The Virgin Birth and the Resurrection
4 THE MIRACULOUS CHRIST
Miracles and Science
Do miracles occur? In Christ the Controversialist (1970) John Stott concisely put the questions of the 'modernists':
Hasn't science demonstrated that the universe is a dosed, mechanistic system, and therefore dispensed with any necessity for God?. . . And even if we can still in some sense believe in God as the creator and controller of the natural order, we must surely now give up the old-fashioned notion that this God has ever intervened supernatu in human history, let alone that he still does? (CtC, pp. 50-1)
The answers to these questions have, I gather, seemed so obvious to Dr Stott that he has never felt it necessary to publish any extended treatment of the problem of miracles. His understanding of the inspiration of the Bible is thoroughly miraculous, for he believes that the Bible's human authors were inspired to give an accurate account of events which had occurred and speeches which had been delivered many years previously. It follows naturally from this that the sacred text tells the simple truth about miracles which took place in history. His impatience with doubts came out at the end of The Authentic Jesus (1985), for example: 'It seems logically absurd to accept the greater miracle (the incarnation) and jib at lesser ones like the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection' (AJ, p. 88). He was chairman of the committee which drafted the 1982 report on Evangelism and Social Responsibility, and in it we read that in the ministry of Jesus the signs of the kingdom of God which gave 'public evidence that the kingdom he was talking about had come' included exorcism and the healing and 'nature' miracles.
For him, the answers are in the Bible. He has felt the full power of the Bible's message that God has intervened in history, supremely in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus followed by the gift of the Holy Spirit but also in the exodus from Egypt and in later events in the preparatory drama of Israel. In the Bible God is the Saviour in history. So he has gladly accepted the Bible's assurance that God is the Sovereign in nature. Faith, he acknowledges, is needed to believe this teaching, for 'by faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible' (Hebrews 11:3). Yet faith is, he claims, fully in accord with human knowledge and experience, and is even demanded by them, for as Paul wrote 'since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made', so that 'men who suppress the truth by their wickedness' are 'without excuse' (Romans 1:18-20). In his books Dr Stott records his conviction that a reluctance to obey God's will - a kind of wickedness - rather than any intellectual difficulty often lies at the bottom of unbelief.
This biblical proclamation of God as Saviour and Sovereign is contrasted in Dr Stott's mind with inferior theologies which in his view have merely encouraged atheism in the long rim. Thus he has no wish to defend the belief that every word in the Bible is literally true. Some statements which at first sight appear to contradict science may well have been intended as poetry. Although as we have seen his willingness to deviate from fundamentalism has in practice been limited, this principle means that he has no need to defend the historical accuracy of, for example, the various myths about the creation found in the Hebrew Scriptures (in the Psalms and Job as well as in Genesis).
He also has no wish to defend attempts which have been made to find a place for God merely in the gaps of scientific knowledge. He rejects the picture (associated with Newton as well as with many lesser names) which presents God as a 'hypothesis' necessary to explain things that science cannot yet explain and which suggests that God is active only in creating a machine-like nature and in occasional interventions to put the machine right. He is fully aware of the danger that a God so pictured disappears as the gaps in science are closed. But 'no biblical Christian', he insists,
can accept the distinction between natural law and divine action which lies at the root of all this misunderstanding. For natural law is not an alternative to divine action, but a useful way of referring to it. . .
The Bible itself should have protected us from regarding God either as a stop-gap or as a machine-minder, for the God of the Bible dwells not in gaps but in every place. (CtC, p. 59)
I, too, believe that the salvation which committed Christians (at least) have experienced is continuous with the history of salvation related in the Scriptures. My faith in God as the Creator of all that exists flows out of this history of salvation more than out of any observation of nature, which is so often silent or ambiguous when asked our religious questions. With this faith I, too, can understand the signs of God's sovereignty which the eyes of faith can see throughout his creation. I, too, believe that the Bible often expresses this faith poetically, but does magnificently celebrate God's glorious presence and power in the whole of nature, from the stars to the flowers, from the hippopotamus to the ant; and with the authors of the Bible I, too, worship the Saviour and Sovereign.
I also agree with Dr Stott on the point with which we are immediately concerned. C. F. D. Moule put it well when introducing a collection of studies of Miracles from Cambridge University (1965). 'If we have reason to believe that the character of God is best seen in Jesus, and that the consistency of sheer moral perfection is the ultimate consistency, then we may have to revise our ideas of what is and is not "possible".' If God is Saviour and Sovereign as the Bible affirms, there is nothing essentially incredible in the idea that for our salvation he will create 'miracles' understood as events which arouse a religious sense of wonder because they seem to be in keeping with God's character but contrary to what is known of nature. Normally the Creator works according to the regularities which can be called 'laws of nature', but this does not mean that his work as Saviour must always be regular. Rudolf Bult-mann was not entitled to make his famous claim that no one who uses modem devices developed scientifically, such as electric light, can take miracles seriously. For while thankfully using electricity, I believe that God can switch on a light in a darkened life.
In finding myself in emphatic agreement with Dr Stott about all that, I recall the controversy about belief in a non-interventionist and therefore non-miraculous God ('Deism') in England during the years 1690-1790. That was an age when to many civilised and educated people it seemed imperative to abandon miracles. It was the 'Age of Enlightenment' when modern science was beginning to offer a solid, dependable and fruitful body of knowledge in contrast with the guesswork, credulity, and incompetence of ages which all seemed more or less 'dark'. Even where science was not yet able to provide complete explanations of natural phenomena, it was intellectually and morally essential not to believe reports of miracles. Only if religion and reason could be reconciled would religion cease to be ridiculous. This was the attitude which inspired the historian Edward Gibbon's contempt for the early Christians. David Hume expressed it in a famous essay eventually published in 1748. Reports of miracles, he was sure, came from 'ignorant and barbarous' people. Ά miracle', he declared, 'is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.' And there were theologians who attempted to develop a religion which would be thoroughly at home in that climate of opinion, a Christianity Not Mysterious (John Toland's book in 1696). But they were answered - and not only by stupid conservatives whose wrath Hume had feared (making him delay the public appearance of his essay and hesitate to be too clear about its logical conclusion). Bishop Joseph Butler replied far more wisely and formidably, with the argument that 'natural' religion -without miracles or any special self-revelation by God - had difficulties at least as great as those of biblical, orthodox Christianity. Butler showed that what could be proved rationally from the dispassionate observation of nature fell far short of any demonstration of the existence of a benevolent and mighty Creator. The world, as Butler saw it, was so full of mystery and of evil that if its Creator was in any sense loving he must reveal himself and act in ways such as those reported in the Bible. The core of this argument has always convinced me and has always made me dissatisfied with Deism and with all the movements that have followed it in the history of Christian thought, denying that God is Saviour and Sovereign.
To some extent the climate of educated opinion is now more favourable to the idea of miracle. In 1947 C. S. Lewis was able to attack 'naturalism' or 'materialism' in his book on Miracles, knowing both that science was dominant in the culture of the English-speaking world and that the misuse of science, causing the miseries of harsh industrialism and of two horrific world wars, had made many people look for other sources of wisdom. Since then science has not recovered its full prestige as a general guide to life. On the contrary, Theodore Roszak's verdict in Where the Wasteland Ends, quoted by Dr Stott, is a judgement which would be shared by many: 'What science can measure is only a portion of what man can know. Our knowing reaches out to embrace the sacred' (IFCT, p. 36). And the continuing advances in science have made many of the more distinguished scientists justifiably proud, confident and determined within their scientific discipline but also humbly sensitive to the limits of science. Not only do they acknowledge that science cannot completely displace religion, art, music, the intuitive emotions and other parts of man's pre-scientific equipment for living. They also acknowledge the limits of the human capacity to understand natural phenomena scientifically - limits which seem likely to be permanent. In quantum physics the dance of the elementary particles seems to be unpredictable and also impossible to measure completely (for example, both position and momentum cannot be measured with absolute accuracy at the same time). The way the world is seems to depend on things which might have gone very differently-in the seconds after the initial 'big bang' or during the long ages of evolution. And no amount of scientific knowledge can answer the question what this immeasurably vast and infinitely complex universe 'means' - whether life arose accidentally or was a programme somehow built into a computer-like universe, whether progress in evolution results entirely from the interplay of 'chance' (for example, random genetic mutations) with 'necessity (the needs to survive, to feed and to reproduce) or is somehow part of the drive of evolution itself, ever seeking fresh and more complex fulfilment. In this climate of scientific humility, quite a large minority of professional practitioners and teachers of science declares that it is respectably scientific to keep an open mind about the possibility of miracles if God is revealed in history as Saviour and Sovereign. Miracles, some scientists say, are among the phenomena which cannot be accurately predicted or fully understood. If they are thought to be real (on religious grounds, which science can neither strengthen nor demolish beyond the possibility of debate), then the scientist has a duty to accept them, with a sense of wonder to which he is already accustomed in his work.
However, to say that the possibility of miracles should be taken seriously is not to say that all stories about them should be taken uncritically. For the extent to which the climate of educated opinion now favours the idea of miracle (defined by C. S. Lewis as an 'interference with nature by supernatural power') should not be exaggerated. Probably most scientists in the world, and most of those who fully accept science without being professional experts, have an attitude of scepticism rather like David Hume's. While acknowledging that the 'laws of nature' are in fact statistical regularities, they do the kind of science that concerns them (not advanced physics) by assuming that the regularities are stable and consistent. And many religious believers are cautious; 'miracle' is no longer 'faith's favourite child' (Goethe). The conservative Calvinist Benjamin Warfield, who (as I have already noted) more or less defined the creed of the American movement known as fundamentalism, published a massive examination of Counterfeit Miracles in 1918, denying that any had taken place since the apostles' day; and since then many Christians have been either outspokenly sceptical or discreetly evasive about some or all of the biblical miracles, which of course Warfield entirely accepted. The 1982 report whose affirmation of the biblical miracles I have quoted recorded a disagreement between Evangelicals: 'Some of us think we should expect miracles as commonly as in the ministry of Jesus and his apostles, while others draw attention to the texts which describe these miracles as authenticating their unique ministry' (ESR, p. 32). For no advance in quantum physics has contradicted the elementary truths of science such as the law of gravity. What we know about nature, after all the investigations, is that it has many statistical patterns, regularities or 'laws' which enable us to understand something of the way it works. That confirms common sense. 'Miracles' are what stands in contrast with understandable regularity and it is inevitable that reports about them are often treated cautiously by educated people.
The Bible includes many sayings such as 'all things are possible with God' and 'everything is possible for him who believes' (Mark 10:27; 9:23). But as the Bible also says, it does not necessarily follow that God performs all the miracles that we should like. The servants of God are not being wise (or biblical) if they rely on the power of their faith to move mountains literally. Nor does it necessarily follow from belief in God as Saviour and Sovereign that he has actually done all the miracles that people have reported. It seems that some accounts of miracles have to be treated as legends if the elementary truths of science are to be accepted, although these accounts may be in the Bible and may read like straightforward history. Thus when considering the authority of the Scriptures I felt it important to separate the Bible's spiritual message from the story that during a war between Israel and the Amorites, in response to the prayer of Joshua, 'the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day' (Joshua 10:13), and from the story that as a sign that King Heze-kiah's prayer for healing would be granted the shadow cast by the sun on a stairway 'went back the ten steps it had gone down' (Isaiah 38:8). These quaint and apparently trivial miracle stories matter in the history of Christian thought. The mistaken belief that they must be taken literally compelled many bishops, theologians and preachers to resist the scientific demonstration, basic to any modem understanding of the universe, that our planet circles around a comparatively immobile sun. The Roman Catholic Church's persecution of Galileo has not ceased to be notorious but was matched by a Protestant stupidity equally discrediting to Christianity.
It was, I suggest, a defect in his Miracles (sub-titled A Preliminary Discussion) that C. S. Lewis never got down to a close examination of the miracle stories in the Bible. It has also been a defect of a good deal of the work of New Testament scholars that they have concentrated on the links between parts of the Bible - for example, on the echoes of the psalms to be found in the New Testament's miracle stories - to the exclusion of serious thought about links with science. That is to eliminate any possibility of conflict with what may be called 'the scientific world-view' or 'common sense' by eliminating any possibility of contact. I am guided by the advice of Η. H. Rowley that 'the miracle stories can neither be uncritically accepted as historical, nor uncritically rejected as fantasy. Each example must be examined for itself, in the light of the character of the narrative in which it stands and the purpose for which it appears to have been written' (The Faith of Israel, 1965, p. 58). My own approach as an amateur will be to study the miracle stories in some detail, asking not only what they mean in the context of the Bible but also how they relate to what we think we know about the way this world is. At some points I shall accept answers to the second question which seem so probable as to be reliable for most practical purposes. At other points I shall be more hesitant. It can be disappointing when the answer to a question ends up in a probability, not a certainty. But I again recall the wisdom of Bishop Joseph Butler, who pointed out how many of our opinions have to be judgements about probability. Probability, he said, is the guide of life.
