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McCullagh, C. Behan. Justifying Historical Descriptions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
———. “What Do Historians Argue About?” History and Theory 43 (2004): 18–38.
Mandelbaum, Maurice. The Problem of Historical Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1967.
Martin, Raymond. “Progress in Historical Studies.” History and Theory 37 (1998): 14–39.
Novick, P. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Nowell-Smith, P. H. “The Constructionist Theory of History.” In “The Constitution of the Historical Past.” History and Theory Beiheft 16 (1977): 1–28.
Orwell, George. 1984: A Novel. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.
Partner, Nancy F. “Historicity in an Age of Reality-Fictions.” In A New Philosophy of History, edited by Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner, 21–39. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Pirenne, Henri. “What Are Historians Trying to Do?” In The Philosophy of History in Our Time, edited by H. Meyerhoff, 87–100. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959.
Plantinga, Alvin. “Methodological Naturalism.” Paper presented at the symposium “Knowing God, Christ, and Nature in the Post-Positivistic Era.” University of Notre Dame, April 14–17, 1993.
———. The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Calvin College and Seminary, 1990.
Popper, Karl. “Has History Any Meaning?” In The Philosophy of History in Our Time, edited by H. Meyerhoff, 300–312. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959.
———. The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.
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———. The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957. Repr. New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1964.
Rubinoff, Lionel. “Historicity and Objectivity.” In Objectivity, Method and Point of View: Essays in the Philosophy of History. Philosophy of History and Culture 6, 133–53. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991.
———. “Introduction: W. H. Dray and the Critique of Historical Thinking.” In Objectivity, Method and Point of View: Essays in the Philosophy of History. Philosophy of History and Culture 6, 1–11. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991.
Scheffler, Israel. Science and Subjectivity. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982.
Suppe, Frederick, ed. The Structure of Scientific Theories. 2nd ed. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1977. See especially the Introduction and Afterword.
Tyrrell, George. Christianity at the Cross-Roads. London: Longman, Green, 1910.
Van der Dussen, W. J. “The Historian and His Evidence.” In Objectivity, Method and Point of View: Essays in the Philosophy of History, 154–69. Philosophy of History and Culture 6. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991.
Walsh, W. H. Philosophy of History: An Introduction. New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1965.
White, Hayden. The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.
———. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
White, Morton. “Can History Be Objective?” In The Philosophy of History in Our Time, edited by H. Meyerhoff, 188–202. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959.
———. Foundations of Historical Knowledge. New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1965.
Yamauchi, Edwin. “Immanuel Velikovsky’s Catastrophic History.” Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 25 (1973): 134–39.
Zagorin, Perez. “History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now.”
History and Theory 38 (1999): 1–24.
———. “Rejoinder to a Postmodernist.” History and Theory 39 (2000): 201–9.
6
The Problem of Miracles
Before we can examine the evidence to see whether the Creator God of the universe has revealed himself in some special way in the world in order to offer us the promise of immortality so necessary for meaningful existence now, we must deal with the problem of whether such divine action is possible in the first place.
And if it is, how can it be identified? That is to say, we are confronted with the problem of miracles.
Undoubtedly, one of the major stumbling blocks to becoming a Christian for many people today is that Christianity is a religion of miracles. It asserts that God became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, being born of a virgin, that he performed various miracles, exorcised demonic beings, and that, having died by crucifixion, he rose from the dead. But the problem is that these sorts of miraculous events seem to belong to a worldview foreign to modern man—a pre-scientific, superstitious worldview belonging to the ancient and middle ages.
Some theologians have been so embarrassed by this fact that many of them, following Rudolf Bultmann, have sought to demythologize the Bible, thereby removing the stumbling block to modern man. According to Bultmann, no one who uses the radio or electric lights should be expected to believe in the mythological worldview of the Bible in order to become a Christian. He insists that he is not trying to make Christianity more palatable to modern man but is trying merely to remove a false stumbling block so that the true stumbling block—the call to authentic existence symbolized by the cross—might become evident. But 247
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in so doing, Bultmann reduces Christianity to little more than the existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Indeed, some Bultmann disciples like Herbert Braun or Schubert Ogden have pushed Bultmann’s views to their logical conclusion and have propounded a Christless and even atheistic Christianity. Such theologies offer man no hope of immortality. If the Christian hope of immortality through eschatological resurrection is to be believed, then contemporary thinkers may well demand of Christians some defense of miracles.
Historical Background
Deist Objections to Miracles
The skepticism of modern man with regard to miracles arose during the Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, which dawned in Europe during the seventeenth century.
Thereafter, miracles simply became unbelievable for most of the intelligentsia. The attack upon miracles was led by the Deists. Although Deists accepted the existence of God, his conservation of the world in being, and his general revelation in nature, they strenuously denied that he had revealed himself in any special way in the world.
They were therefore very exercised to demonstrate the impossibility of the occurrence of miracles, or at least of the identification of miracles. They were countered by a barrage of Christian apologetic literature defending the possibility and evidential value of miracles. Let’s examine now the principal arguments urged by the Deists against miracles and the responses offered by their Christian opponents.
THE NEWTONIAN WORLD-MACHINE
Although the most important philosophical opponents of miracles were Spinoza and Hume, much of the debate was waged against the backdrop of the mechanical worldview of Newtonian physics. In his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687), Isaac Newton formulated his famous three laws of motion, from which, together with some definitions, he was able to deduce the various theorems and corollaries of his physics. In regarding the world in terms of masses, motions, and forces operating according to these laws, Newton’s Principia seemed to eliminate the need for God’s providence and gave rise to a picture of the universe appropriately characterized as the “Newtonian world-machine.”
Newton’s model of mechanical explanation was enthusiastically received as the paradigm for explanation in all fields; this attitude reached its height in Pierre Simon de Laplace’s belief that a Supreme Intelligence, equipped with Newton’s Principia and knowing the present position and velocity of every particle in the universe, could deduce the exact state of the universe at any other point in time.
When Napoleon remarked to Laplace on the absence of any mention of God in his work, a nonplussed Laplace retorted, “Sire, I have no need of that hypothesis.”1
1. For an account of this famous exchange see Roger Hahn, Pierre Simon de Laplace 1749–1827: A Determined Scientist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 172.
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Such a worldview promoted the Deist conception of God as the creator of the world-machine, who wound it up like a clock and set it running under the laws of matter and motion, never to interfere with it again.
Indeed, this harmoniously functioning world-machine was thought to provide the best evidence that God exists. The eighteenth-century French philosophe Diderot exclaimed, “Thanks to the works of these great men, the world is no longer a God; it is a machine with its wheels, its cords, its pulleys, its springs, and its weights.”2
But equally it was thought that such a world system also made it incredible that God should interfere with its operation via miraculous interventions. Diderot’s contemporary Voltaire said it was absurd and insulting to God to think that he would interrupt the operations of “this immense machine,” since he designed it from the beginning to run according to his divinely decreed, immutable laws.3
For eighteenth-century Newtonians, such miraculous interventions could only be described as violations of the laws of nature and were therefore impossible.
BENEDICT DE SPINOZA
The philosophical attack upon miracles, however, actually preceded the publication of Newton’s Principia. In 1670 Benedict de Spinoza in his Tractatus theologico-politicus argued against both the possibility and evidential value of miracles. Two of his arguments are of special significance for our discussion.
Miracles Violate the Unchangeable Order of Nature
First, Spinoza argues that nothing happens contrary to the eternal and unchangeable order of nature. He maintains that all that God wills is characterized by eternal necessity and truth. For since there is no difference between God’s understanding and his will, it is the same to say that God knows a thing or that God wills a thing.
Thus, the same necessity that characterizes God’s knowledge characterizes his will.
Therefore, the laws of nature flow from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature. If some event contrary to these laws could occur, then the divine will and knowledge would stand in contradiction to nature, which is impossible. To say that God does something contrary to the laws of nature is to say God does something contrary to his own nature. Therefore, miracles are impossible.
Miracles Insufficient to Prove God’s Existence
Second, Spinoza believed that a proof of God’s existence must be absolutely certain.
It is by the unchangeable order of nature that we know that God exists. By admitting miracles, Spinoza warns, we break the laws of nature and thus create doubts about the existence of God, leading us right into the arms of atheism!
Spinoza also develops two sub-points under this objection. First, a miracle could not in any case prove God’s existence, since a lesser being such as an angel 2. Denis Diderot, “Philosophical Thoughts,” in Diderot’s Philosophical Works, trans. M. Jourdain (Chicago: Open Court, 1916), 18.
3. A Philosophical Dictionary (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1962), s.v. “Miracles,” by Marie François Arouet de Voltaire.
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or demon could be the cause of the event. Second, a so-called miracle is simply a work of nature not yet discovered by man. Our knowledge of nature’s laws is limited, and just because we cannot explain the cause of a particular event does not imply that it is a miracle having God as its supernatural cause.
