Smith Wigglesworth's Claimed Resurrections from the Dead (1900s-1940s)

Smith Wigglesworth (1859–1947) was a Bradford plumber who became one of the founding figures of British Pentecostalism. His ministry spanned four decades and multiple continents, and he is credited in Pentecostal tradition with some of the most dramatic miracles in modern Christian history — including multiple raisings from the dead.

The number of claimed resurrections attributed to Wigglesworth is itself diagnostic: sources within the tradition cite figures ranging from three to over one hundred, depending on the biographer and the era of publication. A ten-fold or greater discrepancy in the count is characteristic of legend growth rather than documented historical fact. Authenticated historical events do not generate such variance in the record.

Atlas Obscura, investigating the resurrection claims specifically in 2020, found no independently authenticated case. No hospital records, death certificates, physician statements, or coroner's reports supporting any specific claimed resurrection have been identified in a century of scrutiny. Wigglesworth's biographies rely almost exclusively on accounts published in Pentecostal ministry periodicals written by or sympathetic to Wigglesworth himself.

The most pointed internal evidence against the healing claims is Wigglesworth's own daughter, Alice, who served as his ministry assistant for decades. Alice was congenitally deaf and, despite constant proximity to her father's healing ministry, was never reported to have been healed. That is the kind of concrete, proximate counter-evidence that is hard to explain if Wigglesworth's powers were genuine. The case illustrates how historically prominent healing ministries can dissolve under evidentiary scrutiny into community memory and hagiography rather than documented fact.