The name Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761-1851) is hardly a household term today. Relatively few scholars know who he was, and surprisingly few reference books mention him. Perhaps it is the passage of 150 years that has caused people to forget this German theologian and Biblical scholar, who was once one of the most prominent  – and more controversial –  religious writers in Europe. And yet, for the subject under discussion today  – miracles and the miraculous, especially in Scripture –  H.E.G. Paulus is an absolutely essential starting-point and, despite the passage of more than a century and a half, he is a figure whose ideas frequently seem strikingly modern, and which resonate with many more recent authors.

Heinrich Paulus was born near Stuttgart, Germany, on September 1, 1761, to a father who was a Lutheran pastor in his hometown. He received a solid theological education, specializing in the languages and culture of the ancient Middle East, a field in which he distinguished himself, and of which, in 1793, he was appointed professor. But Paulus had also been well-steeped in the intellectual traditions of German Enlightenment thought, and counted people such as Goethe and Schiller among his peers.

Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a nation of many brilliant academics and thinkers, a rather sophisticated and advanced society, which had embraced the Age of Reason and its optimism that human beings, through science and other branches of learning, were capable of unravelling the mysteries of the world without recourse to traditional religion or the need for divine revelation. As the cradle of the Protestant Reformation, it was also an area with a significant distrust of religious institutions and a suspicion of traditional orthodoxy imposed from above. The Protestant emphasis on Scripture over and against the sacraments of Catholicism meant that theological power gradually came to reside, not with the clerics  – the priests and bishops who were the ministers of the Church’s rites –  but with the academics, with the learned scholars who knew the ancient languages and cultures impeccably, and were in a position to explain to others the “true meaning” of the Bible, by means of their own personal knowledge. In Germany, many so-called “free” universities were established that were essentially independent, and did not fall under the patronage or control of any church. Scholars were free to pursue their research, study and publication without being subject to the dogmas or sanctions of religious authorities. For perhaps the first time in Christian history, the study of the Bible began to become divorced from religious practice; in order to be a competent and respected Biblical scholar, what was required was the necessary academic training, rather than an allegiance to, or participation in, any particular denomination. Theology and Biblical study came to be a branch of secular knowledge much like any other; in fact, these “independent” scholars were considered to be more credible and more objective, precisely because they had no links to established churches, and could therefore, it was argued, challenge the churches with the difficult facts that Christianity insisted on sweeping under the carpet. State universities allowed for the existence of a new breed of theological mavericks, able to confront the Church, not because of their religious titles, but by virtue of the calibre of their scholarly credentials. To study and teach theology, it was no longer necessary to believe what one taught, and in many ways, it was considered preferable if one did not, since this was presumed to ensure a certain impartiality and objectivity that eliminated subservience to received dogmas and understandings. One could propose fresh, radical, new ideas that would have been unthinkable in the older church-run schools, which were portrayed as havens of conservativism, and as almost hostile to the pursuit of critical, creative thought. This was the era in which Paulus lived and studied, an era of growing academic criticism of traditional Christianity, and a time in which, it seemed, modern scientific discoveries had largely eliminated the need to accept the “antiquated” world-view and beliefs that were presumed by much of the Bible – including belief in the fact of miracles.