Biblical Miracles
As Dr Stott has observed (CtC, p. 60), the miracle stories are not spread equally throughout the Bible. If we exclude Genesis we can say that they cluster around Moses; around Elijah and Elisha; and around Jesus and his apostles.
When the stories about Moses are considered seriously nowadays, it is often explained that the 'burning bush' where he had his all-decisive vision of God burned with natural electricity, many similar sights having been observed by travellers in those parts. The spiritual miracle that the leader of the Hebrews saw God as Ί am who I am' (or Ί will be what I will be'), and obeyed the will of that God in liberating his people from slavery, does not depend on the bush being a physical miracle (Exodus 3). Nor does the wonder of that liberation, constituting Israel as a federation of tribes, depend on the literal accuracy of the stories of the ten plagues which afflicted their Egyptian oppressors (Exodus 4-11).
The careful study of those stories has disclosed that they come from two sources, called J and P. Only one comes from J alone and only one from P alone. The two sources have not been harmonised in all details, but they are not utterly unrelated to reality as known to scientists. The introductory tall stories - that the magic wand of Moses became a snake, and that his hand became leprous 'like snow' when put into his cloak - are fortunately not typical. The other stories to some extent reflect the facts that the Nile periodically becomes muddy, looks somewhat like blood, overflows its banks and helps frogs, gnats and flies to breed. Cattle do die of plague; Egyptians are troubled by boils; plagues of locusts are highly destructive; hailstorms and cloud formations producing 'darkness at noon' do occur. Such facts were known, even if only by hearsay, to the story-tellers who, however, added many touches of magic while admitting that the Egyptian magicians could perform some similar feats. Thus the Nile is turned into blood by a magic wand, Aaron creates the frogs, the dust becomes gnats.
It is surely not essential to take such magic seriously even when it is attributed to Moses. Nor is it essential to believe that when the Israelites crossed the sea 'the surging waters stood firm like a wall' and 'congealed' (Exodus 15:8). That is a piece of poetry in the Song of Moses. But another strand in the tradition says that 'all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land' (Exodus 14:21). Elsewhere we are told that it was the Sea of Reeds (Exodus 13:18) and if this was in reality a shallow papyrus marsh on the borders of Egypt the bogging down of the chariots sent in pursuit of the Hebrews is not too hard to explain naturally. Similar natural explanations have been advanced to account for other miracle stories in the Hebrew traditions. The pillar of cloud and the fire at night are said to be volcanic phenomena in the Sinai peninsula; there are other reports of water being made drinkable if a piece of wood is added; manna was almost certainly the secretions of a tamarisk tree caused by the sting of a tree-louse; quail are migratory birds and can be caught easily when exhausted; some springs of water in the desert are thinly concealed by rocks which can be broken. I do not reckon that we are being 'unbelievers' if we prefer such explanations to magic. For the true wonder of the exodus is that a group of fugitive slaves found the Egyptian army not strong enough to catch them, and nature friendly enough to support them, as they grew together to form a people which became a unique instrument in the working out of the loving purpose of God.
In the stories about Elijah and Elisha (1 Kings 17-2 Kings 13:20) we meet two of the heroes of Israel's deliverance from Canaanite paganism. But the story-telling has become fanciful. These stories are what a learned commentator f (John Gray) has called 'traditions orally preserved' by 'dervish guilds', mostly of limited and even trivial interest' and without 'moral tone'. It is possible that 'fire from heaven' or lightning struck both the offerings on an altar to the God of Israel and, later and fatally, Elijah himself; but we have no way of knowing. Obviously there could be a shortage of food, suddenly coming and suddenly going; but the facts behind these tales of miracles during famines cannot be recovered. Obviously children thought to be dead could be resuscitated by artificial respiration, bears could kill other children, poisonous gourds in a stew could be remedied, a skin disease could be cured by the influence of faith on mind and body, an axehead could be recovered after being dropped into a river, and so forth; but the stories are so colourful that we cannot tell exactly what took place in the time of Elijah and Elisha. What is clear is that these legends have little or no connection with the true greatness of the prophets or with the gospel - extremely little when the magic is accompanied by praises of massacres. Luke (9:51-56) reports that when James and John asked Jesus, 'Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to destroy them?' (many manuscripts reading 'even as Elijah did'), Jesus rebuked their lack of mercy on a Samaritan village. And Mark (15:34-37) records that although 'some of those standing near' thought that the crucified Jesus was calling on Elijah for a miracle, in fact the Christians' Lord suffered and died along with the millions who have known no miracle.
Should scepticism be entirely banished when we read the stories told about Jesus himself or about his apostles? We are told that before his own 'exodus' (Luke 9:31, the niv uses 'departure') from life to death and glory, Jesus was strengthened by a mystical experience during which the figures of Moses and Elijah were seen in 'splendour'. Mark tells us that he was popularly thought to be a reincarnation of Elijah (6:15). According to Luke his sermon in the Nazareth synagogue referred to the miracles of Elijah and Elisha (4:24-27) and the healing of the widow's son at Nain (7:11-17) was closely similar to the miracle performed by Elijah in nearby Shunem. All Christians agree that Jesus shared the spiritual splendour of Moses and Elijah as courageous and vastly influential witnesses to the power and holiness of the one true God. But in modem times there has been no such agreement about the real connection of Jesus with the images of Moses and Elijah as miracle-workers. One of the most elaborate of the recent studies of The Miracle Stories of the Early Christian Tradition by Gerd Theissen (in English, 1983), begins its analysis with a very simple statement: 'Today we can no longer regard miracle stories as evidence of divine intervention in the normal course of things' (p. 34). Rudolf Bultmann is quoted: 'Diseases and their cures have their natural causes, and do not depend on the action of evil spirits or on their casting out. This puts an end to the New Testament miracles as miracles.'
One reason why the matter is, I think, somewhat more complicated than Bultmann and Theissen suppose is that it is generally agreed that Jesus was a faith healer and exorcist. As a Jewish scholar, Geza Vermes, showed us afresh in his Jesus the Jew (1973), there were a number of charismatic healers and exorcists at work in Galilee in that century. A hostile echo of the tradition that Jesus 'practised sorcery' has survived in the later Tractate Sanhedrin in the Talmud, but more important is the evidence provided abundantly from many sources including the New Testament that the ability of charismatics to cure diseases and drive out devils was then taken for granted both in Jewish circles and in the pagan world. It was commonly believed that even a Roman emperor could perform miracles of this kind. If the traditions about Jesus had declared that he had lacked this ability, or had not exercised it, that would have been more remarkable than the claims which were made. Jesus and his first followers lived in an age whose character we glimpse when we read what Paul wrote. He criticised the cult of miracle ('Jews demand miraculous signs. . .but we preach Christ crucified'), but saw no need to justify his claim to have performed miracles while preaching 'from Jerusalem all the way around to Dlyiicum' (1 Corinthians 1:22-23; Romans 15:19). His first letter to the Corinthians reminded them that some of them had this power (12:28) before putting the emphasis on love. Similar power was present in the churches of Galatia (3:5), but Paul's second letter to the Thessalonians included another reminder - that Satan, too, could perform 'miracles, signs and wonders' (2:9). The Acts of the Apostles provides many more glimpses of the acceptance of these 'miracles'. There it is claimed that the sick could be cured even by handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul (19:12) or by Peter's passing shadow (5:15). In Jerusalem, we are told, 'many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles' (2:43) in response to their prayers (4:30). In Lystra another healing miracle made the people shout: 'The gods have come down to us in human form!' (14:11). But such power was not thought to be confined to Christians. Among the Samaritans, Simon the sorcerer was already famous as 'the Great Power' before he tried to buy extra power from Peter and John (8:9-24). Against that background, it is not surprising to hear the cry of Jesus in Luke's gospel: Ί will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal' (13:32).
About a third of the earliest surviving gospel tells of the miracles of Jesus and the character of the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John is not very different. Matthew, for example, groups ten miracles together in chapters 8 and 9. Most are healing miracles similar to those in Acts. As with the Acts stories, it is impossible to be sure of the authentic medical situation. Obviously these stories may have grown in the telling during their long journey - between thirty and sixty years long - from a Palestinian village to the pen of the evangelist. This may be true of reports of healing a Gentile from a distance (Mark 7:24-30; Matthew 8:5-13, paralleled in Luke). Sometimes we seem able to watch a story at different stages. Thus Mark (14:47) tells us that a man in the service of the high priest had his right ear cut off during the arrest of Jesus; Luke (22:50-51) that the man was promptly healed by Jesus; and John (18:10) that his name was Mal-chus. It is also obvious that there was nothing like a modern medical diagnosis. Not all 'the sick' are said to be possessed by 'demons' but demon possession was so commonly thought of as the cause of sickness that the anonymous author of the third gospel - traditionally identified with Luke, 'our dear friend . . . the doctor' (Colossians 4:14) -could explain the cure of Peter's mother-in-law (Mark 1:31): 'Jesus bent over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her' (Luke 4:38-39). The detail with which the symptoms are given in the story of the boy healed after the transfiguration, suggesting epilepsy, is not usual (Mark 9:14-32). It has often been explained that people said to be 'blind' may not have lost all power of vision; that people called 'lepers' may have been suffering from any one of a number of skin diseases; that people thought to be 'dead' may have been in a coma. All such explanations reduce the apparent contradictions between these miracle stories and what is known scientifically of the natural healing processes. The contradiction is further reduced if it is recognised that it is sometimes possible to heal by the power of suggestion. There seems no good reason to doubt that Jesus communicated a spiritual power which, if believed in, had physical effects, including the effect of calming and healing persons convinced that they were possessed by demons. The woman subject to bleeding for twelve years touched the cloak of Jesus and was healed, to be told: 'Daughter, your faith has healed you' (Mark 5:34). Luke's special material includes a similar saying (17:19). Nor is it surprising that the acutely sensitive Jesus 'realised that power had gone out from him' (Mark 5:30), particularly when he healed by laying on hands or by a command to the demon. It is not incredible that the influence of an atmosphere of trust in this miracle-worker, not necessarily a clear personal faith, could effect the cure (as in Mark 2:3-5; 7:24-30). Nor is it incredible that what some patients needed was to be assured that their sins were forgiven, since sickness was believed to be a punishment for sins (Mark 2:5). But when Jesus was amazed to find little faith during a return to his home town, 'he could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them' (Mark 6:5). All this can be understood in the context of a large body of evidence about the successful practices of 'faith' or 'psychosomatic' healers in many ages and cultures. It is widely agreed that a calmed, cleansed, strengthened, confident mind can affect the body - that 'faith7 can sometimes 'heal'. Probably every general practitioner of scientific medicine would agree with that.
These stories about Jesus are far removed from the magical atmosphere of the tales about Moses and Elijah. Jesus wields no wand. So far from uttering an incantation such as the conjurer's Abracadabra, he is reported to have been very simple in his words; thus Mark quotes in the original Aramaic not a magical formula but 'Little girl, I say to you, get up!' (5:41) and 'Be opened!7 (7:34). When instead of merely touching 'blind' eyes Jesus uses spittle (8:23) as the commonly accepted means of dealing with eye diseases, the atmosphere is somewhat more magical - but not decisively so, since the spittle can be regarded as a sign of faith in the healing power of God. And according to the gospels Jesus does not make his work as a healer his supreme mission. He does not cure as many people as he can; his cures seem to be compassionate responses to emergencies which come his way. It is noticeable that the number of healings decreases as the gospels move to their climax. Jesus is said to have declared that no miraculous 'sign from heaven' would be given by him (Mark 8:11-12) and to have lamented that 'a wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah' (Matthew 12:39). About the nature of this 'sign of Jonah' the gospels differ. Since Jonah was raised from death in order to preach, Luke (11:29-32) confines the 'sign' to preaching which produces repentance, although Matthew (12:40) interprets it as the sign of the resurrection of Jesus. Luke (16:31) reports a parable which says that people 'will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead'. Certainly the impression is given by the gospels apart from John's that the healing miracles of Jesus prove very little. Korazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum are unimpressed (Matthew 11:20-24). Very few of those cured are said to 'follow' Jesus. Herod hopes to see a miracle done by Jesus without listening to a word he says (Luke 23:8). Those who do 'follow' are warned that at the last judgement it will not be enough to say, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' (Matthew 7:22). Indeed, it is expected that 'false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and miracles' (Mark 13:22). Already the critics of Jesus can themselves drive out demons (Matthew 12:27).
The healing miracles are, however, 'signs' (John's great word in his gospel) that the messianic age, or the age of the Spirit, or the kingdom of God, has dawned. Jesus casts out demons by God's 'finger' (Luke 11:20) or 'Spirit' (Matthew 12:28). In Matthew's gospel (11:1-6), paralleled in Luke's, it is reported that when John the Baptist sends messengers from prison to ask whether Jesus really is the Messiah, the reply points to the signs of the messianic age in the poetry of the books of Isaiah (29:18-19; 35:5-6; 61:1). 'The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor' (Matthew 11:5). Yet the deepest insight into the central purpose of Jesus is provided by his silence. He does not promise John that he will be delivered miraculously from prison. And he does not rely on a miracle to save him from his own death. This silence arises from the decision, made in the depths of his personality and after a great struggle, that it is not the will of his Father that he should compel faith by performing miracles (Matthew 4:5-7, paralleled in Luke). And Paul, when he prays for a healing miracle for himself, receives a silent answer - silent apart from the message: 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness' (2 Corinthians 12:9).
