Conclusion 761
Conclusion M iracle claims, especially regarding healings, are by Western standards surprisingly common (though by no means universal) in regions of the world where such events are expected. These claims include, as in the Gospels and Acts, the healing of the blind, those unable to walk, and the raising of the dead, among many others. To acknowledge the frequency of such claims is not to pass judgment on their accuracy or to prejudge their theological meaning. Their frequency does, however, at least bring into question some traditional critics' suppositions that any such claims must reflect a lengthy period of legendary accretion. That eyewitnesses can cite dramatic cures does not mean that all other claims of dramatic cures stem from eyewitnesses; but it should remove the persistent prejudice that such claims cannot stem from eyewitnesses. Most of the claims I have cited are from sources claiming to represent eyewitnesses or voices at most one remove from eyewitnesses. There therefore seems no reason, based on the principle of historical analogy, to deny that first-century eyewitnesses could have believed that they saw Jesus heal blind eyes, make paralytics walk, or raise the dead, all of which cures eyewitnesses also claim today.
The frequency of such cures also challenges some scholars' working hermeneutical assumption that no one in the modern world believes in miracles. That assumption has always rested on an elitist exclusion from the "modern world" of the voices of the Majority World, as well as a sizable proportion of Western voices outside of a traditional academic and cultural elite. This observation does not by itself prove that miracles exist; it does show that the assumption that modern people cannot believe in miracles is plainly false. In today's postmodern climate, those who would deny the possibility of miracles need to provide supporting arguments more effective than an appeal to a nonexistent consensus or an appeal to the "uniformity" of human experience (the traditional basis for rejecting miracles).
The Western intellectual tendency is to regard most cultures in history and in today's world as precritical, without so much as undertaking a critical analysis of
Conclusion any of their claims.1 Yet it seems to me that such disdain for vast numbers of claims
(apparently hundreds of millions of them) from other cultures, purely on the basis of unproved presuppositions inherited from the radical wing of the Enlightenment, risks the charge of ethnocentric elitism. Even on the level of interpretation, the radical Enlightenment is not a certain guide. Scientific endeavor by virtue of its nature must work with the concept of an orderly and predictable universe, but it is both reductionist and reflects a logical fallacy to leap from a normally effective method applied to purely natural phenomena to the epistemological and ontological conclusion that no intelligence exists, whether human or nonhuman, that cannot be addressed solely on the basis of known physical laws.
When we have not an isolated instance but a pattern of a number of highly extraordinary events accompanying prayer that do not normally occur without it, it may seem logical to explore prayer as a factor in the anomalous events. I think of circumstances like a number of persons apparently dead for hours abruptly recovering; cataracts immediately disappearing; long-term impaired hearing becoming normal; or the more unusual of the nature miracles I have mentioned. Some of these cases are strongly attested to by reliable eyewitnesses. Because some witnesses inevitably prove unreliable, some readers may be prepared to dismiss all eyewitness claimants as liars. I know many of the eyewitnesses personally, however, and am ready to depend on their integrity—far more than I would be willing to dismiss them as liars because some people's philosophic assumptions require them to dismiss witnesses who arouse for them cognitive dissonance. At the very least, must not arguments based on the "uniformity of human experience" be reconsidered?
Of course, many recoveries claimed as miracles have ready natural explanations.
Others, however, are far more difficult on these terms. Even if cases as surely extranormal as those just mentioned are a small proportion of the total claims, I believe that they are cumulatively too numerous to be simply dismissed. (One should keep in mind that I have not necessarily collected the strongest cases—simply the ones that were available without me taking time off for extensive world travels.) I believe that the evidence is sometimes compelling enough to warrant the suggestion of supernatural causation as the simpler explanation, and I hope that most readers will share my opinion that a number of miracle claims press far enough beyond currently plausible naturalistic explanations to invite at least consideration of the possibility of supernatural causation.
Even if some readers committed to the Humean paradigm are not persuaded by my secondary argument supporting divine or at least supernatural activity, is the evidence not compelling enough to allow at least the verdict that, in view of the inadequacy of current naturalistic explanations for a number of miracle claims, we should leave other possibilities open? Is a scholar who is unwilling to grant even that possibility at least willing to grant that fellow scholars who do allow
1. As noted in ch. 10, Davies and Allison, Matthew, 2:62–65, cite various eyewitness claims through history and today and contend that such claims cannot be dismissed as merely "antique naïveté."
Conclusion
for supernatural explanations may indeed be genuine scholars with a respectable case for their position? The primary philosophic arguments against supernatural causation, often accepted a priori and uncritically, were formulated mostly in the absence of our current abundant testimony regarding such claims.
Admittedly, those who are committed to an antisupernatural worldview may propose alternate explanations for virtually any purportedly suprahuman phenomenon (certainly the limited sort that appear in the Gospels and Acts). And as I have already conceded, in a number of instances natural explanations are preferable, though in others I believe that such attempts become strained. If one's worldview disallows a miraculous interpretation of all claims, one must, and therefore will, come up with purely natural explanations. Yet I have argued, following many others, that the philosophic foundation for this less charitable reading of miracle claims rests on an argument that is circular; certainly it is too disputed in philosophy today to provide a simple basis for all evaluations. A Humean approach is not neutral, and no examination of miracle claims undertaken with these presuppositions can arrive at its conclusions genuinely open-mindedly. Since almost anything can have a possible natural explanation (for example, for whatever reason, someone apparently dead has on occasion revived), one need not accept any proposed evidence for miracles; but a possible explanation is not always the most plausible or probable explanation. For example, multiple raisings following prayer in the same circles would seem to defy any reasonable probability of mere accident.
