Thank you for your comments on Bill Graham. Readers might be interested in the following article:
Latham: The healing powers of Bill Graham.
The miracle described by author Ric Brack was not a physical healing, but rather involved an elderly woman who was instantly and permanently cured of racism, thanks to Billy Graham’s altar call. In its own way, that’s just as remarkable.
And that brings me to a subject I’d like @dga471, @swamidass and other contributors to address: the miracle of Judaism. We should always remember that Jesus was a Jew. The argument I would like to put forward is that the emergence of Judaism is just as much of a miracle as the Resurrection. Let me explain why.
The first version of the Pentateuch seems to have been put together around 300 B.C. and the final version, around 200 B.C. Prior to that, the worship of the Israelite god Yahweh seems to date back to some time before 1,300 B.C., when he was worshiped as as a lesser Canaanite god. El was theCanaanites’ supreme sky-god. Much later on, the book of Deuteronomy narrates that El allotted each of the gods authority over a separate people on earth, and Yahweh was assigned to the Israelites (Deuteronomy 32:8-9). Yahweh was also originally held to have had a wife, named Asherah. Not exactly an encouraging beginning to belief in Yahweh, you might think - especially when we recall the long and grisly history of child sacrifice in that region of the world and the longstanding practice (which is even sanctioned in certain Biblical passages) of killing the enemy’s infants in warfare (see more bloodthirsty Biblical passages here). Nevertheless, by 300 B.C. at the latest, the Israelites had come to believe in one God Who created the entire universe, Who made man in His own image, Who answered prayers, Who commanded the Israelites to take care of widows, orphans and wayfarers from distant lands, and Who abominated infanticide. That in itself is a miracle. The Greeks, Romans, Indians, Chinese and Meso-Americans never managed to give up the barbarous practice of infanticide, but somehow the Jews did. Thus the Roman historian Tacitus recorded that the Jews “regard it as a crime to kill any late-born children” (see here). Josephus, writing in the first century A.D., wrote that God “forbids women to cause abortion of what is begotten, or to destroy it afterward” (see here). I have to ask: what wrought this change of heart? And why did the more civilized Greeks fail to make the transition? I can only posit some kind of supernatural revelation - whether a sudden or a gradual one, a single event or a series of events, I cannot say. But something happened.
Skeptical readers will be sure to bring forward the genocidal passages in the Bible. By all means do. Most if not all of them refer to battles that never happened, anyway: the Biblical story of the Israelite conquest of Canaan is almost entirely fiction. The severity of the Biblical laws described in the Torah is another obstacle brought forward by skeptics. But in both cases, what we see by the time of Jesus is that capital and corporal punishment had virtually disappeared from Israel, while the bloodthirsty commands to wipe out the Amalekites had been largely rendered moot by the Rabbis’ declaration that it was no longer possible to identify them, after Sennacherib deported and mixed the nations. How did this humanitarian revolution come about?
Let’s put the issue another way. I’d like Christian contributors to ask themselves this: prior to Jesus’ birth, was there any evidence for the intervention of God in human history? What do readers think?