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.
Part 14: The Case for the Historical Reliability of the Miracle Stories in the Gospels: reasons 1-2
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.
As promised at the end of our last installment, here are the first two of 10 solid reasons why historical research backs us the claim that Jesus of Nazareth really did perform miracles, just as the Gospels say.
Reason 1
It is hardly fair to object to accounts of miracles in general on the grounds that they are “opposed to ordinary human experience” (as historian Dale Allison did, see article 13 in this series) 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, 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 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). For example, He might very well do so if He sent his divine Son into the world to rescue His broken world.
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. [1]
JesusHimself 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, pointed 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 [4Q521], 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.” [2]
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.
Reason 2
Eighteeenth-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.
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, as discussed in #1 above.
Next: Part 15: More Evidence in Favor of the Gospel Miracle Accounts: reasons 3-6
Previous article.
Notes
[1] N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus (New York, HarperOne, 2011), p. 83
[2] C.S. Lewis, Miracles, (The Macmillan Co., 1947 edition), chapter 8.
{shopmercy-ad}
