The 'miracle story' was a popular literary genre used in all ancient religions. Such stories functioned in the promotion and marketing of many religions in order to attract followers. This paper will compare and discuss two ancient resuscitation miracle stories in reference to the discussion on p. 163 in the textbook The Bible in Context. The literary genre "miracle story" can be defined as a textual type in the ancient world that was used to promote or market your religion. It was considered to have a propagandistic intent and purpose. Within a miracle story there are almost always four features or parts of a typical miracle story. These parts start with (i) a description of a problem, usually involving a hopeless situation; (ii) the presence of the holy man, inspiring hope; (iii) the holy man performs a ritual action and/or speaks ritual words; and lastly, (iv) the resulting miracle.

The Gospel of Luke 7:11-16 is considered a miracle story because it contains the four basic elements of the typical miracle story. First, there is a description of the problem, which was that in a town called Nain a widowed mother was watching her dead and only son being carried out of the town on a bier. Jesus and his disciples got there right in time to see this. This is when the second feature of the miracle story comes in, the presence of the holy man, Jesus. He inspired hope by going up to the crying mother and saying "Don't cry." The ritual action that Jesus performed was that he went up and touched the bier they were carrying the dead body on. Jesus spoke as he touched the bier saying "Young man, I say to you, get up!" Lastly, the story ends with the miracle that after Jesus had touched the pier, the dead man sat up, and began to talk. The young man got to return to his mother.

The next miracle story that we will be analyzing is called the M iracle Story of the Resurrection of a Girl by Apollonius of Tyana. The story starts out with a description of the problem, a young girl had just died at the hour of her marriage. Her political family and her groom mourned with each other following the casket. This sets up the presence of the holy man, Apollonius. Apollonius inspires hope by saying "Set down the casket, and I will stop the reason you are crying for this girl." After inspiring hope Apollonius asks them the girls name. By doing this he causes the crowd to think he was going to perform some eulogy, which usually causes even more grieving. But instead, it leads into the third feature, Apollonius performing a ritual action. He went over and simply touched the girl, whispering some words in her ear. The story wraps up with the resulting miracle of the girl awaking from her apparent death and speaking clearly, returning to her father's house.

Believers of all types of religions are constantly looking for ways to market and promote their religions. One way a religion might do this is through using sensationalist stories and miracle stories like the ones discussed above. Miracle stories were the vehicles for the marketing of ancient religions. Miracle stories were the central of advertising of religions because they offered divine power to common people and were meant to inspire people. This tactic could be useful in promotion because it was not important to people whether the miracles actually happened, the main point was to attract believers to the religion and to inspire the reader. People were more intrigued in things that were more godlike and supernatural, not things such a suffering and grief. There is clear evidence demonstrating miracle stories were used in all ancient religions including Christianity. For example, in Luke 7:11-16, someone who has no faith may be inspired by this story and the holy man Jesus, causing them to follow Christianity. A modern type of  person that would be attracted to a religion because of such a story may be one who is homeless or possibly found them inside a hopeless situation, like a drug or alcohol addiction. One in this kind of situation might use these stories as inspiration to get their life going in a better direction. A similar statement can be said about a person who lived in the time of Apollonius or Jesus. Maybe this person was blind, suffering from a disease, or dying and heard the story of Apollonius resurrecting a girl from the dead. This could attract people to the story and make them want to follow the ancient hero. Religions did a good job of marketing themselves using miracle stories by making many kinds of miracle stories. Healing blind people, healing people with no voice, healing pregnant women, and healing paralyzed people are just a little amount of miracle stories one could find. Having a vast majority of miracle stories was a great way to market a religion. By having many categories, religions were able to connect to many more people who were experiencing the same sufferings.

If you switched the names "Jesus" and "Apollonius" between these two stories there wouldn't be a change in how the story goes, but there would be a change in how people view them. If you analyze both stories Jesus and Apollonius both are very similar in their ritual words and actions. They both arrive at a scene just in time to see the problem and what people are sad about. They then both go on to tell the families who are suffering to have no fear. After that Jesus and Apollonius both are able to perform their own miracles on people who were dead, resurrecting them back to life. After both of the families from Jesus' story and Apollonius' story saw that they were able to perform miracles and all of the wandering people by the event saw it, word spread out quickly. In Luke 7: 11-16 a large crowd saw him perform his miracle and they were all in awe afterward. News about Jesus then spread throughout Judea and the surrounding Country. The two stories are very similar. The change between Jesus and Apollonius would come from the people who read the stories. People will believe more about the story that Jesus because there are many sources, testimonies, and letters from the life of Jesus, making it seem more accurate.

Since Apollonius was after the time of Jesus people will think that the further one gets from original events, the more likely it is for later stories to become contaminated by later supernatural, legendary developments. Readers may not think the ancient Greek hero is real or ever existed.