12. In the time of Jesus miracles were relatively easy, or so it would seem
The people of the areas in which Jesus of Nazareth lived his relatively short life were not, as a general rule, considered to be educated. Illiteracy has been estimated to have been as high as 90% of the population of what the Romans called Judea, and as is usually the case with an uninformed people, superstition and folklore ruled. As has been noted, witchcraft and sorcery were rife, and the Holy Scriptures which were the basis of religious and civil law dictated that the world upon which they lived was flat (Isaiah 11:12), held up in the firmament by pillars (1 Samuel 2:8), and that it was stationary in place. Heaven, which existed above the firmament, was layered, as was noted by Paul in his 2nd letter to the Corinthians. Earthquakes, floods, tempests at sea, were all actions of gods, or in the case of the monotheistic Israelites, God.
What is today understood to be mental illness was to the world of the ancients’ demonic possession. For centuries miracles had been recorded by certain holy men, visionaries, and seers. Stories of those miracles were handed down in oral tradition, as well as in the sacred scriptures. The miracles of the prophets Elijah and Elisha were repeated by those who documented the ministry of Jesus in the four gospels, and by Paul in the letters which he wrote to the followers forming the early church. Competition between false messiahs and faith healers was as common in His day as it is more than two millennia later, and many of the miracles presented, themselves borrowed from the books of the Old Testament, faced skeptics among the followers of other faith healers and itinerant preachers of the time.