This reserve about the importance of healing miracles prepares us for the problem of those miracle stories which present Jesus not as healing people but as interfering with the course of nature. Such stories are particularly prone to grow in the telling. Thus it must arouse suspicion when Luke (5:1-11), and he alone, adds to the story of the calling of the first disciples a story of a miraculous catch of fish. This may well be a story told in order to draw out the meaning of the promise: 'from now on you will catch men'. A similar story is told by John in the epilogue to his gospel (21:1-14) before the risen Jesus turns Peter from the fisherman into the pastor. Matthew (17:24-27) alone tells the story that Jesus paid the temple tax by contributing a coin found miraculously in the mouth of a fish. This may well be a legend originating in the simple thought that fishermen could pay the tax out of their profits. The story of the fig tree which is withered by the curse of Jesus is found more widely, but it is suspicious that Mark (11:20) says that the tree was found withered next morning while Matthew (21:19) claims that the miracle occurred 'immediately'. This may well be a misunderstanding of a parable comparing the opponents of Jesus with a fruitless fig tree (Luke 13:6-9). At least that explanation seems more in keeping with the character of Jesus than Matthew's, which suggests that Jesus was angry because 'hungry' although it was not the season for fig trees to bear fruit.
Other problems are presented by the stories of the feeding of the thousands and of control over storms on the Lake of Galilee. These stories occur in all the gospels. Indeed, Mark and Matthew occupy much of their space by telling of two feedings, of five thousand and four thousand, with a number of repeated details. It has often been suggested that the Church understood the first story as a drama of the spiritual feeding of Jews, while the second is a drama of the spiritual food of the Gentiles, for it takes place in the region of the Decapolis where many Gentiles lived (Mark 7:31). But this is far from certain since Mark does not say that any Gentiles were fed and Luke, who is specially interested in the Gentile mission, includes only the first feeding (9:10— 17). It has also often been suggested that the feeding was no more than a speeding up of the natural processes which produce grain and fish. But the stories emphasise the miracle by implying that the bread was baked and by not saying that the fish was raw. We are asked to imagine that complete new loaves - so many that 'seven basketfuls of broken pieces' were left over when 'about four thousand' had been 'satisfied' - were multiplied from the seven loaves placed in the hands of Jesus (Mark 8:1-10). And this is very hard to imagine as a piece of accurate history. It is far more likely to have been a story which developed out of a tradition about a large meeting full of excitement and including a common meal in anticipation of the banquets traditionally believed to belong to the messianic age. As the story was passed on, it may well have been compared with the stories of manna in the wilderness and of the miraculous creations of food by Elijah and Elisha - and it may well have acquired colour from those sources. The uncertainty about the numbers involved may well have resulted in two reports being available to Mark and being copied by Matthew.
The story of the walking on the water after the feeding of the four thousand is not included in Luke's gospel. This may have been because he thought it unfit for his readership, which was more educated than Mark's. (He did not recount the story of the cursing of the fig tree.) It is obvious that if Jesus really did multiply the loaves and fish miraculously, he was capable of crossing the lake on foot. It is, however, equally obvious that the disciples have not been the only people to be 'completely amazed' (Mark 6:51). The miracle too closely resembles the story of Elisha's stick which made an iron axe-head float in the river (2 Kings 6:1-7). Another storytells that Jesus 'rebuked the wind and said to the waves, "Quiet! Be still!"' so that the sea was 'completely calm' after a 'furious squall' (Mark 4:35-41). But just as the story of the feeding of the thousands would have appealed particularly to preachers at Christian Eucharists, so these stories must often have been preached as illustrations of the power of the Lord to control the storms of the Christian's life. The probability appears to be that miracle stories developed when, as was almost inevitable in that world, the spiritual message was taken literally. The addition by Matthew (14:28-31) of the story that Peter as well as Jesus walked on the water suggests that the tradition did develop.
What are we to make of these stories? In his Interpreting the Miracles (1963, pp. 122-3), R. H. Fuller concluded a careful examination with a plea for agreement about the religious significance of a story such as the miraculous catch of fish.
Whether we take its historicity for granted (as the evangelist did) or not, the real point lies, as it did for the evangelist, elsewhere. It is over that real point that the fundamentalist and the modem critical believer can agree. For the evangelist, the real miracle was not the draught of the fishes, but the call of Peter to the apostleship and his apostolic ministry. This interpretation is not a modem subterfuge, a solution d'embarrassment for a sceptic whose faith has been corroded by the acids of modernity. It represents the true intention of the evangelist.
My own plea, for what it is worth, is the same as Professor Fuller's. I do not doubt that the writers of the gospels were far less sceptical about the historicity of these miracle stories than are people who are inclined to scepticism because of their whole education and culture. But the intention of the evangelists was not to satisfy modem sceptics with proof that Jesus did perform precisely these miracles. If that had been their aim, they would have had to provide many more medical details of the patients before and after the cure and much more evidence about the miracles of control over nature (although even to suggest this necessity is to move out of their pre-scientific world). Still less was it their aim to prove the 'divinity of Jesus' (which is not a biblical phrase) by his miracles. Many of the contemporaries of Jesus who were emphatically not divine were reported to perform miracles. The real intention was to strengthen the faith of those who read or heard these stories, in order that these Christians might be delivered from the evils ('demons') which they faced in situations far from Palestine. The power of Jesus to conquer fear and anxiety could have healing effects: that they knew and that they preached. And even when it did not cure the ills of the body, even when the Christian had to undergo sufferings like the Lord's own, the Lord's power could calm the storms of life. John's gospel provides a profound meditation on the spiritual significance of seven miraculous 'signs' - the new wine means a new age (2:1-11), the healing of a boy means a new life (4:43-54), the healing of a lame man means a new freedom from sin (5:1-15), the feeding of the thousands means that Jesus is the bread of life (6:1-15,25-59), the walking on the water means that Jesus banishes fear (6:16-21), the healing of a blind man means that Jesus is the light of the world (9:1-41), the raising of Lazarus means that Jesus already is 'the resurrection' or 'eternal life' (11:1-44).
That was the gospel. Is it not the gospel now? And if it is the gospel to be proclaimed within a scientific culture, is not belief in it compatible with scepticism (or an open mind) about the historicity of parts of the miracle stories? May not faith in God through Christ be held together with an inclination to give the stories of healing miracles explanations which are acceptable to those medical scientists who are prepared to make room for the evidence about 'faith' or 'psychosomatic' healing?
The Birth of Jesus
I ask these questions hoping that Evangelicals such as Dr Stott will agree to make some distinction between the essential gospel and the miracle stories of the Bible. But I am fully aware that many conservatives are highly suspicious of - or hostile to - the 'liberal' attitude to the two most important miracles in the Christian Scriptures, the virginal conception and physical resurrection of the Saviour. In 1986 I wrote a booklet (Bishops and Beliefs) about the controversy which erupted in the Church of England after publicity given to sceptical remarks by the new Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins. There I showed that this controversy had many precedents in theological conflicts in England and many other countries throughout the twentieth century. In response to these arguments, belief in the 'virgin birth' and bodily 'resurrection' is stated to be essential for Evangelicals in many definitions of belief by groups and individual teachers around the Evangelical world. Dr Stott has claimed that the doctrine of the virginal conception, for example, is plainly taught in the gospels of Matthew and Luke and 'has been the virtually unanimous belief of the universal Church ever since. This teaching and tradition cannot lightly be set aside. Besides, it is entirely congruous that a supernatural person (who was simultaneously God and man) should enter as well as leave the world in a supernatural way' (AJ, p. 56).
It might seem that a very careful book of some six hundred pages by a Roman Catholic scholar, Raymond Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (1977), left nothing more to be said about the virginal conception of Jesus. The book certainly was an almost completely exhaustive study of the first two chapters of Matthew's gospel and of Luke's. But theologically it left everything to be said, for it did not answer the question whether Jesus truly was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit without the intervention of a human father. Professor Brown rightly said that both Matthew and Luke assumed that the basic historical question had been answered by the traditions which they received. He added, rightly, that those who compiled the summaries of belief commonly called the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds took it for granted that the gospels of Matthew and Luke were true history, a point very seldom disputed in the ancient or medieval Church. But he also showed that it is very difficult indeed for minds accustomed to weigh evidence in the modem manner to accept everything in these gospels as historically accurate - despite the teaching of Dr Stott that Matthew and Luke were writing 'prose not poetry, history not myth' (AJ, p. 58). This problem is relevant to the historical question, since in the whole of the New Testament there is no other reference to the virginal conception.
Paul's surviving letters do not refer to it. They do not even name the mother of Jesus. Instead they accept that Jesus, 'born of a woman' (Galatians 4:4), 'as to his human nature was a descendant of David', presumably through his father (Romans 1:3). Mark's gospel, beginning with the Baptist and the baptism of Jesus, also does not mention this miracle. It does not even record the name of the legal father of Jesus. John's gospel is also silent about a miraculous conception, except that all Christians are Tiom' not through sex but 'of God' (1:13). Far from incorporating the story that Jesus was literally bom of a virgin in Bethlehem, it reflects the tradition that Jesus and his followers had faced the difficulty of origins in Nazareth, a village never mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures. No historical answer is given within this gospel to Nathanael's question, 'Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?' (1:46). Nor are 'others of the people' answered historically when they ask: 'How can the Christ come from Galilee? Does not the Scripture say that the Christ will come from David's family and from Bethlehem, the town where David lived?' (7:41-42).
Even more damaging to the historicity of these early chapters of Matthew and Luke is the fact that none of the gospels shows any signs of a tradition that the sensational events surrounding the birth of Jesus were recalled by his family or other contemporaries. On the contrary, Mark tells us that his family attempted 'to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind,"' and that when the mother and brothers of Jesus were outside the house looking for him he replied that his true family was the circle seated attentively around him (3:21,31-35). Later Jesus lamented that he was a prophet without honour 'in His home town, among his relatives and in his own house' (6:4). Matthew's own gospel reports the saying of Jesus which appears to exclude his mother from the circle of 'whoever does the will of my Father in heaven' (12:46-50), while Luke reports that the adult John the Baptist doubted whether Jesus was the Messiah (7:19) although we are told that his own mother had fully shared Mary's experiences before the miraculous birth. Matthew adds that the Herod whose father had met the Magi was utterly puzzled by reports about Jesus: was this John the Baptist risen from the dead? (14:1-2). And in both gospels the story of the Messiah's birth - of the miraculous star or the appearance of the angels to the shepherds-is said to have been known widely in Jerusalem or in Bethlehem (only five miles away). Yet the story is apparently not known by anyone who meets the adult Jesus.
But the final damage to the historicity of these stories is done by a close examination of their details, many of which are impossible or improbable. There are, for example, contradictions. The family trees of Jesus given by Matthew and Luke do not agree with each other or with the Old Testament. Matthew says nothing of any association with Nazareth until the family is back from Egypt (2:19-23); on the contrary, the Magi are received in a 'house' in Bethlehem (2:1-12), apparently some two years after the birth.
Luke, in contrast, locates the parents of Jesus in Nazareth until a census of the entire Roman world decrees that everyone must go to his own town to register (2:1-7) - a decree which is not mentioned in any other surviving document. Joseph and Mary return to Nazareth after presenting the child in the temple in Jerusalem according to 'the Law of the Lord' (2:21-24) - a law or custom for which, again, there is no other evidence. Matthew says that Joseph is so dismayed by Mary's pregnancy that he intends to divorce her (1:18-19), but Luke claims that her pregnancy has already been explained to Mary by the angel Gabriel (1:26-38). If we believe that both stories are historically accurate, we must suppose either that Mary never told Joseph or that, although a 'just man', he thought that she had invented the story of the angel.
Matthew's stories of Joseph's dreams (1:20-24; 2:13-15) are suspiciously like the stories told in Genesis of the dreams of another Joseph (37:2-11). He claims that a 'star in the east' announced the birth of the Messiah to Gentile astrologers (2:1-2) but does not explain how any star could do such a thing, let alone how it could guide them first to Jerusalem and then, moving ahead of them, to the particular house in Bethlehem where Joseph and Mary were living. He also says that King Herod, although presumably well aware of the popular expectation of a greater king, the Son of David, had to ask 'all the people's chief priests and teachers of the law' where the Messiah was to be bom (2:4). Then he made no effort to investigate the family to which the Magi went. The later massacre of 'all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under' (2:16) is not out of keeping with Herod's known character but is not mentioned in the indignantly careful list of Herod's atrocities given by the Jewish historian, Josephus. It is suspiciously like the story of Pharaoh's massacre of Hebrew boys in Exodus (1:22). In Luke's narrative the characters, saying and experiences of John the Baptist's parents (1:5-25; 57-80) are suspiciously like those of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis and Mary's Song (1:46-55, the Magnificat) resembles the song of Hannah (1 Samuel 2:1-10). For all its beauty, it celebrates not the birth of the Messiah but the deliverance of the humble and poor in Israel, only one sentence being a personal reference. Zechariah's Song (1:68-79, the Benedictus) is similar. Many scholars believe that these are Jewish or Christian hymns which Luke has incorporated. And they do not believe that Dr Stott is right to claim that 'ultimately the facts must have come from Mary and Joseph themselves, whether in written or spoken form' (AJ, p. 61). Joseph seems to have died when Jesus was young. This seems to be the simplest explanation of his absence from the gospels and of the reference to Jesus as 'Mary's son' (Mark 6:3, an expression avoided by Matthew and Luke). If Mary told these stories as facts, she described many events at which she was not present and which are not compatible with each other. According to Jewish custom at that time, she would have been between twelve and thirteen years old when pledged by her family to marry Joseph. Dr Stott thinks that Luke probably 'received her story from her own lips' when he was in Palestine during Paul's imprisonment in Caesarea (AJ, p. 61). But the probable chronology suggests that Mary would then be aged almost eighty and it was very rare for people to live so long.