DAVID HUME
While Spinoza attacked the possibility of the occurrence of a miracle, the eighteenth-century Scottish skeptic David Hume attacked the possibility of the identification of a miracle. In his essay “Of Miracles” he presents a two-pronged assault against miracles, which takes the form of an “Even if . . . , but in fact . . .” argument; that is to say, in the first half he argues against miracles while granting certain conces-sions, and in the second half he argues on the basis of what he thinks is in fact the case. We may differentiate the two halves of his argument by referring to the first as his “in principle” argument and to the second as his “in fact” argument.
“In Principle” Argument
Hume maintains that it is impossible in principle to prove that a miracle has occurred. A wise man, he says, proportions his belief to the evidence. If the evidence makes a conclusion virtually certain, then we may call this a “proof,” and a wise man will give wholehearted belief to that conclusion. If the evidence makes a conclusion more likely than not, then we may speak of a “probability,” and a wise man will accept the conclusion as true with a degree of confidence proportionate to the probability. Now, Hume argues, even if we concede that the evidence for a particular miracle amounts to a full proof, it is still in principle impossible to identify that event as a miracle. Why? Because standing opposed to this proof is an equally full proof, namely the evidence for the unchangeable laws of nature, that the event in question is not a miracle.
Hume seems to imagine a scale in which the evidence is being weighed. On the one side of the scale is the evidence for a particular miracle, which (he concedes for the sake of argument) amounts to a full proof. But on the other side of the scale stands the evidence from all people in all the ages for the regularity of the laws of nature, which also amounts to a full proof. He writes, “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, a proof against miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”4 Thus, proof stands against proof, and the scales are evenly balanced. Since the evidence does not incline in either direction, the wise man cannot hold to a miracle with any degree of confidence.
Indeed, Hume continues, to prove a miracle has taken place one would have to show that it would be an even greater miracle for the testimony in support of the event in question to be false. Thus, with regard to the resurrection, Hume 4. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 10.1.90.
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asks, which would be the greater miracle: that a man should rise from the dead or that the witnesses should either be deceived or try to deceive? He leaves no doubt as to his answer: he asserts that even if all historians agreed that on January 1, 1600, Queen Elizabeth publicly died and was buried and her successor installed, but that a month later she reappeared, resumed the throne, and ruled England for three more years, Hume would not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event. He would accept the most extraordinary hypothesis for her pretended death and burial rather than admit such a striking violation of the laws of nature. Thus, even if the evidence for a miracle constituted a full proof, the wise man would not believe in miracles.
“In Fact” Arguments
But in fact, says Hume, the evidence for miracles does not amount to a full proof.
Indeed, the evidence is so poor, it does not even amount to a probability. Therefore, the decisive weight falls on the side of the scale containing the full proof for the regularity of nature, a weight so heavy that no evidence for miracle could ever hope to counter-balance it.
Hume gives four reasons why in fact the evidence for miracles is negligible: First, no miracle in history is attested by a sufficient number of educated and honest men, who are of such social standing that they would have a great deal to lose by lying.
Second, people crave the miraculous and will believe the most absurd stories, as the abundance of false tales of miracles proves. Third, miracles occur only among barbarous peoples. And fourth, miracles occur in all religions and thereby cancel each other out, since they support contradictory doctrines.
Hume concludes that miracles can never be the foundation for any system of religion. “Our most holy religion is founded on Faith, not on reason,” pontificates Hume, all the while laughing up his sleeve:
The Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.5
In other words, it is a miracle that anyone could be stupid enough to believe in Christianity!
Christian Defense of Miracles
As I indicated earlier, the Christians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were far from lax in responding to the Deists’ attacks. Let us look, therefore, at 5. Ibid. , 10.2.101.
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some of their answers to Spinoza and Hume, as well as to the general Newtonian worldview.
CONTRA SPINOZA
First, we shall consider the response to Spinoza’s two objections by several of the leading Christian thinkers of that era.
Jean Le Clerc
One of the earliest progenitors of biblical criticism, the French theologian Jean Le Clerc presented in his Sentimens de quelques théologiens (1685) an apologetic for Christianity that, he maintained, was invulnerable to Spinoza’s attacks. He asserts that the empirical evidence for Jesus’ miracles and resurrection is simply more convincing than Spinoza’s a priori philosophical reasoning. Specifically, against Spinoza’s contention that miracles may simply be natural events, Le Clerc rejoins that nobody could sincerely believe Jesus’ resurrection and ascension to be natural events comparable to, say, a man’s birth. Nor does it suffice to say these events could be caused by unknown natural laws, for why then are not more of these events produced, and how is it that at the very instant Jesus commanded a paralyzed man to walk “the Laws of Nature (unknown to us) were prepared and ready to cause the . . . Paralytic Man to walk”?6 Both of these considerations serve to show that the miraculous events in the Gospels, which can be established by ordinary historical methods, are indeed of divine origin.
Samuel Clarke
Considerable analysis was brought to the concept of miracle by the English philosopher-theologian Samuel Clarke in his Boyle lectures of 1705. Reflecting Newtonian influence, Clarke asserts that matter has only the power to continue in either motion or rest. Anything that is done in the world is done either by God or by created intelligent beings. The so-called natural forces of matter, like gravitation, are properly speaking the effect of God’s acting on matter at every moment. The upshot of this is that the so-called “course of nature” is a fiction—what we call the course of nature is in reality nothing other than God’s producing certain effects in a continual and uniform manner. Thus, a miracle is not contrary to the course of nature, which does not really exist; it is simply an unusual event that God does.
Moreover, since God is omnipotent, miraculous events are no more difficult for him than regular events. So the regular order of nature proves the existence and attributes of God, and miracles prove the interposition of God into the regular order in which he acts.
From the miracle itself taken as an isolated event, it is impossible to determine whether it was performed directly by God or by an angel or a demonic spirit. But, according to Clarke, the key to distinguishing between demonic miracles and divine miracles (whether done directly or indirectly by God) is the doctrinal context in 6. Jean Le Clerc, Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures (London: [n.p.], 1690), 235–36.
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which the miracle occurs. If the miracle is done in support of a doctrine that is contrary to moral law, then we may be sure that it is not a divine miracle. Thus, in order for an event to be a divine miracle, the doctrinal context of the event must be at least morally neutral. If two miracles are performed in support of two contrary doctrines, each morally neutral in itself, then the doctrine supported by the greater miracle ought to be accepted as of divine origin. Hence, the correct theological definition of a miracle is: “a work effected in a manner unusual, or different from the common and regular Method of Providence, by the interposition of God himself, or of some intelligent Agent superior to Man, for the proof or Evidence of some particular Doctrine, or in attestation to the Authority of some particular Person.” Jesus’ miracles thus prove that he was “a Teacher sent from God” who had “a Divine Commission.”7
Jacob Vernet
The finest apologetic work written in French during the eighteenth century was, in my opinion, Jean Alphonse Turretin and Jacob Vernet’s multi-volume Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne (1730–1788). Turretin, an esteemed professor of Protestant theology at Geneva, wrote the first volume in Latin; Vernet, also a member of the theological faculty at Geneva after 1756, translated Turretin’s volume and added nine of his own. The result was a sophisticated and informed response to French Deism based on internal and external Christian evidences.
Vernet defines a miracle as “a striking work which is outside the ordinary course of nature and which is done by God’s all-mighty will, such that witnesses thereof regard it as extraordinary and supernatural.”8 Vernet does not, like Clarke, deny that there is a course of nature, but he does insist that the so-called course or order of nature is really composed of incidental states of events, not necessary states. They depend on the will of God, and it is only the constant and uniform procession of events that leads us to think the course of nature is invariable. But God can make exceptions to the general order of things when he deems it important. These miraculous events show that the course of nature “is not the effect of a blind necessity but of a free Cause who interrupts and suspends it when He pleases.”9
Against the objection that miracles may be the result of an as yet undiscovered law of nature, Vernet replies that when the miracles are diverse and numerous, this possibility is minimized because it is hardly possible that all these unknown, marvelous operations of nature should occur at the same time. One might be able to explain away a single, isolated miracle on this basis, but not a series of miracles of different sorts.
7. Samuel Clarke, A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation (London: W. Batham, 1706), 367–68.
8. Jean Alphonse Turretin, Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne, 2nd ed., 7 vols., trans. J. Vernet (Geneva: Henri-Albert Gosse, 1745-55), 5:2–3.
9. Ibid ., 5:240.
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Claude François Houtteville
The French Abbé Claude François Houtteville also argued for the possibility of miracles against Spinoza in his treatise La religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits (1740). He defines a miracle as “a striking action superior to all finite power”
or more commonly as “a singular event produced outside the chain of natural causes.”10 Given the existence of God, it is at once evident that he can perform miracles, since he not only created the world but preserves it in being and directs all the laws of its operation by his sovereign hand. Against Spinoza’s charge that miracles are impossible because natural law is the necessary decree of God’s immutable nature, Houtteville responds that natural law is not necessary, but that God is free to establish whatever laws he wills. Moreover, God can change his decrees whenever he wishes. And even if he could not, miracles could be part of God’s eternal decree for creation just as much as the natural laws, so that they represent no change in God. Houtteville even suggests that miracles may not be contrary to nature but only to what we know of nature. From God’s perspective they could conform to certain laws unknown to us.
