Experience with the Supernatural in Early Christian Times

Book excerpt: The Bible is rich in miracles. Supernaturalism runs like a scarlet thread through the whole book from Genesis to Revelation. Many people tend to pass hastily over the miracle stories, however, and find greater satisfaction in the Bible's less spectacular portrayals of moral ideas and spiritual struggles. So how can we account for the prominence of the miraculous in Hebrew religion and more particularly in early Christianity? Why did the advocates of the new religion concern themselves so extensively with the imagery of supernaturalism? These are the questions Shirley Jackson Case seeks to answer in this provocative work. SHIRLEY JACKSON CASE (1872-1947) was a liberal theologian at the University of Chicago. Case was regarded as perhaps the finest scholar of the socio-historical method, which viewed the Bible as telling and reflecting the history of a movement that had its own needs and goals. She is also the author of The Historicity of Jesus, which is one of the earliest book-length scholarly refutations of the Jesus Myth.