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?
Part 13: Did Jesus Really Perform Miracles?
By Robert Stackpole, STD
In this weekly web series, Dr. Robert Stackpole, emeritus director of the John Paul II Institute of Divine Mercy, leads us step-by-step through the life of the Founder of Christianity, from Bethlehem to Galilee to Jerusalem. Along the way, we pause to consider in-depth the historical debate over the gospel stories of the virginal conception and nativity of Jesus, his message of the Kingdom, his embrace of persecution and death on the Cross, and his glorious bodily resurrection from the dead. Finally, we plunge into the great mystery of the Incarnation, and show how it actually shines through the whole gospel story from beginning to end. Read the series from the beginning.
New Testament historian Dale Allison, in his book The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (2009), 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 marvelous.
It is no mystery why [19th and early 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. [1]
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 skeptical 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.
"Historicism"
Unfortunately, Allison’s relies here on a principle taken from the historian and philosopher Ernst Troeltsch: namely, the view that events in history always occur according to recognizable and recurrent patterns, 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.
Catholic scholar 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. [2]
Here is an easy way to see the fallacy of this perspective. Up to the 16th century the Aztecs in Mexico had never seen a sailing ship, horses, rifles or cannons before. But all of 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?
"Nature-Miracles"
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” (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 — or 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 a truly Christian response to the Reimarus-Strauss-Bultmann point of view on the miracle narratives in the New Testament. Let’s redress that inequity.
Next time we will begin to offer 10 reasons why we can and should believe that the miracle stories in the gospels are reliable.
Next Monday, March 3: Part 14: The Case for the Historical Reliability of the Miracle Stories in the Gospels: reasons 1-2
Previous article.
Notes
[1] Dale Allison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), p. 68-69; my emphasis.
[2] Roch Kereszty, O.Cist., Fundamentals of Christology (New York: St. Paul’s Books and Media, 2002 edition), p. 9.
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