It seems highly probable that both Matthew and Luke knew of a tradition that an angel had announced that the birth of Jesus would be miraculous, but that to this tradition they added other current stories and their own pious fiction with such success that the imaginations of countless people, including great saints, artists, poets and musicians, have been captured and spiritualised. Apparently the two evangelists did not know of each other's work. Had Matthew known the story of the boy Jesus in the temple in Jerusalem, listening to the teachers of the Law of Moses and asking them questions, it would have fitted in very well with his picture of Jesus as the teacher of the Sermon on the Mount. Had Luke known the story of the Magi, we may guess that he would have delighted to use it as the first great sign that this child was to be 'a light for revelation to the Gentiles' (2:32). But there are enough similarities between their independent narratives to suggest that they inherited a common basic tradition. This tradition may also be reflected in Jewish and pagan charges (of which evidence survives) that Jesus was illegitimate. But it seems more probable that such charges were replies to the stories of Matthew and Luke.
Our answers to the historical question about the virginal conception must therefore depend on our estimates of the probability that this common tradition of an angelic annunciation of a virginal conception is factual rather than fictional. My own answer is that it is probably fictional. As the angel says to Mary in the story, 'nothing is impossible with God' (Luke 1:37). But we have to consider what is probable. Many legends of miracles surrounding the births of heroes exist in the world's literature. We should not link the spiritually beautiful and elevated stories of Matthew and Luke with the pagan myths of girls being impregnated by gods, often against their wills or without their knowledge, but it is striking that within the Christian Church (clearly from the fourth century onwards) the legend developed that Mary was a perpetual virgin. This was thought fitting although Mark's gospel speaks plainly of four brothers of Jesus (James, Joseph, Judas and Simon) and of unnumbered sisters (6:3) and Matthew says that Joseph had no sexual intercourse with Mary until after the birth of Jesus (1:25). It seems clear, although tragic, that births avoiding human sex were thought of as being purer and more wonderful than the mystery of the sexual creation of a new human being.
It is also certain that the ancient world knew nothing of the modem science of genetics, which has done something to unravel the mystery. The mother was commonly but mistakenly thought to contribute nothing to the physical basis of the new personality. She appeared to be a mere tube in which the father's seed became a child. A remarkable illustration of this attitude is the insistence of both Matthew and Luke on tracing the ancestry of Jesus through Joseph although Jesus was only 'the son, so it was thought' of his human father (Luke 3:23). The claim that Jesus was descended from King David could not be supported by claiming that his mother was. But we now know that his mother must have contributed to the genetic equipment which made Jesus a man. Therefore some at least of the theological assertion, familiar in the Church in ancient and medieval times, that his human nature was a new creation, the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit and therefore sinless, resulted from their ignorance of genetics. We live in a different world - a world with which Dr Stott attempts to communicate when he writes that the humanity of Jesus was derived from Mary, while his sinlessness and deity were derived from the Holy Spirit (AJ, p. 65). Within this world we have to think out the gospel which Luke expressed poetically by saying that the Holy Spirit would 'overshadow' Mary (1:35).
There has been a long modem controversy about the suitability of the virginal conception - about its compatibility with the rest of what we know of God's character and methods. It has been generally agreed that the doctrine that Jesus was the Son of God or God the Son incarnate, bom as a man through God's loving initiative for our salvation, does not depend logically on the belief that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, although it is no doubt for many people easier to believe that Jesus was spiritually the Son of God if it is also believed that he was not physically the son of Joseph. This agreement is surely correct. It is well known that like Paul, Mark and John in the New Testament, many Christians in modem times have fervently believed in a gospel about the Son of God which does not include the virginal conception, while some eminent non-Christians (the Prophet of Islam among them as the Koran attests) have believed that Jesus was bom of a virgin without believing that he was in any sense divine or even the supreme prophet. Luke himself does not deduce a full trinitarianism from the virginal conception. He presents a Jesus who is indeed now exalted as the Messiah, the Son of God, the Lord and the Saviour, but who was 'a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs' (Acts 2:22). For Matthew, too, the divinity of Jesus is not proved by his miraculous birth. And all that I am now asking Evangelicals and other conservatives to agree is that in order to believe that the glory of God shone 'in the face of Christ' (2 Corinthians 4:6), that the ultimate truth about the birth of Jesus is not that Joseph so loved Mary but that God so loved the world, it is not necessary to believe that Joseph had nothing to do with the conception of Jesus.
The Resurrection of Jesus
To be a Christian, is it necessary to believe in the supreme miracle reported in the Christian Bible, the physical resurrection of Jesus? The question is so important that I may be forgiven for offering an answer in my own simple and blunt words, although I try to be aware of the sophisticated discussion summarised in, for example, The Structure of Resurrection Belief by Peter Camley, Archbishop of Perth (1987). My own answer to this question is that this belief that the tomb was empty because the corpse was transformed is not necessary although I hold it (or, rather, it holds me despite much puzzlement and doubt). What I believe is essential if one is to be a Christian is that one should share the faith expressed in the popular chorus:
He lives! He lives!
Christ Jesus lives today.
He walks with me,
He talks with me,
Along life's narrow way.
He lives! He lives!
Salvation to impart.
You ask me how I know he lives?
He lives within my heart.
Dr Stott does not like this chorus. He thinks that 'some very orthodox Evangelicals are to blame' when they sing it, because 'to affirm the living presence of Jesus by his Spirit in our hearts is not the same as to affirm his resurrection' (AJ, p. 37). Certainly it is not the same as to affirm his physical resurrection as a fact in history. But to affirm that one who was crucified almost two thousand years ago, feeling God-forsaken, is the living Saviour in my life is to affirm that he has been 'raised from the dead' in some sense - in the sense that matters most to me in my life. Here is the reality which often makes Paul say (in language which is confusing in detail) that Christ is now present and active as Spirit. And I believe that what makes a Christian is a bit, however small, of the experience that 'he lives'. Certainly I know that what keeps me a Christian is the conviction that 'he walks with me' through all the changing scenes of life.
Dr Stott insists on belief in the physical miracle. 'Christianity', he tells us, 'is in its very essence a resurrection religion. The concept of resurrection lies at its heart. If you remove it, Christianity is destroyed' (CtC, p. 61). He is clear that about thirty-six hours after Christ's death his soul and body were reunited and he was 'raised'. 'In this resurrection body Christ burst from the tomb, passed through closed doors, appeared to His disciples and disappeared, and finally, in defiance of the law of gravity, ascended out of sight' (CtC, p. 61). And he is clear that this resurrection
supplies both the proof and the pattern of the resurrection of our body at the last day. As He rose, so shall we - in fact and in manner. The apostle Paul is quite clear about it: 'Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust [i.e. Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [i.e. Christ]' (1 Corinthians 15:49). And, when Christ returns He 'will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body' (Philippians 3:21). On that great day of Christ's return and our resurrection we shall be given bodies like His. (CtC, p. 62)
Dr Stott devoted the fourth chapter of Basic Christianity to assembling the historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ. 'We may not feel able to go so far as Thomas Arnold, who called the resurrection "the best attested fact in history" ',he says, 'but certainly many impartial students have judged the evidence to be extremely good.' Indeed, there 'can be no doubt' that the tomb was empty. It is very unlikely that the women went to the wrong tomb, that Jesus revived naturally after swooning on the cross, that thieves stole the body leaving the grave clothes, that the disciples removed it (and then were prepared to go to prison, flogging and death for a resurrection gospel which was a deliberate lie), or that the Roman or Jewish authorities took it into their own custody but were unable to produce it in response to the apostles' story. 'The authorities' silence is as eloquent a proof of the resurrection as the apostles' witness.' The appearance stories are not deliberate inventions: 'that is as plain as could be'. These narratives are 'sober and unadorned' although 'enlivened by the detailed touches which sound like the work of an eye-witness'. Anyone inventing them would have been careful to avoid both the 'complicated jigsaw puzzle of events which the four gospels together produce' and mention of the apostles' doubts and fears. Also, Mary Magdalene would not have been chosen as the first witness. And itis 'impossible' to dismiss 'ten' appearances, with their 'variety in the circumstances of person, place and mood', as 'the hallucinations of deranged minds' inspired by wishful thinking. Above all, the disciples were transformed into 'men who would hazard their lives for the name of the Lord Christ and turn the world upside down'. 'There is', Dr Stott concludes, 'no adequate explanation of these phenomena other than the great Christian affirmation that "the Lord is risen indeed" . . . The cumulative weight of this evidence is all but conclusive.'
I have quoted this teaching at length because it is an eloquent and very influential exposition of the resurrection of Jesus in terms which are familiar in most Christian - not only conservative Evangelical - evangelism. It presents the physical miracle as the 'pattern and proof' of our own destiny and argues for its truth on historical grounds. Here is an attempt to argue that we can reach a decision about our destiny, and therefore about the reality of the loving and sovereign God, not by the 'leap of faith' which (as Kierkegaard said) feels, even when one has plunged into faith, like swimming in an alarming ocean, and not by any reasoning of a philosophical kind, but by weighing historical evidence. Our attitude to the great questions of religion is to be settled by what we decide most probably took place one Sunday morning almost two thousand years ago. And my own presentations of the Easter faith in preaching and writing have for many years made some of the same points. Yet on some points I am compelled to disagree profoundly. For I believe that the tone of Dr Stott's talk about 'proof' does not do justice either to the difficulty of the problems involved or to the character of the message given in the New Testament. I am convinced that what is essential in that message cannot be communicated to real sceptics unless the problems are faced with total honesty.
Many people find it extremely difficult or impossible to believe that one day they wifi be given bodies which although physically identical or continuous with their corpses will be able to burst from the tomb, etc. This belief involves the idea that one day God will cancel all the laws, regularities or patterns which have made up the framework of this universe, so far over about twenty thousand million years. The implications are that bodies will be reassembled from whatever fragments may remain long after burial or cremation, and will then be reanimated and released to walk around a planet which like these bodies will never be subject to any further decay, making everything unimaginably like our present bodies and the earth on which we walk. And unless this stupendous, all-transforming miracle is to include only a tiny fraction of the human race there seems to be the prospect of inglorious overcrowding. Is such scepticism about the physical side of the New Testament's pictures of our 'resurrection' compatible with the full acceptance of the message that our personalities can be raised from death by the power of God? I believe that it is and that unless it is seen to be, the message itself - the gospel - will be believed by fewer and fewer people.
A physical picture of heaven does not seem a reasonable expectation to hold within the framework of normal reasoning - the framework to which Dr Stott appeals in his historical arguments for the resurrection of Jesus. And many people also find difficulty in these arguments about 'the first Easter'. It is not only fools incapable of understanding historical evidence who wonder whether the resurrection of Jesus was physical. In order to show this I am compelled to examine Dr Stott's arguments from a strictly historical point of view.
There certainly can be doubt that the tomb of Jesus was miraculously empty. The improbability of a body coming to life after brain-death is very great and very obvious. And there are other problems. W. G. Kummel stated some of them in his Theology of the New Testament (in English, 1974, p. 100):
In view of the Palestinian climate, it is not conceivable that the women intend to anoint a corpse on the third day after death. Nor is it comprehensible that the women go to the tomb with the intention of anointing the body although they do not know who will roll away the heavy boulder in front of the tomb. Besides, among the Jews it was not the custom to use spices in caring for the dead. In view of these improbabilities, it is hardly possible to regard this account as historically reliable.
These are problems although it is (whatever Kummel says) possible that the women who loved and followed Jesus were willing to be very unconventional in order to honour him. Although Dr Stott does not mention it, the most likely alternative to such a miracle is that the corpse of Jesus was thrown into the same grave as the corpses of other crucified criminals (presumably in the nearby valley of Hinnom, Jerusalem's rubbish dump) and was beyond recovery and recognition by the time that the story of the resurrection reached the ears of the authorities - a time which may have been many months or years after the death. Almost all Christians will find this alternative distressing to contemplate; I do. But from a strictly historical point of view, excluding all religious faith or emotion, it, too, is possible. Logically it is not necessary to insist on the accuracy or near-accuracy of the evidence given in the New Testament that Jesus was buried in a special tomb known to his followers and that the tomb was known to be empty soon after his burial. There is an alternative.
