks. The tradition of miracles associated with the saints in Catholic tradition is thereby carried through to the present day. Catholics, like Hindus, are not just pious in particular countries. In any case it is among the Protestant groups in the USA that one finds a powerful body of Pentecostalists who reject the post-biblical miracles of the medieval period but believe that the miraculous taps were turned on again on behalf of the Protestants.