Delia Knox: :Walking again

Published by 1c15 on 14th March 202014th March 2020

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A friend of Craig Keener pointed him to an internet video of Delia Knox beginning to have feeling in her paralyzed legs and then walking with others supporting her, from August 30, 2010. Several days later, another video showed her walking several feet with no support. Such steps might not sound impressive, yet Prof. Keener discovered local news reports from two years earlier showing that she had indeed been organically paralyzed due to nerve damage from a car accident; in fact, she had not walked for more than two decades. Initially she was walking only haltingly while regaining strength.

A new video on October 27, however, showed her walking normally as she prayed for others. The paralyzing accident occurred on Dec. 25, 1987. I can imagine no way that her able locomotion in the Oct. 28 video could have been faked, and many suggestions of internet critics border on the absurd: the claim that she faked paralysis for twenty-two years for the sake of later claiming healing lacks any modicum of common sense; the suggestion that she was misdiagnosed for so many years and merely psychologically paralyzed would appear little better, attributing extraordinary incompetence to the medical profession.

We have early video footage, one during the healing ceremony, one much later where Delia is walking around just fine.

Delia Knox celebrates during a service in grand ballroom April 1, 2007, at the Arthur R. Outlaw Mobile Convention Center in Mobile, Ala. A video made Friday, Aug. 27, 2010, in the same convention center shows Knox appearing to walk for the first time in 22 years since being disabled in a car accident. 3 years prior to the healing