Resurrection Miracles in the Synoptic Gospels
(avg. read time: 8–16 mins.)
As part of my book project on resurrection in the Synoptic Gospels, which I have begun working on this year, it is important to address Jesus’s resurrection miracles therein. Because I have written an article on Lazarus’s resurrection that I will epitomize another time, and simply because that story will be part of another book project on John, I do not address it here. I will also not be making this post exclusive to paid subscribers like other forthcoming ones that will serve as previews of the book I hope to write, since what I will be posting here is largely reflective of material I have already published in multiple articles. The texts that concern us here are Jesus’s general statement about raising the dead in Matt 11:5 // Luke 7:22, the story of the raising of Jairus’s daughter in Matt 9:18–26 // Mark 5:21–43 // Luke 8:40–56, and the story of the raising of the son of the widow at Nain in Luke 7:11–17. (The story of the raising of the saints in Matt 27:52–53 is a special case in that it is not associated with Jesus’s regular ministry, but with his death. I will be addressing it in another post.)
Terminology
Before I examine the texts properly, an introductory clarification is necessary. It has been common and proper for scholars to distinguish these raising miracles from Jesus’s resurrection in response to questions about why Paul would say Jesus was the “firstfruits” of the resurrection (1 Cor 15:20) when others had risen from the dead before him (there are also examples from the OT to this effect). Jesus is the firstfruits of the eschatological resurrection of the dead, to which the phrase “resurrection of the dead” properly applies (Matt 22:31; Acts 17:32; 23:6; 24:21; 26:23; 1 Cor 15:12–13, 21, 42; Heb 6:2), while these other events were not part of the eschatological event. Where I part company with other scholars, as I have made clear elsewhere, is that I see no need to apply another term—“resuscitation”—to these miracles as if to imply that they are not resurrections properly speaking. The same terminology is used for describing them as for Jesus’s resurrection and the eschatological resurrection. The verb ἀνίστημι appears in reference to the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:42 // Luke 8:55), Jesus’s resurrection (Mark 8:31; 9:9–10, 31; 10:34 // Luke 18:33; Luke 24:7, 46), and the general resurrection (Matt 12:41 // Luke 11:32; Mark 12:23, 25). The verb ἐγείρω appears in reference to Jesus’s general raising miracles (Matt 11:5 // Luke 7:22; cf. Matt 10:8; 27:52), the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Matt 9:25; Mark 5:41 // Luke 8:54), and the raising of the widow’s son (Luke 7:14), as well as Jesus’s resurrection (Matt 16:21 // Luke 9:22; Matt 17:9, 23; 20:19 // Luke 20:37; Matt 26:32 // Mark 14:28; Matt 27:63–64; 28:6–7 // Mark 16:6 // Luke 24:6; Luke 24:34) and the general resurrection (Matt 12:42 // Luke 11:31; Mark 12:26). The Gospels themselves make no distinctions in the words used but only in the implications of the events. That is why I distinguish between Jesus’s resurrection as part of the eschatological resurrection, wherein his body is transformed and the effects are everlasting, and these events as “temporary” resurrections, since they are only restored to life for a time with the expectation that they will die again. With that clarification, let us proceed to the miracles.
General Raising Miracles (Matt 11:5 // Luke 7:22)
When John the Baptist sends his disciples to inquire of Jesus about whether he is the one who is to come, Jesus responds by summarizing what is happening in his ministry. The group of eschatological conditions are drawn from various texts in Isaiah, such as Isa 26:19; 35:5–6; and 61:1. The implication is that there are multiple such miracles to appeal to, though in both Matthew and Luke only one such raising miracle has been narrated (of Jairus’s daughter in Matthew and of the widow’s son in Luke). This is similar to the notes from John about how Jesus did many other things that were not recorded (John 20:30; 21:25).
This is also the only instance in which this particular action in Jesus’s ministry is explicitly connected with Scripture. And while these authors cite the same material, the way that Jesus’s dialogue summarizes his ministry in their different contexts is noteworthy. It is possible to make the argument in Luke’s case that he has told stories to evoke Elijah and Elisha, the previous prophets who had restored people to life (1 Kgs 17:17–24; 2 Kgs 4:18–37). After all, this note in Luke appears immediately after the story of Jesus raising the son of the widow of Nain (7:11–17) and Luke quoted Jesus as connecting himself with Elijah and Elisha at the inauguration of his ministry (4:24–27). Luke may thus be presenting Jesus as the antitype of Elijah and Elisha in the context of his eschatological ministry. However, the same cannot be said for Matthew, who is content to reserve the identification of Elijah for John the Baptizer (cf. Luke 1:17). Matthew is more thoroughgoing than Luke in narrating the Jesus story as evoking Scripture (Matt 1:22–23; 2:5–6, 15, 17–18, 23; 3:15; 4:14–16; 5:17; 8:17; 11:10; 12:15–21; 13:14–15, 35; 21:42–44; 26:24, 31–32, 54–56; 27:9–10) and fulfilling eschatological expectations, but he never appeals to Elijah and Elisha motifs in relation to Jesus.