In 1828, Paulus published the first edition of his Life of Jesus, in which, as part of his treatment of the Gospels, he followed what he called a “naturalistic interpretation”. In many places where the Gospel-writers seemed to posit miraculous happenings or supernatural qualities of Jesus, Paulus argued that these were impossible, given modern knowledge of the cosmos, and must therefore represent a supernatural “veneer” applied to the story of Jesus in the generations after His death. They were additions or expansions or exaggerations, but they obviously could not be taken literally. In exchange, Paulus tried to suggest ways in which these seemingly transcendent actions and characteristics could be explained as the result of natural phenomena and processes, or were simply the result of misinterpretation of words and concepts by later generations. It seems that Paulus is at the origin of the famous explanation of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, whereby the bread and fish were not miraculously multiplied by divine power, but merely that the generous example of Jesus and His disciples, offering what little they had, inspired the rest of the crowd to pull out packages of food that they had actually concealed in their belongings. The true miracle, therefore, was the spontaneous generosity of a crowd that had previously been inclined to selfishness and concern only for their own needs. There was nothing supernatural about it – it was simply the fact that Jesus had managed, by word and example, to convince people to overcome their naturally egotistical tendencies. The evangelists had either innocently misunderstood, or had deliberately expanded upon the historical reality, transforming it with an “overlay” that seemed to fit well with their conviction that Jesus was, in fact, the promised Jewish Messiah. In another place (Matthew 14:25), Paulus argues that, since it is physically impossible for a human being to walk on water, the reference to Jesus doing so should actually be translated as “walking along the shore” – a translation which is linguistically possible, but certainly doesn’t seem to fit well with the context of the story as we have it. Paulus’s approach was to seek natural, common-sense, reasonable explanations for things that the New Testament authors had once considered extraordinary or divine – an attempt to accommodate the traditional Christian message to the sensitivities and context of his educated European contemporaries. Science had demonstrated that miracles were an impossibility, he argued, and so other explanations had to be sought out which demanded less stretching of the imagination^[2].

The next great scholarly attempt to explain away the Gospel miracles was made by another German, David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), less than a decade later. Although Strauss’ starting-point (the basic impossibility of miracles) was largely the same as that of Paulus, he took a somewhat different direction, and he criticized Paulus severely in his own 1835 Life of Jesus. Strauss actually proved much more radical in some ways, since he believed that Paulus’s great mistake had been to try to provide rational explanations for miraculous happenings when, Strauss argued, the events they describe had never taken place historically in the first place. Strauss’ position was that the miracles attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were actually rooted more in mythology than in fact – that they were largely borrowings of motifs from other ancient cultures and religions, and that even the original authors had never believed them to be historically true. He distinguished between historical mythus (which was rooted in a real event, however much it had subsequently been highly elaborated), and pure mythus (which was a total invention, corresponding either to earlier Jewish messianic expectations, or to the impression Jesus had left in people’s minds, by which they modified messianic ideas in light of the type of person He was):

When therefore we meet an account of certain phenomena or events of which it is either expressly stated or implied that they were produced immediately by God himself (divine apparitions – voices from heaven and the like), or by human beings possessed of supernatural powers (miracles, prophecies), such an account is in so far to be considered as not historical …
If the contents of a narrative strikingly accords with certain ideas existing and prevailing within the circle from which the narrative proceeded, ideas which themselves seem to be the product of preconceived opinions rather than of practical experience, it is more or less probable, according to circumstances, that such a narrative is of mythical origin.^[3].

The importance of Strauss’ scholarly work cannot be underestimated. His research into the “historical Jesus” (as opposed to the “Christ of faith”) sparked a whole new school of critical inquiry into Jesus’ life and work; in many ways, Strauss was the godfather of the “quest for the historical Jesus” which continues unabated today. Much of the early work in this field was done in Germany, but by the middle of the nineteenth century, it had also had a significant impact in other parts of Europe. In 1863, the French Orientalist and scholar Ernest Renan (1823-1892) published his own radically skeptical Life of Jesus, which built upon and expanded ideas first suggested by Paulus and Strauss. Renan proposes that miracles were so much a part of the religious fabric of ancient Palestine that Jesus was obliged to perform quasi-magical actions in order to garner the popular support of His contemporaries. Renan suggests that people’s knowledge of medicine was so primitive that Jesus’ simple actions of compassion, inclusion and care  – so foreign to the experience of the sufferers –  were able to achieve remarkable results. People were superstitious and gullible, he argues, and cases of insanity were generally mistaken for demonic possession – there was nothing extraordinary to Jesus’ apparent exorcisms, except that Jesus treated mentally ill people with kindness and respect, and this had a healing, calming effect on them, which was later artificially magnified in the telling. Renan speaks contemptuously of “the miraculous narratives so tediously enumerated in the Gospels,” and says that such claims could eventually turn out to be the downfall of Christianity in more enlightened times:

“Time has changed that which constituted the power of the great founder of Christianity into something offensive to our ideas; and, if ever the worship of Jesus loses its hold upon mankind, it will be precisely on account of those acts which originally inspired belief in him”^[4].

