And much the same may be said of another passage where Christ is recorded as saying that _all_ believers would be able to work miracles.[345] If He said so, He must surely have been able to work them Himself; and if He did not say so, His followers must have been able to work them, or their inventing such a promise would merely have shown that they were not believers. On the whole, then, as said before, the accounts of the New Testament miracles have every appearance of being thoroughly truthful. [Footnote 345: Mark 16. 17.] (_C._) THEIR PUBLICITY. But the most important point has still to be noticed, which is the alleged _publicity_ of these miracles; and as this renders the testimony in their favour peculiarly strong, we must examine it at some length. (1.) _They occurred in public._ To begin with, according to our Gospels, all the miracles of Christ occurred during His _public ministry_, when He was well known, that at Cana being definitely called the first.[346] And as they were meant to confirm His teaching and claims, it was only natural for them to begin when His teaching began. But if they had been invented, or had grown up as legends, some at least would have been ascribed to His earlier years (as they are in the Apocryphal Gospels) when there was less chance of their being disputed. [Footnote 346: John 2. 11.] Moreover, many of them are stated to have been worked openly, and before crowds of people, including Scribes, Pharisees, and lawyers.[347] And the _names_ of the places where they occurred, and even of the persons concerned, are given in some cases. Among these were _Jairus_, a ruler of the synagogue; _Lazarus_, a well known man at Bethany; _Malchus_, a servant of the High Priest; and the _centurion_ at Capernaum, who, though his name is not given, must have been well known to the Jews, as he had built them a synagogue. While the miracles recorded in the Acts concern such prominent persons as the _proconsul_, Sergius Paulus, at Cyprus, and the _chief man_, Publius, at Malta. And it is hard to overestimate the immense difficulty of thus asserting _public_ miracles, with the names of persons, and places, if none occurred; yet the early Christians asserted such miracles from the very first. [Footnote 347: _E.g._, Luke 5. 17-21.]