Miracles by itself is not a sign of uniqueness at that time, since the Jews believed that righteous and holy men who were particularly close to God could ‘influence’ the divine will and perform signs and wonders in His name. We don’t know the names of any miracle-workers active during Jesus’ lifetime, but we do have records of some who came before or after Him: the rabbi
Hanina ben Dosa, who healed the son of the famous rabbi Gamaliel vicariously, and
Honi/Onias the Circle Drawer, who was perceived to be so close to God that he is on highly familiar terms with Him; God in turn seems to do whatever Honi asks (according to the story preserved in the Mishna, the Pharisaic scholar
Simeon ben Shetach called Honi up and told him that “
if you were not Honi I would decree a ban upon you. But what shall I do to you, for you act like a spoiled child before God and He does your will for you, like a son who acts like a spoiled child with his father and he does his will for him?”). Honi’s fame in particular was such that even Josephus, who was usually extremely skeptical about ‘miracle-workers’, considered him a “
righteous man” and a “
beloved of God.” Of course, that’s not counting charlatans, magicians (who differed from miracle-workers in that they did not perform wonders because of any relationship with a deity and following a fixed set of techniques to perform, rather than being ‘autonomous’ and spontaneous) and people who claimed to be wonderworkers but never got to perform any miracle - usually because they were killed off (some messianic claimants like Theudas or the unnamed Egyptian guy falls under this category).
A study of non-Christian literature would show that the miracles attributed to Jesus were not greatly different from those attributed to other Jews in the same general period. People who saw Honi or Hanina only concluded that their prayers were effective. Those who saw the exorcist named
Eleazar (
Antiquities 8.45-49) using a herb and a ring concluded only that he had access to the wisdom of Solomon, considered in folklore to be the exorcist
par excellence. All in all, people did not doubt that Jesus was a miracle-worker, but this alone did not move all of them to become followers or to conclude that He was God’s final Spokesman. The miracles proved nothing to most Galileans beyond the fact that He was a holy man on intimate terms with God (which wasn’t
that exceptional); with His enemies, on the other hand, thinking that He was on intimate terms with the devil. (Sure makes you appreciate Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Christ in contrast to public opinion: it took a huge leap of faith to do that one, and Jesus Himself says so.) The effect that Jesus’ miracles had on His disciples seems to have been no greater, or not much greater, than their effect on other people: at least it did not stop them from abandoning Jesus when He was arrested. It took the greatest - and most unlikely in many ways - miracle, the Resurrection, to persuade them and set them on fire.
