Similar tales of the miracle-working powers of Jesus’s followers are found in several books collectively known as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. These are legendary narratives of the exploits of the apostles during their missionary endeavors in the years after the crucifixion. Any one of these accounts yields numerous instances of astounding and conversion-inducing miracles. Here I mention just a couple that are illustrative.15
The Acts of John narrates the miraculous ministry of John the son of Zebedee while spreading the word abroad. Some of the episodes serve no evangelistic purpose but have purely entertainment value in showing the remarkable abilities of this man of God. Of these, probably the best known is the incident of the bedbugs. We are told that after a long journey John and his companions come to a country inn for the night. Upon lying down, John discovers to his dismay that the bed is infested with bugs. Since he needs his rest, he orders the creatures to leave him in peace. His companions find this amusing, until the next morning when they get up to find a large throng of bedbugs awaiting John’s command at the door. He wakes up and tells the bugs that they can now return to their home, and they obediently do so.16
Most of John’s miracles are performed not for the benefit of a good night’s sleep but in order to convert the masses. None is more impressive than his effortless destruction of the temple of the great goddess of the Ephesians, Artemis.
Artemis was the patron divinity of the city of Ephesus, on the west coast of what is now Turkey. The Ephesians’ dedication to her is celebrated even in the New Testament, in a scene in which her devotees cause a riot in protest against the missionary work of the apostle Paul (Acts 19). In the Acts of John we have another apostolic encounter. This time the goddess—or at least her temple—does not escape unharmed.
John arrives at the magnificent temple of Artemis and there he confronts a large crowd of pagan worshipers celebrating the goddess’s birthday. Ascending a platform, John challenges them to a kind of spiritual duel: they should pray for their goddess to strike him dead; if she proves unable to do so, he in turn will pray to God to kill them. Since everyone in the crowd knows that John is able to do great miracles—he has already publicly raised the dead—they cry out for him not to do it.
John urges them all to convert and then prays that the deity of the place yield up to God himself. Immediately the altar of Artemis splits apart, the sacrifices all fall to the ground, the “glory of the temple” (whatever that is) is broken, as are the seven idols in the shrine. Half the temple falls, the roof caves in, and the priest of Artemis is killed in the collapse. The god of the Christians obviously means business, and he is patently more powerful than the greatest divinity in town.
Immediately the pagan crowd delivers the expected response for such tales of Christ’s mighty apostles: they all cry out, “There is only one God, that of John, only one God who has compassion for us; for you alone are God; now we have become converted, since we saw your miraculous deeds.”17 Readers might wonder how conversions can occur so suddenly, with almost no instruction about what the people are converting to. But there it is. John encourages the crowd, explaining that God is more powerful than Artemis, and his words now have an added effect: the people rush to destroy what is left of Artemis’s temple, crying out, “We know that the God of John is the only one, and henceforth we worship him, since we have obtained mercy from him . . . . We have seen that our gods were erected in vain.” To make the conversion story complete, the pagan priest who had been killed inside the falling temple is then raised from the dead by the power of God and becomes a believer in Jesus.18
In a different set of apocryphal Acts we find comparable powers attributed to the disciple Peter. One of Peter’s famous animal tricks involves a talking dog. Peter comes to Rome to confront an enemy of the faith—not a pagan, in this instance, but an arch-heretic, Simon Magus, who is ruining the faith of Christian believers in the capital of the empire by convincing them through his own spectacular miracles that his false teachings are true. Miracles convert. Most of the Acts of Peter involves miracle contests between the true apostle of Christ and the wicked corrupter of the faith.
When Peter arrives in the city, he learns to his dismay that one of the great leaders of the faith, Marcellus, has brought the nefarious Simon under his roof. Peter is barred from entering—the heretic fears his power—but he is not to be deterred. He lets loose a large dog on a chain and endows it with a human voice. The dog enters the house to tell Simon Magus that Peter is waiting for him outside and is not in a conciliatory mood. Returning to Peter, the dog gives Simon’s reply: This will be a showdown. The animal then breaths his last and dies. The result is a massive conversion: “When the multitude with great astonishment saw the talking dog, many fell down at the feet of Peter.” Others, for whom one amazing feat is not enough, ask him for another miracle, and Peter responds by bringing a smoked tuna back from the dead, tossing it back into the water to swim. Once again “very many who had witnessed this followed Peter and believed in the Lord.”19
In the miracle contests between Simon Magus and Peter that follow, one fantastic deed trumps another, until eventually everyone has taken a side, either with the heretic or the apostle. At one point Simon and Peter are brought together for an official contest in the arena before all the people of Rome, including senators and prefects of the city. To ensure a fair match, the chief prefect sets the rules of engagement by sending in a slave and giving the two competitors their instructions. Simon is to kill the slave (supernaturally) and Peter is to revive him.