From this strictly historical point of view, it is not plain that the stories of the appearances of the risen Jesus are so unadorned in their sober accuracy that no non-miraculous explanation of the phenomena can be adequate. Although the task is uncongenial, in all honesty I must point out the difficulties which are familiar to many.
The earliest list of the appearances to have survived is found in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, probably written about twenty-five years after the death of Jesus. Paul recalls that about five years earlier he had preached in Corinth what he had 'received', presumably soon after his conversion within a few years of Christ's death. This was the gospel that Christ died, was buried and 'raised on the third day according to the Scriptures'. The reference to the Scriptures appears to point to Hosea 6:2 -
After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.
Acts 2:26-27 shows that the early Christians also quoted Psalm 16:9-10 in this connection:
My heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will live in hope, because you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see corruption.
But the original meaning of the Hosea passage was an exhortation to Israel to hope for God's forgiveness after chastening - and the original meaning of the psalm was a prayer of hope for the recovery of 'your faithful servant' (the probable meaning of the Hebrew, as in the New English Bible translation) from sickness. The relevance of these passages to a resurrection believed to have occurred about thirty-six hours after a death depends on a method of interpreting Scripture which, as we have seen, is ancient rather than modem. The permanent significance of the reference to 'the Scriptures' seems to be that the Old Testament finally encouraged belief in a resurrection at the end of 'this age' - 'Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt' (Daniel 12:2). It was the Christian conviction that the age to come, the age of the resurrection, the End, had dawned some days after the death of Christ.
Six appearances are then listed by Paul - to Peter; to the Twelve; to 'more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living'; to James; to all the apostles; and 'to me also, as to one abnormally bom'. The appearances to women, so important in the gospels, either are not known or are ignored. Three other problems are whether the suggestion that Judas Iscariot had been replaced among the Twelve was deliberate or a slip; whether the Twelve were deliberately distinguished from 'all the apostles'; and whether the accounts of the appearance to Paul given in Acts (9:1-9; 22:4-11; 26:12-18) suggest that it was abnormal in that no physical body appeared or whether it was in this respect like the earlier appearances. The list given to the Corinthians does not explain the connection between 'was buried' and 'appeared' and the long dispute of the scholars shows that it is uncertain whether or not Paul believed in the physical resurrection of Jesus. My own belief is that he did, but that he insisted that his own 'vision from heaven' (as it is called in Acts 26:19) fully entitled him to equality with the other apostles, so that he could write to the Galatians that'God. . . was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles' (1:15-16). What mattered decisively for Paul was the internal, spiritual experience although that experience was connected with the historical Jesus who was buried and who was raised in a 'spiritual' or 'glorious' body. The minor differences between the accounts of Paul's Damascus Road experience in Acts shows that details about history did not matter decisively to the early Christians.
Of course the claim that Jesus appeared physically after his death does not refer to a mere detail. But the narratives in the gospels, said by Dr Stott to be 'a complicated jigsaw puzzle', produce many problems. Mark recounts that early in the morning Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome saw 'a young man dressed in a white robe', in the empty tomb and were told: 'He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, "He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.'" The women 'fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid' (16:1-8). Matthew says that during the evening and during an earthquake 'Mary Magdalene and the other Mary' met an angel whose 'appearance was like lightning' and whose 'clothes were white as snow'. He had already terrified and concussed the guards by rolling back the stone at the entrance to the tomb and sitting on it. The women were 'afraid yet filled with joy7. The exit of Jesus from his tomb is not described (28:1-10). The only claim to provide a description occurs in the Gospel of Peter which dates from about ad 150. (There not only Jesus, who is now taller than the heavens, but also his cross, come out of the tomb and not only the soldiers, but also the Jewish elders, marvel at the spectacle.) In Matthew's gospel as the women 'hurried away. . . suddenly Jesus met them. "Greetings," he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshipped him,' to be told: 'Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.' And the 'eleven disciples' did see him on a mountain there, although 'some doubted'. They received from him the great promises about his authority and continuing presence and the great commission to 'make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit'. So Matthew and Mark do not agree about the number of the women witnesses. It has never been explained why Mark mentions a young man, who is not explicitly angelic. Mark, like Paul, does not tell us of any appearance to a woman. His authentic gospel stops at verse 8 and by then the women have left the vicinity of the tomb, saying 'nothing to anyone'. Matthew narrates an appearance to the apostles to which Paul also refers - but disturbingly he adds a baptismal formula which (according to Paul's letters and Acts) was not used during the first years of the Church.
Luke (24:1-53) does not name or number 'the women'. In the empty tomb they meet not one 'man' or one 'angel' but 'two men' in gleaming clothes. They report the resurrection 'to the Eleven and to all the others'. Peter alone checks that the tomb is indeed empty apart from the grave clothes. Then Cleopas and another disciple converse with Jesus as they walk to Emmaus. Although their conversation with him is about himself and their destination is seven miles from Jerusalem, they do not recognise him during the long walk. They tell him that 'some of our companions' saw that the tomb was indeed empty, just as the women had said after their 'vision of angels'. When Jesus is recognised as he begins supper with a grace, he disappears. By the time that these two reach the Eleven Jesus has appeared to Peter. He then appears to 'the Eleven and those with them', invites them to touch him and eats a piece of broiled fish in their presence. He tells them to 'stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high' and leads them out to the neighbourhood of Bethany, where after blessing them he is taken up to heaven. The disciples then 'stayed continually at the temple'. No mention is made of any appearance in Galilee; on the contrary, had the disciples gone to Galilee it would have been against their risen Lord's explicit command. No explanation is given about the timing of the final appearance in the gospel (called 'the Ascension' in the New International Version) in relation to the beginning of Acts, which is clearly a sequel to Luke's gospel.
Since it is 'nearly evening' at Luke 24:29 and the disciples have to walk seven miles back to the city before the next meeting with Jesus, the gospel reads as if Jesus took his farewell by night, some twenty-four hours after his resurrection. But Acts 1:3 says that 'he appeared to them over a period of forty days'.
The appearances related in John's gospel (20:1-21:24) combine Jerusalem with Galilee. Here only one woman, Mary Magdalene, goes to the tomb. She does not at first meet any man or angel but when she finds the tomb empty she tells Peter and 'the disciple whom Jesus loved', who both investigate. When they have gone back to their homes, she talks with two angels and then meets the risen Jesus, at first mistaking him for the gardener. In the evening Jesus appears to the disciples, having come through locked doors. A week later he appears to a circle which now includes Thomas and he invites him to feel his body. Later he appears to Peter and six other disciples in Galilee, creates a miraculous catch of fish, cooks breakfast and talks with Peter.
John's stories, like Luke's story of the road to Emmaus, possess undying spiritual beauty, fascination and force, but the need to believe that the disciples returned to their fishing trade in Galilee only briefly before going back to Jerusalem is not the only problem in fitting together the pieces of what Dr Stott calls a 'jigsaw puzzle'. Indeed, it has proved impossible to construct a fully harmonised version of the resurrection stories, despite many attempts to do so. It is curious that the gospels in the New Testament contain no stories of the appearances listed by Paul as being to Peter, to more than five hundred and to James (who presumably is James the brother of Jesus). Nor is there any story of an appearance to Mary the mother of Jesus, although in Acts (1:14) she appears with James and her other sons among the disciples. But the stories as given constitute not a jigsaw puzzle but an insoluble mystery.
The incompatibilities in numbering the women and the angels, or in locating and timing the appearances, are less significant than the problems about the physicality of the risen Jesus. A body so normal that it can be clasped, can be thought to be a stranger's, and can cook and eat, is also said to be unrecognisable by disciples, to pass through walls or locked doors, and to disappear at will. Another problem, less noticed by commentators, is that it is said to have acquired clothes which seem to have looked normal (unlike the robes of the angels). It seems difficult to classify the reported phenomenon as either physical or psychic. And what was physical in the glorious Easter body is reported to have ceased when the appearances ceased. It is for ever beyond our understanding.
This difficulty would matter greatly if belief in the physicality of our own future resurrection bodies, said to be promised by the physicality of Christ's risen body, is to be regarded as essential to Christian faith. But we read that Jesus taught that 'at the resurrection they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven'. The possibility of a glorious resurrection depends entirely on 'the power of God' - and on the love of God. God's will is that he should continue to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who are dead. So he is the God of all who, although dead, are 'the living' because God raises them above death (Mark 12:24-27). And Paul expected that the 'spiritual bod/ - imperishable, glorious and powerful - would not be the same body, for 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable' (1 Corinthians 15:50). The 1982 report on Evangelism and Social Responsibility tells us that this international gathering of Evangelical leaders found itself united in the belief that God is going to re-create 'our bodies', and not create another body ex nihilo, 'for the principle of continuity is evident in the resurrection of Jesus. Although, as Paul expresses it, our new body will be as different from the old as a flower differs from the seed, nevertheless there will be a continuity between the two.' This report dtes another sentence in Paul's first letter to Corinth: 'God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power' (ESR, p. 41). But it is important to remember that in the ancient world it was believed that a seed dies in the ground (1 Corinthians 15:36; John 12:24). The continuity between 'our bodies' and heaven as pictured by Paul is a continuity through death, which is why Paul also dwells on the contrast. He compares it with the difference between human flesh and the flesh of fish, or between the sun and the moon.
An examination of Paul's teachings about the resurrection of Christians shows that here, as in the teaching about the closely linked subject of the end of this present age, he used pictures which cannot be fitted into each other exactly and which should not be treated as literal descriptions of the future. The Philippians are encouraged to await eagerly a Saviour from heaven 'who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body7 (3:20-21). It is a picture of the End. So is the picture in the first letter to the Thessalonians of the meeting with the Lord in the clouds after 'the trumpet call of God' (4:16-17). A similar vision is shared with the Romans: 'he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies' (8:11). Indeed, the whole universe is being 'liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God' (8:21). Until the glory of that End, the dead 'fall asleep' (1 Thessalonians 4:13,15). Yet 'if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands' and in it we shall be 'at home with the Lord' (2 Corinthians 5:1,8). It seems purposeless to ask whether the glorious bodies of the saints who survive to see the End are to be made on the earth or in the clouds, or whether those who die before the End are merely to sleep in their spiritual tents which will later be replaced by spiritual bodies. 'Someone may ask, "How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?"' If so, Paul comments: 'How foolish!' (1 Corinthians 15:35-36). For it is foolish to ask about the age or the life to come questions which are relevant only to this life. Perhaps not all of the speculations of Paul himself were entirely wise.
To some extent the historical question about the resurrection of Jesus is similar to the historical question about his virginal conception. In common with more expert scholars I have suggested that the birth stories of Matthew and Luke can be shown to contain at least elements of fiction and that the tradition which they both reflect, of an angelic annunciation of a virginal conception, is probably also legendary. Reflection on the resurrection stories leads me to a partly sceptical conclusion about the historical accuracy of these stories as we have them. The narratives are indeed, as Dr Stott says, 'sober and unadorned' in comparison with some legends, but some or all of the detailed touches in them may well be the work of a story-teller. We know from the parables in his gospel as well as from the Acts of the Apostles that Luke, for example, was a story-teller of consummate skill, able to combine restraint and brevity with vividness. Many Christians, perhaps most, can trace the hand of a story-teller in the reports that at the hour of the death of Jesus 'the curtain of the temple was tom in two from top to bottom' (Mark 15:38), that there was an earthquake during which 'many holy people' came out of their tombs and later 'appeared to many people' in Jerusalem, and that the guards at the tomb of Jesus were so afraid of a resplendent angel who appeared during another earthquake that they became 'like dead men' (Matthew 27: 52-53; 28:2-3). But we have to ask whether these are the only legends in the Easter traditions. The difference of details in these resurrection stories is best accounted for, in my view, by holding either that the stories were handed on in different communities or that the evangelists had different imaginations. But although the opinion which I reach about literary and historical probability cannot endorse the Christmas or Easter stories as all literally true, in my honest view the probability seems to be that the central claim behind the Easter stories is reliable. I believe that contrary to what is known of nature Jesus appeared alive and triumphant after his death, his tomb being empty and his glorious body having some recognisably physical characteristics. It was a miracle.
I say this because I believe that miracles, however rare, are possible in principle and because the evidence for this one seems strong enough to appeal to a person who already believes in this possibility. Like the report that Jesus was a wonderful healer, the report that he appeared alive and triumphant after being buried comes to us from a number of sources. It was taught to Paul within a few years of the crucifixion and he could tell the Corinthians that most of the eye witnesses were alive when he wrote to them. It is common ground amid the differences between Matthew, Luke and John. Mark's gospel may be the one exception to this consensus. The puzzle of its enigmatic end is sometimes solved by saying that Mark did not know of any resurrection appearances and believed that they would be postponed until the time when 'men will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory', as predicted at 13:26 and 14:62. But this solution seems improbable, since the reference in his Easter story is to a future appearance in Galilee, not in the clouds. It seems more likely that Mark believed that such an appearance had taken place but that his gospel does not include it, either for a reason unknown to us or because its end was soon lost after 16:8. If so, Mark's gospel is not really the exception and all the gospels testify, as does Paul, to the appearances of the risen Lord.
