On the Nature Miracles and the Transfiguration (Part 13)

Many New Testament historians today are willing to concede that Jesus must have performed “miraculous” cures of some kind or other, since the historical evidence for them is so strong (see the previous article in this series). But they “draw the line” at the so-called “nature miracle” stories: the claim of the gospels that Jesus fed the multitudes with just a few loaves and fishes, turned water into wine, walked on water, and calmed the storm at sea. For example, in The Historical Jesus: an Essential Guide (2008), James H. Charlesworth writes:

The mighty works attributed to Jesus in the Gospels can be divided between the nature miracles and healing miracles. The former point to Jesus and his elevated stature; thus, Jesus walks on water and can control storms. The attention is drawn to Jesus. These stories seem to develop out of myths and legends that were created in the [post-30 AD Christian] community to laud and elevate Jesus. (p. 81)

Notice the presuppositions at work here: if the miracle story lauds and elevates Jesus, and draws attention to him (rather than, presumably, to his message about the Kingdom of God), then it is most likely the product of myth and legend. Here the old “rationalism” is put back into use, only this time confined to the nature miracles, rather than used to explain away all the accounts of Jesus’ miracles. However, the healing miracles of Jesus also called attention to him, and made people wonder who this man from Nazareth really was (and Jesus did not object to this wonder and questioning: see Mt 11:2-6, and Mk 2:1-12). Furthermore, there are multiple testimonies to Jesus’ nature miracles, especially the calming of the storm at sea (Mt 8:23-27, Mk 4:36-37, Lk 8:22-25) and the multiplication of loaves and fishes to feed multitudes (e.g., Mt 14: 13-21, Mk 6:32-34, Lk 9:10-17, Jn 6:1-14). Indeed, there are more testimonies to these two nature miracles than to most of the healing miracles!

The Feeding of the Multitudes story actually conveys a significant Kingdom-message, a message that was not entirely missed by some of its Jewish eyewitnesses. Immediately after this miracle, Jesus had to put his disciples into boats and disperse the crowd, and St. John’s account tells us why: because the people were in a Messianic fervor, and about to “take him by force and make him king” (Jn 6:14-15; cf. Mt 14:22 and Mk 6:45). Catholic scholar Roch Kereszty explains:

The Jewish belief that the Messiah would be a new Moses (Dt. 18:15) was coupled with the expectation that the Messiah would renew the manna miracle of Exodus. From among several texts, [biblical scholar] Ignace de la Potterie mentions the Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch:

“And it will happen that when all that which should come to pass in these parts has been accomplished, the Anointed One will begin to be revealed … And it will happen at that time that the treasure of manna will come down again from on high, and they will eat of it in those years because these are the ones who will have arrived at the consummation of time.”

It seems that the historical fact behind the multiplication of the loaves story is a prophetic sign action of Jesus, by which he intended to show the very nature of the kingdom. The kingdom is like a banquet to celebrate communion with God and with one another, and the source of this communion is the food that the Messiah himself provides in miraculous abundance. (Kereszty, Jesus Christ: Fundamentals of Christology, 2002, pp. 119-120)

Some commentators point out that there are actually two versions of the feeding of the multitudes by Jesus: in one he feeds 5,000 people, and in another he feeds 4,000, and Mark and Matthew include both stories in their gospels. It is argued that this shows that the gospel writers had conflicting accounts of the same incident that were passed down to them, and did not know what to do with them, so they included both as if they were two separate events. Two things here: (1) if that was what the gospel writers did, then we have even more evidence that Jesus at least once fed a crowd of people with just a handful loaves and fishes, for we would not only have multiple attestation in its favor (the story occurs in all four gospels) but further attestation within two of the gospels themselves (Matthew and Mark). (2) Alternatively, as Robert Hutchinson pointed out in Searching for Jesus (2016):

[T]he feeding of the five thousand appears to be primarily among the Jews, and the Greek text uses a term for “basket” common in Palestine (kophinos), while the feeding of the four thousand occurs in a series of passages in which Jesus is moving among Gentiles, and the word for container used to collect the extra fish is spyris, a different word. … [I]t is very probable that Jesus fed, miraculously or not, large groups of people on more than one occasion. (p.16)

Finally, contra Charlesworth, there is at least one sense in which Jesus surely did want to “draw attention” to himself, a sense which Charlesworth overlooks: Jesus asked people to place their complete trust in him (e.g., “Come unto me,” Mt 11:28-30, Lk 10:21-22; and see the story of the healing of the Centurion’s servant, Mt 8: 5-13, Lk 7: 1-10). This coheres quite well with the message of the stories of calming the storm, and walking on water, where a central theme is the call for complete personal trust in Jesus.

Kereszty suspects that unexamined philosophical presuppositions may be at work in the tendency to dismiss the accounts of the nature miracles, in particular “a still powerful Bultmannian tendency that restricts ‘intervention of God’ to human subjectivity, and excludes it from the impenetrable web of necessary cause-effect relationships in nature” (p. 115).

Hard as it may be for some scholars to admit, therefore, the gospel accounts of most of the nature miracles of Jesus generally pass the tests of “multiple attestation,” “Palestinian-Jewish setting,” and “coherence” (that is, they fit with Jesus’ message). As such, historically they are fairly well grounded.

