Did Jesus Really Perform Miracles? (Part 12)

In the first few articles of this web series, we looked at the perspective of New Testament historian Dale Allison, from his book The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (2009). In that volume, Allison actually provides us with a helpful summary of the typical case brought against the general reliability of the miracle stories in the New Testament:

It remains hard for many of us moderns not to fret about the astounding stories attributed to Jesus. Do we not know that tradition always exaggerates and that a tendency to mythomania seems to be part of human nature? How can anyone with a good education whole heartedly believe that Jesus walked on water, that he fed five thousand with a few food scraps, or that he restored the dead to the land of the living? Such incredible things seem opposed to ordinary human experience. Similar things do, however, appear in archaic tales that everyone knows to be fictional — the apocryphal gospels, for instance — tales that once fed what appears to be an insatiable craving for the marvellous. It is no mystery why [19th and 20th century New Testament historians] Reimarus, Strauss, and Bultmann regarded the miracle stories as pious fictions. They were just being reasonable — treating the gospels the same way that the rest of us treat the fantastic fables of the Greek gods. (pp. 68-69)

Putting aside for the moment the question of whether or not Bultmann and Co. were really so “reasonable” on this matter, it should be noted that Allison himself, like many New Testament scholars today, does not entirely accept their radically sceptical mindset. On the grounds that some of the gospel accounts of the miraculous are analogous to similar tales told by reasonable eyewitnesses from other religious traditions in other historical periods, even in modern times, Allison argues that it just may be that there is a kernel of truth in some of these stories after all.

Unfortunately, one cannot help but notice Allison’s philosophical reliance on the historian and philosopher Troeltsch here: namely, the latter’s view that events in history occur according to recognizable and recurrent patterns, and so an historical report can be credible only if the event it records is analogous to events in common human experience. This kind of “historicism” has been subject to withering critique by many scholars. Roch Kereszty, for example, criticized this “Enlightenment historiographical model” that “any historical event must be understood as a particular instance of a general pattern, and therefore fully explicable by reference to analogous events.” He writes:

This rationalistic presupposition excludes a priori the possibility that there may be something irreducibly new in a historical event. Categorization, of course, is a necessary tool of historical research, but if its limits are not perceived and transcended, it misses precisely what is most important in any event. (Fundamentals of Christology. New York: St. Paul’s Books, 2002 edition)

Here is an easy way to see the fallacy of this perspective. Up until the 16th century the Aztecs in Mexico had never seen a sailing ship, horses, rifles or cannons before. But all these arrived on their doorstep, so to speak, with Hernando Cortes and his Spanish expedition to the New World. Would the Aztecs have been rational to disbelieve the reports of their scouts in the existence of the Spaniards and their new technologies just because those reports did not fit into any recurrent pattern of events with which they were familiar?

Sadly, Allison seems to be bound by the “historicist” presupposition too. This obviously rules out from the start any attempt to appreciate the evidence for the “miracles” in the Jesus story, and especially for the so-called “nature miracles” (the virginal conception of Jesus, his walking on water, calming the storm, feeding the multitudes, and raising the dead). The healings and exorcisms of Jesus may have some credible parallels elsewhere in the history of religions, Allison and others claim, but certainly not these other gospel tales, for which analogies can be found only in Jewish and Hellenistic mythology – myths from which the gospel accounts of nature miracles probably were derived anyway, so it is said.

We will take a closer look at the “nature miracles” of Jesus next time. But given the philosophical lenses from Troeltsch that Allison is wearing, it is not surprising that he fails to provide the reader with fair exposure to an orthodox Christian response to the Reimarus-Strauss-Bultmann point of view on the miracle narratives in the New Testament, or even to his own view. Let’s redress that inequity here:

1. It is hardly fair to object to accounts of miracles in general on the grounds that they are “opposed to ordinary human experience” when the whole point of a divine miracle is that something extraordinary is taking place in human affairs. The laws of nature describe the patterns of cause and effect to which nature seems to conform under normal circumstances, but they cannot tell you what might happen under extraordinary circumstances, such as the incarnation of the Son of God and the dawning of his kingdom in the world.

