Stories about the miraculous exploits of charismatic holy men have a long history in the southern Levant, from the prophets of the Hebrew Bible to Christian ascetics of late antiquity. Wandering the region, they were credited with “wonders and signs” that revealed their special abilities. In the popular imagination, the figure of Jesus of Nazareth looms large as the charismatic healer par excellence, and his legacy influenced how literary accounts portrayed the lives of later holy men. Yet both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament indicate that the wonderworkers they describe were not unique to their own religious traditions but were also common among neighboring groups. In this way, the charismatic healers of this chapter are little different than the other forms of ritual healing that this book has explored: methods of seeking divine cures were similar across the notional lines that separated communities, even while the traditions of each community informed the associated prayers, images, and expectations. Unlike the amulets or localized healing sites discussed earlier, evidence for charismatic healers is markedly one-sided. In Chapters 1 and 2, extant amulets counterbalance the critiques offered by elite authors, and in Chapters 3 and 4, votive offerings dedicated by visitors offer non-literary evidence. Even the ritual practitioners of Chapter 5 can be elucidated by texts discovered in the Judaean desert and by Egyptian papyri, which permit avenues of inquiry separate from the rhetoric of literary texts. In contrast, our knowledge of charismatic wonderworkers is limited to those literary texts, which rarely describe these figures with indifference, instead offering either panegyric or denunciation that necessarily complicates any understanding of their healing methods.

The sectarian lens through which these charismatic healers are viewed also obscures distinctions between the healers of this chapter and those of Chapter 5. Put simply, we frequently find ancient authors who maintain that wonders performed by their coreligionists are miracles wrought by God or his agents, while similar feats performed by individuals outside their community are magic accomplished by trickery or incantations. This dichotomy is encoded in our own use of English to describe healing rituals. What makes one text a prayer and another an incantation? What makes one healer a magician and another a holy man? For many today, as in antiquity, it is all in the eyes of the beholder.