Renan proposed instead a romantic type of Jesus, stripped of His divine status, but preaching a message of love, brotherhood and spirituality, strictly removed from any personal claims to speak on God’s behalf or to be God Himself.

The rapid spread of such ideas among educated readers in Europe rightly concerned religious leaders, and created grave concerns in the Vatican. Some Catholic scholars began to be seduced by some of these writings, which suggested that Jesus had been nothing more than a great man, a prophet of social change, and an exemplary moral teacher – a vision that fell very short of orthodox Christianity. By the end of the 19^th and the early 20^th centuries, certain scholars who had begun to raise such probing questions about the Bible became lumped together under the umbrella term of “Modernists,” and were the object of a series of official (but often sweeping) condemnations by the Church. Some of these writers had evidently abandoned even a vaguely “Christian” understanding of Jesus; others, like the famous French Dominican Marie-Joseph Lagrange (founder of Jerusalem’s École Biblique; 1855-1938), were tainted by the excesses of their scholarly colleagues, and spent much of their lives living under a cloud, under suspicion for heresy, simply for attempting to examine the Bible in the light of history and ancient culture – a position that was later vindicated in the 1943 in Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. In the meantime, a number of prominent Catholic scholars were either excommunicated by the Pope, or else left the Church, convinced that religion and modern science were now fundamentally irreconcilable.

Perhaps the greatest name in Protestant Biblical scholarship in the early twentieth century  – and an exegete who has left a profound impression on the field –  was the German Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976). Bultmann attempted to steer a middle road between fundamentalism and the liberal Protestant critiques of the nineteenth century. Starting in the 1940’s, he announced his intention to help “de-mythologize” the Gospels, to make them credible and meaningful for a sophisticated modern audience; in some ways, his project actually had much in common with the work of Strauss and his contemporaries. Bultmann urged people to look beyond the presumptions of ancient cosmology, to understand the kerygma, the message of salvation that it expressed in ancient language and thought-forms, and then to translate that into modern terms that can speak to people today:

Now that the forces and the laws of nature have been discovered, we can no longer believe in spirits, whether good or evil. We know that the stars are physical bodies whose motions are controlled by the laws of the universe, and not demonic beings which enslave mankind to their service. Any influence they may have over human life must be explicable in terms of the ordinary laws of nature; it cannot in any way be attributed to their malevolence. Sickness and the cure of disease are likewise attributable to natural causation; they are not the result of demonic activity or of evil spells … The miracles of the New Testament have ceased to be miraculous, and to defend their historicity by recourse to nervous disorders or hypnotic effects only serves to underline the fact. And if we are still left with certain physiological and psychological phenomena which we can only assign to mysterious and enigmatic causes, we are still assigning them to causes, and thus far are trying to make them scientifically intelligible … It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles^[5].

Bultmann was arguably the greatest and most influential Biblical scholar of the first half of the twentieth century. His attempt  – to render the ancient mindset of the New Testament in a way palatable to modern sensibilities and learning –  has left a deep and lasting impact on generations of scholars and students, who have grown up with his denial of the possibility of the miraculous, in light of modern scientific knowledge. Bultmann essentially said that we would need to re-conceptualize Christianity apart from miracles, no longer making allowance for divine intervention in the workings of the universe. To believe in literal miracles was to make oneself a scholarly laughing-stock; miracles were the domain of faith-healers, fundamentalism preachers, and little Italian grandmothers in black, kneeling in the back of churches praying the rosary. Many suggested that faith in miracles was fundamentally opposed to any serious study of the Gospels and the New Testament.