With our modern inclination to minimise the divine or supernatural interference in the processes of nature known to be normal, we may prefer to classify these appearances along with the psychic phenomena commonly called 'ghost stories'. Not all 'ghost stories' deserve a complete scepticism although many do. The evidence about mortem experiences is always debatable, but it is quite widely believed by serious investigators that the very large body of evidence in this field does not rest entirely on fraud or self-deception. However, I am convinced that if the traditionabouttheappearancesofjesusistobeplaced among post mortem psychic phenomena, its place must be unique. For these appearances transformed the disciples. Luke, who appreciated the power of the resurrection in the history of the progress of the gospel from Nazareth to Rome, was emphatic that the disciples did not see a mere ghost (24: 37-39). He deduced that the risen Jesus must have had 'flesh and bones'. What can be said with more confidence is that the post mortem appearances had the power to evoke in the Christian community poetic celebrations with the thrill of triumph. 'The trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed' (1 Corinthians 15:52). 'He placed his right hand on me and said: "Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades'" (Revelation 1:17-18). It can also be said confidently that the Christian celebration of this triumph took place on the first day of the Jewish week, the day associated with the event of the resurrection of Jesus. This 'Sunday' gradually replaced the seventh day ('Saturday) as the holy day of the Christians, the climax of their celebration being a memorial of the death of Jesus. Those who belong to the community of Christian faith know how terrible would have been the memory of the totally humiliating death without the memory of the appearances of the risen Lord. So I conclude that these appearances were real and really powerful. Far from being hallucinations, they were uniquely real. I note that this was the conclusion of a recent book by an orthodox Jew, Pinchas Lapide, on The Resurrection of Jesus (in English, 1983). It was also the upshot of the scholarly discussion in the book by Archbishop Peter Camley to which I have referred.
For many a modem mind it would be simpler to leave it at that, for so far I have said no more than that the appearances were like psychic phenomena, although far more triumphant than other events behind authentic 'ghost stories', far more powerful in transforming people from a state of defeat, normal collapse and despair. But the evidence does not permit me to consider only the tradition that 'he appeared'. The message which Paul and the gospel-writers conveyed was that Jesus appeared after being buried. The deduction that his tomb was empty is less probable than the deduction that his appearances were real, for it is further removed from the world known to science. We are reminded of that by the uncertainty about whether Paul himself accepted or knew this tradition. Many thoughtful modem people therefore confine their own Easter faith to the convictions that 'he lives' and 'he appeared', excluding the empty tomb. For example, Pinchas Lapide wrote: T cannot believe in the empty tomb nor in the angels with white garments ... All that belongs to the pious fraud of later generations which themselves no longer felt the direct impact' (p. 12). But the empty tomb is a tradition in all the gospels and, as it seems to me, can reasonably be accepted on such evidence as exists by people who thoroughly appreciate what it means to say that physical miracles are possible for God who is the Saviour and the Sovereign- and what it means to say that Jesus was and is the utterly unique Lord, the Son or Word of this sovereign God.
The empty tomb, if accepted within this faith, was an astounding demonstration of the power of the Creator to cancel the processes of death and decay. It was a miracle utterly unique and therefore beyond our understanding -for we can understand only what we can classify. It involved the dematerialisation of a corpse, for nothing less than that could assure the disciples that the death of Jesus was followed by triumph rather than survival and that they must now share the joy of the triumph. That miracle did not, I think, provide information about the precise future of the universe, of the earth or of any member of the human race other than Jesus. It did not even mean that Jesus himself was always to keep a body that was physical. He 'ascended'. I am aware that Dr Stott is among those who take at least some of the New Testament's pictures of the ultimate destiny literally. One day, he writes, 'Jesus Christ will appear in full magnificence. He will raise the dead, judge the world, regenerate the universe and bring God's Kingdom to perfection. From it all pain, decay, sin, sorrow and death will be banished, and in it God will be glorified for ever' (IFCT, p. 35). But I am among those who believe that these are only imaginative pictures, not blueprints of the future of this planet. Although the 'spiritual' or 'glorious' body in which Jesus appeared is a sign pointing to God's will for all humanity - for it leads to the hope that our j oyful end will be 'spiritual' and 'glorious' - it seems highly improbable that all the tombs of humanity will ever be emptied. The emptiness of the tomb of Jesus, and of Jesus alone, was (it seems) a sign given by God because of the uniqueness of his embodiment of God, because of the uniqueness of his work, because of the uniqueness of the evil which judicially murdered him, and because of the uniqueness of the danger that his cause would be lost as his disciples crept back to Galilee in despair. So I believe. However, if further reflection by myself within my own limited capacity, or by others, were to sway the argument the other way (against the empty tomb), I should not feel that the heart of the Christian faith had been destroyed. I cannot regard it as the absolutely decisive question, whether the physicality of the life of Jesus was ended on the first Good Friday or a few days, or forty days, later. The essential belief, it seems to me, is that God the Saviour and Sovereign has shown the power of his love by raising Jesus from the dead, so that Jesus appeared to his disciples after being buried. He met them as the Living One. That is what makes Christianity a resurrection religion.
I do not claim that the conclusion that the tomb was empty ought to be accepted merely because no other explanation is adequate and the cumulative weight of the evidence in this direction is all but conclusive. Here is a conclusion which is likely to seem reasonable and probable only to people who are prepared to take the step of faith into the post-resurrection community-a community which is formed by the trembling acknowledgement (not understanding) of a mysterious act by the God who is the ultimate reality but also the ultimate mystery. Amid the welter of discussion about the 'Easter faith' and history, I have found no words wiser than these:
This is an affirmation about God which historical evidence as such cannot demonstrate (or, for that matter, disprove). Yet it is not unrelated to history, for the affirmation began to be made at a particular point of time, which can be dated by historical means, and it was motivated by occurrences which can be described in historical terms. . . It is evident that these appearances, vitally important as they were in the origins of primitive Christianity, cannot prove more than that, after the crucifixion, certain persons believed that they had seen Jesus again; they cannot prove the Christian doctrine of the resurrection, since this involves a statement about the action of God incapable alike of observation and demonstration. (C. K. Barrett, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 1971, p. 341)
The first messengers of the empty tomb in the gospels are women. Their evidence would not have been admitted in any court of law in that male-dominated society and they 'were afraid'. But they believed, we are told, because of their direct experience. The gospels do not claim that Pilate, Caiaphas, the other enemies of Jesus or the mob repented because they found the weight of the evidence for the empty tomb overwhelming: the direct experience was essential before there could be faith. Frequently Paul insists on the absolute necessity of a trusting faith and of the spiritual rebirth. I have found in my own experience, and in all that I know of other people's, that the empty tomb almost always seems incredible unless one has this felt, active, all-transforming faith in the utter uniqueness of the one Lord - the Lord whom one must follow in his suffering before one glimpses his victory. One has to belong to the company of those whose hearts, in so far as they are attached to the world known to the passions or to science, history and normal everyday experience, have been broken. One has to know something of what Paul meant when he said that 'if only for this life we have hope in
Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men' (1 Corinthians 15:19). And after that knowledge of death and defeat through our knowledge of the death and defeat of Jesus, we have to be ready to say - again out of our own experience -that 'surely this man was the Son of God', that 'our hearts were burning within us while he talked with us on the road', that he knows us by name and is our Teacher, that he is our peace, that he is our divine Lord, that he forgives our betrayals because he knows that we love him, that he commands us to feed his sheep, that he goes before us as we follow him into the unknown, that he 'will be with us always', that he is the miraculous Christ.
JOHN STOTT'S RESPONSE TO CHAPTER 4
My dear David,
I am glad you have included in your book this chapter on miracles, because clearly Evangelicals (indeed, conservatives of all sorts) and liberals react differently to miraculous claims, and Christian attitudes to them have ranged from uncritical endorsement through doubt and embarrassment to outright rejection. I wonder if you will have seen what is certainly the most thorough scholarly treatment of miracles yet written by an Evangelical, namely Colin Brown's Miracles and the Critical Mind (1984)? It is a well-documented historical survey and evaluation, and Dr Brown followed it in 1985 with a more popular book covering very similar ground, entitled That You May Believe. In both books he quotes this rather telling statement of Reinhold Seeberg: 'Miracle was once the foundation of all apologetics, then it became an apologetic crutch, and today it is not infrequently regarded as a cross for apologetics to bear.'
There are two reasons why this chapter (both your essay and my response) differs from the previous three. The first is that, as you rightly comment, I have never attempted a full discourse on this topic. In consequence I am in a better position to respond to you, than you are to me! The second difference is that in this area I find myself caught in the crossfire between credulity and scepticism, that is, between those who not only accept the biblical miracles but believe they are continuing today and every day, and those who deny not only contemporary miracles but the biblical ones as well. I feel I need to address myself to both positions if I am to clarify the traditional stance of Evangelicals on this topic.
Signs and Wonders Today?
During the last few years a 'signs and wonders' movement has developed, as you will know, within charismatic circles. Its origin is associated with John Wimber and his Vineyard Fellowship in California, but it has now spread to several other countries, including ours. John Wimber (with Kevin Springer) has summarised his position in two books called Power Evangelism (1985) and Power Healing (1986). Although I cannot attempt to do justice to them here, he argues in Power Evangelism as follows:
(1) Since the kingdom of God has come, life is an unremitting battle with Satan, in which we conquer territory for Jesus Christ, evidenced by signs and wonders.
(2) Signs and wonders were 'everyday occurrences in New Testament times' and 'a part of daily life' ( Evangelism, p. 117).
(3) They should therefore be part of 'the normal Christian life' for us too (pp. 11, 101), since God 'has given us the authority to work the works of Jesus' and 'his power is available to us to do the same works' (pp. 102,105).
(4) Church growth in the Acts of the Apostles was due largely to signs and wonders, and still is today. 'Power evangelism is a spontaneous, Spirit-inspired, empowered presentation of the gospel' (p. 46).
(5) Resistance to this emphasis is due to a 'western world-view' dependent on logic and rationalism (pp. 74-85).
I think I was particularly struck by the repeated phrase 'the normal Christian life', partly because it reminded me of an earlier book with that title by the Chinese author Watchman Nee, and partly because I am convinced that miracles cannot be described as 'normal'. Indeed, any definition of miracles must include the fact that they are abnormal, and are deviations from God's normal mode of working. This, then, is a good place for me to begin my response to you. You and I are fully agreed, I am sure, that the overriding biblical revelation of God is of the living Creator who, having made the universe, holds it in his power and sustains the life of all its (i.e. his) creatures. He causes his sun to rise, and sends rain upon the earth. The sea is his, and so is the dry land. He makes the rivers flow and the grass to grow. His trees are well watered. He feeds the birds and clothes the flowers. And 'he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else' (Acts 17:25; cf. Matthew 5:45; 6:25-30; Psalm 95; 104). Moreover, included in life is health. All healing is divine healing. God has put in the human body remarkable therapeutic and recuperative powers, so that, for example, antibodies are formed to fight infection, and energy is restored in sleep. God is ceaselessly active not only in nature, but also in history, working out his purposes in all the nations of the earth. In both spheres (nature and history) we echo the triumphant cry of the psalmist: 'Yahweh reigns!' It is very important for all of us to recover this biblical perspective, for some charismatic Christians are inclined to discern God only in miraculous happenings, which is to turn him into a magician and miss the principal spheres of his operation. This is the biblical witness to those observed normalities or regularities which are usually called 'natural laws'. It was the Christian insistence on the uniformity of nature which provided the essential basis for the scientific enterprise. As Professor R. Hooykaas argued, 'Metaphorically speaking, whereas the bodily ingredients of science may have been Greek, its vitamins and hormones were biblical' (Religion and the Rise of Modem Science, 1972, p. 162).
As a corollary to this, we have to say that the Bible is not primarily a book of miracles, since the God of the Bible is not primarily a God of miracles. Of course the Bible contains miracle stories, as we know, but they do not occur evenly throughout the books of the Bible, and whole tracts of biblical history are devoid of them. It is because they appear in significant clusters that it is possible to propose a biblical doctrine of miracles. For the clusters relate to the four major epochs of God's redemptive revelation, and are associated with the major figures of those epochs - first Moses, the exodus and the giving of the law; secondly, Elijah and Elisha, pioneers of the outburst of prophecy during the monarchy, and champions of the contest between Yahweh and the Canaanite deities, not to mention some of the later prophets; thirdly our Lord Jesus and his inauguration of the kingdom of God; and fourthly the apostles, whom he appointed and authorised to found and teach his Church. That is why we refer to the Acts correctly as 'the Acts of the Apostles', and why Paul called his miracles 'the things that mark an apostle' (2 Corinthians 12:12; see also Acts 1:2; 2:42-43; 5:12; 14:3-4, etc.; Hebrews 2:1-4). This authentication by miracles of the great figures of salvation history and the great organs of revelation has been recognised throughout Christian history, beginning in particular with Augustine. Calvin, in his preface to the first edition of his Institutes (1536), replied in these words to the Roman Catholic criticism that the Reformers' doctrine was a novelty unsupported by miracles: 'In demanding miracles of us, they act dishonestly. For we are not forging some new gospel, but are retaining that very gospel whose truth all the miracles that Jesus Christ and his disciples ever wrought serve to confirm', (p.5). for the 'legitimate end and use of miracles', according to Scripture, was to confirm, seal and magnify both the law and the gospel.
