I occasionally get asked why there are no miracles mentioned in the Sefer Yeshua. The simplest answer is that I wanted Yeshua’s own words to justify themselves, without distractions. If you could read a ‘red letter’ edition of the Sefer Yeshua, you would see that the vast majority of the text would be in red.
Are you someone who says, “I accept the message and ethical teachings of Yeshua; no miracles required”? Or are you someone who says, “I will not accept the teachings of Jesus; I will not believe unless there are miracles”?
I recall that in the last two seasons of Stargate: SG-1, their main enemies were a members of a religion called ‘Origin’, and they worshipped beings called the Ori. These beings could perform amazing miracles – they could heal the sick, and they could resurrect the dead. However, Origin was an incredibly evil religion, because it was all about controlling people, denying them free will. Their followers believed in them because they performed miracles, in spite of them being exceptionally evil and malicious beings. Miracles were used as a means to deceive and control.
In the Hebrew Bible, God performs miracles through the prophets to show God’s power and compassion. However, in Jewish culture, miracles do not prove anything – that is, they are not used to prove that something is true. Dt 13:1-5 explains that even false prophets have the power to perform miracles. In contrast, the pagan cultures of the Mediterranean evolved in an environment where miracles were considered to be the definitive, underlining proof that a message was true. Miracles were understood to be the signs of the gods, and so for Christians who had previously been pagans, including plentiful miracles in the gospels was necessary as signs and proofs that ‘Jesus Christ’ was a god.
Furthermore, in Yahwism, even though miracles are considered possible, nevertheless, performing showy, theatrical-style miracles was considered a sin which misrepresented the holiness of God – as evidenced by how God viewed what Moses and Aaron did when they produced water from the rock at Merivah. It was so serious a misdeed, that Moses and Aaron were denied the blessing of entering the Promised Land (Num 20:12).
I occasionally get emails from Messianics and Evangelicals, asking me if our community can perform miracles. They explain their reason for asking, is that their churches include miracles in all their services, and that’s how they know their gospel message is true; for them, a message without miracles must be false. Their attitude just reminds me of the cults of pagan mystery religions around the ancient Mediterranean (and of the Ori religion in Stargate SG-1). Bart Ehrman once said that one of the reasons why ancient Christians were able to outdo pagans, is because they were able to claim more miracles than the pagans.
If your faith is such that it can only be justified by miracles, it suggests that you are not paying much attention to Yeshua’s real message; it explains why so many Evangelicals call Jesus ‘Lord’, and yet do nothing that he says (Lk 6:46).
In the Sefer Yeshua, I wanted Yeshua’s own words to speak for themselves. If you remove all the words in the gospels that have obviously been added by Christian authors, you are left with the words of a Jewish prophet, who was a faithful messenger of Adonai. I like to think that we, as Followers of the Way, are like those very first disciples of the Prophet Yeshua, who listened to Yeshua’s words with rapt attention on the hillsides of the Galilee – the earliest disciples, who actually took note of what Yeshua said, and were transformed by the power of his words alone.
When you read the gospels as written, the interspersed narrative of the gospel writers present an image of what Paul’s Christians believed ‘Jesus Christ’ to have been. When you read the Jewish words of Yeshua, by themselves, with no additions – not even the illustrative midrash of the Sefer Yeshua, which was only added for explanatory context – you begin to understand what Yeshua’s Message was: the Kingdom of God, and a compassionate call for repentance, to return to the original, precious, saving ideals that God gave us. Whereas the gospels focus on the person of ‘Jesus Christ’, Yeshua’s own words focus on God, and on the Kingdom of God.
I am in no way denying that miracles happen; I personally do believe in miracles, and that God does indeed ‘move in mysterious ways’. The purpose of not including miracles in the Sefer Yeshua was so that readers could refocus their attention onto Yeshua’s core Message, and concentrate on the actual content of his words. This was so that we can realise just how powerful they are, even without the presence of miracles. I wanted to help Talmidis move away from the Christian mindset that ‘miracles exist to prove a message is true’, because in Yahwist Israelite culture, that’s not the purpose of miracles.
There are no miracles in the Sefer Yeshua, because I wanted to give modern Followers of the Way a chance to be able to hear Yeshua’s own, unadulterated words in the same way as ancient Followers did, free of their imposed, alien theology.