Proto-miracles: Blood and its Contrastive Christian and Islamic Domains

In our previous chapters we have presented narratives of what we term ‘proto-miracles’ by way of setting the scene for our main accounts of the miraculous in Christianity and Islam. These ‘proto-miracles’ comprise narratives common to both the Christian and Islamic traditions whose origins may be located in the Old and New Testaments and the Qur'an.

However, this will not be the case in our chosen accounts of ‘protomiracles’ which focus on blood, even though, as previously, such accounts will serve as prologues or prefaces to the principal narratives of the chapter, namely the events of Bolsena in 1263 and an account of a Sufi ‘blood tradition’.

The reasons are clear: the principal theo-anthropological domain of blood in Christianity is sacrifice. This is articulated most powerfully in the Catholic Christian tradition which holds that, at the celebration of the sacrifice of the Mass, the blood and wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ in what is regarded in essence as the same sacrifice of Calvary and not a repetition.

However, the principal theo-anthropological domain of blood in Islam is creation and the revelation of God's power in that creation. God dynamically and powerfully calls attention to the fact that He has created man out of a blood clot (khalaqa al-insān min ʿalaq).

In Christianity, the blood which flows from the side of the dead Christ exhibits the ‘essence’ of the God-Man; in Islam, the blood clot (ʿalaq) exhibits the ‘essence’ of God's power and man's simple, undivinised humanity. The first segues neatly into the events at Bolsena which we shall shortly describe, where the emphasis is on wine becoming blood as part of a sacrifice. The second segues into our story of a Sufi novice where the product of his intense prayer is blood.

Obviously, in the mainstream Islamic tradition, the account of Longinus piercing the side of the dead Christ does not, and cannot, figure for the simple reason that, for Islam, Jesus remains uncrucified and someone else is crucified in his place.