There is an interesting similarity to this text in the fragmentary 4Q521, specifically 2 II, 1–12. This text is sometimes adduced as a precedent for the Isaianic citation in Matt 11:5 // Luke 7:22. It seemingly utilizes the same texts and seems to attribute the actions—including raising the dead—to a messianic figure. However, the most that can be said is that 4Q521 is possibly the sole attestation of this belief prior to the Gospels. That this was a well-established idea outside of Qumran about what the Messiah would do cannot be demonstrated. Even this particular text is ambiguous because the grammar and syntax indicate that the subject of the action in question is the Lord (ll. 5–8, 11–12), while the Messiah disappears as a distinct subject after l. 1.1 Benjamin Wold has presented a good argument for why one could read this passage as implying the Messiah as being the agent of God’s action via the parallel in 4QpsEzekb 1 I, wherein Ezekiel is God’s agent in raising the dead by prophesying.2 Even so, the action is at least one degree removed from the Messiah in 4Q521 and the linguistic ambiguity in this singular text is hardly strong evidence for these actions being expected of the Messiah. More likely is Lidija Novakovic’s argument that this text fits with others of the time in being more about what will happen in the messianic time rather than the actions of a messianic figure (cf. 4 Ezra 7:28–32; 2 Bar 30:1–2; 72–74; T. Jud. 24–25; Jub. 23:26–30).3 Furthermore, these texts link the messianic time with the eschatological resurrection rather than with individual and temporary resurrections, as Jesus performed. As such, this text from Matthew and Luke seems to cohere with the Jewish context of Jesus’s ministry and lends plausibility to the overall tradition. It is less likely that the earliest Christians believed Jesus was the Messiah and assigned raisings of the dead to him to bolster that belief—since there is no identifiable unambiguous expectation that the Messiah would raise individuals from the dead—than that Jesus performed such actions and interpreted them in light of Scripture (as did the Christians who followed him).
This text is an example of how resurrection is interwoven in various ways with Jesus’s identity, mission, and fulfillment of Scripture. Here, raising the dead is among the eschatological actions he performs, thereby fulfilling Scripture, and which serve to identify him as the one who is to come, since he is fulfilling the expected mission of that one. Of course, the raising of the dead is only a foretaste of the fulfillment to come of Isa 26:19 (an eschatological resurrection text, as I have noted before). Even as the kingdom is inaugurated, being both now and not yet, the raising of the dead has begun, first with the temporary resurrections and then with Jesus’s resurrection, but there is still more to come.
The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (Matt 9:18–26 // Mark 5:21–43 // Luke 8:40–56)
The only such triply attested raising story of Jesus’s ministry relates the raising of Jairus’s daughter. This story seems to have been well known in the first Christian generations and Jairus himself may be named in Mark 5:22 and Luke 8:41 because he is well known to Mark, Luke, and their respective implied audiences, but perhaps not to Matthew or, more likely, Matthew’s implied audience. There does not seem to be a reason to invent a story of this kind about the raising of a daughter of a Galilean synagogue leader instead of linking it to someone more noteworthy, unless Mark and the authors that followed him were constrained by the collective memory of linking this story to Jairus and his daughter.
Matthew’s version is much more condensed than the versions from Mark and Luke. He recounts the central events but leaves out some of the more interesting details. Mark and Luke maintain the link between the girl’s age (twelve years old) and the length of time the woman had been suffering with hemorrhaging, though Luke makes this connection more apparent with how closely he places these bits of information together (Mark 5:25, 42; Luke 8:42–43). This was a problem that the woman had faced for approximately the entire life of Jairus’s daughter. It seems probable that she had either been prevented from marrying or been divorced because of this hemorrhaging. Vaginal bleeding made a woman unclean (Lev 15:20–27), like many other bodily emissions, sex was forbidden in such a situation, and even touching a bleeding person could make one unclean. While uncleanness was not necessarily a moral and condemnable failing (unless one would defile that which is holy), it seems likely that people would have kept their distance from her out of some perception that she had been cursed with such unusually continual impurity. But when she touches Jesus, she receives his contagious purity (where the cultural assumption was generally that the impure contacting the pure contaminated the latter) and is miraculously, instantaneously made both well and clean. She could then take her rightful place back in her community, all with a testimony of how God healed and restored her through Jesus. In a manner of speaking, the contagious purity was also life-giving to this woman.