No one has better embodied that vision than a group of scholars who call themselves the “Jesus Seminar”. Beginning in 1985, under the leadership of Robert Funk, a distinguished scholar of New Testament Greek, the Jesus Seminar gathered together an assorted menu of scholars and other interested individuals, who claimed to represent the cutting-edge of modern Biblical scholarship. Using the tools of a discipline broadly known as “historical criticism”, their stated goal was to apply objective scholarly criteria to the Gospels, in order to determine scientifically what Jesus had actually said and done. They would be independent of any religious body, and would fearlessly challenge the received version of Jesus, subjecting it to a scrupulous analysis, which would then be followed by a vote. The Jesus Seminar were very conscious of the media interest in their proceedings, and so they adopted a form of voting sure to attract attention and curiosity: each scholar was given four coloured beads with which to vote, and each bead carried a particular significance. A red bead meant “Jesus undoubtedly said this or something very like it”. A pink bead meant “Jesus probably said something like this”. A grey bead meant that “Jesus did not say this, but the ideas contained in it are close to his own”. And, lastly, a black bead meant, “Jesus did not say this; it represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition” – or, as one scholar suggested, “There’s been some mistake”^[6]. After several years of discussing and voting, in 1993 they published their own colour-coded translation of the four Gospels, together with the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, in a volume entitled The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say?. In the end, they concluded that less than 20% of the words spoken by Jesus in the traditional Gospels could be attributed to Him with some degree of confidence – the remaining 80% was the work, not of Jesus, but of the early Church, who had embroidered the story for their own purposes. In 1998, following another five years of similar discussion and voting, the Seminar published a sequel, entitled The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Do? As they state in their introduction:

…the Fellows examined 387 reports of 176 events … Of the 176 events, only ten were given a red rating (red indicates that the Fellows had a relatively high level of confidence that the event actually took place). An additional nineteen were colored pink (pink suggests that the event probably occurred). The combined number of red and pink events (29) amounts to 16% of the total (176)^[7].

The members of the Jesus Seminar believe that, although the Gospels do not faithfully relate the words of Jesus, they are even less faithful in passing on to us the actions of Jesus. It is probably not surprising, then, that the majority of the actions they reject in their evaluation are miracles.

It is not difficult to see how the work of the Jesus Seminar is, in many ways, simply a logical extension of ideas that were first put into print by Paulus, Strauss, Renan and Bultmann – they are very clearly the intellectual heirs of these European forebears. However, unlike those earlier generations of scholars, our media-steeped modern culture has made the Jesus Seminar almost a household name, and they have become minor celebrities – a rarity in the world of academic Biblical study! Its scholars are regularly quoted in newspaper and magazine articles, they are often interviewed on TV specials about Jesus, and their books have been best-sellers in North America for the last 10 years. Their ideas have achieved a popularity and an audience that means that we must take them seriously, and critically evaluate both their conclusions and their methods, both as Christians and as scholars.

Firstly, it is supremely important to note that, despite their claims to the contrary, the Jesus Seminar is by no means representative of contemporary Biblical scholarship. Although close to 200 names appear in lists of the Seminar’s “fellows” at various times, their meetings often included only half of those members or fewer. And even two hundred members is a tiny fraction of the memberships of the major professional associations of Biblical studies, such as the Society of Biblical Literature (with 6000+ members), the Catholic Biblical Association (1200+ members), the Society for Old Testament Study (450+ members) and the Society for New Testament Studies, which has several hundred as well. For the most part, the members of the Jesus Seminar represent extremely liberal Protestant theology faculties at a small group of universities and seminaries; there are very few Jews or Roman Catholics represented, and almost no evangelicals. In no sense does the Jesus Seminar speak for modern Scripture scholars, and such claims are both indefensible and irresponsible. Despite the impeccable qualifications of some of its members, they are, in many ways, the “radical fringe” of contemporary study of the Bible.

