Marveling is a universal human response to something greater than ourselves. Throughout history, narrative literature has been a prime vehicle for marveling since descriptions of the extraordinary can induce the same sense of wonder as real-life experiences. Also, a reader’s imagination holds limitless possibilities. Ancient culture devoted an entire literary genre to the marvels of the world: paradoxography or ‘writings on the unexpected’. After the Roman empire’s Christianization, new literary genres emerged, a prolific one being hagiography, ‘writings on the saints’. It is full of miracles, awe-inspiring events pointing to divine intervention in the world. Both genres refer to exceptional events as 'thaumata' and 'paradoxa'. Despite such conceptual and terminological overlaps, the history of literary marvels at the turn of Greco-Roman and Christian culture has yet to be written. This project is the first to study hagiography’s relation to paradoxography and interpret its miracles through the lens of the wondrous. It aims to show that paradoxographic themes found their way into early Byzantine saints’ Lives (4th-8th c.), reveals how they relate to miracles, and recruits narrative and rhetorical theory to uncover a hitherto unrecognized function of the miraculous: the imaginative creation of a Christian worldview. Thus, the comparison with paradoxography innovates and expands the study of hagiographic miracles, while offering a unique window into Byzantines’ cognitive world.