CONTRA HUME
The Christian response to Hume’s arguments was as variegated as the response to Spinoza’s.
Thomas Sherlock
Thomas Sherlock, the Bishop of London, wrote his immensely popular Tryal of the Witnesses (1729) against the Deist Thomas Woolston, but his arguments are relevant to Hume’s later critique of miracles. He presents a mock trial in which the apostles are accused of hoaxing the resurrection of Jesus. Woolston’s attorney argues that because the resurrection violates the course of nature, no human testimony could possibly establish it, since it has the whole witness of nature against it. Sherlock has a multifaceted reply.
First, on that principle many natural matters of fact would have to be pronounced false. If we admit testimony only when it accords with our prior conceptions, then a man living in a hot climate, for example, would never believe the testimony of others that water could exist in a solid state as ice. Second, the resurrection is simply a matter of sense perception. If we met a man who claimed to have been dead, we would be admittedly suspicious. But of what? Not that he is now alive, for that is evident to our senses, but that he was ever dead. But would we say that it is impossible to prove by human testimony that this man died a year ago? Such evidence is admitted in any court of law. Conversely, if we saw a man executed and later heard he was alive again, we would be suspicious. But of what? Not that he had been dead, but that he was now alive. But again, could we say that it is impossible for human testimony to prove that a man is alive? The point is, we are suspicious 10. Claude François Houtteville, La religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits, 3 vols. (Paris: Mercier & Boudet, 1740), 1:33.
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in these cases not because the facts in question cannot be proved by evidence, but because we tend to believe our own senses rather than reports of others that go contrary to our preconceived opinions of what can and cannot happen. But as a historical fact, the resurrection requires no more ability in the witnesses than to be able to distinguish between a dead man and a living man. Sherlock is willing to grant that in miraculous cases we may require more evidence than usual; but it is absurd to say that such cases admit of no evidence.
Third, and finally, the resurrection contradicts neither right reason nor the laws of nature. Similarly to Houtteville, Sherlock maintains that the so-called course of nature arises from the prejudices and imaginations of men. Our senses tell us what the usual course of things is, but we go beyond our senses when we conclude that it cannot be otherwise. The uniform course of things runs contrary to the resurrection, but that is no proof that it is absolutely impossible. The same Power that created life in the first place can give it to a dead body again—the latter feat is no greater than the former.
Gottfried Less
Less, a German theologian at the University of Göttingen, discusses Hume’s objections at length in his Wahrheit der christlichen Religion (1758). He defines a miracle as a work beyond the power of all creatures. There are two types of miracles: first degree miracles, which are performed directly by God; and second degree miracles, which are beyond human power but are done by finite spirit beings. Less admits that no more than second degree miracles can be proved, since one cannot be sure when God is acting directly. Miracles are both physically and morally possible: physically because God is the Lord of nature, and morally because miracles constitute part of his plan to confirm divine teaching.
There are two steps in proving that a miracle has occurred. First, one must prove the historicity of the event itself. Second, one must prove that the event is a miracle. Less argues that the testimony of the disciples to Jesus’ miracles meets even the stringent conditions laid down by Hume, and that therefore even he should accept the historicity of the Gospel accounts. Although the apostles were unlearned men, all one needs in order to prove that something happened (say, a disease’s being cured at a sheer verbal command) is five good senses and common sense. More specifically, Less argues that the miracles of Jesus were witnessed by hundreds of people, friends and enemies alike; that the apostles had the ability to testify accurately to what they saw; that the apostles were of such doubtless honesty and sincerity as to place them above suspicion of fraud; that the apostles, though of low estate, nevertheless had comfort and life itself to lose in proclaiming the gospel; and that the events to which they testified took place in the civilized part of the world under the Roman Empire, in Jerusalem, the capital city of the Jewish nation. Thus, there is no reason to doubt the apostles’ testimony concerning the miracles and resurrection of Jesus.
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But were these events miracles? Less maintains that they were and turns to a refutation of Hume’s arguments. In response to the “in principle” argument, Less argues: first, because nature is the freely willed order of God, a miracle is just as possible as any other event. Therefore, it is just as believable as any other event.
Second, testimony to an event cannot be refuted by prior experiences and observations. Otherwise, we should never be justified in believing something outside our present experience; no new discoveries would be possible. Third, there is no contradiction between miracles and experience. Miracles are different events ( con-traria) from experience in general, but not contradictory events ( contradictoria) to experience in general. For example, the contradiction to the testimony that Jesus raised certain people from the dead and himself so rose three days after his death must necessarily be the exact opposite of this statement, namely, that Jesus never raised anyone from the dead and never himself so rose. This latter statement would have to be proved in order to destroy the evidence for the Gospels. But it would hardly be sufficient to assert that experience in general shows that dead men do not rise, for with this the Christian testimony is in full agreement. Only when the exact opposite is proved to be true could the Christian testimony be said to contradict experience.
As for Hume’s “in fact” arguments, these are easily dismissed. First, it has already been shown that the witnesses to the Gospel miracles were abundant and qualified. Second, the fact that people tend to believe miracle stories without proper scrutiny only shows that our scrutiny of such stories ought to be cautious and careful. Third, Jesus’ miracles did not occur among a barbarous people, but in Jerusalem. Fourth, Hume’s allegation that all religions have their miracles is not in fact true, for no religion other than Christianity claims to be able to prove its teachings through miracles. Less also examines in considerable detail the examples furnished by Hume and finds in each case that the evidence does not approach the evidence for the Gospel miracles.
William Paley
Paley’s two-volume A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) is undoubtedly the finest apologetic work of that era in English, and it exercised such considerable influence that it remained compulsory reading for any applicant to Cambridge University right up until the twentieth century. Primarily a studious investigation of the historical evidence for Christianity from miracles, Paley’s treatise constitutes an across-the-board refutation of Hume’s arguments. It will be remembered that it was Paley who so masterfully expounded the teleological argument, and he makes clear that in this work he presupposes the existence of God as proved by that argument.
Given the existence of God, miracles are not incredible. For why should it be thought incredible that God should want to reveal himself in the natural world to men, and how could this be done without involving a miraculous element? Further, any antecedent improbability in miracles is not so great that sound historical tes-
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timony cannot overcome it. Paley discerns the same fallacy in Hume’s argument as did Less. A narrative of a fact can only be said to be contrary to experience if we, being at the time and place in question, observe that the alleged event did not in fact take place.
What Hume really means by “contrary to experience” is simply the lack of similar experience. (To say that a miracle is contrary to universal experience is obviously question-begging, since it assumes in advance that the miracle in question did not occur.) But in this case the improbability that results from our not having similar experiences is equal to the probability that we should have similar experiences. But what probability is there for that? Suppose God wished to inaugurate Christianity with miracles. What is the probability that we should also experience similar events today? Clearly, any such probability is negligible. Conversely, then, any improbability resulting from our lack of such experiences is also negligible.
According to Paley, Hume’s argument assumes either that the course of nature is invariable or that if it is variable, these variations must be frequent and general.
But what grounds are there for either of these assumptions? If the course of nature is the work of an intelligent Being, should we not expect that he would vary the course of nature only infrequently at times of great importance?
As for determining whether a miracle has occurred, Paley considers Hume’s account of the matter a fair one: which is more probable in any given case, that the miracle be true or the testimony be false? In answering this question, Paley reminds us, we must not remove the miracle from its theistic and historical context, nor can we ignore how the testimony and evidence arose. According to Paley, the real problem with Hume’s skepticism becomes clear when we apply it to a test case: suppose twelve men, whom I know to be honest and reasonable people, were to assert that they saw personally a miraculous event in which it was impossible for them to have been tricked; furthermore, the governor called them before him for an inquiry and sentenced them all to death unless they were to admit the hoax; and they all went to their deaths rather than say they were lying. According to Hume, we should still not believe such men. But such incredulity, says Paley, would not be defended by any skeptic in the world.
Against Hume’s “in fact” arguments, Paley maintains that no parallel to the Gospel miracles exists in history. Like Less, he examines Hume’s examples in considerable detail and concludes that it is idle to compare such cases with the miracles of the Gospels. Even in cases not easily explained away, there is no evidence that the witnesses have passed their lives in labor and danger and have voluntarily suffered for the truth of what they reported. Thus, the circumstance of the Gospel accounts is unparalleled.
SUMMARY
Christian apologists thus contested Spinoza’s and Hume’s objections to miracles from a variety of standpoints. It is noteworthy that virtually all the Christian thinkers presupposed the existence of God in their argument. It must be remembered
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that this was not a case of theism versus atheism, but of Christian theism versus Deism. Moreover, God’s existence was not always just assumed: Clarke and Paley formulated sophisticated arguments to justify belief in God. The Christians argued that given the existence of God, miracles are possible because of God’s omnipotence (Clarke), because of his conservation of the world in being (Houtteville), and because of his sovereign freedom to act as he wills (Less).