More important than the numbers of members, however, is their orientation and the fundamental assumptions with which they approach their work. Many of the Jesus Seminar scholars harbour a less-than-subtle hostility toward traditional Christianity; Robert Funk vehemently and publicly rejects the evangelical upbringing he received in church, and John Dominic Crossan, one of the Seminar’s leaders and chief spokespeople, is a former Catholic priest, who makes no secret of his anger toward the Church. A number of others openly mock basic Christian beliefs in their writings, and consider any type of traditional faith to be oppressive, restrictive and unworthy of university-educated adults. In his opening address, Funk proclaimed:

… we will be asking a question that borders the sacred, that even abuts blasphemy, for many in our society. As a consequence, the course we shall follow may prove hazardous. We may well provoke hostility. But we will set out, in spite of the dangers, because we are professionals and because the issue of Jesus is there to be faced, much as Mt. Everest confronts the team of climbers … The religious establishment has not allowed the intelligence of high scholarship to pass through pastors and priests to a hungry laity, and the radio and TV counterparts of educated clergy have traded in platitudes and pieties and played on the ignorance of the uninformed. A rude and rancorous awakening lies ahead.^[8]

Funk makes it very clear that he sees himself and his colleagues as renegades, whose role is to demonstrate the falseness of the version of Jesus which has been preached by the Christian churches for centuries. He is a man with a mission, convinced that Christianity is fundamentally wrong, and that he and his colleagues must liberate people through the enlightenment of scholarship. In this respect, it is particularly instructive to read two strident articles written in the Seminar’s journal, The Fourth R, in the summer of 1998 by Funk^[9] (the Seminar’s chair) and by the controversial Anglican bishop John Shelby Spong^[10]. Essentially, they say, everything Judaism and Christianity believe about God, prayer, morality and discipleship is bunk.

It is not surprising, therefore, that, even before they start, many of the Seminar’s members categorically rule out the divinity of Jesus and the possibility of miracles. Sadly, this is one of the questionable philosophical presuppositions that has become entrenched in much historical-critical study in the last 200 years, and which has given it a bad name in some traditional Christian circles. As Bultmann himself admitted in a series of lectures (1948-1953), history has come to be understood by many as a discipline that necessarily excludes the possibility of God’s existence and action, together with all the consequences that logically flow from that:

The historical method includes the presupposition that history is a unity in the sense of a closed continuum of effects in which individual events are connected by the succession of cause and effect … This closedness means that the continuum of historical happenings cannot be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers, and that therefore there is no “miracle” in this sense of the word. Such a miracle would be an event whose cause did not lie within history.^[11]

This is a striking comment coming from a New Testament commentator and, unfortunately, it virtually assumes in advance the results that will be achieved. Since God is not conceivable as a factor to the historian, Jesus must therefore be considered as non-divine, and any passage in which He speaks of Himself in divine or supernatural terms must derive from the early Church. Since miracles are judged to be a logical impossibility, they are excluded from the pool of evidence from the outset. Funk is quite clear that he sees the Jesus Seminar as furthering Bultmann’s original vision from 50 years earlier: “The notion that God interferes with the order of nature from time to time in order to aid or punish is no longer credible, in spite of the fact that most people still believe it. Miracles are an affront to the justice and integrity of God, however understood. Miracles are conceivable only as the inexplicable; otherwise they contradict the regularity of the order of the physical universe.” As a result, Funk says, prayers directed to God for favours or forgiveness are meaningless and useless; they presume a type of divine inspiration that cannot happen since (as Funk insists) there is no God “out there” to begin with.

It is precisely the imposition of such external philosophical presuppositions that illegitimates much of the work of the Jesus Seminar as scholarship. Contrary to their statements, they are not approaching the Scriptures as objective, disinterested scholars – they are very much crusaders with an agenda, which is to use the tools of modern Biblical scholarship in the service of previously-established conclusions. They make no attempt to justify or support these pre-judgements; in fact, they never explicitly present these assumptions to their readers at all. Rather, they assure their audience (inaccurately) that these are “the assured results of critical scholarship”^[12], when there is certainly no consensus among scholars on questions regarding miracles, God, or the claim of Jesus’ divinity – unless one consciously chooses to omit believing Christian scholars from the mix. Many key claims of the Jesus Seminar were challenged by no less an authority than the late Father Raymond Brown, probably the most distinguished Catholic Biblical scholar of the twentieth century, a man who had received 24 honourary doctorates, and who served as president of the Catholic Biblical Association, the Society of Biblical Literature (1976-7) and the Society of New Testament Studies (1986-7). More recently, Father John Meier, arguably the leading scholar of the historical Jesus today, dedicated an entire volume of his trilogy A Marginal Jew specifically to the question of Jesus’ miracles^[13]. As both a Catholic priest and a renowned exegete, Father Meier understands the challenges of applying historical criteria to ancient miracles. Because miracles seldom leave direct traces that historians can examine, they are forced to rely on surviving written accounts, sometimes by eyewitnesses, but often second- and third-hand sources. As he writes:

