How Many Miracles Did Jesus Perform? What the Gospels Count

The four gospels record about 37 distinct miracles of Jesus, counting each event once even when more than one gospel tells it. Lists that say 35, 40, or 50 are reading the same pages and counting them in different ways. And the Gospel of John closes by telling you that what was written down is only a small part of what Jesus did.

That last part matters more than the number. You may have come here with a simple question, maybe for a Bible study, maybe because a child asked you at bedtime, maybe because you saw three websites give three different answers and wondered whether anyone actually knows. The honest answer is that the gospel writers never gave us a total. They gave us accounts, one after another, each a real person in a real town meeting the power of God in the face of Jesus. The counting came later, from people like us trying to hold it all in our hands.

So this page does two things. It answers the number question plainly, with the reasons the counts differ, the tally in each gospel, and the four types of miracles teachers use to sort them. Then it turns to the part the counting cannot reach, the crowds healed in a single sentence, the signs John chose not to record, and the reason any of them were written down at all. If you want every miracle laid out one by one with its reference, the full list of Jesus' miracles does that. This page is about the count, and what the count is trying to tell you.

How many miracles did Jesus perform?

About 37 miracles are narrated in the four gospels as individual events. That is the number you will see most often, and it is the fairest single answer. It comes from reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John side by side, listing every specific miracle story, and counting each event once even when two or three gospels tell it.

Other numbers are not wrong so much as differently counted. Here is how the most common totals come about.

Total	How it is usually counted
About 33	A tighter list that sets aside borderline events and anything after the resurrection
About 35	Each narrated miracle counted once, with parallel accounts merged
About 37	The most common count, adding a few events tighter lists leave out
About 40	Splits some combined events and adds miracles told in passing
About 50	A broad catalog that counts summary healings and resurrection-related events separately

Every one of those lists is built from the same pages. The feeding of the five thousand is one miracle whether you read it in Matthew or John. The calming of the storm is one miracle told three times. What changes is where each list draws its lines, and that is worth understanding, because it shows you something about how the gospels were written.

Why one list says 37 and another says 50

There is no verse in Scripture that gives a total, so anyone who publishes a number has made choices. Four choices do almost all of the work.

• Parallel accounts. Many miracles appear in two or three gospels. Nearly every list counts these once, but a few older lists count each telling, which inflates the total quickly.
• Similar but separate events. The feeding of the five thousand and the feeding of the four thousand are two different events (Matthew 14:13-21 and Matthew 15:32-39). Some lists merge similar healings of blind men. Others keep them apart.
• Summary statements. The gospels often compress a whole evening into one line, such as the night the whole town gathered at the door and Jesus healed many (Mark 1:32-34). Most lists skip these. Broad lists count them as extra miracles.
• Events after the resurrection. The second great catch of fish (John 21:1-14) happens after Easter. Some lists include it. Some leave it out as belonging to a different season of Jesus' work.

A fifth choice sits underneath all of these, and it is a quieter one. Is a miracle something Jesus did, or something God did to him? The virgin birth, the transfiguration, the resurrection, and the ascension are all miracles, but they are not usually counted among the miracles Jesus performed. Broad lists that include them can reach fifty or more.

I find it steadying that the numbers wobble. It means nobody invented them. They are the honest result of ordinary people counting four independent witnesses who were never trying to hand us a tally in the first place.

Miracles in each gospel

Each gospel writer chose which miracles to tell, and the choices are part of what each one is saying about Jesus. These are the commonly cited counts of individual miracle accounts in each book.

Gospel	Miracle accounts	What stands out
Matthew	About 20	Miracles clustered in chapters 8 and 9, showing the King's authority
Mark	About 18	The fastest pace of any gospel, one miracle crowding the next
Luke	About 20	Six miracles no other gospel records, many for the overlooked
John	7 signs, plus 1 after Easter	Few, chosen, and each tied to a claim Jesus makes

You cannot add those numbers together to get a total, because so many events repeat across the first three gospels. That overlap is why the combined count settles in the mid-thirties rather than climbing toward eighty.

