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By Root 1246 0

The celibate Essenes were avid baptists who looked to a coming war between the forces of “dark and light,” asserting that they were “preparing the way of the Lord.” Phrases such as these have led some scholars to connect John the Baptist and Jesus to the Essene community. While Jesus may have been influenced by the Essenes, or was reacting to their teachings, he was not one of them. The Essenes excluded women, the handicapped, and the diseased, all of whom Jesus openly welcomed in his ministry. In direct opposition to Jesus’ call to love one’s enemies, the Essenes also stressed hatred of enemies.

Why was Jesus so popular?

There was no CNN. He didn’t have Oprah or Today. No newspapers, telegraphs, telephones. No Internet. No information superhighway. In fact, no highways at all. Yes, there were Roman roads, but they were paved with rough stones. Camels, donkeys, and horse carts without radial tires were about the best you could expect for getting around. So word moved slowly in first-century Palestine. But somehow, the word of Jesus and his disciples spread. Like the proverbial wildfire. From the obscure village of Nazareth, an out-of-the-way backwater, word of Jesus and his disciples made the rounds of the Galilean countryside. In almost no time, Jesus’ fame swept the country and threatened the powerful. “Word of mouth” was all it took. Eventually, the words changed the world.

And what fueled that “word of mouth”? For three years, Jesus and the Twelve have been traveling, teaching, healing—and working wonders. In John, Jesus sets a new standard for wedding guests when he performs his first miracle, turning water into wine at a wedding feast. Others claimed he calmed a storm that came up on the Sea of Galilee and even walked across the water. He had cured cripples, lepers, and the blind. As news of Jesus’ miracles as a healer spread his fame around Judea, growing crowds gathered to see and hear him wherever he went. We don’t have ratings or polls to gauge his popularity, but he was attracting rock-concert-sized audiences large enough to worry the Jewish authorities.

Contrary to popular notions or misimpression of the period in Judea, Jesus was not alone in these healing works. Just as other men claimed Messiahship to attract political followers, numerous wonder-workers and healers wandered the Roman empire in that day. Jesus even referred to others who were healing in his name. The Jewish Talmud discusses several wonder-working rabbis of Jesus’ time. But none made the claim that Jesus’ followers made: that he had the ability to raise the dead and had done so on three occasions, with witnesses.

When the daughter of a local religious leader was thought to be dead, Jesus spoke to her, saying “Talitha cum” in Aramaic, for “Little girl, get up.” She rose and Jesus said she wasn’t dead, just sleeping, even though others had examined her and said she was dead. In another resurrection, Jesus restored a widow’s son to life, and the Jews of his time would have made the connection to similar miracles performed by the Hebrew prophets, Elijah and Elisha. And when Jesus raised Lazarus, who had been dead for four days, he made it clear that he was more than just a wandering wonder-worker. He told Lazarus’s sister Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live and everyone who believes in me will never die.” (John 11:24-26)

Jesus’ growing renown was making some Jewish leaders a little uncomfortable. After Jesus raised Lazarus, one Pharisee told another, “You see, you can do nothing. Look, the whole world has gone after him!”

THE MIRACLES OF JESUS

Miracles are as old as, well, Creation.

In the New Testament, as in the Hebrew scriptures, miracles demonstrate God’s hand intervening in earthly affairs in extraordinary ways. But New Testament miracles tend to be “personal” miracles, as opposed to miracles affecting the entire nation, such as the Plagues on Egypt or the crossing of the Sea of Reeds and the destruction of the Egyptian army in Exodus.

Apart from his own miraculous