It is inherently impossible for historians working with empirical evidence within the confines of their own discipline ever to make the positive judgment: ‘God has directly acted here to accomplish something beyond all human power’ … The judgment that this particular event is a miracle accomplished by God necessarily moves the person making the judgment into the realm of philosophy or theology.^[14]

Meier accurately situates the crux of the crisis: it is not that actions of God are inherently unknowable to historians, as is frequently claimed (at least in principle, most Biblical miracles would have been accessible to bystanders). Rather, it is the fact that some modern historians have subtly imported into their discipline philosophical and theological preconditions which are not normally subject to scrutiny or debate. The existence or non-existence of God, the possibility or impossibility of miracles, are not, properly speaking, questions which historians (or Biblical interpreters asking historical questions) are competent to decide; such questions fall outside the bounds of normal historical inquiry. These are metaphysical questions, which must rely on other branches of knowledge to validate or invalidate. To presume such conclusions in advance necessarily rules out whole ranges of the available evidence, and unnecessarily prejudices the outcome. In the case of Christianity, it essentially guarantees a reductionistic result which bears little if any resemblance to the faith of most believers for the last two millennia. It ensures that such fundamentally miraculous happenings as creation, the Incarnation, the Resurrection and Ascension will be rejected outright as impossible. Distressingly little of Christianity (and Judaism) is left if miracles are ruled out of court.

Two thousand years later, a number of Biblical scholars believe that the most appropriate response to claims of the miraculous is not the skepticism and flat-out denial of earlier German scholarship, but a respectful agnosticism, that acknowledges that claims of divine causality go beyond what historically-oriented scholars can prove from a 2000-year-old text. Even though we no longer have direct access to the evidence to form independent conclusions of our own, we can certainly say that many early Christians claimed that Jesus repeatedly accomplished miracles, and that, according to good scholarship, many of these claims appeared to have circulated within the lifetime of the relevant eye-witnesses, when they would have been easy to contradict or disprove if false. If we cannot always access the miracle first-hand, nevertheless we can certainly speak about how people described it, and the impact it seems to have had. We can state, without too much fear of contradiction, that Jesus was perceived as a healer and wonder-worker during His lifetime, and was remembered as such by His earliest followers (and even by many of his opponents, as ancient Jewish sources attest). The further step, from the description to the event itself, is more difficult, and does not allow for the same degree of historical proof. At that point, the evidence must be weighed by those in other fields of scholarship. As John Meier himself acknowledges, a lack of historical evidence does not, however, mean that something is not real or never happened; there are many things that are unquestionably real which are not, however, subject to analysis by historical methodology. Historical analysis cannot, on its own, give us all the answers we seek in terms of miraculous happenings. It is an extremely valuable tool, but it is not entirely sufficient to judge such questions. We must acknowledge its limitations as well as its strengths, and this is perhaps one of the useful caveats we have gained from 200 years of this line of inquiry.

Our journey has taken us a long way, from the writings of Heinrich Paulus in the 1700s to the ongoing work of the Jesus Seminar and its modern critics. And yet it is clear that the question of miracles is by no means resolved in the world of Biblical scholarship. There continue to be  – and there probably always will be –  critical scholars who refuse to accept the possibility of anything supernatural and divine, for whom miracles are a strict impossibility, and who argue passionately against them. And there will be others who defend them, on the basis of scholarship and faith, on the basis of historical reconstruction, philosophical frameworks and theological principles. The dramatic advances in physics and the other sciences since Einstein mean that even many scientists are less inclined than their predecessors to be dogmatic about what is and is not possible in our world. As a branch of knowledge based on observation and measurement, science tells us what happens, why and how; it cannot tell us with absolute certainty what can happen.