What each gospel keeps for itself is where the picture gets rich. Luke alone tells six miracles, the great catch of fish (Luke 5:1-11), the widow's son at Nain (Luke 7:11-17), the woman bent double for eighteen years (Luke 13:10-17), the man with swelling (Luke 14:1-6), the ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19), and the healing of a servant's ear on the night of the arrest (Luke 22:50-51). Look at who is in that list. A widow burying her only son. A woman who could not stand up straight. Ten men who had to live outside the village. Luke kept the miracles that found people everyone else had stopped seeing.

Mark keeps the healing of the deaf man in the Decapolis (Mark 7:31-37) and the blind man healed in two stages at Bethsaida (Mark 8:22-26). Matthew alone tells of the coin in the fish's mouth (Matthew 17:24-27). And only one miracle from Jesus' public ministry made it into all four gospels, the feeding of the five thousand (Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:30-44, Luke 9:10-17, John 6:1-15). You can read that story in full in the feeding of the five thousand, and it is worth asking why every one of the four witnesses felt they could not leave it out.

The four types of miracles Jesus performed

When people search for the four types of miracles, they are usually meeting a teaching tool, not a biblical category. The gospels never sort the miracles into bins. But sorting them helps you see the shape of what Jesus was doing, and the four groups most teachers use hold up well. Using the common count of about 37, the rough breakdown looks like this.

Type	About how many	Examples
Healings	17	Lepers, the blind, the paralyzed, the woman who touched his cloak
Exorcisms	6	Legion in the Gerasenes, the boy his disciples could not help
Nature miracles	8	Water into wine, calming the storm, walking on water, the feedings
Raising the dead	3	The widow's son, Jairus' daughter, Lazarus

Those numbers do not quite add up to 37, and that is fine. A few miracles fall between the lines, and some lists add a fifth group for provision, the miracles where Jesus meets a need for bread or wine or fish.

Healings

Healings are the largest group by far, and the most tender. Jesus touches a leper no one else would touch (Mark 1:40-42). He stops a whole crowd to find the one woman who reached for his cloak, and he calls her daughter (Mark 5:25-34). He hears blind Bartimaeus shouting over the people telling him to be quiet, and he asks him, "What do you want me to do for you?" (Mark 10:51). Almost every healing restores a person to a community, not just a body to health. The healed leper can go home. The woman who bled for twelve years is no longer unclean.

Exorcisms

In the exorcisms Jesus meets people held by something darker than illness, and he sets them free with a word. A man in the synagogue at Capernaum (Mark 1:23-26). A man living among the tombs whom no chain could hold, found afterward sitting, dressed, and in his right mind (Mark 5:1-20). A Gentile mother's daughter, healed at a distance because the mother would not give up (Mark 7:24-30). These accounts are honest about spiritual darkness, and just as honest that it has no standing before Jesus.

Nature miracles

In the nature miracles the wind, the water, the bread, and the fish do what Jesus says. He turns water into wine at a wedding in Cana (John 2:1-11). He rebukes a storm that had seasoned fishermen afraid for their lives (Mark 4:35-41). He walks across the lake in the dark (John 6:16-21). He feeds thousands twice. These are the miracles that made the disciples ask, in the boat, who is this? You can sit with the first of them in Jesus turning water into wine.

Raising the dead

Only three times do the gospels tell of Jesus raising someone who had died. The widow's son at Nain, on the way to his burial (Luke 7:11-17). The twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus, taken by the hand (Mark 5:21-43). And Lazarus, four days in the tomb, called out by name (John 11:1-44). Three is a small number. But these three are the miracles every other miracle was leaning toward. Each person raised would one day die again. Each raising pointed ahead to a morning when Jesus himself would walk out of a tomb and never die again. The raising of Lazarus, where Jesus says before he does anything that he is the resurrection and the life, is told at length in the raising of Lazarus.

John's seven signs

John does something none of the other gospel writers do. He chooses only seven miracles for the body of his gospel, and he calls them signs, because each one points past itself to who Jesus is.