   Of course, one could argue that extraordinary events ordinarily require extraordinary evidence to back them up. For example, when an Aztec warrior ran back to chief Montezuma and told him that he had just seen a giant wooden ship (a Spanish galleon) land near the beach, and out of it came armored people riding on four-legged beasts never seen before (horses), and carrying sticks that shoot fire (guns), Montezuma could be forgiven for sending out several more scouts to verify and corroborate the amazing things he had just been told! Similarly, if your brother calls you and tells you he just won the multi-million dollar jackpot, you might kind-of believe him, but would probably await further evidence to be sure he was not mistaken, or that he was not playing a practical joke on you. But (to go back to our discussion of the importance of “presuppositions” in historical research, from articles 4-6 of this web series): if we are operating with prior belief in the existence of an all-powerful Creator God, a belief based on strong philosophical arguments, or personal religious experience, or both, then that would certainly affect the degree of extra historical evidence we really need legitimately to believe that this God has done a miracle in a particular case. Indeed, prior philosophical and experiential knowledge of the existence, nature and character of that God would give us a framework for judging which reports of miracles to take seriously, and were worth investigating further (e.g., God probably wouldn't make the face of the Blessed Virgin Mary appear in someone's pancake batter — a cheap trick — but God might heal people miraculously, or perform some mighty act in nature, e.g., the parting of the Red Sea, to further his good purposes for individuals or for humanity as a whole.). By all accounts, Jesus claimed to be the Final Judge and Savior of the world, lived with astonishing integrity, compassion, and courage, and claimed to be the Messianic agent of the coming of the Kingdom of God. If there is a God, and Jesus really was his Son, it would hardly be surprising that God would authenticate and vindicate the life and work of Jesus by works that only divine power could perform.

   This leads us to a proper biblical definition of “miracle.” Anglican theologian Charles Gore summed it up like this: a miracle is “an occurrence in the process of nature of something which nature, that is, the experienced order, cannot account for, and which constrains men to recognize a special or extraordinary act of God calling attention to a special purpose. … The point of a divine miracle, as the Bible conceives it, is not to be a mere portent, but a sure indication to men’s minds that the moral will of God is supreme in the world. … What God is doing from this point of view when He works a miracle is not to violate the order of the world in the deeper sense. He innovates, it is true, upon the normal physical order, but solely in the interest of a deeper moral order and purpose of the world.” (The Reconstruction of Belief. London: John Murray, 1926, p. 231, 238, 239).

2. 18th century skeptical philosopher David Hume presented the classic philosophical case against miracles like this: (a) a miracle must be defined as the violation of a natural law, but (b) the evidence in favor of the regularity of natural laws can never be exceeded by the evidence in favor of any particular miracle story, therefore (c) belief in the occurrence of a miracle can never be justified; a miraculous explanation for an event will always be far less probable than any natural explanation that fits with the laws of nature.

   The problems with Hume’s argument, however, are legion; just to pick out two: (a) it is not true that miracles must be defined as violations of natural law. In fact, most biblical miracles involve no violation of any natural laws at all. For example, it violates no law for God to miraculously bring to life an unfertilized egg in the womb of a virgin, producing a child without a human father. The usual course of nature would have been overridden to bring about an event which nature could not produce on its own – but nature is not forced to act against its own laws. God has just supernaturally introduced a new entity and event into nature — and once the child arrives, its body behaves according to all the normal laws and patterns of fetal development. As C.S. Lewis once wrote: “Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform, but of feeding new events into that pattern. It does not violate the proviso ‘If A, then B’: it says “But this time instead of A, A-2’ and Nature, speaking through all her laws, replies, ‘Then B-2’ and naturalizes the immigrant, as she well knows how” (Miracles, chapter 8).

   Besides, (b) even if Hume's premise is sound that miracles do violate natural laws, and even though we do have massive amounts of experience that these laws usually seem to obtain, still, the fact that one has strong, prior philosophical reasons for believing in the existence of a supernatural, Creator God would surely tip the scales of probability that miracles could, and do sometimes occur, for we know of a supernatural agent who certainly could, and probably would do them in the right circumstances.

3. People in antiquity (especially by the first century AD), and especially the Jewish people, were not so possessed by “mythomania” that they necessarily accepted all accounts of the miraculous uncritically, nor were they completely unaware that nature behaves according to certain obvious patterns of cause and effect; it was precisely an addition to or alteration of that normal pattern that might be ascribed to the direct intervention of a supernatural agent. In other words, they were “pre-scientific,” but not “pre-common-sense.” For example, St. Joseph certainly knew that women normally conceived children via the natural process of sexual intercourse, and therefore finding his betrothed with child before they came together naturally plunged him into a personal crisis. The gospel writers certainly knew that people do not usually recover from leprosy simply because someone touches them and says “Be clean.” Indeed, they do not usually recover at all. In short, the normal patterns of nature were usually ascribed by the Jews to the ordinance of God, while alterations of or additions to those patterns could be ascribed to divine or demonic intervention, depending upon the circumstances. This is hardly a fundamentally irrational attitude to take toward allegedly miraculous phenomena.

4. Miracles were not reported of many major religious figures in antiquity: for example, none by John the Baptist or Mohammed (other than the inspired writing of the Koran itself). So it was not the case that unless one could demonstrate miraculous powers over nature, no one in the ancient world would believe you were a messenger from God.