Simon complies by speaking a word in the slave’s ear, and he drops down dead. The prefect is more than a little disturbed, in no small measure because the slave is a favorite of the emperor’s and now the prefect realizes that he is to blame for his death. He pleads with Peter to do something, and, naturally enough, Peter complies. Informing everyone present that God “is doing many signs and miracles through me to turn you from your sins,” he takes the slave by the hand and raises him from the dead. Then comes the expected response: “When the multitude saw this they cried, ‘There is only one God, the God of Peter!’ ”20
Such accounts can be found throughout the entire corpus of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles.21 But not only there.
OSTENSIBLY HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS
In addition to such legendary tales of apostolic adventures, we have two narratives from the early Christian centuries that describe missionary activities of later evangelists, one active in the third century and one in the fourth. Even though these are presented as ostensibly historical accounts, they more easily align themselves with “tales of a holy person,” that is, an idolizing biography known as “hagiography”—a highly pious and legendary kind of writing that celebrates the miraculous deeds of a Christian saint.
The Life of Gregory the Wonderworker
The third-century figure of Gregory “Thaumaturgus”—that is, the “Wonderworker”—is known to us from a biographical sketch produced over a century after his death by a namesake, Gregory of Nyssa (335–94 CE). Gregory of Nyssa was a major theologian in the Christian church, most famous for his contributions to the ongoing discussions centered on the doctrine of the Trinity. His narrative of the Wonderworker shows how, in the fourth-century imagination, the earlier conversion of the pagan masses came through clear and compelling demonstrations of divine power. The god of the Christians routed the gods of the pagans in a series of direct confrontations. The Life of Gregory the Wonderworker declares that whereas he could find only seventeen Christians when he arrived in New Caesarea, a city in the region of Pontus (northern Turkey), when he completed his missionary campaigns, only seventeen pagans remained.
The account’s first episode provides a foretaste of what is to come. The entire region is said to have been filled with pagan temples, altars, and idols. When Gregory arrives, a violent rainstorm forces him to enter a pagan temple. It is filled with the filthy stench of sacrifices, and he purifies it by making the sign of the cros
s and invoking the name of Christ, putting the terror of God into the resident demons—that is, the pagan gods. Gregory spends the night in the temple saying prayers and singing hymns. The next morning, when the custodian of the temple arrives, the demons appear to him and inform him that they are now barred from the temple. He is furious with Gregory, but the saint tells him that his god has the power to order the pagan demons at will.
The temple custodian asks for proof, so Gregory tears off a piece of paper and writes a command to the demons: “Gregory to Satan, Enter!”22 The custodian places the message on the altar, and only then is he able to perform his customary sacrifices. “When these things happened he began to grasp the fact that Gregory possessed a divine power, by which he appeared to have overwhelming superiority over the demons.” He asks for a further demonstration of divine power, and the saint is more than happy to comply. Outside the temple is a large boulder, far too heavy for a human to lift. Gregory orders it to move. It levitates on its own and glides through the air to settle in another place. “When this had happened, the man straightaway believed in the word, and left everything (including his family) to follow Gregory.” The Life explicitly states that “he was converted to the true God,” not “by some sound or word,” but by the great miracle.
That was just the beginning. Soon “the inhabitants of the town poured out en masse as to some account of a new marvel, and all were eager to see who that Gregory is who, though a human being, has power like an emperor over those whom they deemed gods, apparently able to order the demons to and fro like slaves wherever he might will.” By the end of Gregory’s impressive displays of divine power, virtually the entire region converts.
The Life of Martin of Tours
Within about twenty years of Gregory of Nyssa’s description of the remarkable missionary endeavors of the Wonderworker, the Christian writer Sulpicius Severus (c. 355– 420 CE) produced an account of another missionary saint, Martin of Tours, in Gaul, modern France. In this case, however, the subject was a contemporary of the author. He was, in fact, the author’s spiritual mentor. Sulpicius claims he based his narrative on personal interviews with the saint.
Here too we find numerous accounts of amazing deeds, as Martin is empowered by God to cast out demons and raise the dead. But it was the miracle of a falling pine tree that converted the masses.
Martin comes to a village with a pagan temple and begins to chop down a sacred tree because, he maintains, it is dedicated to the resident demon. A crowd of pagans gathers and objects to his proceeding—naturally enough, as it is a desecration of their sacred site. After an angry exchange, one of crowd offers to chop down the massive tree if Martin agrees to stand beneath it to see if he can avoid being crushed. Martin is not one to back down from a challenge. He stands beneath the tree, the pagans cut it down, and it begins to fall with a loud noise; but before it can land on the saint, he makes the sign of the cross and then “you would have thought it had been repelled by a kind of tornado. The tree fell in a different direction, so that it almost flattened the country men who had been standing all around the place.” The miraculous aversion of disaster has its desired effect. “It was agreed that on that day, salvation had come to those regions. For there was almost no one from that immense multitude of pagans who did not believe in the Lord Jesus, and who did not renounce the impiety of their error.”23
As Martin travels around from one village to another, destroying more pagan temples, the miracles continue to occur. In one site the villagers stand by helplessly as he tears their sacred place down to the foundation, smashes its altars, and reduces the idols “to dust.” Once he is finished, the pagans realize they have been frozen in place and unable to move, transfixed by a divine power to prevent them from interfering with the man of God. As a result, “nearly all of them believed in the Lord Jesus, claiming openly and confidently that they should worship the God of Martin and forsake the idols that had been unable to assist either them or others.”
