New Research Confirms Jesus’s Miracles
“New Research Confirms Jesus’ Miracles” by T.C. Schmidt
In chapter 5 of his Gospel, Luke unfolds the following scene: Jesus is teaching in a crowded house, and a paralyzed man is lowered through the roof to ask for healing. Jesus answers by forgiving his sins. Shocked, the scribes and Pharisees accused Jesus of blasphemy—for who, they ask, can forgive sins but God alone?
In response, Jesus heals the man’s paralysis. At this, the crowd is amazed. They glorify God, they’re filled with “awe,” and they exclaim, “Today we have seen paradoxa!” (Luke 5:26).
The word paradoxa is unusual. It’s used nowhere else in the New Testament, and translations are divided as to its meaning; the ESV renders it “extraordinary,” the NIV and NASB say “remarkable,” but many others prefer “strange things” (KJV, NKJV, NRSV, ASV, WEB, YLT). Dictionaries of ancient Greek retain both positive and negative meanings and also add “paradoxical.”
It seems that either the crowd as a whole was confused by what it had witnessed, not knowing exactly what to make of Jesus, or the crowd was divided, with some denigrating Jesus as a blasphemer and others praising him as a prophet of divine commission.
Either way, paradoxa captures the crowd’s belief that it witnessed something supernaturally strange, unsettling, and inexplicable, something perhaps paranormal, as we might say in English. The word paradoxa therefore isn’t inherently negative, but it isn’t inherently positive either—it connotes the kind of astonishment that leaves one bewildered, wondering what the source of the paradoxa might be. Are these of demonic origin? Are they divine? Without context, who can tell?
In my recent book Josephus and Jesus (read TGC’s review), I show that the ambiguous connotations of paradoxa reveal remarkable new evidence for Jesus’s miracles—evidence, moreover, that comes from an early, non-Christian writer well placed to know all about Jesus of Nazareth.