5. Accounts from pagan antiquity that parallel the gospel miracle stories generally seem to have been written after the New Testament accounts were in circulation (such as the third century “Life of Apollonius”), and thus may have deliberately copied some of the miracle stories in the gospels. This is true even of the stories of dying-and-rising gods in ancient world:

   The first account of a dying and rising god that somewhat parallels the story of the resurrection of Jesus appeared at least 100 years after the reports of Jesus’ resurrection. The earliest versions of the death and resurrection of the Greek mythological figure Adonis appeared after A.D. 150. There are no accounts of a resurrection of Attis, the Phrygian god of vegetation who was responsible for the death and rebirth of plant life, until early in the third century A.D. or later. Therefore, one cannot claim that the disciples were writing according to a contemporary literary style of dying and rising gods, since there is no literature contemporary to the disciples indicating that this was a genre of that period. …

   [T]he ancient Egyptian cult of Osiris is the only account of a god who survived death that predates Christianity. … He was given status as a god of the gloomy underworld. So the picture we get of Osiris is that of a guy who does not have all his parts and who maintains a shadowy existence as god of the mummies. … [O]siris’s return to life was not a resurrection but a zombification. (Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004, p. 90-91)

6. Many pagan miracle stories from antiquity outside of the gospels include magic charms, incantations, amulets, etc., and most are done for dramatic public effect. Nowhere in antiquity do we see the kind of healing miracles performed by Jesus: seemingly simple acts of compassion in response to, or received by, an act of personal faith in him (and far from seeking publicity, Jesus often told those whom he healed to “tell no one.”). The stark originality of the gospel accounts of the miracles of Jesus, therefore, compels us to treat them with historical respect — they are not mere copies of the kinds of tales told elsewhere in antiquity.

   Here we need to pause and look more closely at these points. In his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013), Reza Aslan reminds us of the claim of one of the early church Fathers, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, regarding the special nature of the miraculous deeds of Christ:

   It was precisely the lack of such magical devices that distinguished Jesus’ miraculous actions from those of the common magician. Jesus, in the words of Irenaeus, performed his deeds “without any power of incantations, without the use of the juice of herbs and grasses, without any anxious watching of sacrifices, of libations, or of seasons.” (p. 108)

   Aslan then goes on to claim that in Mark’s gospel Jesus does in fact use “magician’s techniques” for some of his miracles — including the use of “chanting” and “ritual formula”— and since Aslan believes Mark was the earliest and therefore most historically reliable account of the life of Jesus, it is not unreasonable to label Jesus a “magician.” But Aslan can only point to two healing stories in Mark that allegedly back up his claim (in Mark 7:31-35 and 8:22-26), and in neither case does Jesus use chants or ritual formula (as a mere reading of the text in any English translation will show). What he does use in both cases is spittle – which was commonly believed in the ancient world to have healing properties. What this shows is not that Jesus was relying on magic, or even any alleged curative powers of spittle (in Mk 7:34, for example, it was not the spittle but Jesus’ word of command, Ephphatha, “Be opened,” that directly effected the cure). Most likely, in these two cases Jesus was reassuring his patients, and eliciting deeper trust from them, by using a sign of healing that the sick person understood; in other words, it was an act of accommodation on the part of Jesus to the need for external signs or symbols to help awaken the faith of his patients.

   This brings us to the other special feature of the miracles of Jesus (mentioned above): the importance Jesus attached to people’s “faith” in him if they were to be able to receivethe effects of his healing power. This act of faith acted like the opening of a door or channel, removing obstacles to the flow of Christ’s healing love. The great mid-20th century New Testament scholar Gunther Bornkamm explains the matter this way:

   All those who turn to him in faith count on the power of Jesus which knows no bounds, and on the miracle which he can work, where human help fails. Thus, the bearers who came bringing one sick of palsy (Mk 2:1), the lepers (Mk 1:40 ff., etc.), the blind by the wayside (Mt 9:27 ff.; 20:29 ff.), the woman who was a sinner (Lk 7:36 ff.). The miracle stories in all the Gospels are meant to show that Jesus does not disappoint these expectations, and that he has been given this power. It would be difficult to doubt the physical healing powers which emanated from Jesus, just as he himself interpreted his casting out of demons as a sign of the dawning of the kingdom of God (Lk 9:20; Mt 12:28). …

   And the father of the child cried out “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mk 9:24). I believe! — here the petitioner has indeed exceeded his own ability, and confesses a faith greater than he really has. Help my unbelief! — here he who falls short of faith throws himself on the power and help of Jesus. In this paradox of faith and unbelief, as the story points out [Mk 9:20-27], faith becomes true and capable of receiving the miracle of God. Where Jesus does not find this faith, he cannot work a miracle (Mk 6:1-6). This certainly does not mean that faith itself is the power which works the miracle, although in the Christian view faith may be enabled to work miracles (Acts 2:43; 5:12; Mk 6:7; I Cor 13:2; II Cor 12:12). What matters here, however, is the readiness to receive the miracle. It is so indispensable for Jesus’ work that he can say repeatedly to the cured and the saved — for both terms are implied by the word “salvation” — “Your faith has made you whole” (Mt 9:22; Mk 10:52; Lk 17:19). (Jesus of Nazareth. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973, pp. 130-132)

