It's an unfortunate fact that a number of charlatans inhabit our world, many of them claiming to have powers from, or relating to, the God of the Bible. Most notably, and most relevant to this article, are so-called faith healers. People who, often on stage or in front of a large audience, will pretend to "cure" a number of illnesses. Documentaries exposing their tricks are not hard to find. And not even just documentaries. Mike Winger, a.k.a. Bible Thinker, did an excellent live stream on the same topic.
The long and short of it is that faith healing is easily recognisable as a fraud to anyone with an interest in magic. There are a number of tricks used. Sometimes, the healer can even utilise the placebo effect; faith really does give the illusion of helping. Effectively, skeptics are 100% correct to dismiss this kind of show as a con.
But to connect this to Jesus and say "faith healing is a con, therefore all Christianity is a con", is fallacious. The Bible is practically flooded with warnings that fake Christians can, and will, show up all over the place, and that their deceptive power will be substantial. The solution is to read the word of God and test them. Faith healers always fail that test, and more often than not don't even know the Gospel.
On top of that, there is a view in Christianity known as "Cessationism". Cessationism, a view which I am hesitant to profess, is the view that the miraculous gifts of the spirit, such as the ability to speak in tongues and the ability to heal, were limited to the first century. Now, the reason I am hesitant to profess it is because I am not especially gifted in defending it, but I thought it was worth mentioning here, because it is a perfectly valid view within Christianity that faith healers should not exist at all in the modern day.
But more worth noting is the difference between Jesus' healings and the "healings" performed by faith healers. Let's examine a few. Faith healers often choose their own marks. This is convenient. Literally anyone could come to Jesus, and He didn't even necessarily have to consent, His back could be turned (Mark 5:30-34), and it would still work. But faith healers choose their marks. They choose their marks because then they don't have to deal with the blind, deaf, dumb, lame, crippled etc. In other words, people they can't cure.
Which brings us to our next point. The types of illness that were cured. There's a reason you'll never see a faith healer in a hospital. They're fakes. They can "cure" small things. Maybe they even actually can cure some illnesses using this brilliant invention called "medicine". The human body is so amazing that sometimes, healing just requires you to know what to do with it. But what about when the body itself is broken? What about when it's actually born broken? No faith healer has ever cured a man who was blind since birth. But Jesus did. Jesus could have worked in a hospital (and arguably still does), because unlike the fake power of the faith healers, Jesus has real power from God. And He used that to do everything from making a lame man walk to making a dead man walk. Jesus did with mere words what doctors cannot do with all our technological advances.
Which brings us to another difference: how do they heal? Just like any magician, faith healers have a number of tricks to fool their audience into believing they truly have the power to heal. But there is only one time when Jesus actually uses anything that can be considered a "trick" (Mark 8:22-26), and even that healed something that typically can't be healed. Every other time, He healed by words. Sometimes, He didn't even need to be within a mile of his mark, they'd still be healed. But faith healers still use tricks.
So you see, far from being a valid argument against Christianity, faith healers are significantly different from Jesus. While many of them claim to be Christians, this is just one more part of their act. Jesus could not have been a normal faith healer like today's charlatans. So now there are a few more questions to ask. First, did Jesus actually do what it is claimed He did? If so, how?
Establishing the historicity of Jesus' miracles is a little beyond the scope of what I intended to write for this particular article, and so I will only address it briefly and encourage you to do your own research. There is no shortage of sources analysing the historicity of the New Testament, and of course I have addressed it elsewhere.
For now, I will just say there is no good reason to dismiss the historicity of the New Testament. It is a well known fact that Christianity was born in a hostile environment. When the founder of a religion is literally crucified for His beliefs, that's a pretty good sign that people don't like what He's saying, and frankly, liars make poor martyrs.
Thus, we have two points. On the one hand, if Jesus didn't demonstrate His power, who would risk their lives preaching? Matthew, Mark, Luke and John would have been terrified of what the Jews would do. On the other hand, you have the Jews themselves, who were so hateful of the Christian message that they actually paid the soldiers who guarded the tomb to say the apostles stole Jesus' body. The only way the New Testament could realistically be expected to have survived is if it is accurate. And so the bigger question: If Jesus really did heal all these people, how?
The most logical explanation is that He really was performing miracles by the power of the Holy Spirit. The physical healing of incurable diseases, and the literal resurrection from the dead, shows that He is able to spiritually heal us of the incurable disease that is sin, and raise us from spiritual death into eternal life. This offer is just as free as the offer to heal was. Come to Him in faith, and you will receive eternal life as easily as the blind received their sight, the deaf received their hearing, the mute received their voice, and so on and so forth.