Nowhere in the study of the historical Jesus do the presuppositions of the historian play a greater role than in the study of the accounts of Jesus’ miracles. Nowhere does the difference between ancient, modern, and postmodern worldviews affect our decisions. And perhaps nowhere else are any conclusions drawn likely to be equally controversial. On the one hand, a Christian historian is under great pressure to conclude that the miracle accounts in the Gospels are straightforward accounts of what actually happened, while other miracle stories in ancient literature are dismissed as fictitious. On the other hand, a secular historian is usually expected to dismiss the stories as myth without hesitation. Here more than anywhere else the historian’s perception of reality comes into play: is the universe essentially a closed, self-sufficient system, or is it subject to regular interventions from outside the normal everyday nexus of cause and effect? Or is there, perhaps, another alternative? Such questions are not strictly questions about the historical Jesus, but they seem unavoidable.
E. P. Sanders rightly distinguishes a number of different ways that one may tackle the problem, and a number of significantly different categories of questions that one may ask. One may ask what ancient Christians believed Jesus did; one may ask what ancient skeptics thought about miracles; one may ask what modern Christians do or should believe about miracles; one may ask whether science really leaves room for miraculous interventions or not. All of these questions (and a number of others as well) are perfectly legitimate, but are all of them part of research into the historical Jesus? Do they not overflow our topic into issues of philosophy and science? Indeed they do, especially the latter two questions.
So let’s tackle the question head on. Do miracles really happen? Are miracles impossible? Before one can answer such questions, one must decide what is meant by a ‘miracle’. The birth of a child is a ‘wondrous event’ – but it is not scientifically incomprehensible, and does not require intervention by a being outside the space-time continuum in order to occur. To walk away as the lone survivor of a plane crash may lead one to consider it a miracle – but others would call it just being lucky. When the money needed arrives just in time to pay the bill, it can be attributed to divine providence – but the term others would use is ‘coincidence’. In all of these cases, there is no way of proving that the normal flow of events has somehow been ‘tampered with’ – and so in such instances ‘miracle’ means ‘the interpretation of an event as involving divine intervention’. But one may always give counter-examples: While some children are born perfectly healthy, others are born with such defects that they can never hope to live normal lives. While one person survives a tragedy, others do not – does the believer who says “God was good to me” mean to imply that “God was bad to those other people”?! And while sometimes the check arrives on time, sometimes it doesn’t. The strongest objections to accounts of miracles and divine providence of this sort are not scientific but moral [On this subject see further Peter Vardy, The Puzzle of Evil, London: Fount/Harper, 1992. Also worth reading are Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, New York: Avon, 1981; and Maurice Wiles, God’s Action in the World, London: SCM, 1986].
But let us leave aside subjective interpretation of wonderful or improbable events as ‘miraculous’. The things that are generally called miracles in connection with Jesus are things like healings, resurrections, multiplications of food, walking on water, exorcisms, and so on. Healings and exorcisms may of course be explained in rationalistic, psycho-somatic terms if one wishes: one can say that Jesus inspired people to faith, which then brought about self-healing. This appears to be the way John Dominic Crossan understands Jesus’ miracles. It is well known that faith (whether in a healer or in a placebo) can result in the body healing itself. Jesus himself often attributed healings to the faith of the one healed. If one is inclined to believe only these sorts of accounts of miracles, which can be explained ‘rationally’, then one can always dismiss other accounts as legendary or fictional. But from the perspective of a historian, the necessary evidence to make such judgments is decidedly lacking. We do not have access to the medical records and X-rays, much less to the immune systems, of those who experienced healing after being touched by Jesus. No one should presume to pronounce on such matters one way or the other as a historian. The necessary evidence is just not there. The opportunity to cross-examine the people involved has long since passed. Any judgments passed about accounts of healings and exorcisms will probably be made on the basis of one’s worldview and of philosophical and scientific considerations. It is not necessarily wrong to do so! But certainly many people today, perhaps the majority, appear to believe that miracles of this sort do happen, and so to simply dismiss the possibility of miracles as things that “simply cannot be believed today” is probably to adopt a minority viewpoint. But again, most Christians would accept that the majority isn’t always right. So what can we say about accounts of healings and exorcisms? All we can say is that there is certainly enough evidence to conclude that Jesus was renowned in his time as a healer and exorcist. More than that takes us beyond historical research into other fields. But it is important that one be consistent as a historian. It is no good invoking special pleading in the case of Jesus’ miracles, while dismissing all other miracle stories from the ancient world as legendary or imaginative fabrications.