7. Many scholars believe that St. Mark’s gospel was the first gospel to be written, but Mark is full of stories of the miraculous works of Jesus Christ, including his nature miracles. Even earlier, the Pauline epistles leave no doubt as to early Christian belief in the miracle of the Resurrection. Moreover, the first records we have of early Christian preaching also mention the miracles of Jesus (see Acts 2:22-24, and 10:34-41). Thus, it is not likely that the miraculous elements in the gospel in general can be dismissed as later accretions and legendary embellishments of an earlier, non-miraculous, “simple gospel;” indeed, many historians do not believe that there was enough of a time lapse between the earthly ministry of Jesus (ca. 30 AD) and the writing of the synoptic gospels (ca. 60-80 AD) for such legends to arise and gain wide acceptance (especially since there were many eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus, and close friends of eyewitnesses, still living right to the end of the first century, e.g. St. Clement of Rome, St. Polycarp, and St. John the Apostle himself).

8. Even the earliest Jewish opponents of Jesus admitted the brute fact that Jesus performed miracles, although they generally believed he performed them by the power of “Beelzebub,” the Devil (Mt 9:34; Mk 3:22). We know this not only from the gospel accounts, but also from early rabbinic sources such as Sanhedrin 43a, a copy of the records of the Jewish Temple Court discovered in Persia, which tell us that Jesus was executed because He practiced “sorcery,” and “led the people astray.”

9. Jesus himself seems to have interpreted his own miracles as powerful signs that God’s Kingdom was breaking into the world through his own ministry, and also as signs of his Messianic authority (compare Mt. 11:2-5, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have the good news preached to them,” with Is. 29:18-19 and 35:5-6; see also Lk. 11:20: “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out evil spirits, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.”). New Testament historian N.T. Wright, in his book Simply Jesus (2011), points out that this fits very well with the expectations that many people had for the Messiah in the first century AD:

   When [Jesus] tells John’s messengers that the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, and so forth, he is quoting directly from Isaiah’s vision of a “return from exile” that would be nothing short of a new creation: Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy (Isa 35:5-6).

   Interestingly, similar language also shows up in a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls, showing that other Jews of roughly the same period were reading the Isaiah passage as a prediction of what the Messiah would do:

   “For the heavens and the earth shall listen to the Messiah … for he will honor the devout on the throne of his everlasting kingdom, setting the prisoners free, opening the eyes of the blind, raising up those that are brought low … and the Lord shall do wonderful deeds which have not been done, as he said. For he shall heal those who are badly wounded, and raise up the dead, and send good news to the afflicted. (4Q521) (p.83)

   In short, in the New Testament divine miracles are not just any random alteration of the normal pattern of events (as described by the laws of nature), and attributed to a supernatural agent; they are “signs” (Greek: semeion) of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, and of his Messianic role, and they further both God’s saving plan for history, and his compassionate plan for individuals.

10. Recent attempts to explain away the accounts of the miracles of Jesus on the grounds that these accounts are similar to stories about the marvellous deeds performed by charismatic Jewish rabbis of first century Palestine (such as Honi the Rainmaker and Hanina ben Dosa,) have also fallen short of the mark. First of all, these devout Jewish rabbis generally did not do the same kinds of miracles reported of Jesus, for example, Jesus was not a rain-maker, and the rabbis did not cure people of lameness or paralysis, or raise the dead. Most importantly the form of their miraculous deeds was entirely different: much like Moses and the prophets, they healed or performed wonders by means of devout prayer to God, whereas Jesus healed not by prayer, but by touch and/or by simple command, in other words, on his own personal authority: “Little girl, I say to you, arise” (Mk 5:41). It was precisely this extraordinary, divine authority evident in his miraculous deeds that led his first followers to ask: “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mk 4:41)

11. Historian Humphrey Carpenter summed it up best:

    If we label the miraculous element as fiction and discuss Jesus purely in terms of his teachings, we may be satisfying the demands of modern minds which do not accept the supernatural, but we are doing violence to the historical record. We are also leaving ourselves with a “non-miraculous Jesus” whose extraordinary impact on his contemporaries becomes inexplicable. His teachings, on their own, are not enough to explain the impression he caused. (Jesus. Oxford University Press, p. 73).

    Thus, contra Bultmann, and Co., there is no significant rational obstacle for “anyone with a good education” to believe in the strength of the historical evidence for the miraculous deeds of Jesus Christ.

Next Time: On the Nature Miracles and the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ

Robert Stackpole, STD
© The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2017