Signs and wonders and miracles, oh my: When you've seen one, you've seen them all

 

  No wonder to us, who have conversed with too many strange actions, now to wonder at any thing: wonder is from surprise, and surprise ceases upon experience.

-- Robert South

The Gospel of Luke's unique use of "pestilences" (loimoi) turns Jewish apocalyptic into Greek

And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. (King James Version)

(σεισμοί τε μεγάλοι κατὰ τόπους καὶ λιμοὶ καὶ λοιμοὶ ἔσονται φόβητρά τε καὶ σημεῖα ἀπ᾽ οὐρανοῦ μεγάλα ἔσται) (Textus Receptus)

-- Luke 21:11

The parallel use of loimoi in Matthew 24:7, found in the KJV and NKJV (footnoted), is weakly attested in the manuscripts and is therefore omitted by the NIV, ESV, RSV, ASV, NET and NASB.

Luke alone in the New Testament uses the otherwise relatively rare "loimos" (see in Bruzzone, below, p. 890), and in but one other place, Acts 24:5. There Luke puts the word in the mouth of a trained orator employed by the Jews to accuse St. Paul of being a "pest", which is quite funny actually (cf. Demosthenes 25.80). It must have been the mention of "famines", "limoi", in the tradition received by Luke which probably triggered his addition of "pestilences". 

This is likely because "limoi" and "loimoi", "famines" and "pestilences", are part of a classic literary constellation of calamities, those two especially and frequently in combination with "polemos", "war" (which Luke also has in 21:9f., kicking off the list of troubles). These terms in combination reach deep into Greek memory, back to such eminences as Homer (Iliad 1.61), Hesiod (Erga 243), Aeschylus (Suppliants 659), the historian Herodotus (7.171.2; 8.115.2f.), Plato (Laws 709A), Pindar, Sophocles, and particularly to the historian Thucydides (1.23; 2.47; 2.54), whose account of the famine and plague at Athens opens his History of the Peloponnesian War. The pairing of famine and plague in particular had become a topos taught in the schools already by the time of the Attic orator Aeschines (3.135), so thoroughly ingrained in the imagination had it become by then (see now Rachel Bruzzone, "Polemos, Pathemata, and Plague: Thucydides' Narrative and the Tradition of Upheaval", Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 57 (2017) 882-909, esp. 888ff., here).

As an obviously educated writer, Luke probably had learned the topos as a boy. 

Once this is appreciated, one can also observe and better appreciate Luke's (double) introduction of the felicitous "te...kai" construction, also in imitation of good style found in Herodotus and Thucydides in similar contexts, and how Luke uses it to pair "great earthquakes" with this topos "famines and plagues" in the first half of the sentence on the one hand, and in the second half of the sentence, the "signs from heaven" with a description of them as "both fearsome and great" on the other.

The only translation I know of which even attempts to capture this, at least in the first half of the sentence, surprisingly, is that of J. N. Darby:

there shall be both great earthquakes in different places, and famines and pestilences; and there shall be fearful sights and great signs from heaven.

Luke's is a morbidly beautiful sentence in its way, if not pulled off entirely successfully, attempting as it does to express how more or less two things of all too familiar and essentially terrestrial terror will be doubly echoed in the heavenly realm by signs at once spectacular and disturbing, confirming the gods' displeasure with men:

There shall be both great signs in place after place, as well as famines and pestilences, and signs from heaven both fearsome and great.

These "te...kai" and topos niceties are wholly lacking in Matthew 24:7 and Mark 13:8, which are artless and probably closer to the original form of the saying, omitting "pestilences" and "both...and". Hence the confusion in the manuscripts with the word order in Luke 21:11 itself, producing many variant readings, because the introduction of the terminology by Luke fought with the received elements.

It's all Luke's fault.

Smart people are frequently misunderstood.

But if one can keep from getting bogged down in all that for one moment, it points to the effort made by Luke to make the apocalyptic teaching of the Christians intelligible to Greek minds. He's trying to make it sound even more familiar to them than it already was. And this begs the question of the origin of Christian apocalyptic in the first place. Just how Hellenized was all this to begin with? It looks more plausible to me after reading Bruzzone, who, by the way, says narry a word about it. The success of the Christian movement is at least partly explained by the resonance of its message with the actual hopes and the fears shared by its hosts.

Bruzzone makes a good case that the Greek tradition is immemorially rich with suspicions of divine involvement in human ills of civil strife, war, natural calamities, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, as well as wonders and portents in the skies, and on the earth below famine, plague, and mass death (loigos). All of these things are associated, if not always in every detail, with the gospels' memory of Jesus' apocalyptic teaching . . . and with Thucydides.

Oh my God, not Thucydides.

This unique case in Luke's Gospel involving pestilence might lead some quickly to say and too quickly to say, "See, Luke was a physician, preoccupied with 'medical' terminology. That's all this is." Well, that hardly makes Luke a physician than it makes one of Thucydides.

But maybe it makes Luke an historian, and a very Greek one at that, at least in his own imagination.

There are miracles, and then there are wonders

It was near a miracle to see an old man silent,

since talking is the disease of age;

but, amongst cups, makes fully a wonder.

-- Ben Jonson

Bill Johnson of Bethel Redding erects his whole theory of signs and wonders on a Christological lie

From When Heaven Invades Earth (2013), p. 29, where Bill Johnson attempts to drive a wedge between the two natures in Christ in the manner of an Arian, an Adoptionist, or a Nestorian:

'Jesus could not heal the sick. Neither could He deliver the tormented from demons or raise the dead. To believe otherwise is to ignore what He said about Himself, and more importantly, to miss the purpose of His self-imposed restriction to live as a man. Jesus Christ said of Himself, "The Son can do nothing" (John 5:19). ... He had no supernatural capabilities whatsoever! While He is 100 percent God, He chose to live with the same limitations that man would face once he was redeemed. ... He performed miracles, wonders, and signs as a man in right relationship to God. . . not as God.'

But it's Johnson who does the ignoring about what Jesus said about himself, and he does so utterly dishonestly.

Not only does Johnson rip John 5:19 from its broader narrative (where Jesus is defending a Sabbath miracle by actually appealing to his intimacy with the Almighty as the divine Son), Johnson deliberately shortens it into a fragment, representing that as if it were the whole:

Then answered Jesus and said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.

 

-- John 5:19

Johnson ignores "but what he seeth the Father do". Jesus is not emphasizing his limitations as a man in this statement, but his glory as the one who is so close to God that he cannot but do what God himself does, because it would be contrary to his nature to do anything else. "No man hath seen God at any time" the Evangelist has said earlier (John 1:18), but here the Son clearly has, and does. Accordingly he cannot do anything but what he sees his Father do. Whereas John is out to show Jesus' divinity in this way in the narrative, Johnson is out to show Jesus' mere humanity.

But Jesus' Jewish opponents in John are not out to kill him for claiming to be a mere man, but for claiming equality with God!

Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.

 

-- John 5:18

Bill Johnson specializes in nothing so much as a violence of his own . . . to the text and to those who follow it.

 

If there were a jail for heresy, Bill Johnson should be celebrating his tenth year in it.

Lesbian Minister Wonders Why Only 3 In 10 In Her Pews Are Men

Ah . . . how would she know they are men?

Dumbest story of the year, from, where else?, Canada.

Here.