And what of accounts of Jesus apparently defying gravity or things like that? I believe it was the Scottish philosopher David Hume who said that extraordinary claims and events require extraordinary evidence. A historian is certainly not justified in saying that events happened in the past for which there is no contemporary analogue. Spiritual people (the sort traditionally called ‘saints’ or ‘holy men’) have throughout the ages been associated with healings and the like, and so there is no surprise that Jesus should be too, and a historian may well be open to accepting that people did indeed experience healing through their contact with Jesus. But until one sees someone walking on water with one’s own eyes, one is certainly justified in being skeptical of any stories that claim such things happened. Conversely, one is unjustified in asserting as a historian that such things probably did happen in the past, when one has no verifiable experience of such things happening in the present. And unless the event were public and repeatable, one could still not ‘prove’ that such things happen: others would simply have to ‘take your word for it’. So you can see that, while one may or may not accept such accounts as true from the standpoint of a religious believer, a historian, using the methods of historical inquiry, should (indeed must) have a healthy degree of skepticism.
Parallels from the ancient world: http://religion.rutgers.edu/iho/prayer.html#sons
Ancient Miracle Stories http://www.uoregon.edu/~dfalk
http://www.uoregon.edu/~dfalk/courses/jesus/miracles.htm
Excerpt from a workshop at Harvard University by L. Michael White:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/symposium/magic.html
Miracles in Other Words: Social Science Perspectives on Healings - Jerome H. Neyrey
Pages with links to articles by William Lane Craig:
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/historical.html
http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/jesus/
http://dmoz.org/Society/Religion_and_Spirituality/Christianity/Jesus_Christ/Traditional_Views/
Someone asks the Discovery Channel: Is there independent confirmation of the miracles of Jesus? http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/jesus/qa/qa_04.html
Blackburn, B. L., “Miracles and Miracles Stories”, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall, Downers Grove: IVP, 1992, pp.549-560.
Bultmann, Rudolf, Jesus Christ and Mythology, London: SCM, 1958. [See also his writings, and the discussions thereof, available at http://www.religion-online.org]
Fuller, Reginald H., Interpreting the Miracles, London: SCM, 1963.
Meier, John P., A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume Two: Mentor, Message, and Miracles, New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Richardson, Alan, The Miracle Stories of the Gospels, London: SCM, 1941.
Twelftree, Graham H., Jesus The Miracle Worker, Downers Grove: IVP, 1999.
The evidence of Josephus (which probably had an authentic form, although its present form has clearly been revised by Christian copyists) agrees with the Synoptic Gospels’ portrait of Jesus as having been both a teacher and a miracle worker. This is clearly how he was remembered in general, and not just by his followers.
The text in Josephus, if what are obviously Christian additions are removed, reads as follows:
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not cease. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still up to now, not disappeared.
It is certainly legitimate to ask about how we should understand the miracle stories in relation to issues raised in the modern world, whether issues raised by scientific skepticism or New Age superstition and credulity. But as with everything else, it is crucial that we first put Jesus the miracle worker in his original context and understand what those who read Matthew’s accounts of his miracles would have understood. We shall focus therefore on a literary and cultural/contextual approach. As with so many aspects of these stories and of ancient literature in general, the historian faces a problem: either these events are explicable and therefore less than what many believers mean by ‘miraculous’, or they are inexplicable and thus historians can say nothing significant about them in their role as historians. But be that as it may, recent research has been much more open to accepting that, however one is to explain the miracle stories in relation to other issues, it is clear that Jesus was renowned in his own time as a healer and exorcist. Whether any or all of the illnesses were psychosomatic, whether their faith healed them because faith has a positive effect on the immune system, whether by virtue of being the Messiah one can therefore defy the laws of gravity – all these issues are important in terms of reflecting and presenting the Christian faith today. But these were not the issues of either Matthew or his readers, and thus there is a sense in which they fall under the category of apologetics (and perhaps also systematic theology), but are not central to exegesis.