It is probably safe to say that there is today a much greater openness and freedom to at least examine the subject of miracles than there was in the past. Today, a number of respected scholars, including John Meier, Craig Blomberg^[15], William Lane Craig^[16], and Gary Habermas^[17], are demonstrating that the idea of miracles is not intrinsically opposed to reason, science and philosophy, as some previous generations supposed. Indeed, the question has attracted considerably interdisciplinary interest and study, in which each field addresses miracles from its own point-of-view, and with its own specific resources and tools.

As these scholars are quick to demonstrate, the miracles of Jesus are intimately interwoven with the other parts of His life, preaching and ministry that scholars have traditionally accepted as historically reliable that it is difficult to see how these can be neatly separated without doing violence to the context in which they appear. Miracles are widely attested of other figures in ancient pagan and Jewish sources, although by comparison, Jesus’ actions generally come across as remarkably sober and unadorned – with little evidence of the type of mythological embellishment and clearly magical motifs so evident in other texts. And, despite claims that ancient citizens were inherently gullible, naive and quick to accept supernatural claims, the Gospels make it surprisingly clear that Jesus’ miracles were not unanimously believed in by eyewitnesses, and that people were able to offer other possible explanations. While people certainly attributed supernatural causes to some things we today would explain naturally, they clearly did not ascribe miraculous sources to everything, and they were almost certainly more discerning and more intelligent than some modern authors give them credit for^[18].

In conclusion, just as today we can gently chuckle at Nietzche’s categorical declaration that “God is dead” (so widely accepted by academics in the 1960’s), so we can take with a grain of salt the older exegetical “given” that miracles can be comfortably dismissed by serious students of the Bible. Not only has our scientific frame of reference opened up horizons of possibilities unthinkable to Paulus, Strauss and Bultmann, but a healthy modern skepticism of certain presuppositions within historical criticism has led to a healthy skepticism about some of its claims, and a corresponding relativization of its pride of place in the toolbox of Biblical scholars. Newer forms of historical, cultural and theological analysis continue to explore the supernatural and miraculous elements of the New Testament, and the ongoing dialogue between Christian theology and the sciences means that the discussion is by no means closed, and all these questions answered. Although there continue to be radical scholars who deny Jesus’ miracles  – because they also deny the existence of God and the possibility of Jesus’ divinity –  they constitute a relatively small (though vocal) extremist fringe in Biblical study, hardly representative of the rest of us. Even with our modern sophistication and scientific knowledge, miracles continue to intrigue us and, as Christians, to inspire us. For if, as the creeds all state, Jesus the God-man is indeed risen from the dead, if the bonds of death have truly been broken by even one individual by God’s own intervention, then what else must be possible and, indeed, probable? What wonders? … what surprises? … what miracles?

 

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[1] Matthew 14:2

[2] F.G. Vigouroux, Dictionnaire de la Bible, Tome IV, 2, col. 2233 : « Il se fit surtout connaître par son explication naturelle des miracles bibliques. D’après lui, il ne peut y avoir de vrai dans la religion que ce qui est croyable et démontable, par conséquent, tout ce qui est invraisemblable dans l’Ecriture n’est pas littéralement historique, mais doit être explique d’une manière rationnelle. »

[3] Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson; English translation by George Eliot. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), pp. 89, 89. Italics in original.

[4] Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus (London/Toronto: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1927), p.150.

[5] Rudolf Bultmann, “Kerygma and Myth”; Online at: http://www.religion-online.org/showbook.asp?title=431. My emphasis.

[6] Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (Harper SanFrancisco, 1993), pp. 36-37.

[7] From the Westar Institute’s Web site: http://westarinstitute.org/Jesus_Seminar/jesus_seminar.html

[8] Funk also dedicates a paragraph in his address to his belief that the Bible is a “fiction” – neither true nor false, but to be judged on how effective it is for us, how well it communicates meaning.

