The essays collected in Miracles in Jewish and Christian Antiquity are the product of the annual year-long seminar on Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity held in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. Each is a study of some aspect of the miraculous relevant to the Bible and associated literature, or to rabbinic or patristic literature, which together range in focus from theoretical issues of the miraculous to single passages from the literature of the miraculous, with consideration of everything in between.These essays explore ways in which miracle stories, both biblical and post-biblical, invite us into the realm of the imagination as itself a locus, and in some cases a privileged locus, of truth. The collection opens with a discussion of the history of the problem of miracles in the Bible from Spinoza to Bultman, then moves to various demonstrations of how it is precisely to the imagination which we must turn if we are to understand stories of the miraculour or if we are to permit them to have their intended effect. Other essays take up the much neglected topic of the miraculous in the Rabbis and those told in connection with the lives of monks in sixth-century Palestine. A concluding essay discusses the theme of miraculous fertility of the earth in various early Christian accounts of the millenium, and examines the sources of such belief.