In his book The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (2009), Dale Allison writes:

Consider the transfiguration. How can we receive it as sober history? [NB: one wonders what Allison really means by this phrase “sober history” that he repeatedly uses in this book. Does only historical chronicle without evident theological ramifications count as “sober history”? If so, then has he ruled out from the start the Judeo-Christian claim that God acts precisely in history to reveal His nature, character, and saving purposes for us?] Jewish legend bestowed radiance upon Adam, Enoch, Noah, and Abraham and a host of others. Christian imagination similarly moved the artistic nimbi decorating the icons of the saints into sacred biographies. (p. 69)

Allison himself is not entirely convinced by this sceptical line of reasoning: “For the inference implicitly assumes that people are never transfigured into light, or at least that there are no credible accounts of such, whereas, if one patiently investigates without prejudice, one discovers a surprisingly large body of first-hand testimony reporting just this.” (p. 62)

While Allison’s open-mindedness here is commendable, such a tepid defence of the Transfiguration narrative (a defence haunted by the ghost of Troeltsch again: see article 12 in this series) is hardly fair or adequate.

First, Allison misses what makes the Transfiguration story in the gospels unlike most, if not all of the accounts of Jewish holy men and others who have appeared to the faithful shining with divine light. The evangelists tell us not just that Jesus was immersed and surrounded by the light of God as in a nimbus, but that the light emanated from him, shining through his garments; in other words, he was the very source of that light (Mt 17:2; Mk 9:2-3; Lk 9:29). This is especially emphasized in St. Luke’s account, where he says that Jesus shone with “his glory” (9:26, 32). The divine status of Jesus as “the Lord of Glory” (I Cor 2:8; Js 2:1), and “the light of the world” (Jn 8:12) is thereby implicit in these Transfiguration accounts, and this is how they were understood by a number of the ancient Fathers. In fact, as Brant Pitre has pointed out,

If you go back to the Jewish Scriptures, you will discover that both Moses and Elijah experience theophanies — that is, appearances of God — in which God comes to them on a mountain and reveals his glory. Yet neither Moses nor Elijah is able to see God’s face. … On the mountain of Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah are finally allowed to see what they could not see during their earthly lives: the unveiled face of God. How is this possible? Because the God who appeared to them on Mt. Sinai has now become man. In Jesus of Nazareth the one God now has a human face. (The Case for Jesus, pp. 132-133)

Second, we not only have multiple attestation for the Transfiguration stories in the New Testament (namely, all three synoptic gospels), but we also have a late first century corroboration of these accounts in 2 Peter 1:16-18, which appears to be a direct response to the charge that the Transfiguration narrative was really just a product of what Allison would call “mythomania”:

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we heard his voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.

Third, one sign that we are dealing with historical reportage here rather than with fiction is that the Transfiguration event is one of the few in the synoptic gospels with a definite chronological marker: it occurred “about eight days after” Peter’s confession of faith at Caesarea Philippi, according to St. Luke (9:28), or “six days later” according to St. Matthew (17:1) and St. Mark (9:2) — essentially the same marker, depending on whether you include the day of the confession and the day of the transfiguration in the count, or merely the days in-between.

Fourth, we might be tempted to think that the Transfiguration story was the result of some early attempt at creating “haggadic fiction,” a pious embellishment of the Jesus-story, if the account was found only in the Gospel According to St. Matthew. After all, as we have seen, Matthew is the “prime suspect” of having done this on occasion in his gospel, and he also takes great pains to arrange the biographical material about Jesus in such a way as to show that Jesus was the New Moses, the giver of the New Law in His Sermon on the Mount. In fact Allison points to seven parallels between the story of the Transfiguration and the story of Moses on Mt. Sinai in Exodus 24 and 34 (p.69). Nevertheless, Matthew is certainly not the only evangelist who recounts this tale for us; Mark and Luke do as well, and they were generally far less interested in scoring Mosaic points for Jesus than Matthew was. Thus it seems more likely that it was God himself who was (among other things) illustrating the way Jesus was a new and better Moses by the event of the Transfiguration, and not Matthew doing so by concocting a literary fiction which the other synoptic gospel writers, and the entire early Christian community (e.g. II Pet 1:16-18) then mistook for historical fact.

On the whole there seems to be no strong evidence against the general historical authenticity of the Transfiguration narratives in the gospels. Given the presumed innocence of multiple witnesses, and also how unlikely it is, a priori, that the early Christian communities, or the evangelists themselves, could concoct out of thin air a legend of this magnitude about the life of Jesus while so many first-hand and second-hand witnesses to his life were still alive — and then have the whole thing mistaken for historical reportage by the very same generation of Christians onward, as well as the author of St. Peter’s second epistle — and the balance of historical evidence seems to favour the gospel accounts once again.

I have tried to show that the nature miracles, and the Transfiguration of Christ, are not just remarkable feats of supernatural power: they are enacted parables, designed to reveal to the disciples of Jesus the deepest mysteries of his Messiahship, and his divine identity. As such, they were meant not only to convey profound and astounding truths, but to give the disciples reason to believe in those truths. Above all, they mark the beginning of the transfiguration of the whole creation, the dawning of the Kingdom that Jesus was sent to bring to this poor earth. New Testament scholar N.T. Wright said it best in his book Simply Jesus (2011):

These “miracles” make little or no sense within the present world of creation, where matter is finite, humans do not walk on water, and storms do what storms will do, no matter who … tries to tell them not to.

But suppose, just suppose, that … there were a god like Israel’s God. Suppose this God did after all make the world. And suppose he were to claim, at long last, his sovereign rights over the world, not to destroy it … or merely to “intervene” in it from time to time … but to fill it with his glory, to allow it to enter into a new mode in which it would reflect his love, his generosity, his desire to make it over anew. Perhaps these stories are not, after all, the sort of bizarre things that people invent in retrospect to boost the image of a dead hero. … Perhaps they are, instead, the sort of things that might just be characteristic of the new creation, of the fulfilled time, of what happens when heaven and earth come together. (p. 141)

Next Time: Can We Have Confidence in the Gospel Records of the Teachings of Jesus?

Robert Stackpole, STD
© The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2017