Against the mechanistic Newtonian worldview, they argued variously that the course of nature is really only the regular pattern of the operation of God’s will (Clarke), or that it is subject to God’s freedom to alter it (Vernet, Houtteville, Less, Paley), or even that it may include within itself the capacity for miraculous events (Sherlock, Houtteville).
Against Spinoza’s first objection, the apologists argued that miracles do not contradict God’s nature, because the laws of nature do not flow in necessitarian fashion from the being of God, but are freely willed and therefore alterable (Vernet); and miracles as well as the laws could be willed by God from eternity so that their occurrence represents no change in God’s decrees (Houtteville). Against his second objection, they maintained that miracles, while not proof of the existence of God, are proof of the Christian God. Hence, it is correct to say that the regular order of nature proves God’s existence; but it is equally true to say that a miracle proves the action of God in the world (Clarke, Paley).
The Christian thinkers sometimes granted freely that one could not know whether God or a lesser being was at work in the miracle; but here they urged that it was the religious, doctrinal context that allowed one to determine if the miracle was divine (Clarke, Less).
As for Spinoza’s charge that a supposed miracle may be caused by an unknown law of nature, Le Clerc responded that it then becomes inexplicable why such events do not recur and why these mysterious laws operated coincidentally at the moment of Jesus’ command. Vernet replied that this possibility is negligible when numerous and various miracles occur. And others (Sherlock, Houtteville) granted that such unknown laws might be God’s means of acting within the course of nature.
In response to Hume’s “in principle” argument they argued: Given God’s existence, miracles are as possible as any other event (Less); and the probability that God would reveal himself nullifies any inherent improbability in miracles (Paley).
A miracle is a matter of sense perception like any other event, and is therefore capable of being supported by historical testimony (Sherlock). A miracle is not contrary to experience as such, and therefore, the testimony to a miracle cannot be nullified by the testimony to the regular order of other experiences (Less, Paley).
The improbability that a miracle should occur in the past is equal to the probability that we should experience such events today, a probability that is slight or non-existent (Paley). Hume’s argument, if equably applied, would eliminate not only miracles but many natural matters of fact as well (Sherlock, Less). Hume’s
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argument leads to an indefensible skepticism regarding events amply established by reliable testimony (Paley).
In response to Hume’s “in fact” argument, the Christian apologists simply sought to prove that in the case of Jesus’ miracles and resurrection, the factual evidence was strong enough to establish the credibility of these events, in contrast to other stories of purported miracles (Less, Paley). In short, miracles are neither impossible nor unidentifiable.
Assessment
We’ve seen that the problem of miracles occupied a central place in the Deist controversy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although the Christians argued vigorously on behalf of miracles, it was undoubtedly the arguments of Spinoza, Hume, and the Deists that posterity gave an eye to, for in the next century D. F. Strauss was able to proceed in his investigation of the life of Jesus on the a priori assumption that miracles are impossible. According to Strauss, this is not a presupposition requiring proof; on the contrary, to assume that miracles are possible is a presupposition requiring proof. Strauss asserts that God’s interposition in the regular course of nature is “irreconcilable with enlightened ideas of the relation of God to the world.”11 Thus, any supposedly historical account of miraculous events must be dismissed out of hand; “indeed no just notion of the true nature of history is possible, without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of miracles.”12
This presupposition governed the remainder of the nineteenth-century Life of Jesus movement. According to Albert Schweitzer, the historian of that movement, by the mid-1860s the question of miracles had lost all importance. He reports,
“The exclusion of miracle from our view of history has been universally recognized as a principle of criticism, so that miracle no longer concerns the historian either positively or negatively.”13 This might lead one to think that the Deists had won the debate. But is this in fact the case?
The Newtonian World-Machine
It will be remembered that the backdrop for the Deist controversy was a deterministic view of the universe as a Newtonian world-machine that bound even the hands of God. With the advent of quantum physics, however, a significant element of indeterminacy has been introduced into physics, which a good many thinkers have sought to exploit in defense of miracles or, ironically, as way of explaining divine action in the world without miracles.
11. David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. G. Eliot (London: SCM, 1973), 737.
12. Ibid . , 75.
13. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 3rd ed., trans. W. Montgomery (London: Adam
& Charles Black, 1954), 111.
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In quantum physics there is an ineradicable element of indeterminacy in the behavior of systems described by quantum physical laws, whether those systems be sub-atomic or macroscopic. For example, in classical physics, if the kinetic energy of an elementary particle is less than its potential energy, then the particle will be unable to surmount a potential barrier which it confronts. But in quantum physics, if the kinetic and potential energies are close, then by means of a phenomenon called “quantum tunneling” the particle can surmount or pass through the barrier.
Whether the particle is stopped by or overcomes the barrier cannot be determined on the basis of obtainable information concerning its state prior to its encounter-ing the barrier. It appears to be entirely random whether or not similar particles breach the barrier, and where they end up is a matter of probability. Similarly, an elementary particle fired at a screen cannot be predicted to strike the screen at a specific determined point, as in Newtonian physics. Rather, there is a probability curve describing the various points where it might strike which is highest in a certain area and becomes vanishingly low as one moves away from that area.
Theoretically, the particle could end up anywhere. Now since macroscopic objects, like a human body, for example, are composed of sub-atomic particles governed by quantum laws, there is some non-zero probability that each of the particles composing the body should travel to some distant location, and if all the particles did this in concert, the whole body would be “miraculously” transported to another location. Natural laws then become statistical in nature, describing what generally occurs in a number of cases.
This would appear to bring some comfort to the modern defender of miracles, for he may now argue that it is illegitimate to exclude a priori a certain event that does not conform to known natural law, since that law cannot be rigidly applied to individual cases. Given quantum indeterminacy, there is at least some chance of an event’s occurring, regardless of how bizarre it might be.
It seems to me, however, that this appeal to quantum indeterminacy does not settle the problem of miracles. In the first place, not all of nature’s laws are affected by quantum indeterminacy. Relativity theory, which, together with quantum theory, underpins the structure of modern physics, enunciates laws which are not statistical or based on indeterminacy. Miracles violating such laws would still be impossible. Secondly, it is not evident that all the Gospel miracles could be explained in conformity to quantum laws. Water might be changed into wine by a spontaneous rearrangement of its sub-atomic constituents, but no such explanation could account for the resurrection of Jesus, which was not simply the resuscitation of a corpse, but the transformation of the body to an immortal and glorified existence.
Thirdly, and most importantly, quantum indeterminacy and the statistical character of certain natural laws show only that one cannot absolutely rule out in advance an event not conforming to known laws. Although quantum physics has opened a crack in the door for the defender of miracles, it is not wide enough for
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him to put his whole case through. As one philosopher of science explains: There is no question that most events regarded as significantly “miraculous” in religious contexts would, if they violate Newtonian laws, also be excessively improbable on well-established quantum laws, and therefore would be regarded as violations of these also. Thus, if we consider only the currently accepted theories of physics, the credibility of such miracles is no greater than in Newtonian theory.14
It would be crazy, for example, for a person accused of murder, who was known to have been alone in the room with the victim at the time the murder occurred, to offer as his defense the claim that another man quantum tunneled into the room spontaneously, shot the victim dead, and then, before he could be apprehended, spontaneously quantum tunneled back out again. (Come to think of it, maybe such a defendant could get off by being declared not guilty by reason of insanity!) We cannot sidestep the problem of miracles, then, by a disingenuous appeal to quantum indeterminacy or the statistical character of nature’s laws. We are still confronted with the question whether violations of nature’s laws are possible.
But are miracles in fact “violations of the laws of nature,” as Newtonian mechanists claimed? Here it would seem to be of no avail to answer with Clarke that matter has no properties and that the course of nature is simply God’s regular action.
Not only does modern physics hold that matter does possess certain properties and that certain forces like gravitation and electro-magnetism are real forces operating in the world, but Clarke’s view also leads to the strange doctrine of occasionalism, which holds that fire does not really burn wood, for example, but that God causes wood to burn merely upon the occasion of its coming into contact with fire. Nor would it help to answer with Sherlock and Houtteville that nature may contain within itself the power to produce certain effects contrary to its normal operation, for this explanation is unconvincing in cases where the natural laws are sufficiently well known so as to preclude with a high degree of probability the event’s taking place. Moreover, this solution threatens to reduce the event in question to a freak of nature, the result of chance, not an act of God.
A better tack, I think, is to ask whether in fact miracles should be characterized as “violations of the laws of nature,” as Newtonian mechanists assumed. (It would be well if we could rid ourselves of this characterization, since it is very prejudicial psychologically, smacking of the breaking of a civil law, so that God takes on the appearance of a divine rapist who violates Mother Nature.) An examination of the chief competing schools of thought concerning the notion of a natural law in fact reveals that on each theory the concept of a violation of a natural law is incoherent and that miracles need not be so defined. Broadly speaking, there are 14. Mary Hesse, “Miracles and the Laws of Nature,” in Miracles, ed. C. F. D. Moule (London: A. R.
