Commenting on the difference between the miracles of Jesus and those in Rabbinic literature, Ephraim E. Urbach wrote:
An outstanding feature of the miracle stories in Rabbinic literature is the fact that the personality of the miracle-worker is not emphasized. The Sages were careful not to turn the person himself, who performed the miracle, into a wonder and marvel. The prayer ‘He who answered Abraham’ (M. Ta’anit ii, 4) is evidence of this. We do not pray to Abraham, our father, but to Him who answered Abraham. This point established a difference of principle between these stories and the tales about the miracles of Jesus, whose entire purpose is to accentuate his might and power. It will suffice to set aside by side the following two narratives, which are similar in detail, but differ in their basic aim:
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John iv 46-54
And there was an official, whose son was ill at Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus had come . . . he went and begged him to come down and heal his son . . . Jesus therefore said to him: ‘Unless thou seest signs and wonders thou wilt not believe.’ The man said to him . . . ‘Sir, come down before my child dies.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go, thy son will live.’ The man believed the word that Jesus spoken to him and went his way. And as he was going down, his servants met him, and told him that his son was living. So he asked them the hour when he began to mend, and they said to him, ‘Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.’ The father knew that was the hour when Jesus said to him ‘Thy son will live’; and he himself believed, and all his household.
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T.B. Berakhot 34b
Our Rabbis taught: Once the son of R. Gamaliel fell ill. He sent two scholars to R. ḥanina b. Dosa to ask him to pray for him. Upon seeing them, he [R. ḥanina b. Dosa] went up to an upper chamber and prayed for him. On coming down, he said to them, ‘Go for the fever hast left him’. Said they to him: ‘Are you a prophet?’ He answered: ‘I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet; but I have this tradition: if my prayer is fluent in my mouth, I know that he [the sick person] is accepted, and if not, I know that he is rejected. They sat down and wrote down the exact moment; and when they came to R. Gamaliel, he said to them: ‘I swear by the Temple service! you have stated the time neither too soon nor too late, but so it actually happened. At that moment the fever left him and he asked us for a drink of water.’
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The Christian story seeks to confirm ‘that this is indeed the Christ, the savior of the world’ (Ibid., v. 45), while the Jewish narrative puts into the mouth of R. ḥanina b. dosa . . . the words ‘I am no prophet, nor the son of a prophet’. (Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: The World and Wisdom of the Rabbis of the Talmud [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975, 1979], 116-18)