1. Water turned into wine at Cana (John 2:1-11)
2. The royal official's son healed from a distance (John 4:46-54)
3. The man at the pool of Bethesda, unable to walk for 38 years (John 5:1-9)
4. The feeding of the five thousand (John 6:1-15)
5. Jesus walking on the water (John 6:16-21)
6. The man born blind given sight (John 9:1-7)
7. Lazarus raised from the dead (John 11:1-44)

After the resurrection John adds one more, the catch of 153 fish (John 21:1-14). Some readers count it as an eighth sign. Others see it as an epilogue, a breakfast on the shore where Peter is restored.

John is clear from the first sign that these are not a random sample.

What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

— John 2:11

Seven is a small number for a man who healed whole towns. John is not trying to tell you everything. He is trying to tell you enough. The bread in chapter 6 opens into Jesus calling himself the bread of life. The sight given in chapter 9 opens into Jesus as the light of the world. Lazarus in chapter 11 opens into the resurrection and the life. Each sign is a door, and John wants you to walk through it.

The miracles nobody counted

Here is where every list, however careful, falls short. The gospels do not only tell individual miracle stories. Again and again they pull the camera back and show you a crowd, and in that crowd are more healings than anyone could write down.

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them.

— Matthew 4:23-24

Read that slowly. Every disease. All who were ill. Those are not a number. They are a region. Mark describes the evening in Capernaum when the whole town gathered at the door and Jesus healed many who had various diseases (Mark 1:32-34). Later, in the villages and towns and countryside, people laid the sick in the marketplaces and begged just to touch the edge of his cloak, "and all who touched it were healed" (Mark 6:56). No one wrote down their names. Heaven knows every one of them.

And then John, at the very end of his gospel, says it outright.

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

— John 21:25

So the honest answer to how many miracles Jesus performed is that no one knows, and the gospels never pretend to. Thirty-seven is how many were told one by one. The real number is closer to what John says, more than the world could hold. If you have ever felt like one of the unnamed people in the crowd, the one nobody wrote down, this is worth holding onto. The gospels are full of people like you, and Jesus did not pass over a single one of them.

Why the number was never the point

When John the Baptist sat in prison, wondering whether he had been right about his cousin, he sent messengers to ask Jesus whether he was really the one. Jesus did not send back a tally. He sent back a picture.

Jesus replied, "Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor."

— Matthew 11:4-5

Those words echo what Isaiah had promised about the day God would come to save his people (Isaiah 35:5-6). The miracles were not a show of strength for its own sake. They were evidence that the promised King had come, and that his kingdom had broken into a hurting world. Peter preached the same thing at Pentecost, that God had accredited Jesus by miracles, wonders, and signs done among the people (Acts 2:22).

Vern Poythress, in The Miracles of Jesus (Crossway), reads each miracle as a small picture of redemption, a preview in one body or one boat of what Jesus came to do for the whole creation. Craig Keener, in his two-volume Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Baker Academic, 2011), gathers a great deal of evidence that the gospel accounts were written by people reporting events they took to be real, not decorating a legend. Both men land in the same place John did. The miracles are there so that you can know who Jesus is.

John tells you his reason in so many words.

Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.

— John 20:30-31

That is the whole reason there is anything to count. Not so we could argue over 37 or 40, but so that a person reading tonight could believe and have life. You can hold the number loosely. You can hold him tightly.

Further study

If this page answered the number question, the natural next step is to read the miracles themselves. The complete list of Jesus' miracles sets out every one by type, with a one-line summary and the gospel reference, so you can open your Bible and read each account for yourself. It pairs well with this page. Here you have the count. There you have the stories behind it.

Then pick one gospel and read it straight through. Mark is the shortest, and the miracles come so quickly that you feel the weight of them the way the first crowds did. When you finish, turn to John and read the seven signs slowly, watching how each one opens into something Jesus says about himself. Somewhere in those pages is the miracle that was written for you, so that you might believe.

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