In the Synoptic Gospels, no one seriously disputes that Jesus in fact did miracles. The only question that is raised is by what power Jesus accomplishes these feats. The accusation that one practices what is essentially ‘black magic’ was a dangerous one that most non-conformist miracle-workers in the ancient world faced sooner or later: it meant labeling them as deviants and dangerous, and this was one way the establishment could neutralize the dangerous charismatic authority of such a person. Other figures in the ancient Greco-Roman world who are said to have done similar things to Jesus also faced similar accusations (a notable example being Apollonius of Tyrana). And so it is not surprising that slightly later on (see Matthew 9:34; 12:24) those who feel threatened by Jesus’ popularity engage in such attempts at neutralizing him. Matthew thus at times eliminates elements in Mark’s accounts that might have left Jesus open to charges of magic. Jesus’ practices were clearly not for the most part like those of typical Jewish or Greco-Roman magicians, who called on God by as many different names as possible, prepared ointments and potions, and sought by using the right methods and words to manipulate divine or angelic powers to perform their will. Jesus heals with simply a word, or a touch (and the few instances of Jesus using spittle or other techniques that resemble those of contemporary magicians are removed by Matthew – see Mark 7:33-34; 8:23). But at any rate, the term ‘magic’ was primarily one of ‘name-calling’ rather than objective evaluation, of declaring the wonder-worker as beyond the bounds of what is acceptable in society, and thus this term occurs nonetheless in Jewish and Roman polemic against Christians in the subsequent centuries.
For discussion of the miracle tradition in the Gospels and their contemporary setting see also the following excerpt from a workshop at Harvard University by L. Michael White:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/symposium/magic.html
The Healing of a ‘Leper’ (Matthew 8:1-4)
Matthew changes the order of the material he takes over from Mark. He does this to emphasize some of the most important aspects (from his perspective) of Jesus’ healings. And so he begins with two stories that show Jesus interacting with those beyond the fringes of Jewish society, the unclean, moving a story from Mark to a place before the one that appears to have immediately followed the large group of ‘Sermon’ material in Q. A person with a skin disease like eczema was considered unclean and would have been prohibited access to the Temple and would have been shunned by many. The disease in question is not Hansen’s disease (what we call ‘leprosy’ today), for which there was another term, but simply refers to some form of skin disease. To any who, like the Pharisees, sought to avoid contracting ritual uncleanness on a day-to-day basis and not only when they were going up to the Temple, people with skin diseases needed to be avoided at all costs, because ritual uncleanness was ‘contagious’ even though the disease was not. Once again, we need to understand the meaning of these interchanges in a pre-scientific world without our modern medical knowledge.
Jesus’ healing of the man was clearly something significant, but not necessarily unheard of. What would have been most striking (and this is the reason Matthew places the story so prominently) is that Jesus touched this unclean person in making him clean. This rabbi was therefore clearly something different than the Pharisees. This would become even clearer once they saw him eat and drink with sinners and other outcasts, but such actions were not ‘one off’ events in Jesus’ ministry: they were deliberate, calculated declarations that Jesus has a different mission and a different vision than the Pharisees. Jesus was not about restricting access to the exclusive dinners of the pure. He was, on the contrary, about foreshadowing the eschatological messianic banquet at which people with eczema, Gentiles, tax collectors, prostitutes, and various other undesirables would be present, while many of the respectable and ritually clean figures of influence in contemporary Jewish society would find themselves excluded.
There is something distinctive about the way Jesus heals too. He heals with a command, on his ‘own’ authority. He does not, apparently, pray for people to be healed. This may simply be an oversight on the part of the Evangelists, but this seems unlikely in view of the fact that Jewish parallels to the Gospel miracle stories always have the healer pray to God for the person who is sick to be healed. The fact that this detail seems to be universally mentioned in other stories, and universally absent from Jesus’ healings, cannot be without significance. [See the parallels (especially item #113) on the following web page: http://religion.rutgers.edu/iho/prayer.html#sons] Jesus does not just have the usual authority of one who relates to God as ‘son’ and dares to ask what others would not; Jesus has a delegated authority of his own (as is indicated in Matthew 8:8-9, and as will also be emphasized in the next chapter, in Matthew 9:6-8). Even ancient ‘magicians’ invoked some power outside themselves (calling on the name of a divine power in multiple names and mysterious gibberish like ‘abracadabra’ – the sort of babbling that Jesus is said to denounce in Matthew 6:7). But the leper recognizes that if Jesus wants to, he has power to heal, and Jesus does not deny this. This is certainly striking, and shows that Jesus is understood to be empowered by the Spirit of God and to accomplish miracles by this power (as Matthew 12:28 makes explicit). He thus has no need to ask for power from heaven, nor to invoke angelic names as others did in casting out demons. His association with the Spirit is ongoing, and thus so is his anointing and authority to accomplish these wondrous feats.
