The Miracles of Jesus: A Complete List by Type

There is a flat way to read the miracles of Jesus, as a tally. Thirty-seven of them, or fifty, depending on who is counting, lined up in chronological order like entries in a ledger. You can find that list almost anywhere. What is harder to find, and what actually helps, is seeing the miracles for what they were: not a string of wonders, but a man revealing who he was through what he did. Jesus healed the sick, calmed a storm, fed thousands from a boy's lunch, called the dead out of their tombs, and freed people the darkness had hold of. Each act met a real need in a real moment. And each one was pointing somewhere.

This page lays the miracles out in groups, by the kind of thing Jesus did, because grouping them shows the shape of his power better than a calendar does. Under each group you will find the individual miracles with a one-line summary and the gospel reference, so you can open your Bible and read it for yourself. Where this site has a fuller page on a particular miracle, the link is right there in the list. Near the end we will answer the questions people actually ask: how many there were, which one all four gospels kept, which one only Mark recorded. Start wherever you like. The point is not to count them. The point is to see what they were saying.

What is a miracle?

A miracle, in the plainest terms, is an event that the ordinary workings of the world cannot produce on their own. Water does not become wine. A man dead four days does not walk out of a tomb. When those things happen, something has reached in from outside the usual order. The gospels do not treat Jesus' miracles as tricks or as exaggerations that grew in the retelling. They present them as real interruptions of the normal, done in front of witnesses, in named towns, to named people.

The New Testament uses more than one word for these events, and the words are worth knowing. One word stresses power, the sheer ability to do what cannot be done. Another, the one John leans on, is sign. A sign is a miracle considered for its meaning. It does the same thing a road sign does: it points past itself to something you would not otherwise see. When John tells the story of the water turned to wine, he does not call it a wonder. He calls it the first of the signs.

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

That single sentence is the key to the whole list. The miracle was not the destination. The glory it revealed was. Read this way, the calming of a storm is not mainly about weather, and the feeding of a crowd is not mainly about lunch. Every miracle is an arrow, and they all point the same direction, toward the identity of the one performing them.

Why Jesus performed miracles

If the miracles were signs, then the obvious question is what they were signs of. The gospels give a layered answer. At the surface, Jesus acted out of compassion. Again and again the text tells us he was moved before he did anything, that he saw a crowd or a widow or a leper and his heart went out to them. The miracles were never cold demonstrations of strength. They were mercy made visible to people in front of him who were sick, grieving, hungry, or held captive.

Underneath the compassion was a claim. When Jesus healed a paralyzed man, he first forgave the man's sins, and then healed his body specifically to prove he had the authority to do the first thing (Mark 2:1-12). The miracles were credentials. They backed up the things he said about himself, which were the kind of things that either had to be true or had to be blasphemy. Peter, preaching weeks after the resurrection, summed the whole ministry up in exactly these terms.

Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know.

— Acts 2:22

Accredited. The miracles were God's endorsement, the seal on Jesus' identity. And there was a third layer beneath even that. The miracles were previews. Every healing was a small undoing of the brokenness that came into the world, a glimpse of the day when there is no more sickness or death at all. When Jesus opened blind eyes, he was not only helping one man. He was showing what the kingdom of God looks like when it arrives in full. That is why, after walking through the whole list, John steps back and tells us why any of it was written down.

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 purpose, stated by one of the men who was there. The miracles were never meant to settle in your head as facts. They were written so they would do something in you.

Healings

Healings are the largest group by far. More of Jesus' recorded miracles restore broken bodies than do anything else, which tells you something about where his attention went. He touched lepers no one else would touch, opened eyes, unstopped ears, straightened spines, and stopped bleeding that had drained a woman's life for twelve years. A representative selection, with the references:

• Cleansing a leper. Jesus reaches out and touches a man no one was allowed to touch, and the leprosy leaves him (Mark 1:40-45).
• Healing the paralyzed man lowered through the roof. Jesus forgives the man's sins, then heals his body to prove he had the right to (Mark 2:1-12).
• Healing the man with a withered hand. On the Sabbath, in front of his critics, Jesus restores a useless hand (Mark 3:1-6).
• Healing the centurion's servant. Jesus heals from a distance, in answer to a Roman soldier's faith (Matthew 8:5-13).
• Healing the woman with the flow of blood. A woman who had bled for twelve years touches his cloak and is made well (Mark 5:25-34).
• Healing the man born blind. Jesus gives sight to a man blind from birth, then uses it to expose a deeper blindness in the people watching (John 9:1-41).
• Healing the woman bent double. Jesus frees a woman who had been crippled for eighteen years and could not stand up straight (Luke 13:10-17).
• Healing the ten lepers. Jesus cleanses ten, and only one comes back to thank him (Luke 17:11-19).
• Healing blind Bartimaeus. A blind beggar outside Jericho refuses to be silenced, and Jesus restores his sight (Mark 10:46-52).
• A blind man you can read about here. The healing of the blind man, in stages at Bethsaida and outright in the man born blind, is worth its own study. See how Jesus heals the blind man for the fuller account.

