For many, the Gospel portrait of Jesus as a miracle worker smacks of legend. Raising the dead, healing the blind, making the deaf hear—these don’t seem like the stuff of history.
But the Gospel narratives themselves include clues that point in a different direction. Take, for example, the story of Jesus healing the deaf-mute man in Mark 7:31-37. When we look closely, several lines of evidence support the conclusion that this story goes back to Jesus himself and not to later Christian invention.
Unusual and Unique Details
The first is that Mark’s account includes details that are strikingly out of the ordinary for the Gospel miracle tradition. As biblical scholar John P. Meier observes in A Marginal Jew (vol. 2, p. 713), the gestures Jesus performs here resemble symbolic actions found in magical rituals, which makes them atypical for Jesus’ usual style of miracle-working. Such uniqueness strongly suggests a distinctive origin—one that traces back to Jesus rather than to the Christian community. This doesn’t mean that non-unique details suggest inventions, since the claim is merely that if such a unique, or dissimilar, detail is present, then the probability of such a detail being authentic increases. To conclude that such a detail is not authentic because it is not unique would be to negate the antecedent, which is a fallacy.
For instance, Jesus puts his fingers into the man’s ears—a detail found nowhere else in the Gospel miracle traditions. He then applies his spit directly to the man, something Mark mentions only one other time, in the healing of the blind man at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26). John 9 includes another use of Jesus’ spit, but there it’s mixed with mud, not directly applied. Even more remarkable—and unique in all four Gospels—is Jesus’ touching the man’s tongue with his spit.
Mark also records that Jesus “looked up to heaven and sighed” (v. 34). Meier notes that Jesus “looking up to heaven” during a miracle occurs only twice elsewhere—in the feeding of the five thousand (Matt. 14:19, Mark 6:41, Luke 9:16) and before the raising of Lazarus (John 11:41). These distinctive details, inconsistent with Mark’s usual pattern of miracle storytelling—where Jesus simply commands something to be done, like when he tells the paralytic man to get up and go home (Mark 2:11)—provide good reason to think Mark is preserving a genuine historical memory rather than composing fiction.
The Criterion of Embarrassment
These unusual features also meet what historians call the criterion of embarrassment, which strengthens the case for authenticity. If historical accuracy isn’t a person’s concern when trying to persuade others with a fabricated story, it would be unreasonable to include details that might undermine credibility.
In this story, however, Jesus’ gestures—placing fingers in ears, using spit on the tongue—could easily be mistaken for acts of magic, something that would undercut rather than bolster faith in his divinity. The early Church had every reason not to include such earthy, awkward elements, which might help explain why Matthew and Luke omit the story entirely. The best explanation for why Mark includes it is that he is drawing from an early tradition—most likely received from Peter—too well known to suppress, which ultimately goes back to Jesus himself.
The same logic applies to Jesus’ prayerful sigh before performing the miracle. To invent such a detail would risk confusing readers: why would one who is divine need to pray before working a miracle? The inclusion of that feature could work against Mark’s case for Christ’s divinity. Thus, his inclusion of it makes sense only if Mark is faithfully reporting what was remembered, not crafting a fabricated story of some miracle worker.
The Presence of a Semitism
Another sign of authenticity is the presence of a Semitism—a grammatical or syntactical detail that reveals the influence of the Semitic language. Scholars view the presence of Semitisms as providing good reason to think the narrative has its origin within a Palestinian community near the time of Jesus. And the closer a narrative is to the events it narrates, the more reliable it is.
In verse 34, Mark preserves Jesus’ original word: Ephphatha (“Be opened”). As Meier points out (p. 714), this Semitic detail is unique in that it is the only healing miracle in which Jesus’ Aramaic words are preserved. The rarity of this linguistic feature further strengthens the argument that Mark is drawing on a genuine, early tradition rooted in the historical Jesus. Think about it: what good would a Semitic word do for Mark, who is trying to persuade a Gentile audience that Jesus is divine?
Multiple Attestation
Finally, this story’s theme—Jesus healing the deaf—appears in multiple independent sources, which further confirms its authenticity. In Matthew and Luke, Jesus tells John’s disciples, “The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear” (Matt. 11:5, Luke 7:22).
If we take for granted the scholarship that Matthew and Luke wrote theses parts of their Gospels from one source (called “Q”) and Mark from a different one, then the above means that the image of Jesus as one who makes “the deaf hear” is multiply attested—found both in Mark’s independent tradition and in the source for Matthew and Luke. Moreover, it’s attested across multiple forms: both in a narrative (Mark 7) and in a saying (Matthew and Luke). This kind of cross-source, cross-form consistency provides some of the strongest historical confirmation available in Gospel studies.
Conclusion
Far from being a legendary embellishment, Mark’s account of the healing of the deaf-mute man bears the marks of a genuine historical event. Its unusual realism, linguistic traces, and multiple attestation all point to a story rooted in the memory of Jesus’ actual deeds, not the imagination of later believers.
In short, what skeptics see as the stuff of legend turns out, under historical scrutiny, to look strikingly like the stuff of history. The more closely we examine the Gospels, the more they ring true to the voice—and touch—of the real Jesus.