Mowbray, 1965), 38.
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three main views of natural law today: the regularity theory, the nomic necessity theory, and the causal dispositions theory.15
According to the regularity theory, the “laws” of nature are not really laws at all, but just descriptions of the way things happen in the world. They describe the regularities which we observe in nature. Now since on such a theory a natural law is just a generalized description of whatever occurs in nature, it follows that no event which occurs can violate such a law. Instead, it just becomes part of the description.
The law cannot be violated, because it just describes in a certain generalized form everything that does happen in nature.
According to the nomic necessity theory, natural laws are not merely descriptive, but tell us what can and cannot happen in the natural world. They allow us to make certain contrary-to-fact conditional judgments, such as “If the density of the universe were sufficiently high, it would have re-contracted long ago,” which a purely descriptivist theory would not permit. Again, however, since natural laws are taken to be universal inductive generalizations, a violation of a natural law is no more possible on this theory than on the regularity theory. So long as natural laws are universal generalizations based on experience, they must take account of anything that happens and so would be revised should an event occur which the law did not permit.
Of course, in practice proponents of such theories do not treat natural laws so rigidly. Rather, natural laws are assumed to have implicit in them the assumption
“all things being equal.” That is to say, the law states what is the case under the assumption that no other natural factors are interfering. When a scientific anomaly occurs, it is usually assumed that some unknown natural factors are interfering, so that the law is neither violated nor revised. But suppose the law fails to describe or predict accurately because some supernatural factors are interfering? Clearly the implicit assumption of such laws is that no supernatural factors as well as no natural factors are interfering. Thus, if the law proves inaccurate in a particular case because God is acting, the law is neither violated nor revised. If God brings about some event which a law of nature fails to predict or describe, such an event cannot be characterized as a violation of a law of nature, since the law is valid only under the tacit assumption that no supernatural factors come into play in addition to the natural factors.
On such theories, then, if miracles are to be distinguished from both God’s ordinary and special providential acts, then miracles ought to be defined as naturally impossible events, that is to say, events which cannot be produced by the natural causes operative at a certain time and place. Whether an event is a miracle is thus relative to a time and place. Given the natural causes operative at a certain time and place, for example, rain may be naturally inevitable or necessary, but on 15. For discussion see Stephen S. Bilinskyj, “God, Nature, and the Concept of Miracle” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1982); Alfred J. Freddoso, “The Necessity of Nature,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 11 (1986): 215–42.
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another occasion, rain may be naturally impossible. Of course, some events, say, the resurrection, may be absolutely miraculous in that they are at every time and place beyond the productive capacity of natural causes.
According to the causal dispositions theory, things in the world have different natures or essences, which include their causal dispositions to affect other things in certain ways, and natural laws are metaphysically necessary truths about what causal dispositions are possessed by various natural kinds of things. For example,
“Salt has a disposition to dissolve in water” would state a natural law. If, due to God’s action, some salt failed to dissolve in water, the natural law is not violated, because it is still true that salt has such a disposition. As a result of things’ causal dispositions, certain deterministic natural propensities exist in nature, and when such a propensity is not impeded (by God or some other free agent), then we can speak of a natural necessity. On this theory, an event which is naturally necessary must and does actually occur, since the natural propensity will automatically issue in the event if it is not impeded. By the same token, a naturally impossible event cannot and does not actually occur. Hence, a miracle cannot be characterized on this theory as a naturally impossible event. Rather, a miracle is an event which results from causal interference with a natural propensity which is so strong that only a supernatural agent could impede it. The concept of miracle is essentially the same as under the previous two theories, namely, God’s acting to cause an event in the sequence of natural events in the absence of any secondary cause of that event, but one just cannot call a miracle “naturally impossible” as those terms are defined in this theory; perhaps we could adopt instead the nomenclature “physically impossible” to characterize miracles.
On none of these theories, then, should miracles be understood as violations of the laws of nature. Rather they are naturally (or physically) impossible events, events which at certain times and places cannot be produced by the relevant natural causes.
Now the question is, what could conceivably transform an event that is naturally impossible into a real historical event? Clearly, the answer is the personal God of theism. For if a transcendent, personal God exists, then he could cause events in the universe that could not be produced by causes within the universe. It is precisely to such a God that the Christian apologists appealed. Given a God who is omnipotent, who conserves the world in being, and who is capable of acting freely, Christian thinkers seem to be entirely justified in maintaining that miracles are possible. Indeed, only if atheism were proved to be true could one rationally deny the epistemic possibility of miracles. For if it is even epistemically possible that a transcendent, personal God exists, then it is equally possible that he has acted in the universe. Therefore, it seems to me that the Christian apologists argued in the main correctly against their Newtonian opponents, and that the natural (or physical) impossibility of miracles in no way precludes their reality.
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Spinoza’s Objections
As we turn to Spinoza’s objections, again it seems to me that the Christian thinkers argued cogently.
OBJECTION BASED ON THE IMMUTABILITY OF NATURE
It would be tempting to dismiss Spinoza’s objections simply on the grounds that he was a pantheist, for whom “God” and “Nature” were interchangeable terms.
So, of course, a violation of nature’s laws would be a violation of God’s nature, since they are the same. The question is not whether miracles are possible on a pantheistic worldview, but on a theistic worldview.
But such a refutation would be too easy. The Tractatus is a Deistic, not a pantheistic, work, and Spinoza presupposes the traditional understanding of God. In particular, his argument is based on the classic doctrine of divine simplicity, which states that God’s knowledge, will, goodness, power, and so forth are all really identical and one with his essence. The question Spinoza raises is, in effect, how can God’s knowledge be necessary and his will be contingent, if these are identical?
Now contrary to Spinoza, classical theology did not claim that God’s knowledge is characterized by necessity. For example, God knows the truth “The universe exists.”
But God was under no obligation to create the universe. Since creation is a free act, he could have refrained from creating anything at all. If God had not created the world, then he would instead know the truth “No universe exists.” Necessarily, then, whatever God knows is true; but it is not necessary that the content of God’s knowledge be what it is. Had he created a different world or no world at all, the content of his knowledge would be different. Hence, just as God is free to will differently than he does, so he is able to have different knowledge than he does.
The laws of nature, then, are not known by God necessarily, since, as Vernet said, they depend on God’s will. Even if we hold that the laws of nature are necessary truths, God could have willed to create a universe operating according to a different set of laws by creating things having different natures from the things he created. By the same token, the miracles he performs could, as Less and Houtteville pointed out, have been willed by God just as eternally and immutably as the laws.
There is just no reason, then, to think that when he causes a naturally impossible event, God’s knowledge and will come into conflict.
Spinoza’s objection does raise one important point, though. It is very difficult to see how God’s knowledge, for example, can be contingent and yet be identical with his essence, which includes necessary existence. How can God be utterly simple if he is in some respects necessary and in others contingent? What this calls into question, however, is not the possibility of miracles, but the doctrine of divine simplicity. This is a doctrine which is fortunately extra-biblical and is rejected as incoherent by the majority of Christian philosophers today.16
16. For a brief discussion see my and J. P. Moreland’s Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2007), 524–26.
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OBJECTION BASED ON THE INSUFFICIENCY OF MIRACLES
Spinoza’s second objection was that miracles are insufficient to prove God’s existence. As it is stated, the objection was simply irrelevant for most of the Christian apologists, for virtually all of them used miracles not as a proof for the existence of God, but as a proof for his action in the world. Hence, Spinoza was really attacking a straw man.
Nevertheless, the supporting reasoning of the objection was relevant to the Christians’ position. Spinoza’s main point was that a proof for God must be absolutely certain. Since we infer God’s existence from the immutable laws of nature, anything that casts doubt on those laws casts doubt on God’s existence. Two assumptions seem to underlie Spinoza’s reasoning: first, that a proof for God’s existence must be demonstratively certain; and second, that God’s existence is inferred from natural laws. But Christian apologists denied both of these assumptions. The more empirically minded of them held that a cogent argument for God’s existence need not be demonstratively certain. Think, for example, of Paley’s teleological argument: while not reaching absolute certainty, it claimed to make it more plausible to believe in God than not. Contemporary philosophers agree that if we were justified in accepting only those conclusions proved with demonstrative certainty, then we should know very, very little indeed. The second assumption fails to take account of the fact that there are other arguments for the existence of God not based on natural laws. For example, Clarke, while sharing Spinoza’s concern for demonstrative certainty, nevertheless believed that the ontological and cosmological arguments provided rational grounds for accepting God’s existence. So even if natural law were uncertain, that would not for Clarke call into question God’s existence.
