The Miracles of Jesus · Lectio Daily

All four Gospels narrate episodes in which Jesus acts on an illness, a dead body, a storm or a spirit, and something changes in front of witnesses. Greek has no single word for that: Matthew, Mark and Luke usually write dynameis, "acts of power"; John prefers sēmeia, "signs", and also erga, "works". "Miracle" is the word translators reach for, not one the manuscripts carry. Below are the episodes told one by one, each with the chapter where it is read and every parallel passage.

Healings · 17

The leper made cleanMatthew 8 Mark 1 Luke 5
The centurion's servantMatthew 8 Luke 7
Peter's mother-in-lawMatthew 8 Mark 1 Luke 4
The paralytic lowered through the roofMatthew 9 Mark 2 Luke 5
The woman with the flow of bloodMatthew 9 Mark 5 Luke 8
The two blind menMatthew 9
The withered handMatthew 12 Mark 3 Luke 6
The blind men at JerichoMatthew 20 Mark 10 Luke 18
The deaf man with a speech impedimentMark 7
The blind man of BethsaidaMark 8
The bent-over womanLuke 13
The man with dropsyLuke 14
The ten lepersLuke 17
The servant's earLuke 22
The royal official's sonJohn 4
The paralytic at BethesdaJohn 5
The man born blindJohn 9

Exorcisms · 6

The Gadarene demoniacMatthew 8 Mark 5 Luke 8
The mute demoniacMatthew 9
The blind and mute demoniacMatthew 12 Luke 11
The Canaanite (Syrophoenician) woman's daughterMatthew 15 Mark 7
The boy with a spiritMatthew 17 Mark 9 Luke 9
The unclean spirit in the synagogueMark 1 Luke 4

Over nature · 9

The storm calmedMatthew 8 Mark 4 Luke 8
Feeding the five thousandMatthew 14 Mark 6 Luke 9 John 6
Walking on the waterMatthew 14 Mark 6 John 6
Feeding the four thousandMatthew 15 Mark 8
The coin in the fish's mouthMatthew 17
The fig tree that withersMatthew 21 Mark 11
The great catch of fishLuke 5
Water turned into wineJohn 2
The catch of 153 fishJohn 21

Raisings from the dead · 3

Jairus's daughterMatthew 9 Mark 5 Luke 8
The widow's son at NainLuke 7
The raising of LazarusJohn 11

The four groups on this page — healings, miracles over nature, exorcisms and raisings from the dead — are a cataloguing convention, not a division the Gospels themselves make: no evangelist sorts what he narrates. They are a way of finding your bearings, and their edges are porous. Luke 13 introduces the bent-over woman as bound by a spirit for eighteen years, and almost every catalogue still files her under healings; the boy in Matthew 17 is described with the vocabulary of illness and of possession at once; and a raising can be read as the extreme case of a healing. Where an entry could sit in two boxes, it sits here in the usual one, not the only correct one.

John handles them differently: he calls them sēmeia, "signs", and numbers the first two — the water turned into wine is the first of his signs (John 2:11), the healing of the official's son the second (John 4:54). After that he never numbers again. Speaking of "the seven signs of John" is a reader's count, not the evangelist's, and published lists disagree: some include the walking on the water in John 6, which the text does not call a sign, while others drop it and put the catch of fish in John 21 in its place. The Gospel says outright that the selection is partial: Jesus did many other signs that are not written in the book (John 20:30). And the word does not survive translation intact: at John 4:54 the English edition on this site reads sign, the Portuguese sinal and the Spanish milagro.

The Gospels alternate episodes with summaries: Matthew 8:16 reports that he healed all the sick brought to him, and Mark 1:34 that he healed many. A summary is not an episode, and counting it as one inflates the total without saying so. Hence a list here rather than a round number: 35 entries, each event once, with its parallels beside it. Published catalogues tend to land somewhere between the mid-thirties and the low forties, and the gap is a matter of criteria: Matthew reports two demoniacs at Gadara where Mark and Luke report one; the two feedings can be two events or one story told twice; the centurion's servant (Matthew 8) and the official's son (John 4) have sometimes been identified as the same case; and some lists add the resurrection of Jesus himself, which the Gospels do not narrate as something he does to someone else. None of this divides one church from another: the four Gospels are the same in every canon.

Three miracles in one chapter

Mark 5 runs three of them together: the Gadarene demoniac and the herd of pigs, Jairus's daughter, and folded inside that scene the woman who had been ill for twelve years. One account interrupts the other and then picks it up again. Read the chapter straight through.

Mark 5 Plans