That contagious purity is more literally life-giving for Jairus’s daughter. After all, touching a corpse was a more serious breach of the purity code than touching a bleeding person, even when it was necessary for burial (Num 19:11–20). But Mark and Luke specifically say that Jesus took the dead girl by the hand (Mark 5:41 // Luke 8:54). In so doing, he once again passes on his purity and his life to another. But while the previous miracle was incidental, being initiated by the woman who reached out and touched him, this miracle comes by Jesus’s words (a frequent way he did miracles: Matt 8:3 // Mark 1:41 // Luke 5:13; Matt 8:13 // John 4:50; Matt 8:26 // Mark 4:39 // Luke 8:25; Matt 8:32 // Mark 5:13 // Luke 8:32–33; Matt 9:6–7 // Mark 2:11–12 // Luke 5:24–25; Matt 9:29–30; 12:13 // Mark 3:5 // Luke 6:10; Matt 14:28–29; 15:28 // Mark 7:29–30; Matt 17:18 // Mark 9:25–26 // Luke 9:42; Mark 1:25–26 // Luke 4:35; Mark 7:34; 10:52 // Luke 18:42–43; Luke 13:12–13; 17:14; John 2:8–9; 5:8–9; 9:6–7).
The wording of the command is also noteworthy. Only Mark provides the original Aramaic, but both Mark and Luke provide the same translation of the verb. In Aramaic, the verb (transliterated here as koum) is קום while in Greek the verb is ἐγείρω. I have noted before the similar semantic domains of קום and קיץ on the one hand, and ἀνίστημι and ἐγείρω on the other. The first Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek words are more closely correlated, since they do not tend to have the extra sense of “wake up” that the second Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek words do. But this translation is a reminder that these words overlap much more than they do not. Indeed, both Mark and Luke use the Greek verbs interchangeably in Mark 5:41–42 // Luke 8:54–55.
Despite Jesus’s orders for this deed to not be known, it is notable that in Mark’s and Luke’s narrative structure this is the last miracle narrated before the recorded speculation on who Jesus is. It is thus with this miracle most immediately in mind that one encounters the speculation that Jesus is John the Baptizer resurrected (Mark 6:14–16 // Luke 9:7–9; cf. Matt 14:1–2), or Elijah, or one of the prophets of old. That is, the power to resurrect is supposedly a result of being resurrected, coming back stronger than ever, by the will of God. This speculation in turn shapes what the disciples will later recount to Jesus about who people say that he is (as noted in my post on the resurrection speculation). Once again, resurrection is tied with his identity, but in a way that no one in the narrative, besides Jesus, yet anticipates.
The conceptual link is also present for Matthew, but it is at further remove of proximity compared to Mark and Luke. What is more immediate to this story is Jesus’s empowerment instruction for his disciples in Matt 10. Among the deeds he authorizes them to do is to raise the dead (10:8). In fact, all of the deeds he authorizes are ones that Matthew has provided at least one example of him doing himself prior to this story. In his own way, Matthew conveys how Jesus passes on his life-giving power, but now it is so that others may pass on that life-giving power in the resurrections they perform by the power Jesus gives them.
The Raising of the Widow of Nain’s Son (Luke 7:11–17)
Our last story is unique to Luke, who is thus the only Gospel author to record two individual raising stories in Jesus’s ministry. As noted previously, this resembles stories of Elijah and Elisha raising sons back to life, though it is closer to Elijah’s case in 1 Kgs 17:17–24, as there is no intervention by a servant and the young man is the son of a widow. But just because it fits Luke’s particular theological narration, one would be hard-pressed to explain convincingly why Luke would tell a story about a widow and her son in the obscure Galilean village of Nain (modern-day Nein) unless the story (and perhaps its teller) was known to his audience.
