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According to the canonical Gospels, Jesus worked many miracles in the course of his ministry. The large bulk of them are various cures, though there are also a large number of exorcisms, three raisings of dead persons to life, and various other miracles that don't fit into these categories.
Especially since the 19th century, the movement of higher criticism has put the life of Jesus under very fine-grained examination. The Tübingen school was a major center of this examination. Many critical scholars reject all of the miracles out of hand, because they reject the concept of a God who intervenes in human history. Others are more nuanced in their arguments. The modern Jesus Seminar holds that the various cures are probably true, since there were many others in the ancient world credited with healing power, but rejects most other miracles, at least in their literal interpretation from the Bible.
The exorcisms of Jesus are particularly disliked among the critical scholars. As they claim there is no empirical evidence for diabolic possession, they generally conclude that the statement that a person was possessed by the devil really means that that person was suffering from some sort of psychological disturbance, so that most exorcisms can be lumped together with the cures.
The largest group of miracles is his various cures. The manner of his healing varies from one case to the next, according to the reports in the Bible. For instance, often he lays hands on the person to be cured, other times, only a word suffices to perform the cure. One notable cure of a blind man involves the making of a paste of mud and spittle which is rubbed on the blind man's eyes and then washed off (Cf. Gospel of John 9). The woman with a haemorrhage was healed simply by touching the fringe of Jesus' garment.
There are records of several wandering healers at Jesus' time. However, Jesus allegedly performed a few cures that are not recorded as having been done elsewhere, such as the healing of the man born blind, cited above.
Belief in supernatural creatures was very common in Jesus' time, especially due to the preaching of the Pharisees. The Bible records several cases of the expelling of demons from the possessed. Many critics seek to explain away these demonic influences, reading them as cases of psychological sickness or epilepsyEpilepsy (sometimes referred to as a seizure disorder is a chronic neurological condition characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures. The condition is named from the Greek epilepsia ("a taking hold of or seizing"). It is commonly controlled with medic, which would provide the external symptoms without requiring the need for a supernatural force.
Nonetheless, many Christians accept these exorcisms as having really happened. The Roman Catholic ChurchThe Roman Catholic Church (often called simply the Catholic Church, but see Catholicism for other meanings of the term "Catholic Church") is a worldwide body of Christians in full communion with the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, and subscribing to the beliefs, in particular, still maintains a detailed protocol of what is to be done to perform an exorcism. This is only done with the explicit permision of the bishopA bishop is an ordained person who holds a specific position of authority in any of a number of Christian churches. Bishops in the New Testament The bishop's role is typically called the " episcopacy", because the word "bishop" is derived ultimately from and after eliminating all possible natural causes of the behavior attributed to demonic possession.
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