The healings share a grammar. They almost always start with someone reaching toward Jesus, or being carried to him, and they almost always end with a restored person sent back into ordinary life. Jesus rarely healed at a distance, and even when he did, he made the person's faith part of the story. The bodies he mended were real bodies. But the gospels keep nudging us to notice that the deeper sickness he came for was not in anyone's eyes or skin.

Power over nature

The second group is the one that unsettles people the most, because it is the hardest to explain away. Sick bodies sometimes recover. Storms do not stop the instant a man tells them to. In this group Jesus exercises authority over creation itself, the wind, the water, the food supply, the fish in the sea. These miracles do for the physical world what the healings do for the body: they show the created order recognizing its maker.

• Turning water into wine. At a wedding in Cana, with the wine run out and the hosts about to be shamed, Jesus turns six stone jars of water into the best wine of the feast. Read the fuller story of Jesus turning water into wine, his very first sign (John 2:1-11).
• Calming the storm. Caught in a squall that terrified seasoned fishermen, Jesus is asleep in the boat until they wake him, and then he speaks to the storm directly. The account of Jesus calming the storm is in Mark 4:35-41.

He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, "Quiet! Be still!" Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.

— Mark 4:39

• Walking on water. The same night he fed the crowd, Jesus comes to his disciples across the open sea, and the wind dies as he climbs into the boat. The story of Jesus walking on water is in John 6:16-21, with parallels in Matthew and Mark.
• Feeding the five thousand. Five loaves and two fish feed a crowd of thousands, with twelve baskets gathered up afterward. The feeding of the five thousand is the one miracle every gospel writer kept (Mark 6:30-44).
• Feeding the four thousand. A second crowd, mostly Gentile, is fed from seven loaves and a few fish, with seven baskets left over (Mark 8:1-10).
• The withered fig tree. Jesus curses a fruitless fig tree and it withers, a living parable about the difference between leaves and fruit (Mark 11:12-14, 20-21).
• The miraculous catch of fish. Jesus tells fishermen who caught nothing all night where to let down their nets, and the haul nearly sinks the boat (Luke 5:1-11).

The British writer C. S. Lewis once observed that these nature miracles are not random violations of the rules. They are the maker doing quickly and locally what he already does slowly and everywhere. He turns water into wine every year through vines and rain and sun. At Cana he simply did it in an afternoon, without the vine. Read that way, the power over nature is not a break in God's character. It is a close-up of it.

Raising the dead

The third group is small, only three accounts, but it sits at the heart of everything. Three times in the gospels Jesus stands at the boundary the rest of us cannot cross, and calls someone back.

• The widow's son at Nain. Jesus interrupts a funeral procession, touches the bier, and gives a grieving widow her only son back alive (Luke 7:11-17).
• Jairus' daughter. A synagogue leader begs for his dying child, and Jesus takes the dead girl by the hand and tells her to get up. The raising of Jairus' daughter is in Mark 5:21-43.
• Lazarus. Four days in the tomb, the body already past the point anyone hoped for, and Jesus calls him out by name. The raising of Lazarus is the longest of the three (John 11:1-44).

When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!"

— John 11:43

Each of these was a real death and a real return. But none of them was permanent. The widow's son, Jairus' daughter, and Lazarus all died again eventually, as everyone does. That is the quiet point the gospels make about this group. These three raisings were signs, not the main event. They were rehearsals, pointing ahead to the one resurrection that would not be undone, when Jesus himself walked out of his own tomb never to die again. The three he raised borrowed their life back for a while. He gave his away and took it up for good.

Deliverance from demons

The fourth group can feel strange to a modern reader, but it filled a great deal of Jesus' public ministry. The gospels describe him confronting and casting out evil spirits that had taken hold of people, leaving them tormented, mute, self-destructive, or cut off from everyone around them. Whatever framework you bring to these accounts, the gospel writers are clear about what they saw: people in bondage, and Jesus setting them free with a word.

• The man in the Capernaum synagogue. An unclean spirit cries out, recognizing exactly who Jesus is, and Jesus silences and expels it (Mark 1:21-28).
• Legion, in the region of the Gerasenes. A man so tormented he lived among the tombs and could not be chained is freed from a host of demons, and is found afterward clothed and in his right mind (Mark 5:1-20).
• The Syrophoenician woman's daughter. A Gentile mother's persistent faith wins the deliverance of her child at a distance (Mark 7:24-30).
• The boy his disciples could not help. Jesus rebukes a spirit that had thrown a boy into fire and water since childhood, and gives him back to his father (Mark 9:14-29).

