Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

to their control of the Jewish cult, for the vast majority of
     Jews in Palestine—those he claimed to have been sent to free from oppression—Jesus
     was neither messiah nor king, but just another traveling miracle worker and professional
     exorcist roaming through Galilee performing tricks.

Chapter Nine
By the Finger of God
    It did not take long for the people of Capernaum to realize what they had in their
     midst. Jesus was surely not the first exorcist to walk the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
     In first-century Palestine, professional wonder worker was a vocation as well established
     as that of woodworker or mason, and far better paid. Galilee especially abounded with
     charismatic fantasts claiming to channel the divine for a nominal fee. Yet from the
     perspective of the Galileans, what set Jesus apart from his fellow exorcists and healers
     is that he seemed to be providing his services free of charge. That first exorcism
     in the Capernaum synagogue may have shocked the rabbis and elders who saw in it a
     “new kind of teaching”—the gospels say a slew of scribes began descending upon the
     city immediately afterward to see for themselves the challenge posed to their authority
     by this simple peasant. But for the people of Capernaum, what mattered was not so
     much the source of Jesus’s healings. What mattered was their cost.
    By evening, word had reached all of Capernaum about the free healer in their city.
     Jesus and his companions had taken shelter in the house of the brothers Simon and
     Andrew, where Simon’s mother-in-law lay in bed with a fever. When the brothers toldJesus of her illness, he went to her and took her hand, and at once she was healed.
     Soon after, a great horde gathered at Simon’s house, carrying with them the lame,
     the lepers, and those possessed by demons. The next morning, the crush of sick and
     infirm had grown even larger.
    To escape the crowds Jesus suggested leaving Capernaum for a few days. “Let us go
     into the next towns so I may proclaim my message there as well” (Mark 1:38). But news
     of the itinerant miracle worker had already reached the neighboring cities. Everywhere
     Jesus went—Bethsaida, Gerasa, Jericho—the blind, the deaf, the mute, and the paralytic
     swarmed to him. And Jesus healed them all. When he finally returned to Capernaum a
     few days later, so many had huddled at Simon’s door that a group of men had to tear
     a hole in the roof just so they could lower their paralyzed friend down for Jesus
     to heal.
    To the modern mind, the stories of Jesus’s healings and exorcisms seem implausible,
     to say the least. Acceptance of his miracles forms the principal divide between the
     historian and the worshipper, the scholar and the seeker. It may seem somewhat incongruous,
     then, to say that there is more accumulated historical material confirming Jesus’s
     miracles than there is regarding either his birth in Nazareth or his death at Golgotha.
     To be clear, there is no evidence to support any particular miraculous action by Jesus.
     Attempts by scholars to judge the authenticity of one or another of Jesus’s healings
     or exorcisms have proven a useless exercise. It is senseless to argue that it is
more likely
that Jesus healed a paralytic but
less likely
that he raised Lazarus from the dead. All of Jesus’s miracle stories were embellished
     with the passage of time and convoluted with Christological significance, and thus
     none of them can be historically validated. It is equally senseless to try to demythologize
     Jesus’s miracles by searching for some rational basis to explain them away: Jesus
     only
appeared
to walk on water because of the changing tides; Jesus only
seemed
to exorcise a demon from a person who was in reality epileptic. How one in the modern
     worldviews Jesus’s miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people
     of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates
     raged within the early church over who Jesus was—a rabbi? the messiah? God incarnate?—there
     was never any debate, either among his followers or his detractors, about his role
     as an exorcist and miracle worker.
    All of the gospels, including the noncanonized scriptures, confirm Jesus’s miraculous
     deeds, as does the earliest source material,
Q
. Nearly a third of the gospel of Mark consists solely of Jesus’s healings and exorcisms.
     The early church not only maintained a vivid