Does this mean that miracles died out with the apostles? No, not necessarily. This is the mistake which B. B. Warfield made in his otherwise important book Miracles Yesterday and Today, which was first published in 1918 as Counterfeit Miracles. He was right in his affirmation that miracles were 'part of the credentials of the Apostles as the authoritative agents of God in founding the church', but wrong in his deduction that miracles were 'confined... to the Apostolic Church and .. . necessarily passed away with it' (p. 6). Those of us who believe (as I do) that the major function of miracles no longer exists, because we are not living in a fresh epoch of revelation or redemption, and that therefore we have no liberty to expect miracles to occur with the frequency with which they occurred in such epochs, should nevertheless be entirely open to them. We believe that God the Creator is free, sovereign and powerful. We must not attempt to domesticate God, or dictate to him what he is allowed to do. Especially on the frontiers of mission, where a power-encounter may be needed to demonstrate the lordship of Christ, miracles have been and are being reported. So if our expectation is limited, we must ensure that this is due to the biblical doctrine of miracles, and not to our unbelief or to a Western rationalistic mind-set.
As a church historian, David, I expect you have come across Baron George Lyttelton's little book Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St Paul (new edition 1769)? Lyttleton refers in it to certain recent and 'famous miracles supposed to be done at Abbe Paris's tomb' in France which were enthusiastically claimed by the Jansenists. The authorities were determined to suppress them, however. So first they walled up that part of the church where the tomb was situated, and then they fixed on the wall this peremptory order: De par le roy defense a Dieu defaire miracle en ce lieu, which Lyttelton translated: 'By command of the king, God is forbidden to work any more miracles here'!
The Argument against Miracles
Three main arguments seem to have been developed against miracles in general and against the biblical miracles in particular. Perhaps it would be appropriate for me to attempt a response to them, even though you do not elaborate them all.
The first is that miracles cannot and therefore did not happen, and that in the modem world it is impossible to believe in them any longer. You quote Bultmann's famous statement to this effect. But the roots of such scepticism go back at least to Spinoza in the seventeenth century, who plainly declared that nothing in nature can 'contravene nature's universal laws'. This conviction about the mechanistic uniformity of nature was given a further push by Newton's brilliant exposition of the laws of physics (died 1727), and found in David Hume in the same century its best-known champion. You quote Hume's definition of a miracle as 'a violation of nature' and his consequent rejection of them. In the nineteenth century Strauss and Renan published their Lives of Jesus from which everything miraculous had been expunged. Coming to our own century, I will quote only from a lecture in 1937 by Max Planck, the distinguished German physicist: 'the faith in miracles must yield ground, step by step, before the steady and firm advance of the forces of science, and its total defeat is indubitably a mere matter of time' (A Scientific Autobiography, 1950, p. 155). I imagine that all this is what you mean by 'the climate of educated opinion'.
But there still remains a large (even growing?) number of educated people who do not share the contemporary climate of scepticism. They do more even than 'keep an open mind about the possibility of miracles' (your phrase); they actually believe in them! I think, for example, of those fourteen scientists, most of whom were university professors in different disciplines, and whose spokesman was the geneticist Professor R. J. Berry, President of the Linnaean Society, who wrote to The Times on 13 July 1984 as follows: 'It is not logically valid to use science as an argument against miracles . . . We gladly accept the virgin birth, the Gospel miracles and the resurrection of Christ as historical events.' I doubt if these scientists would be comfortable with Hume's definition of a miracle as 'a violation of the laws of nature', for it implies a violent contradiction. C. S. Lewis' 'interference' is better. But better still, instead of a violation of (or interference with) the natural, would be a deviation from the normal. Professor Donald MacKay emphasised this in his The Clockwork Image (1974): 'Biblical theism insists that any breaks with scientific precedent that have occurred were but a further expression of the same faithfulness (of God) to a coherent overall purpose which is normally expressed in the day-to-day reliability of nature on which we depend as scientists.' He then instanced the resurrection of Jesus as something not incredible but inevitable, 'because it was not possible for death to keep its hold on him' (Acts 2:24). 'In other words, it would not have made sense for the Creator, when he came into his own drama, to have been destroyed in any ultimate sense by characters in that drama' (pp. 65-6). In all this I am not suggesting that miracles are an adequate basis for theism. But, once we have come on other grounds to believe in God, indeed in 'a real, living, active, creative, loving, serving God' (as you beautifully describe him), it becomes logical to affirm, and illogical to deny, the possibility of the miraculous. For 'natural laws' describe God's activity; they do not control it.
The second argument against the biblical miracles follows; it declares that such stories are legends. You yourself mention the parallels which some scholars have discerned either in Greek tales of healers, exorcists and 'divine men', or in the 'charismatic' Jewish teachers and miracle-workers (of whom Geza Vermes has written), or in the fanciful prodigies of the apocryphal gospels, which Archbishop Trench called 'a barren and dreary waste of wonders without object or aim'. (Dr Craig Blomberg has a useful section on these supposed 'parallels' in his The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 1987, pp. 81-92.) But in contrast to these, the miracles of Jesus in the canonical gospels are sober, restrained, unsensational and spiritually significant, as we will see later. Moreover, they are evenly distributed through the four gospels and their sources, so that they are widely attested; the time elapsing between the public ministry of Jesus and the publication of the gospels was not long enough for the development of legends; and many eyewitnesses would have been still alive to refute (if the stories were not true), for example, the restoration to Malchus of his right ear and to Bartimaeus of his eyesight.
Thirdly, a standard objection to miracles has been the argument that the evidence for them is inadequate. This is not just Hume's general point that the witnesses of miracles are either incompetent or gullible or prone to exaggeration or lovers of gossip, or 'ignorant and barbarous', or impelled by ulterior motives. It is rather his emphasis on the principle of analogy. That is, all testimony has to be evaluated in the light of our regular experience. Since we did not ourselves experience a past event, we have to ask if it is in any way analogous to events which we have experienced. Ernst Troeltsch, the early twentieth-century German theologian and philosopher, developed this argument further. He wrote: 'Agreement with normal, ordinary, repeatedly attested modes of occurrence and conditions, as we know them, is the mark of probability for the occurrences which criticism can acknowledge as having really happened or leave aside' (quoted by Colin Brown in Miracles and the Critical Mind, p. 129).
It is not valid, however, to make the principle of analogy determinative of truth and to reject as unhistorical any event of which we have had no analogous experience. John Locke told the story of the King of Siam, repeated by Hume and others of 'an Indian prince', who, when the Dutch ambassador told him of water in northern countries which becomes so hard that elephants could walk on it, refused to believe in ice: 'Hitherto I have believed the strange things you have told me, because I look upon you as a sober, fair man; but now I am sure you lie' (quoted by Colin Brown in That You May Believe, p. 33, and in Miracles and the Critical Mind, p. 84). But the fact that ice was beyond the king's own experience was not a reasonable ground on which to refuse to believe in it. Similarly, as those fourteen scientists said in their letter to The Times, 'Miracles are unprecedented events . . .It is important to affirm that science (based as it is upon the observation of precedents) can have nothing to say on the subject.' The incarnation and the resurrection, for example, were both sui generis, without precedent or parallel. If anybody could claim an analogy in his own experience, it would be a reason for disbelief, not faith.
I realise that these general points are not a complete answer to the commonest philosophical, scientific and historical objections to miracles, but perhaps they show in what direction answers may be sought and found.
A Fresh Look at the Gospel Miracles
I do not have space to comment on the Old Testament miracles which you mention, although, as you say, the portrayal of some is certainly poetic rather than literal (e.g. 'By the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up/ Exodus 15:8); others may be explained by natural phenomena (e.g. the quails and the manna), in which case the miraculous element was only the timing; and a number are important because they belong to the context of God's judgement and salvation (e.g. the exodus) and to the public contest between Yahweh and Baal (e.g. the fire consuming Elijah's sacrifice on Carmel).
Instead, I will concentrate on the miracles of Jesus recorded in the gospels. A good place to begin is with the three commonest words which are used to describe them. 'Powers' (dunameis) seems to refer to their origin and nature: they were expressions of supernatural power, though in other people the power could be satanic, not divine. 'Works' (erga is similar.) The second word 'wonders' (terata) refers to their effect; they evoked amazement in the people who witnessed them. More important than either of these, however, is 'signs' (semeia), which indicates that they signified something. They were more than power-packed, wonder-working events (which is all they are in the apocryphal gospels); they had a message. They were sermons, parables, even sacraments, which pointed beyond themselves to another and greater reality. So their purpose was to arouse in the beholders not just astonishment but understanding, and indeed an understanding faith. John is of course the evangelist who emphasises that Jesus' miracles were 'signs' (seventeen times in his gospel), and many commentators have suggested that the first half of his gospel, because it deliberately focuses on seven major signs, could be called 'the Book of Signs', while the second part is 'the Book of Suffering'. To John Jesus' signs belonged to the category of testimony, whose purpose was to lead to faith and so to life: 'Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name' (20:30-31). The order is clear: testimony (through words and signs)—faith —life. John is not the only evangelist, however, who calls miracles 'signs'; so do the three synoptists (especially in the phrase 'seeking a sign'), and so did Peter in his Pentecost sermon, namely that Jesus of Nazareth was 'a man accredited by God ... by miracles, wonders and signs [he used the three words together], which God did among you through him' (Acts 2:22). Indeed, it is the sign-character or significance of the miracles, and the teaching which they embody, which is their distinguishing characteristic. For false prophets can also do miracles which exhibit power and excite wonder (Deuteronomy 13:1-3; Mark 13:22), but they perform them according to 'the energy of Satan' (2 Thessalonians 2:9; cf. Matthew 12:24-28). Such miracles could even be called 'signs', as in Deuteronomy 13 and Mark 13, but what they signify is different. The signs must be judged by the teaching, not the teaching by the signs.
This biblical emphasis on miracles as meaningful 'signs' seems to offer the most fruitful way forward in our dialogue. It explains Jesus' refusal to perform miracles on demand or for show, merely to satisfy curiosity or create a sensation (e.g. Matthew 12:39; 16:1-4; Luke 23:8). It is true that in these verses what people were requesting was precisely 'a sign', yet all they meant by this was an authenticating display of power (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:22). Jesus had decisively rejected that way of securing a following before his public ministry began (Matthew 4:1-11). In this John and the synoptists are agreed, and Alan Richardson was surely right to draw attention to it:
We would draw no . . . dear distinction between the Synoptists and St John. In all the Gospels Jesus is unwilling to work miracles as mere displays... In the Synoptists no less than in St John the miracles are evidence (. . . to those who have eyes to see) as to Who Jesus is. This, we shall maintain, is their raison d'etre in all four Gospels. (The Miracle-Stories of the Gospels by Alan Richardson, 1941, p. 31)
If it is right, then, always to bracket the teaching and healing of Jesus, his words and works, his sayings and signs, what did his miracles signify? John's statement, in the context of his first sign, was that 'he thus revealed his glory' (John 2:11). But, since his 'glory' is the visible manifestation of his being and character, this leads us to ask a supplementary question, namely: 'Which aspects of his person, or what kind of "glory”, did his signs display?' Some will immediately reply 'his compassion', and indeed the evangelists several times say that his motive (e.g. in healing the sick and feeding the hungry) was compassion for the needy. 'He saw, he was moved with compassion, he took action' is a regular sequence in the miracle-stories. But such compassion lay behind all his works of mercy; it was not uniquely displayed in his miracles.
Essentially the mighty works of Jesus were signs of the inauguration of the kingdom. We are agreed about this, although I would want to add that their miraculous nature was inherent in this claim. Preaching and healing went together because the former was the proclamation, and the latter the demonstration, of the kingdom's arrival. Why was this so? Partly because, as Jesus implied in his message to the imprisoned Baptist, the prophetic vision of the coming kingdom included the blind seeing, the lame walking, leprosy sufferers being cured, the deaf hearing, the dead receiving life and the poor hearing good news (Matthew 11:2-5, echoing Isaiah 35:5-6). Partly because the coming kingdom would coincide with a liberal effusion of the Spirit (e.g. Ezekiel 36:26-27; Joel 2:28-29), and the Spirit was evidently upon Jesus in both his words and works (e.g. Luke 4:18-19; Matthew 12:28). And partly because (here is where we part company, I think) the shalom of the kingdom would include the subservience of all nature to God's rule. That is why Jesus walked on the turbulent waters and stilled the storm on the lake (for wind and waves were widely seen as symbolising the primeval chaos and the hostility of demonic forces); turned water into wine (the water standing for Judaism and the wine for the gospel); multiplied loaves and fishes (setting forth the messianic banquet). That also is why Jesus is said to have 'rebuked' both the fever of Peter's mother-in-law (Luke 4:39) and the tempest on the lake (Mark 4:39), just as he 'rebuked' the demons. His nature-miracles were signs of the overthrow of Satan's kingdom, and of the establishment of God's. They gave a dramatic preview (which we cannot, and should not expect to, replicate) of the final subjugation of the whole material order to the gracious rule of God.