[9] The Fourth R, Vol. 11:4 (July/August 1998), From the Westar Institute’s Web site: http://www.westarinstitute.org/Periodicals/4R_Articles/Funk_Theses/funk_theses.html

[10] A Call for a New Reformation, From the Westar Institute’s Web site Bishop John Shelby Spong: http://www.westarinstitute.org/Fellows/Spong/spong.html

[11] Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, trans. S. M. Ogden [ New York: Meridian Books, 1960], 291-292. As Norman Perrin notes in his The Promise of Bultmann (Philadelphia: Lipincott, 1969), “The idea of God as a force intervening in history as an effective cause is one which a historian cannot contemplate” (p.38); “Since the process of history is uniform and not random – if it were random, any kind of historical existence would become impossible – then it follows that there never has been and there never will be an event within history … of which God has been or will be the effective cause” (pp.90-91).

[12] The Five Gospels, p.34

[13] Meier’s working definition: “A miracle is
(1) an unusual, startling, or extraordinary event that is in principle perceivable by any interested and fair-minded observer,
(2) an event that finds no reasonable explanation in human abilities or in other known forces that operate in our world of time and space, and
(3) an event that is the result of a special act of God, doing what no human power can do.”

[14] John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2, pp.513-14.

[15] The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (InterVarsity Press, 1987), chapter 3, “Miracles”.

[16] “The Problem of Miracles: A Historical and Philosophical Perspective” in Gospel Perspectives VI, pp. 9-40. Edited by David Wenham and Craig Blomberg (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1986).

Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics.Crossway Books, 1994, chapter 4, “The Problem of Miracles”.

See also the chapter on miracles (chapter 3) in Blomberg’s excellent The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1987), pp. 73-112, in which he addresses a number of the key objections raised to miracles.

[17] R. Douglas Geivett and Gary R. Habermas, In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Action in History (InterVarsity Press, 1997).

[18] "In antiquity miracles were not accepted without question. Graeco-Roman writers were often reluctant to ascribe miraculous events to the gods, and offered alternative explanations. Some writers were openly skeptical about miracles (e.g. Epicurus; Lucretius; Lucian). So it is a mistake to write off the miracles of Jesus as the result of the naivety and gullibility of people in the ancient world." (Graham N. Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus, Second edition [Oxford University Press, 2002], p.235)

“On the other hand it must be admitted that in the relatively peaceful and stable period of the first two centuries the irrationalism which first appeared at the beginning of the first century was unable to strike roots. There continued to be rationalist movements alongside it. In his dialogues Lucian mocked his contemporaries’ belief in the miraculous. Oenomaus of Gadara mocked the oracles, and Sextus Empiricus once more brought together all the arguments of scepticism … Primitive Christian belief in the miraculous thus has a crucial role in the religious development of late antiquity. It stands at the beginning of the 'new' irrationalism of that age. Our brief outline of this development may have done something to correct the widespread picture of an ancient belief in the miraculous which has no history. What we have found here is not a rampant jungle of ancient credulity with regard to miracles, but a process of historical transformation in which forms and patterns of belief in the miraculous succeed one another. If we accept this picture, we must firmly reject assertions that primitive Christian belief in the miraculous represented nothing unusual in the context of its period.” (Gerd Theissen, Miracle Stories of the Early Christian Tradition [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983], pp. 275-76)

“It is in this light that we must judge the accounts we possess of other miracle-workers in Jesus’ period and culture. We have already observed that the list of such occurrences is very much shorter than is often supposed. If we take the period of four hundred years stretching from two hundred years before to two hundred years after the birth of Christ, the number of miracles recorded which are remotely comparable with those of Jesus is astonishingly small. On the pagan side, there is little to report apart from the records of cures at healing shrines, which were certainly quite frequent, but are a rather different phenomenon from cures performed by an individual healer. Indeed it is significant that later Christian fathers, when seeking miracle workers with whom to compare or contrast Jesus, had to have recourse to remote and by now almost legendary figures of the past such as Pythagoras or Empedocles.” (A. E. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History: Bampton Lectures 1980 [Duckworth:1982], p.103)

For a further discussion of this issue, see “Questions on the Miracles of Jesus,” online at: http://www.christian-thinktank.com/mq6.html