In touching the leper, Jesus has overstepped the boundaries of ritual purity. This is probably one of the reasons he tells the man to keep it a secret precisely how he was healed. It is the issue of uncleanness that torments the woman with a hemorrhage in chapter 9, and that makes her desperate to be healed and yet terrified of being found out that she had touched Jesus’ clothing. This ignoring of ritual purity raises yet again the question of Jesus’ attitude to the Jewish Law. And it is for this reason that the command to go offer the sacrifice specified by Moses is made (Matthew 8:4). But what does it mean to say it is a testimony ‘to them’? Does this imply a recognition that such sacrifices are not really necessary? In Leviticus 13-14, only the priest has the God-given authority to pronounce that God has healed someone. Jesus as the Messiah also has such God-given authority, but it would not be helpful for word to spread that a man who was a source of uncleanness had intermingled again with the population without being officially declared clean by the priest. And so he is to bring the required sacrifice, not because it is necessary in view of his being healed and declared clean by the Spirit-empowered Messiah, but ‘as a testimony to them.’ Perhaps the idea of testimony also has an additional aspect: if the priests do declare the man clean, then they should therefore also recognize Jesus’ healing power and no longer persist in unbelief (so Davies & Allison, vol.2, p.16).
A Centurion and his Son/Servant (Matthew 8:5-13)
A centurion whose servant is ill comes to Jesus for help. The Greek word pais like the Aramaic talya’ can mean either ‘son’ or ‘servant’, but the latter seems more likely to be the meaning here. The centurion calls Jesus ‘Lord’, the proper form of address from Matthew’s perspective, and his words a little later will show that he not only calls Jesus ‘Lord’ but recognizes what the implications are in some detail! At any rate, he communicates to Jesus that his servant is paralyzed and suffering. Jesus says “I shall come and heal him” (or possibly “Shall I come and heal him?”, which would show the hesitation (characteristic of Jesus in Matthew) to go to anyone other than the lost sheep of Israel). The centurion, perhaps realizing the attitude of Jews to unclean Gentiles, and not knowing of Jesus’ touching of the man with eczema and its implications, declares himself unworthy to have Jesus come under his roof. He then expresses his great confidence in Jesus’ ability and authority in two ways. First, he declares that Jesus need only speak a word and his servant will recover. Second, he makes a comparison between Jesus and himself. The centurion can simply command a subordinate to do his bidding, not just because of his own personal authority but because the whole authority of the Roman Empire and Emperor are behind him, and more to the point above him in the chain of command. He thus recognizes that in the same way Jesus is given such great authority by God that demons and diseases will obey his commands, because they have the full authority and power of God behind them.
The significance of this is not lost on Jesus, or on Matthew. It is quite a recognition coming from someone outside the people of Israel, and without the benefit of the teachings of the Jewish Scriptures. And so it is only here in Matthew that the author describes Jesus as marveling, as genuinely astonished (in a positive way, of course). Faith and healing are closely connected, and in the only two instances in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus heals Gentiles, it is explicitly because of their great faith, a faith that is greater than what he has found in Israel, among God’s own chosen people.
The reply of Jesus is that many shall come from the East and the West, taking their place at the table with Abraham and the other patriarchs at the messianic banquet, while some of Abraham’s own physical descendents will be cast out. Matthew’s version seems almost to suggest that the whole present generation of ethnic Israel will be rejected and replaced by Gentiles; but surely this is simply a result of his use in 8:11-12 of a Q saying (found also in Luke 13:28-29) in a new context. Originally, those from ‘the East and the West’ would perhaps have referred to the regathering of the Diaspora, while in contrast those who live in privilege in the land of Israel and who do not respond to Jesus’ teaching will be cast out. But the reference to ‘East and West’ is reminiscent of ‘the ends of the earth’, and so it was natural for Matthew to apply it to those who are not Israelites scattered to various places, but actually from the East and the West. At any rate, this is a good example of the way individual sayings of Jesus were transmitted and repeated in a number of new and different contexts, and these new contexts led to the meaning of the sayings themselves being adapted, applied, and transformed in new and creative ways. In its present context, it does not mean that all the sons of the kingdom (i.e. the ethnic people of Israel) will be cast out, any more than it means that everyone from the East and the West will come. The black-and-white language should not be pressed too far. Its point is clear in this context: Gentiles are showing faith that many in Israel lack. Those who are ethnically part of Israel should not presume on God’s grace and favor on the basis of heredity alone.
This story is moved forward from its relative position in Mark chapter 5. Matthew also changes the location from the region near the town of Gerasa mentioned in Mark, which was 30 miles from the sea of Galilee. Gedara, on the other hand, was about 5 miles away from the sea. Although this might seem a long way for pigs to jump, in fact Josephus speaks of the territory of the region of Gedara reaching to the sea (Life, 9:42), and apparently coins from Gedara often featured an image of a ship. At any rate, the version in Mark’s Gospel was crying out to be interpreted symbolically, and yet Matthew pares the story of precisely those features that make this clear.