But is Spinoza’s objection in fact true? He seems to think that the admission of a genuine miracle would overthrow the natural law violated by the miracle. Now we have already seen that miracles, properly defined, do not violate natural laws and so do not cast doubt upon their truth. Perhaps Spinoza would insist that were it proven that some event occurred which under current understanding of natural law is thought to be naturally impossible, then rather than admit that a miracle has happened we should instead revise the natural law so as to permit the natural occurrence of such an event. But Clarke and Paley argued more persuasively that a miracle need not overthrow nature’s general regularity; a miracle shows at most God’s intervention at that particular point. As Richard Swinburne argues, a natural law is not abolished because of one exception; the exception must occur repeatedly whenever the conditions for it are present. If the event will not occur again under identical circumstances, then the law will not be abandoned. A natural law will not be reformulated unless a new version will yield better predictability of future events without being more complicated than the original law. But if the new version does no better in predicting the phenomena and explaining the event in question, then the event will simply remain an unexplained exception to the natural law. Thus,
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Spinoza’s fear that miracles would destroy the fabric of natural law appears to be unjustified. Rather than leading us into the arms of atheism, exceptions to natural laws could lead us to discern the action of God in the world at that point.
Spinoza’s sub-point that miracles could not prove the existence of God, but only of a lesser being, did not strike against most of the Christian apologists because they were not trying to prove the existence of God. Having proved or presupposed God’s existence, they used miracles chiefly to show that Christian theism was true.
Nevertheless, Christian apologists were very concerned about how to show in any particular case that a miracle was not demonic but divine. I think that their answer to this problem constitutes one of their most important and enduring contributions to the discussion of miracles. They held that the doctrinal context of the miracle makes it evident if the miracle is truly from God. In this way they drew attention to the religio-historical context in which the miracle occurred as the key to the interpretation of that miracle. This is very significant, for a miracle without a context is inherently ambiguous. This is the problem with Hume’s example of the revivification of Queen Elizabeth: the event lacks any religious context and appears as a bald and unexplained anomaly. Hence, one feels a degree of sympathy for Hume’s skepticism. But how different it is with the case of Jesus’ resurrection!
It occurs in the context of and as the climax to Jesus’ own unparalleled life and teachings and produced so profound an effect on his followers that they called him Lord and proclaimed salvation for all men in his name. It ought, therefore, to give us serious pause, whereas the resuscitation of Queen Elizabeth would occasion only perplexity. The religio-historical context is crucial to the interpretation of a miraculous event.
Spinoza’s concern with lesser spiritual beings like angels and demons would probably not trouble many contemporary minds. Such beings are part of the fur-niture, so to speak, of a wider theistic worldview, so that no atheist today would seriously concede the Gospel miracles and yet maintain they were performed by angels. It would not seem unwarranted to infer that if such events are genuine miracles, then they were wrought by God.
Spinoza’s final sub-point, that a supposed miracle may really be the effect of an unknown law of nature, is not really an objection against the occurrence of miracles, but against the identification of miracles. Granted that miracles are possible, how can we know when one has occurred? This problem has been persuasively formulated in our day by the British philosopher Antony Flew: We simply do not have, and could not have, any natural . . . criterion which enables us to say, when faced with something which is found to have actually happened, that here we have an achievement which nature, left to her own unaided devices, could never encompass. The natural scientist, confronted with some occurrence inconsistent with a proposition previously believed to express a law of nature, can
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find in this disturbing inconsistency no ground whatever for proclaiming that the particular law of nature has been supernaturally overridden!17
The response of Sherlock and Houtteville to this objection, that an unknown law of nature is God’s means of producing the event, is surely inadequate. For it could just as easily be the case that the event is no act of God at all, just a spontaneous accident of nature without religious significance. Rather I think Le Clerc and Vernet have taken a better tack: when the miracles occur at a momentous time (for example, a man’s leprosy vanishing when Jesus spoke the words “Be clean”) and do not recur regularly in history, and when the miracles in question are numerous and various, then the chance of their being the result of unknown natural causes is minimal. Since, as we shall see, most critics now acknowledge that Jesus did perform what we may call miracles, this answer to Spinoza and Flew seems to be a cogent defense of the supernatural origin of the Gospel miracles.
Stephen Bilynskyj provides the following criteria for identifying some event E as a miracle:18
1) The evidence for the occurrence of E is at least as good as it is for other acceptable but unusual events similarly distant in time and space from the point of the inquiry;
2) An account of the natures and/or powers of the causally relevant natural agents, such that they could account for E, would be clumsy and ad hoc; 3) There is no evidence except the inexplicability of E for one or more natural agents which could produce E;
4) There is some justification for a supernatural explanation of E, independent of the inexplicability of E.
Even if we leave Jesus’ miracles aside and focus our attention on his resurrection from the dead, I think that the supernatural nature of that event alone may be successfully defended. We’re not asking here whether the facts of the case, such as the empty tomb or resurrection appearances, might be explained in a natural manner. The question is, if Jesus actually did rise from the dead, would we then be justified in inferring a supernatural cause for that event? Here the overwhelming majority of people would say yes. Those who argue against the resurrection try to explain away the facts of the case without allowing that Jesus rose from the dead. I know of no critic who argues that the best explanation of the historical facts is that Jesus rose from the dead, but that his resurrection was no miracle but a perfectly natural occurrence. That would appear to be a somewhat desperate obstinacy.
Two factors undergird this reasoning. First, the resurrection so exceeds what we know of natural causes that it seems most reasonable to attribute it to a su-17. Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Miracles,” by Antony Flew.
18. Bilynskyj, “God, Nature, and the Concept of Miracle,” 222.
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pernatural cause. Hume himself asserted that it has never in the history of the world been heard of that a truly dead man (in Jesus’ case for a night, a day, and a night) has been raised from the dead. Given the length of time that Jesus had been dead, it would be idle to compare his resurrection with the resuscitation of persons pronounced clinically dead in hospitals. But more than that: it is very important to understand that the resurrection was more than the resuscitation of a corpse.
It was not a return to the earthly mortal life; rather it was the transformation of the body to a new mode of existence, which Paul described as powerful, glorious, imperishable, and Spirit-directed (1 Cor. 15:42–44). It is inconceivable that such an event could be the product of natural causes. Moreover, if it were the effect of purely natural causes, then its singularity in the history of mankind becomes very difficult to understand—why has it not happened again? In the nearly two thousand years since that event, no natural causes have been discovered that could explain it. On the contrary, the advance of science has only served to confirm that such an event is naturally impossible.
Second, the supernatural explanation is given immediately in the religio-historical context in which the event occurred. Jesus’ resurrection was not merely an anomalous event, occurring without context; it came as the climax to Jesus’ own life and teachings. As Wolfhart Pannenberg explains,
The resurrection of Jesus acquires such decisive meaning, not merely because someone or anyone has been raised from the dead, but because it is Jesus of Nazareth, whose execution was instigated by the Jews because he had blasphemed against God.19
Jesus’ claim to authority, through which he put himself in God’s place, was . . . blasphemous for Jewish ears. Because of this Jesus was then also slandered before the Roman Governor as a rebel. If Jesus really has been raised, this claim has been visibly and unambiguously confirmed by the God of Israel, who was allegedly blasphemed by Jesus.20
Thus the religio-historical context furnishes us with the key to the supernatural character of that event.
One final remark on Spinoza’s objection against the identification of a miracle: his argument, unlike Hume’s, does not spring from the nature of historical investigation. Rather, the very eyewitnesses of the event could press Spinoza’s objection. But in this case, the argument leads to an untenable skepticism. There comes a point when the back of skepticism is broken by the sheer reality of the miracle before us. I think, for example, of that delightful scene in Dickens’s Christmas Carol in which Scrooge is confronted by Marley’s ghost, all bound in chains: 19. Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Jesu Geschichte und unsere Geschichte,” in Glaube und Wirklichkeit (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1975), 92.
20. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus—God and Man, trans. L. L. Wilkins and D. A. Priebe (London: SCM, 1968), 67.
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“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?”
“I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”
“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more gravy than grave about you, whatever you are.”
“. . . You see this toothpick?” said Scrooge.
“I do,” replied the Ghost.
“. . . Well!” returned Scrooge, “I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my life persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation.
Humbug, I tell you! Humbug!”
At this the spirit raised a frightful cry and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling into a swoon. But how much greater was his horror, when the phantom, taking off the bandage round its head . . . its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!
Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.
“Mercy!” he said. “Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”
“Man of worldly mind!” replied the Ghost, “do you believe in me or not?”
“I do,” said Scrooge. “I must.”21
Such studied skepticism as Scrooge’s becomes untenable when confronted with the evident reality of such a striking miracle. Can we imagine, for example, doubting Thomas, when confronted with the risen Jesus, studiously considering whether what he saw palpably before him might not be the effect of an unknown natural cause?
Had Jesus himself encountered such skepticism, would he not have attributed it to hardness of heart? In this light, such skepticism need not be demonstratively refuted but is self-condemned. Perhaps Pascal was right in saying that God has given evidence sufficiently clear for those with an open heart, but sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed.
Hume’s Objections
“IN PRINCIPLE” ARGUMENT
Hume’s “in principle” argument, despite its influence, especially upon biblical scholars, is generally recognized by philosophers today to be, in the words of the 21. Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol,” in Christmas Books, by Charles Dickens (London: Oxford, 1954), 18–19.