What if, instead of a priori ruling them in or out as a class of claims, one examines individual supernatural claims, using the same criteria we use for other claimed events? I believe that a reader without Humean premises, who allows for the possibility of supernatural explanations among others, would find sufficient cases to render the hypothesis of a supernatural explanation probable in those cases, hence challenging prejudice against such a possibility.
Again, I recognize that some genuine scholars will demur from my secondary argument that some cases of supernatural causation are likely, as I myself once did. What I do not believe is intellectually legitimate is to simply dismiss on the basis of preexisting assumptions the sincerity of all the millions of persons who claim to have witnessed such phenomena, or to insist that such claims could arise only gradually in legend or through a writer's imagination. Such insistence flies in the face of an extraordinary amount of evidence, denying voluminous and cross-cultural testimony merely on the basis of a dogmatic theory forged in a very different era and context (one dependent, in fact, on a much narrower range of evidence). In view of even the very limited number of cases I have offered above,
I would consider such sweeping claims (or the claim that no one in the modern world believes in miracles) to be impossibly naive and misinformed. At the very least, then, we need not attribute the key aspects of miracle accounts in the Gospels and Acts to legend.
Any finite number of firsthand observations may be technically anecdotal, but the witnesses are surely no more biased for believing that they have seen some
Conclusion unusual dramatic recoveries immediately following prayer than are those who, not having seen them, deny that anyone else could have seen them either. Their a priori skepticism appears plausible when forged in contexts where such phenomena are not observed; but it seems less than charitable when they presuppose universal nonexperience on the basis of their own. Most important, it is no longer plausible to tout "uniform human experience" as a basis for denying miracles, as in the traditional modern argument. Hundreds of millions of claims would have to be satisfactorily explained in nonsupernatural terms for this appeal to succeed; while many may be so explained, one cannot adopt the conclusion of uniformity as a premise without investigating all of them.2
In the climate of current scholarship, one might do well to write merely like Josephus, urging caution with particular miracle claims while leaving open the possibility that some could occur. Several statements, however, are possible and,
I hope, widely agreeable:
1. Most people in Mediterranean antiquity believed that miracles occurred, and the Gospels and Acts include a relatively high proportion of such claims.
2. Modern scholars may question the interpretations of such ancient reports, yet regard some of them as genuine experiences for those who claim them.
(That many other reports were fraudulent, of course, no scholar in antiquity or today would deny.)
3. The a priori modernist assumption that genuine miracles are impossible is a historically and culturally conditioned premise. This premise is not shared by all intelligent or critical thinkers, and notably not by many people in non-Western cultures. The assumption is an interpretive grid, not a demonstrated fact; contrary to what appeared to be the case to many Western intellectuals one or two centuries ago, history does not support a linear evolution of all cultures toward this position.
4. Even the vast majority of those who always reject suprahuman interpretations of ancient miracle reports do not uncritically otherwise reject the value of ancient historians who include them.
5. Without prejudice based on one's views regarding the possibility of divine causation, we must recognize that enormous numbers of eyewitnesses claim to have witnessed such phenomena. We should therefore acknowledge that many such claims (certainly regarding cures during prayer) can belong even to the eyewitness level of our sources and need not be attributed to a long process of oral development.
In view of such conclusions, one should not a priori reject the possibility of eyewitness testimony behind reports of cures in the Gospels and Acts; whatever one's
2. One might argue for a probable premise based on what one deemed a representative sample, but that sample should include an impartial investigation of the strongest and not simply the weakest cases
(e.g., should include medical evidence from Lourdes and elsewhere).
Conclusion
explanation for eyewitness testimony of cures, this phenomenon is too common to merely dismiss. Whatever one's other tools for evaluating these reports, skepticism that eyewitnesses could offer them should not be among them. Further, I would also argue that scholars need not rule out the possibility of divine activity in all such claims, although this argument technically involves a philosophic and theological question rather than a historical one in the narrow sense. Finally, given the presence of such claims in ancient historical sources, even if one were to remain skeptical about miracle claims one would not need to reject the rest of the testimony of the Gospels and Acts regarding other events.
Whether in the end one shares the early Christian worldview concerning signs, it is ethnocentric simply to despise it. And whether in the end one despises it, one cannot objectively expunge from the record the clear evidence that early Christians
(and many people since then) believed that they witnessed these phenomena.
Oxford scholar G. B. Caird long ago remarked regarding Luke, the first Christian historian:
Luke has often been accused of credulity because he has packed his narrative with signs and wonders, but it would be more in keeping with the evidence to commend him for his faithful reproduction of one of the major constituents of early Christianity.
For the Epistles bear their concurrent witness that the preaching of the Gospel was everywhere accompanied by exorcisms and healing and by other forms of miracle.3
3. Caird, Apostolic Age, 64, citing Rom 15:19; 1 Cor 12:9–10, 28–30; 2 Cor 12:12; Gal 3:5; and (I believe less clearly) Heb 2:4.