In Mark, the story sounds more like a political-religious “joke” at the expense of Rome than an account of an actual event, and so let us look at Matthew’s source before looking at Matthew’s own version of the story…
In Mark’s account, in Mark 5:1-20, the setting is the area near Gerasa, which had been an important city in the classical period, and which had been under Jewish control during the Maccabean period but which was incorporated into the Roman province of Syria as of Pompey’s conquest in 63 CE. It eventually became a flourishing member of the ‘Decapolis’ (i.e. the ‘Ten Cities’). In this context, a man with an unclean spirit is said to live among the tombs and to be uncontrollable, even if put in shackles. He would howl and cut himself with stones. When the man sees Jesus, something ‘funny’ happens. He goes up to this renowned exorcist, throws himself at his feet (an acknowledgement of superiority, practiced before a patron or authority figure), recognizes him as ‘Son of God’ (the key christological title in Mark’s Gospel), and then uses the language of an exorcist on Jesus! Normally, an exorcist would say to a demon “I adjure you by X”, where X is the name of a higher angelic power than the demon, in order to compel the demon to come out (the best example of this is the work known as the Testament of Solomon – to read it click here). In an ironic reversal of roles, the demon invokes the higher power of God himself (presumably the only higher power, to whose authority Jesus would submit) in order to try to ‘compel’ Jesus not to torture him. Jesus, as exorcists were wont to do, asks the demon its name (asking for the name was a usual practice in exorcism, since knowledge of one’s true name was thought to give someone power over that person). The demon replies that there are many of them and they are called ‘Legion’. Now ‘legion’ was a specifically Roman military term, referring to a group of over 6,000 soldiers, and so this would be like a story about someone in Nazi-occupied France during World War II asking a demon its name and being told “We’re called ‘Panzer Division’.” The language of the story in Mark is politically loaded. Essentially, we have an ironic presentation of the demonic power of Rome begging the Son of God and king of Israel not to send them out of the region (Mark 5:10)! They then ask to be sent into a herd of (unclean) pigs. Once again the roles are reversed (as you’ll have seen if you visit the link just below to parallel texts with accounts of exorcisms). Normally, the exorcist might tell the demon to knock over a cup or a statue to demonstrate that it had left the possessed person. In contrast, the demons ask to perform something of this sort, and to be sent into a herd of pigs. Their effect on the pigs shows that the effect of Roman rule is to drive its subjects to suicidal self-destruction. To round off this story that is so full of irony, the locals realize they are dealing with someone with the power and authority to drive out a ‘Roman legion’, and they make the exact opposite request of the demons: they beg him to leave their district. The man who has been set free, however, would have liked to leave the region and to be with Jesus, but he is instead left behind to tell all that the Lord had done for him. You can see why, in light of all this irony, one would wonder whether this story were intended to be treated as historical!
Matthew in his account removes the political ‘bite’ of the story by obscuring the reference to ‘Legion’, as well as the irony of having the language typical of the exorcist used by the demons. The reason for the latter is presumably Matthew’s theological convictions: no one, least of all demons, should imagine that they can dare tell Jesus what to do!
[For examples of contemporary practice of exorcism see the following web page:
http://www.uoregon.edu/~dfalk/courses/jesus/miracles.htm
Yet see also the discussion in John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew; Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume 2, New York: Doubleday, 1994, pp.576-601, who stresses the need to keep in mind that these stories are for the most part later than the New Testament, leaving open the possibility of having been influenced by it in some way]
Ancient Miracle Stories http://www.uoregon.edu/~dfalk/courses/jesus/miracles.htm
"Jesus' Miracles", by Darrell Doughty http://www.courses.drew.edu/sp2000/BIBST189.001/JesusMiracles.html
"The Miracles of Jesus" by J. Hampton Keathley http://www.bible.org/docs/nt/topics/miracles/toc.htm
"Were the Miracles of Jesus Invented by the Disciples?" http://www.christian-thinktank.com/mq4.html
"The Mighty Deeds of Jesus" sermon by Mike Castle http://www.crosscreekchurch.org/ARCHIVE/sermons/jan-jun01/mightydeeds010225.html
Miracles of Jesus: A Skeptic's Perspective http://www.geocities.com/logic_faith/miracles.htm
Richard Carrier, "Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire" http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/kooks.html
Can Miracles Really Happen? http://www.seejesus.net/tough_other3.html