New Testament Miracles.
The prophets of the old dispensation looked for a Messiah who should be the healer of His people and those who had eyes to see could not fail to recognize such an one in the person of the Great Physician. In Him we find the culmination of miraculous power. When we compare the long stretch of centuries covered by the Old Testament record, its few scattering miracles centering about a few strong personalities, with the three short years of Jesus' active work crowded full of miraculous doings, we can form some estimate of the importance and frequency of these manifestations of a great personality.
In short we have here the greatest epoch in the history of the miraculous. The miracles of other peoples and even those of the prophets of Israel seem on the whole a little trifling and insignificant in comparison.
While many of the conceptions of disease and its cure which prevailed under the old order of things were still prevalent at the time of Jesus, there are certain marked differences that are worth noting.
In Old Testament times, as we have seen, the traces of a belief in evil spirits as a cause of disease are few, indefinite, and of a primitive type; in the New Testament we find a perfectly developed demonology clearly stated and generally accepted.
The similarity between the Persian and Chaldean demonology and that of the Jews has often been noted and many critics have attributed the likeness to influences exerted on the Jews in captivity. The trend of present day criticism, however, is to make less of the influence of outside nations and to recognize that the Jews being a people of like race and temperament with the races about them, living in a similar environment, and possessing, as we have seen, the germs of such an idea, needed only the rigor of their Judaistic monotheism to complete the evolution of a demonology such as we find in New Testament and subsequent times.
However that may have been, there is no mistaking the fact that a radical change of view has taken place and that Satan and his emissaries play an exceedingly important role in disease from this time on. How far Jesus shared the current views it is impossible to know but in His healing work He proceeded as though the prevailing explanation of the phenomena of demon possession were the true one. On the other hand there is no very strong proof that He ever considered disease a punishment for sin and on one occasion at least He is quoted as having clearly opposed this old Hebrew conception as contrary to the spirit of His religion.
Miracles of Healing
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By Charles W. Waddle (1909)
Primitive Christian Worship
Hereditary genius