I think we must say, however, that the signs of Jesus revealed the glory of his deity as well as of his kingdom. For they visibly set forth judgement and salvation, both of which are the prerogative of the Father, although entrusted to the Son (John 5:19-23). At least John saw things this way. Perhaps the only judgement-sign was the cursing of the fig tree (an Old Testament symbol of Israel), although this story is limited to the synoptists. The cleansing of the temple is another (non-miraculous) sign - and warning - of judgement, told by all four evangelists, although the synoptists put it at the end, and John at the beginning, of Jesus' ministry. The salvation-signs predominate, however. John plainly sees the Ί am' affirmations dramatised in the accompanying miracles, as the Bread of life feeds the hungry crowds, the Light of the world gives sight to the man bom blind, and the Resurrection and the Life restores life to Lazarus. These are signs of the saving sonship of Jesus. Colin Brown, at the end of his thorough study and survey, goes further, and sees the three persons of the Godhead manifest in Jesus' works:
From one standpoint, the miracles of Jesus are the work of the Spirit or divine breath in and through him. From another, they are wrought by the Word of God that he uttered and that, according to John, was made flesh in him. From yet another standpoint, both these activities were the work of the Father.
For the Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Word is the Word of the Father ... The question of miracles is really a question of the Trinity, (p. 325)
So, then, you and I are agreed that, as you say, the works of Jesus had 'religious significance', and that this is their real point. But you want if possible to detach the thing signified from the sign, or at least from its miraculous character. Is this feasible, however? Certainly 'miracles are not to be severed from the accompanying teaching', to quote Colin Brown again (p. 98). But can the teaching be severed from the miracles? Well yes, in the sense that the teaching can stand on its own without the necessity of any signs. But no in the sense that the miraculous nature of the signs is intrinsic to their meaning. Thus, reverting to John 20:30-31, the signs bear witness to the glory of Jesus, in order to elicit faith in Jesus, so that readers of the gospels may receive life from Jesus.
The Virgin Birth and the Resurrection
The virginal conception and bodily resurrection of Jesus are both said to be 'essential to Evangelicals', you write, as may be seen from their various hases of faith' in different parts of the world. What you write is true. But two queries arise in my mind as I reflect on your statement. First, are you meaning to imply that these two doctrines are distinctive to Evangelicals? If so, I must respectfully dissent, for both are to be found in the Apostles' Creed and therefore belong to the universal Church. On the one hand, our Lord Jesus Christ 'was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary', which is unambiguous. On the other, 'the third day he rose again from the dead', which in its wording may be ambiguous (since it is not explicitly stated whether he rose 'bodily') but in its intention is not (since we know the beliefs of those who framed the creed). Moreover, the Apostles' Creed is the minimal faith which new converts are asked to express at their baptism; it is not the fuller statement which candidates for the presbyterate (the official teaching office of the Church) are expected to make before and at their ordination (the Thirty-Nine Articles in the case of the Church of England). So the proper question is not whether Evangelicals are peculiar in holding fast to these doctrines, but whether liberals have liberty to depart from the catholic faith.
My second query, when you ask whether a particular tenet is 'essential for Evangelicals', is to respond with the counter-question, 'Essential for what?' I think the virginal conception and bodily resurrection of Jesus are essential if the faith we profess is legitimately to be termed 'Evangelical', 'catholic', 'original', 'apostolic' or 'biblical'. If, on the other hand, you are asking me to pronounce whether those who deny these doctrines ipso facto forfeit the right to be called Christians, then I would say 'no' or at least 'no, not necessarily'. For only God knows those who belong to him (2 Timothy 2:19); it is not for us to make such judgements. Personal faith in Jesus Christ as 'God and Saviour' is certainly essential. And one can go on to argue that, in order to be biblically consistent, this faith should include the virginal conception and bodily resurrection of Jesus. But in all of us our heart may be better than our head, and salvation is by faith not by orthodox formula, even though 'faith' must have some solid Christian content.
With regard to the virgin birth, I confess that I do not experience the difficulties that you do. Perhaps you will regard my faith as more simplistic than simple. But the birth and infancy narratives seem to me to be much more cogent and compelling than you concede. Let me make a number of points briefly (they are somewhat elaborated in The Authentic Jesus, as you know). Whatever case may be made for the idea that Matthew was writing midrash (commen-tary-as-story), Luke's account of the virgin birth must surely be understood in the light of his gospel preface, in which he claims to 'have carefully investigated everything from the beginning', to depend on sources traceable to the first eyewitnesses, and so to be writing history, not myth, which will help establish Theophilus in 'the certainty of the things' he has been taught. It is, of course, true that Mark and John do not refer to the virgin birth. But that is neither here nor there. For both evangelists choose to open their narrative with John the Baptist, although John begins his gospel with his marvellous prologue about the eternal Word. The argument from silence is notoriously precarious. Mark and John do not mention the birth or boyhood of Jesus at all; are we to conclude from this that they thought he had neither? Besides, there is no evidence (beyond their silence) that these evangelists did not believe in the virgin birth. There is indirect evidence that John did. He refers so often to the pre-existence of the Son, who 'came down from heaven' or 'was sent into the world' and indeed 'became flesh', that he is likely to have had some notion as to how these things took place. There was also the persistent rumour that Jesus' birth had been illegitimate (Mark 6:3; John 8:41; 9:29), which led Bishop John Robinson to write:
the first and most indisputable fact about the birth of Jesus is that it occurred out of wedlock. The one option for which there is no evidence is that Jesus was the lawful son of Joseph and Mary. The only choice open to us is between a virgin birth and an illegitimate birth. ( Twelve More New Testament Studies, 1984, pp. 3-4)
You offer as evidence against the virginal conception the fact that Jesus' family did not at first recognise or acknowledge his identity. But this is a problem for all of us, whether we believe in the birth and infancy stories or not. For those denying the virginal conception are not also denying his deity and sinlessness, on account of which he must have been unique in boyhood and youth. How, then, is it that his relatives doubted and even opposed him? One can only guess the reasons. It may be that Mary still 'treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart7 (Luke 2:19), and felt free to share them only with one or two confidants.
Or, if all the family knew, they may have been motivated either by fear of the reaction of the Jewish authorities or by their own prejudice, because Jesus did not fit the messianic style they were expecting. You then go on to give a longish list of apparent discrepancies between Matthew's and Luke's accounts. But as with other gospel discrepancies, so with these, they really are not so baffling as you make out. Every one has been given a plausible explanation. Indeed, most of them are due to independent pieces of information, which cannot reasonably be said to contradict each other, but simply do not overlap. Whether we react to them in faith or in scepticism depends largely, I think, on whether we approach them in a believing or a sceptical frame of mind.
I agree with you that the incarnation 'does not depend logically [I would prefer the word 'necessarily'] on the belief that he was conceived by the Holy Spirit'. In theory, at least, God could have chosen some other 'mechanism' by which the incarnation took place. There have been and are Christians (yourself among them) who firmly believe in the incarnation, while doubting or denying the virgin birth. So I accept your statement that 'in order to believe that the glory of God shone "in the face of Christ" ... it is not necessary to believe that Joseph had nothing to do with the conception of Jesus'. I agree further that, though the death and resurrection of Jesus were integral to the apostolic kerygma, as summarised in Peter's speeches in the Acts and in Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 15, his virgin birth was not. At the same time, I am bound to add that I find your doubt and denial strange and indeed (if I may say so without appearing obnoxiously patronising) regrettable. For it seems to me (1) that it is inconsistent to affirm the greater miracle (the incarnation) while denying the lesser (the virgin birth), and not to perceive the congruity between them; (2) that you are quite unnecessarily negative towards the Matthean and Lucan birth narratives; (3) that you reject the only account we have of how the incarnation took place, without offering any alternative explanation; and (4) that you do not sufficiently feel the seriousness of breaking away not only from Scripture but from the way the universal Church has understood and accepted its witness on this matter.
Turning now to the resurrection, I am extremely thankful for your conclusion (though you describe it only as 'reasonable and probable' and not 'absolutely decisive') that the tomb was empty, that the body in which Jesus appeared was 'a sign given by God because of the uniqueness of his embodiment of God', and that 'he is the miraculous Christ'. Despite all your caveats and hesitations, I really rejoice with you that 'Christianity is a resurrection religion'.
I have to concede that in my summary in Basic Christianity of the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus my single use of the word 'proof' was a slip. For to 'prove' something is to establish its truth. The way I end that chapter, however, is to speak of evidence, not proof: 'the cumulative weight of this evidence is all but conclusive'. I then add that, in consequence, 'it makes eminently reasonable that last step of faith which brings us to our knees before him and puts on our lips the mighty confession of a doubting Thomas "My Lord and my God"' (pp. 59-60). But if my claim for the evidence was somewhat exaggerated, your long list of supposed discrepancies is exaggerated too. Yes, I have written that the resurrection narratives form 'a jigsaw puzzle'. But it is of the essence of jigsaw puzzles that their various bits and pieces can be fitted together. I really cannot agree with you that this 'has proved impossible', and that the stories 'constitute not a jigsaw puzzle but an insoluble mystery'. G. E. Ladd in I Believe in the Resurrection (1975) and Murray Harris in Raised Immortal (1984) both address these problems, while John Wenham in Easter Enigma (1984) has proposed the fullest, most careful and cogent harmonisation yet. My own view is that the resurrection narratives contain enough discrepant material to show their independence, but not enough to destroy their credibility, let alone to establish their falsehood.
The kerygma of 1 Corinthians 15:1-7, which Paul claims to be both the original (verses 1-4) and the universal (verse 11) faith of the Church, has seemed to most commentators to include an affirmation of the objective, bodily character of Jesus' resurrection. The reference to the preceding burial (which definitely referred to his body), the apparently trivial detail that he was raised 'on the third day' (which makes it a datable event), and the fact that elsewhere he distinguishes his 'visions' (e.g. 2 Corinthians 12:1-10) from the resurrection appearance in which he had 'seen Jesus' (1 Corinthians 9:1), all point to the physical or quasi-physical nature of both the resurrection and the appearances. Yet, I agree, my statement that the resurrection of Jesus supplies 'the proof and pattern' of ours is a little bit (though not much!) too emphatic. Because 'proof' means 'conclusive evidence' it is slightly too strong a word, although Paul's use of 'firstfruits' (1 Corinthians 15:20,23) clearly implies that the harvest will follow. And, although 'pattern' is accurate, since Paul more than once says that our resurrection bodies will be like Christ's (1 Corinthians 15:49; Philippians 3:21), our knowledge of his resurrection body is scanty, being pieced together from the resurrection narratives. It would therefore be wise not to be too dogmatic about its precise character, remembering John's frank admission that 'what we will be has not yet been made known', except that we shall see him and be like him (1 John 3:2).
At the same time, I am anxious to be true to what has been made known. This includes Paul's statement in Romans 8, which you quote, that one day the whole creation, now groaning as if in the pains of childbirth, is going to be 'liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God', and in addition that our own bodies are going to be included in that redemption (verses 18-25). Is it not legitimate to identify this hope with the 'regeneration' or 'renewal' of the universe (Matthew 19:28), the time when God will 'restore everything' (Acts 3:21) and make 'a new heaven and a new earth' (2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1-5)? It is not just 'heaven' to which the New Testament looks forward, but a renewed universe, from which pain, sorrow, disease and death have all been eliminated, indeed destroyed. It is a more material expectation than popular visions of 'heaven'. Was William Temple not right in emphasising that Christianity is 'the most materialistic religion in the world' - with its doctrines of creation and resurrection, and its use of water, bread and wine? That's surely why our affirmation of the resurrection of the body (his and ours) is so important. A year or two ago Bishop David Jenkins kindly spent a couple of hours with five of us Evangelicals who wanted to engage in questioning and discussion with him. He has given me permission to quote my recollection of one part of our conversation. He was willing to concede that the bodily resurrection of Jesus, although in his view 'historically unverifiable' (because the story of the empty tomb was probably not published until twenty years or more after the event), could nevertheless be termed 'theologically appropriate'. There, I think, was a man speaking out of his catholic tradition, but we Evangelicals endorsed it.
In conclusion, is not the most helpful way to approach the gospel miracles to place them within the familiar and inescapable tension between the already and the not yet, kingdom come and kingdom coming, the new age inaugurated and the new age consummated? To the sceptical (who doubt all miracles) I want to say 'but already we have tasted the powers of the age to come'. To the credulous (who think that healing miracles are an everyday occurrence) I want to say 'but not yet have we been given resurrection bodies free from disease, pain, infirmity, handicap and death'. In this interim period between the beginning and the end we both look back to the outburst of miracles in the ministry of Jesus and his apostles, and on to the final resurrection of both body and universe.
Further thought about the implications of the 'already -not yet' tension would, I suspect, be profitable to us all.
Yours as ever,
John