These deliverances were not sideshows. Jesus treated them as direct evidence that the kingdom of God had arrived and that the enemy's grip was breaking. The American pastor and teacher Tony Evans has often pressed the point that the exorcisms were skirmishes in a larger war, visible proof that Jesus had come to undo the works of the devil. The freed man at the tombs is the picture: where the gospels show a person at his absolute lowest, ruled by something cruel, Jesus is shown stronger than the thing that ruled him.

Provision

The last group overlaps with the others, because some of these same miracles show up under power over nature. But it is worth seeing them together under one heading, because together they make a particular point: Jesus provides. He meets the plain, daily, physical needs of the people around him, and he does it with a generosity that always leaves more than was there before.

• Water into wine. When the wedding was about to run dry, Jesus supplied not just enough wine but the best wine, in abundance (John 2:1-11).
• Feeding the five thousand. Thousands ate until they were full, and the leftovers filled twelve baskets (Mark 6:30-44).
• Feeding the four thousand. A second crowd fed, a second pile of leftovers gathered (Mark 8:1-10).
• The miraculous catch of fish. Empty nets all night, then more fish than the boats could hold (Luke 5:1-11).
• The coin in the fish's mouth. Jesus sends Peter to catch a single fish, and the temple tax for both of them is in its mouth (Matthew 17:24-27).
• Breakfast on the shore. After the resurrection, the risen Jesus has a fire and fish waiting and leads the disciples to a second great catch (John 21:1-14).

The pattern in the provision miracles is the same every time. There is a real lack, the wine runs out, the crowd is hungry, the nets are empty, the tax is due. Jesus does not lecture about it. He meets it, and he meets it with surplus. The point is not that following Jesus removes every need. It is that the one we follow is not stingy, and has never once been caught short. The bread that fills you in the afternoon will leave you hungry by morning, which is exactly why John lets the feeding of the crowd open out into Jesus calling himself the bread of life. The provision was real. It was also a sign that the deepest hunger has only one answer.

How many miracles did Jesus perform?

The number you will see most often is 37. That figure comes from counting the individual miracles the four gospels narrate, and harmonizing the ones that appear in more than one gospel so they are not double-counted. Some lists land lower, around thirty, by grouping similar healings together. Others run higher, toward fifty, by separating events that overlap or by counting the gospels' summary statements as additional miracles. None of those numbers is wrong, exactly. They are counting slightly different things. If you want the counting laid out gospel by gospel, how many miracles Jesus performed walks through each method.

What every honest count has to admit is that the total is far higher than any list. The gospels repeatedly summarize whole days of miracles in a single line, telling us Jesus healed all who were brought to him, or that the sick were laid in the marketplaces wherever he went. Those summaries cover hundreds of unnamed, unnumbered healings. And then there is John's own disclaimer, that Jesus did many other signs not written down, that the world itself could not hold the books if they were all recorded.

So 37 is best understood as the number of named, narrated miracles, not the number of times Jesus showed his power. R. C. Sproul made the point that the miracles in the gospels are a curated sample, chosen and arranged by each writer to make a case, not a complete medical record. John MacArthur has taught the same: the recorded miracles are evidence presented to a jury, selected to prove a verdict, which is why John says outright that he wrote them down so that you would believe. The right question, in the end, is not how many there were. It is what the ones we have are asking of you.

Further study

The best thing you can do with this list is stop reading lists and open a gospel. Read the Gospel of Mark straight through in one or two sittings. It is the shortest gospel and the most action-driven, and the miracles come fast, one after another, so that the cumulative weight of them lands the way Mark intended. Then read John more slowly, watching for the word sign, and notice how each of the seven signs he selects is wired to a claim Jesus makes about himself. For a careful, warm companion alongside your reading, R. C. Sproul's teaching on the miracles treats them as windows into who Jesus is rather than puzzles to be solved, and it has steadied ordinary readers for years.

From here, follow the miracle that pulled at you. If it was the crowd on the hillside, the feeding of the five thousand opens out into the bread of life. If it was the storm, Jesus calming the storm is worth sitting with when your own life feels swamped. If it was the tomb, the raising of Lazarus is where Jesus says, before he does anything, that he is the resurrection and the life. The miracles were never meant to be admired from a distance. They were written so that, reading them, you would come to the same place the first witnesses did, and believe.

Jesus taught as powerfully as he healed. If you want the other half of his ministry, read the list of Jesus' parables, and for the words that opened his Sermon on the Mount, explaining the Beatitudes. Mary Magdalene, freed from seven demons, is one of the people the miracles changed most. Seeing these scenes acted out can bring them close, and The Chosen and other faith-based films give a starting point. Many readers also gather Jesus' own sayings in Jesus quotes.

Common questions