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philosopher of science John Earman, an “abject failure.”22 Even Hume’s admirers try at most to salvage some insightful nugget from his convoluted discussion, typically Hume’s maxim that “no testimony . . . is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless this testimony is of such a kind that . . . its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” But, as we shall see, even that maxim requires re-interpretation.
Hume’s argument actually falls into two more or less independent claims. On the one hand there is his claim that miracles are by definition utterly improbable; on the other hand there is his claim that no evidence for a purported miracle can serve to overcome its intrinsic improbability. As it turns out, both of these claims are mistaken.
Consider the second claim first, that no amount of evidence can serve to establish a miracle. Stimulated by Hume’s argument against miracles, there arose a discussion among probability theorists from Condorcet to John Stuart Mill over how much evidence it takes in order to establish the occurrence of highly improbable events.23 It was soon realized that if one simply weighed the probability of the event against the reliability of the witness to the event, then we should be led into denying the occurrence of events which, though highly improbable, we reasonably know to have happened. For example, if on the morning news you hear reported that the pick in last night’s lottery was 7492871, this is a report of an extraordinarily improbable event, one out of several million, and even if the morning news’ accuracy is known to be 99.99 percent, the improbability of the event reported will swamp the probability of the witness’s reliability, so that we should never believe such reports. In order to believe the report, Hume would require us to have enough evidence in favor of the morning news’s reliability to counter-balance the improbability of the winning pick, which is absurd. Paley was therefore quite correct when he charged that Hume’s argument could lead us into situations where we would be forced to deny the testimony of the most reliable witnesses because of general considerations. And that goes not only for miraculous events, but, as Sherlock and Less urged, for non-miraculous events as well, as Hume himself admitted with respect to the man in the tropics confronted with travelers’ tales of ice.
Probability theorists saw that what also needs to be considered is the probability that if the reported event has not occurred, then the witness’s testimony is just as it is. As Mill wrote,
To know whether a coincidence does or does not require more evidence to render it credible than an ordinary event, we must refer, in every instance, to first principles, 22. John Earman, Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
23. See S. L. Zabell, “The Probabilistic Analysis of Testimony,” Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 20 (1988): 327–54.
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and estimate afresh what is the probability that the given testimony would have been delivered in that instance, supposing the fact which it asserts not to be true.24
Thus, to return to our example, the probability that the morning news would announce the pick as 7492871 if some other number had been chosen is incredibly small, given that the newscasters had no preference for the announced number.
On the other hand, the announcement is much more probable if 7492871 were the actual number chosen. This comparative likelihood easily counterbalances the high prior improbability of the event reported.
The realization on the part of probability theorists that other factors need to be included in the correct calculation of the probability of some event comes to expression in Bayes’ Theorem, which we encountered in chapter 1. Letting M =
some miraculous event, E = the specific evidence for that event, and B = our background knowledge apart from the specific evidence, the so-called “odds form” of Bayes’ Theorem states:
Pr(M|E&B) Pr(M|B) Pr(E|M&B)
______________ = ___________ × ______________
Pr(not-M|E&B) Pr(not-M|B) Pr(E|not-M&B) On the left-hand side of the equation Pr(M|E&B) represents the probability of the miracle given the total evidence, and Pr(not-M|E&B) represents the probability of the miracle’s not occurring given the total evidence. The odds form of Bayes Theorem gives us the ratio of these two probabilities.25 If the ratio is 1/1, then M and not-M have the same probability; the odds of M’s occurring are, as they say, fifty/fifty, or 50 percent. If we represent this ratio as A/B, what Hume wants to show is that, in principle, A<B—for example, 2/3 or 4/9 or what have you. So given the odds, one could never rationally believe, no matter what the evidence, that a miracle has taken place.
Now whether the miracle is more probable than not will be determined by the ratios on the right hand side of the equation. In the first ratio, the numerator Pr(M|B) represents the intrinsic probability of the miracle, and the denominator Pr(not-M|B) represents the intrinsic probability of the miracle’s not occurring.
We’re asking here which is more probable, M or not-M, relative to our background knowledge alone, abstracting from the specific evidence for M. In the second ratio the numerator Pr(E|M&B) represents the explanatory power of the miracle, and the denominator Pr(E|not-M&B) represents the explanatory power 24. J. S. Mill, A System of Logic, 2 vols. (London: 1843), bk. 3, chap. 25, §6, cited in Zabell, “Probabilistic Analysis of Testimony,” 331.
25. Given this ratio we can also compute the actual probability of M. If we represent the ratio as A/B, then we can compute the probability of M given the total evidence by A/(A+B). So if the ratio is 2/3, then the probability of M given the total evidence is 2/(2+3) = 2/5 = .4, or 40%.
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of the miracle’s not occurring. We’re asking here which best explains the specific evidence we have, M or not-M.
Now notice that even if the ratio of the intrinsic probabilities weighs heavily against M, that improbability can be offset if the ratio representing the explanatory power of M or not-M weighs equally or greater in favor of M. For example, (1/100) × (100/1) = 100/100 = 1/1, or a 50% probability for M.
Unfortunately, Hume never discusses the second ratio representing the explanatory power of the miracle’s occurring or not occurring. He focuses almost exclusively on Pr(M|B), the intrinsic probability of a miracle, claiming that it is so inevitably low that no amount of evidence can establish a miracle. But that is plainly wrong, since no matter what non-zero value one assigns to the first ratio, the miracle may be very probable on the total evidence if the second ratio is sufficiently large.26 So much for Hume’s in principle argument!
Hume does say that “no testimony . . . is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless this testimony is of such a kind that . . . its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” This is the closest Hume comes to discerning the remaining factors in the probability calculus. Hume’s way of putting his maxim is rhetorically loaded, however, equivocating on the term “miraculous.”
Since it is not at all miraculous that human testimony be false, any miracle, no matter how small, would seem to be more miraculous than the testimony’s being false. Indeed, it would seem almost sacrilegious to suggest, for example, that the disciples’ being mistaken would be a greater miracle than Christ’s resurrection! But Hume’s maxim is not really using “miraculous” in the sense of “naturally impossible.”
To see this point, suppose, for the sake of argument, that it is more intrinsically probable that Jesus would rise from the dead than that the disciples were either deceivers or deceived. In such a case their testimony may, indeed, be sufficient to establish the fact of Jesus’ resurrection, even though Jesus’ resurrection is, technically speaking, more miraculous than their testimony’s being false. Of course, Hume argues that a miraculous event will always be more improbable than the falsehood of the testimony in support of it. But that only goes to underline the point that the real issue here is the probability of the events, not their miraculousness.
The miraculousness of an event is merely the means by which Hume endeavors to show its improbability. It’s the improbability of miracle claims that Hume is after. So as Paley correctly discerned and as contemporary thinkers recognize, what 26. A further factor which is neglected by Hume is the remarkable impact of multiple, independent testimony to some event. If two witnesses are each 99% reliable, then the odds of their both independently testifying falsely to some event are only .01 x .01 = .0001, or one out of 10,000; the odds of three such witnesses’ being wrong is .01 x .01 x .01 = .000001, or one out of 1,000,000; and the odds of six such witnesses’ being mistaken is .01 x .01 x .01 x .01 x .01 x .01 = .000000000001, or one out of 1,000,000,000,000.
In fact, the cumulative power of independent witnesses is such that individually they could be un reliable more than 50% of the time and yet their testimony combine to make an event of apparently enormous improbability quite probable in light of their testimony. With respect to Jesus’ resurrection, it is difficult to know how independent some of the witnesses are—though in the cases of people like Peter, James, and Saul independence is well established.
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Hume’s maxim, less pejoratively stated, really means is “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless this testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more improbable than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” Paley accepts Hume’s maxim and challenges Hume’s argument that it is always more probable that the testimony in support of a miracle is false than that the miracle actually occurred.
There is a slogan beloved in the free thought subculture that “extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence.” What we now see is that this seemingly commonsensical slogan is, in fact, false as usually understood. In order to establish the occurrence of a highly improbable event, one need not have lots of evidence.
The only plausible sense in which the slogan is true is that in order to establish the occurrence of an event which has a very low intrinsic probability, then the evidence would also have to have a very low intrinsic probability, that is, Pr(E|B) would have to be very low. So, to return to our example of the pick in last night’s lottery, it is highly improbable, given our background knowledge of the world, that the morning news would announce just that specific number out of all the numbers that could have been announced. In that Pickwickian sense the evidence for the winning pick is, indeed, extraordinary. But obviously, that isn’t the sense that skeptics have in mind when they say that it takes extraordinary evidence to establish the occurrence of an extraordinary event. For that condition is easily met in the Pickwickian sense. The skeptic can’t reasonably mean that miraculous events require miraculous evidence, for that would force us to reject any miracle claim, even if wholly natural evidence rendered the miracle more probable than not. What the skeptic seems to be saying by his slogan is that in order to believe rationally in a miraculous event, you must have an enormous amount of evidence. But why think that that is the case? “Because a miracle is so improbable,” the skeptic will say. But Bayes’ Theorem shows that rationally believing in a highly improbable event doesn’t require an enormous amount of evidence. What is crucial is that the evidence be far more probable given that the event did occur than given that it did not. The bottom line is that it doesn’t always take a huge amount of evidence to establish a miracle.
