Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

memory of Jesus’s miracles, it built
     its very foundation upon them. Jesus’s apostles were marked by their ability to mimic
     his miraculous powers, to heal and exorcise people in his name. Even those who did
     not accept him as messiah still viewed Jesus as “a doer of startling deeds.” At no
     point in the gospels do Jesus’s enemies ever deny his miracles, though they do question
     their motive and source. Well into the second and third centuries, the Jewish intellectuals
     and pagan philosophers who wrote treatises denouncing Christianity took Jesus’s status
     as an exorcist and miracle worker for granted. They may have denounced Jesus as nothing
     more than a traveling magician, but they did not doubt his magical abilities.
    Again, Jesus was not the only miracle worker trolling though Palestine healing the
     sick and casting out demons. This was a world steeped in magic and Jesus was just
     one of an untold number of diviners and dream interpreters, magicians and medicine
     men who wandered Judea and Galilee. There was Honi the Circle-Drawer, so named because
     during a time of drought he drew a circle in the dirt and stood inside it. “I swear
     by your great name that I will not move from here until you have mercy on your sons,”
     Honi shouted up to God. And the rains came at once. Honi’s grandsons Abba Hilqiah
     and Hanan the Hidden were also widely credited with miraculous deeds; both lived in
     Galilee around the same time as Jesus. Another Jewish miracle worker, Rabbi Hanina
     ben Dosa,who resided in the village of Arab just a few kilometers from Jesus’s home in Nazareth,
     had the power to pray over the sick and even intercede on their behalf to discern
     who would live and who would die. Perhaps the most famous miracle worker of the time
     was Apollonius of Tyana. Described as a “holy man” who taught the concept of a “Supreme
     God,” Apollonius performed miraculous deeds everywhere he went. He healed the lame,
     the blind, the paralytic. He even raised a girl from the dead.
    Nor was Jesus the sole exorcist in Palestine. The itinerant Jewish exorcist was a
     familiar sight, and exorcisms themselves could be a lucrative enterprise. Many exorcists
     are mentioned in the gospels (Matthew 12:27; Luke 11:19; Mark 9:38–40; see also Acts
     19:11–17). Some, like the famed exorcist Eleazar, who may have been an Essene, used
     amulets and incantations to draw demons out of the afflicted through their noses.
     Others, such as Rabbi Simon ben Yohai, could cast out demons simply by uttering the
     demon’s name; like Jesus, Yohai would first command the demon to identify itself,
     which then gave him authority over it. The book of Acts portrays Paul as an exorcist
     who used Jesus’s name as a talisman of power against demonic forces (Acts 16:16–18,
     19:12). Exorcism instructions have even been found within the Dead Sea Scrolls.
    The reason exorcisms were so commonplace in Jesus’s time is that the Jews viewed illness
     as a manifestation either of divine judgment or of demonic activity. However one wishes
     to define demon possession—as a medical problem or a mental illness, epilepsy or schizophrenia—the
     fact remains that the people of Palestine understood these problems to be signs of
     possession, and they saw Jesus as one of a number of professional exorcists with the
     power to bring healing to those afflicted.
    It may be true that, unlike many of his fellow exorcists and miracle workers, Jesus
     also maintained messianic ambitions. But so did the failed messiahs Theudas and the
     Egyptian, both of whom used their miraculous deeds to gain followers and make messianicclaims. These men and their fellow wonder workers were known by Jews and gentiles
     alike as “men of deeds,” the same term that was applied to Jesus. What is more, the
     literary form of the miracle stories found in the Jewish and pagan writings of the
     first and second centuries is almost identical to that of the gospels; the same basic
     vocabulary is used to describe both the miracle and the miracle worker. Simply put,
     Jesus’s status as an exorcist and miracle worker may seem unusual, even absurd, to
     modern skeptics, but it did not deviate greatly from the standard expectation of exorcists
     and miracle workers in first-century Palestine. Whether Greek, Roman, Jewish, or Christian,
     all peoples in the ancient Near East viewed magic and miracle as a standard facet
     of their world.
    That said,