A comparison of this story and the story of Jairus’s daughter to one about Apollonius of Tyana is instructive. Apollonius is one of the rare figures who existed within two hundred years of Jesus to have multiple miracle claims made about him and he is the only non-Christian one to be attributed with raising the dead within two hundred years of Jesus.4 However, even the miracle claims about Apollonius first appear in Philostratus’s account, which he wrote well beyond living memory of Apollonius (roughly 150 years later in the case of the miracle in question and approximately 130 years after Apollonius’s death) with a main source that may well be an invention of Philostratus (a book attributed to Damis, a student of Apollonius).5 In some cases, Philostratus’s shaping of Apollonius stories appears to arise from direct ideological conflict with Christians, whose miracle claims about Jesus were well known by Philostratus’s time.6 This characterization fits the relevant story in Vit. Apoll. 4.45, which combines elements that appear in the aforementioned stories of Jairus’s daughter and of the son of the widow of Nain. But even Philostratus’s narration is ambiguous about whether this raising was a true return to life or a quickening of a spark of life that still remained. Furthermore, Philostratus’s story appears to heighten the significance of Apollonius’s act beyond the scope of the stories of Jesus in the Gospels. Apollonius restores a girl who belongs to a family of political importance (specifically, a consul’s family) in Rome (the significance of which does not need stating). Jesus raises a daughter of a local synagogue leader in Galilee and a son of a widow in the obscure Galilean village of Nain.
As with the previous story, Jesus passes on his contagious purity and life-giving power as he touches the bier and does not become unclean, since he raises the one who was a corpse back to life. Likewise, he performs this miracle with a word, as Jesus often did, and as he did with all of his recorded raising miracles (cf. John 11:43). In these various accounts, we see the concretizing of what Jesus says in John in another way that makes these raising miracles proleptic of the eschatological resurrection. The command for the dead to get up is reminiscent of Jesus’s statement that the hour is coming when the ones who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out (John 5:28–29). But it is only in John that we see one literally being called out of a grave.
The one other feature to note from this text is the recognition that what Jesus had done was the work of God. The impression is not that the power comes from Jesus alone, from any nefarious power, or from some magically manipulated power. The raising of the widow’s son—and thus, her restoration so that she is not left utterly destitute without a family to care for her—is seen as the work of the God who raises the dead. As such, this event is described as God “visiting” or “looking upon” (ἐπισκέπτομαι) his people (7:16). This is the only time the verb appears in Luke after ch. 1, though the associated noun appears elsewhere. The language of visitation has eschatological resonance, much as Jesus’s raising of the dead itself does. In the LXX the verbal term and its noun form have at least three connotations, all of which relate to or set precedent for eschatology. First, it is used in the context of a visitation of divine judgment (Exod 30:12; Ps 89:32; Isa 23:17; Sir 2:14). Second, it appears in perhaps even more liturgically significant contexts as a reference to the exodus (Exod 3:16; 4:31). Third, based directly or indirectly on the exodus, it appears in expressions of hope for divine deliverance for the vindication and exaltation of the people of God, which leads to the glorification of his name (Pss 80:14 [LXX 79:15]; 106:4 [LXX 105:4]; Wis 3:7; also see Pss. Sol. 3:11; 10:4; 11:6; 15:12). Luke himself uses this language elsewhere in the narration of what people say concerning a climactic action of God (1:68, 78; 7:16; 19:44; Acts 15:14; also see 1 Pet 2:12). As in the Magnificat and Benedictus, the visitation language fits well with the themes of God’s covenantal faithfulness expressed in faithful love, consistency with past action and promise (the remembrance that is the basis of hope), the coming of the hoped-for deliverance, judgment upon enemies (in this case, death), as well as the salvation of people when light shines in the darkness, and when life bursts forth from death.
Hans Kvalbein, “Die Wunder der Endzeit: Beobachtungen zu 4Q521 und Matth 11,5,” ZNW 88 (1997): 111–15; Lidija Novakovic, “4Q521: The Works of the Messiah or the Signs of the Messianic Time?” in Qumran Studies: New Approaches, New Questions, ed. Michael Thomas Davis and Brent A. Strawn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 214–15.
Benjamin Wold, “Agency and the Raising of the Dead in 4QPseudo-Ezekiel and 4Q521 2 ii,” ZNW 103 (2012): 8–13.
Novakovic, “4Q521,” 209–10, 219–25. Cf. Eric Eve, The Jewish Context of Jesus’ Miracles, JSNTSup 231 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2002), 196: “The Messiah will come and the great age of salvation will dawn (for the pious); that is the author’s message; demarcating a precise division of labour is not his concern.”
For a thorough list of possible restoration miracles in the Jewish and Greco-Roman worlds, see Werner Kahl, New Testament Miracle Stories in Their Religious-Historical Setting, FRLANT 163 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 57–61. More specifically concerning Apollonius, Kahl observes that he is, “the only pagan immanent BNP [bearer of numinous power] to whom more than one healing story and other miraculous acts is ascribed” (ibid., 222; emphasis original).
Christopher P. Jones, introduction to The Life of Apollonius: Books I–IV, by Philostratus, ed. and trans. Christopher P. Jones, LCL (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 5–6; Tomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 324–26, 331–32.
Craig S. Keener, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), 53–56.