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Miracles in Jewish and Christian Antiquity

Imagining Truth

Edited by John C. Cavadini

Notre Dame Studies in Theology

The essays collected in Miracles in Jewish and Christian Antiquity: Imagining Truth are the product of the annual year-long seminar on Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity held in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Each is a study of some aspect of the miraculous relevant to the Bible and associated literature, or to rabbinic or patristic literature. Together they range in focus from theoretical issues to single passages from the literature of the miraculous.

The contributors explore ways in which miracle stories, both biblical and post-biblical, invite us into the realm of the imagination as a locus, and in some cases a privileged locus, of truth. The collection opens with a discussion of the history of the problem of miracles in the Bible from Spinoza to Bultman, then moves to various demonstrations of how it is that we must turn to the imagination if we are to understand miracle stories or if we are to permit them to have their intended effect. Other essays take up the much-neglected topic of the miraculous in the Rabbis and stories told in connection with the lives of monks in sixth-century Palestine. A concluding essay discusses the theme of the miraculous fertility of the earth in various early Christian accounts of the millenium, and examines the sources of those accounts.

Contributors are Randall C. Zachman, Jerome H. Neyrey, S.J., Joseph Blenkinsopp, Mary Rose D’Angelo, Michael A. Signer, Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., Sidney H. Griffith, S.T., Joy A. Schroeder, and J. Massyngbaerde Ford.

John C. Cavadini is Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and editor of Gregory the Great: A Symposium (Notre Dame Press, 1996).