The Miracles of Salvation
Some thirty years after the death of Martin of Tours, Augustine of Hippo, the greatest theologian of Christian antiquity, published his famous City of God in twenty-two books (416–22 CE). Augustine had a clear sense of why the great miracles of Scripture had been recounted: “The miracles were published that they might produce faith, and the faith which they produced brought them into greater prominence.”24 But some people—possibly a large number of people—wondered why such miracles no longer happened. Augustine had a witty response: “I might, indeed, reply that miracles were necessary before the world believed, in order that it might believe. And whoever now-a-days demands to see prodigies that he may believe, is himself a great prodigy, because he does not believe, though the whole world does.”
Augustine is not content to leave it at that. He proceeds to recount miracle after miracle that occurred in his own day, some of them, he claims, in his very presence, seen with his own eyes: people cured of blindness, gout, paralysis, cancer, hernia, and “rectal fibula.” These miracles may not be widely talked about, Augustine avers, or even known, but they continue to occur. They reveal the power of God, which continues to work in the present. Augustine’s readers then can rest assured that God is still very much active in the world, and because of these manifestations of divine power, people can believe.
Augustine was writing very much at the end of the period I am covering in this book, and his stories provide a fitting conclusion to the period, begun with the letters of Paul and the book of Acts. Throughout those first four Christian centuries converts did not need to see divine displays of power with their own eyes. They needed simply to hear about them. And they certainly did hear about them, from the pages of Scripture, from apocryphal accounts of Jesus’s apostles, from narratives of great evangelists such as Gregory and Martin, and, possibly most frequently, from stories orally circulated about this or that great thing that the god of the Christians had done for his people in response to their prayers.
But miracles come in different packages. There are two related phenomena that contributed to the spread of the Christian faith as well, if we can credit our ancient sources to any extent at all. Both also relied on manifestations of awesome power from the God over all. One of them relates to the specific message Christians delivered to the lost, the other to their own refusal to depart from that message, even in the face of torture and death.
THE TERRORS OF THE AFTERLIFE
One of the reasons stories of miracles proved so effective in making converts is that Christians combined them with the claim that God’s manifestation of power in the present foreshadowed what he would do in the future. Life was filled with pain and suffering: people were starving; they were afflicted with blindness, loss of hearing, paralysis, the ravages of disease, or abject poverty; they were attacked by hordes of evil demons. Life could be—and for many it was—a wretched existence, a cesspool of misery. But God’s miracle workers cured these ills. They could multiply the supplies of food, cure the body’s deficiencies, heal any disease, and overpower the demons. Moreover, all that was merely a prelude to what was to come. After this life humans could enter into a world of sheer joy, free from the trials, tribulations, defects, plagues, and forces of evil of this world. There was a world to come, and those who sided with God would inherit it, to live a utopian existence for all eternity.
Alternatively, they could reject the power of God and be subject to the ravages of sheer evil, physical torments that made the miseries of the present pale by comparison. This horrific existence would not last a mere human life span of fifty or sixty years. No, the torments would never end. It would be everlasting hell.
And so people had to choose. God had shown what he could do. It was also quite clear what the forces of evil could do. Which would people prefer? Christian preachers were forthright and stark about the options. As the third-century church father Cyprian wrote to one of his correspondents, a man named Demetrius, “An ever-burning Gehenna will burn up the c
ondemned, and a punishment devouring with living flames . . . . Souls with their bodies will be reserved in infinite tortures for suffering.” There will not be “either respite or end to their torments . . . . Too late they will believe in eternal punishment who would not believe in eternal life.”25
In the second century, accounts of the afterlife begin to appear in Christian texts, often presented as guided tours of the realms of the blessed and of the damned. In these a saint is shown the ecstasies of the saved and, especially, the torments of the lost, presented with barely concealed voyeuristic glee. Roman historian Ramsay MacMullen has called these accounts “the only sadistic literature I am aware of in the ancient world.”26
The earliest surviving example is called the Apocalypse of Peter. In it Jesus himself gives his disciple Peter a glimpse of what life will be like for those who refuse the path of righteousness, who are not baptized as believing Christians, who instead follow the ways of sin. In the realms of the damned Peter sees blasphemers hanged by their tongues over eternal flames. Men who committed adultery are similarly suspended, but by their genitals. Women who have performed abortions on themselves are sunk in excrement up to their necks forever. Those who slandered Christ and doubted his righteousness have their eyes perennially burned out with red-hot irons. Those who worshiped idols are chased by demons off high canyons, time and again. Slaves who disobeyed their masters are forced to gnaw their tongues incessantly while being burned by fire.
The Triumph of Christianity Page 17