J. Howard Sobel takes Hume’s maxim to assert that Pr(M|E&B) > 1/2 only if Pr(M|B) > Pr(not-M&E|B).27 Sobel’s rendering of “the falsehood of the testimony”
as Pr(not-M&E|B) is controverted,28 but his formula does state a necessary condition of Pr(M|E&B) > 1/2. But there is nothing in this formula to show that it is in principle impossible to establish the occurrence of a miracle. One might think that relative to our background knowledge a miracle is always more improbable than the miracle’s not occurring and the evidence’s being as it is. But that is by 27. Jordan Howard Sobel, Logic and Theism: Arguments for and against Beliefs in God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 316.
28. Earman takes it more plausibly to be Pr(not-M|E & B) or Pr(E| not-M & B). He concludes, “Hume’s Maxim is just the unhelpful tautology that no testimony is sufficient to establish the credibility of a miracle unless it is sufficient to make the occurrence more probable than not” ( Hume’s Abject Failure, 40).
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no means the case. Remember that the evidence itself may be extraordinary in the Pickwickian sense of being, like the miracle, highly improbable relative to the background information alone, so that Pr(not-M&E|B) < Pr(M|B). Ironically, the skeptic’s own slogan returns to bite him, for the evidence may well be extraordinary, that is, highly improbable relative to our background knowledge, so that Sobel’s condition is met.
In order to show that no evidence can in principle establish the historicity of a miracle, Hume needs to show that the intrinsic probability of any miracle claim is so low that it can never be overcome. This takes us back to the first part of Hume’s argument, that miracles are by definition utterly improbable. Hume claimed that the uniform experience of mankind supports the laws of nature rather than miracles.
Now such an assertion appears at face value to be question-begging. To say that uniform experience is against miracles is implicitly to assume already that all miracle reports are false. Earman interprets Hume to mean, not that uniform experience is against miracles, but that up to the case under investigation, uniform experience has been against miracles; that is to say, as we come to some alleged miracle claim, we do so knowing that all past miracle claims apart from this one have been spurious. Earman interprets Hume to construe Pr(M|B) in terms of frequency. Miracles are utterly improbable because they diverge from mankind’s uniform experience.
But Earman points out that the frequency model of probability simply will not work in this context. For trying to construe the probabilities in Bayes’ Theorem as objective frequencies would disqualify many of the theoretical hypotheses of the advanced sciences. For example, scientists are investing long hours and millions of dollars hoping for an observation of an event of proton decay, though such an event has never been observed. On Hume’s model of probability such research is a waste of time and money, since the event will have a probability of zero. Earman concludes that in the case of Pr(M|B) the guidance for assigning probability
“cannot take the simple minded form” of using the frequency of M-type events in past experience; that frequency may be flatly zero (as in proton decay), but it would be unwise to therefore set Pr(M|B)=0.29
How we assess the intrinsic probability of M will depend on how M is characterized. Take the resurrection of Jesus, for example. The hypothesis “Jesus rose from the dead” is ambiguous, comprising two radically different hypotheses. One is that
“Jesus rose naturally from the dead”; the other is that “Jesus rose supernaturally from the dead,” or that “God raised Jesus from the dead.” The former is agreed on all hands to be outrageously improbable. Given what we know of cell necrosis, the hypothesis “Jesus rose naturally from the dead” is fantastically, even unimaginably, improbable. Conspiracy theories, apparent death theories, hallucination theories, twin brother theories—almost any hypothesis, however unlikely, seems more probable than the hypothesis that all the cells in Jesus’ corpse spontaneously came back to life again. Accordingly, that improbability will lower greatly the probability that 29. John Earman, “Bayes, Hume, and Miracles,” Faith and Philosophy 10 (1993): 303.
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“Jesus rose from the dead,” since that probability will be a function of its two com-ponent hypotheses, the one natural and the other supernatural. But the evidence for the laws of nature which renders improbable the hypothesis that Jesus rose naturally from the grave is simply irrelevant to the probability of the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead. Since our interest is in whether Jesus rose supernaturally from the dead, we can assess this hypothesis on its own.
Let us ask, then, what is the intrinsic probability of the hypothesis R= “God raised Jesus from the dead.” How we assess Pr(R|B) will depend on whether our background knowledge B includes the facts which support the arguments of natural theology for God’s existence, such as the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, objective moral values and duties, and so forth. If it does not, the Pr(R|B) will be lower than if it does, for then our evidence E will have to carry the full burden of justifying belief in God’s existence as well as Jesus’ resurrection.
If we let G = God’s existence, the Theorem on Total Probability tells us: Pr(R|B) = [Pr(R|G&B) × Pr(G|B)] + [Pr(R|not-G&B) × Pr(not-G|B)]
Now Pr(R|not-G&B) is 0, since it is impossible for God to raise Jesus if God doesn’t exist! So Pr(R|B) reduces to just Pr(R|G&B) × Pr(G|B). As we have seen, the classical defenders of miracles did not treat them as arguments for God’s existence; rather God’s existence was taken to be implied by facts already included in B. So let’s include in B all the facts that go to support the premises of the arguments of natural theology. On this basis let’s suppose that the probability of God’s existence on the background knowledge of the world Pr(G|B) is at least 0.5. The remaining probability to estimate is Pr(R|G&B), the probability that God would raise Jesus from the dead, given that God exists. We may think of this probability as the degree of expectation that a perfectly rational agent would have that, given G&B, God would raise Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. God has never before intervened to do such a thing, so far as we know, and there are other ways he could vindicate Jesus, should he want to, if he even wants to. So how would a perfectly rational agent assess the risk of betting in this case that, given G&B, God would raise Jesus from the dead? In estimating this probability, we mustn’t abstract from the historical context of Jesus’ own life, ministry, and teaching, insofar as these can be included in our background knowledge. When we include in B our knowledge of the life of the historical Jesus up to the time of his crucifixion and burial, I don’t think we can say that God’s raising Jesus is improbable. So just for the sake of illustration let’s say that Pr(R|G&B) = 0.5. In that case Pr(R|B) = 0.5 × 0.5 =
0.25, or one out of four. Such an intrinsic improbability is easily outweighed by the other factors in Bayes’ Theorem.
Now in fact I think that it is impossible to assign a value to a probability like Pr(R|G&B) with any sort of confidence, and so Pr(R|B) will remain inscrutable.
The difficulty here is that we are dealing with a free agent (the Creator of the universe), and how do we know what he would do with respect to Jesus? But I
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think we can say that there is no reason to think that Pr(R|G&B) is terribly low, such that Pr(R|B) becomes overwhelmingly improbable. We certainly cannot take Pr(R|G&B) to be terribly low simply because of the infrequency of resurrections, for it may be precisely because of the resurrection’s uniqueness that it is highly probable that God would choose so spectacular an event as a means of vindicating Jesus.
In any case, I think it is evident that there is no “in principle” argument here against miracles. Rather what will be at stake, as our example of Jesus’ resurrection illustrates, is an “in fact” argument that handles a putative miracle claim in its historical context, given the evidence for God’s existence. So the Humean skeptic has failed to show that any possible miracle claim has an insuperably low intrinsic probability. Couple this result with our earlier conclusion that even incredibly low intrinsic probabilities can be outweighed by the other factors in Bayes’ Theorem, and it is evident why contemporary thinkers have come to see Hume’s argument as a failure.30
Although the fallaciousness of Hume’s reasoning has been recognized by the majority of philosophers writing on the subject today, still a widespread assumption persists that if historical inquiry is to be feasible, then one must adopt a sort of methodological naturalism as a fundamental historiographical principle.
According to this outlook, historians must adopt as a methodological principle a sort of “historical naturalism” that excludes the supernatural. Antony Flew, while acknowledging the failure of Hume’s argument, has sought to defend the presump-tion against miracles in historical studies. He writes: It is only and precisely by presuming that the laws that hold today held in the past and by employing as canons all our knowledge . . . of what is probable or improbable, possible or impossible, that we can rationally interpret the detritus of the past as evidence and from it construct our account of what actually happened. But in this context, what is impossible is what is physically, as opposed to logically impossible.
And “physical possibility” is, and surely has to be, defined in terms of inconsistency with a true law of nature. . . . Our sole ground for characterizing a reported occurrence as miraculous is at the same time a sufficient reason for calling it physically impossible.31
This viewpoint is simply a restatement of the nineteenth-century German theologian Ernst Troeltsch’s principle of analogy. According to Troeltsch, one of the most basic historiographical principles is that the past does not differ essentially from the present. Though the events of the past are obviously not the same events as those of the present, they must be the same kind of events if historical investigation is to be possible. Troeltsch realized that this principle was incompatible 30. I’m indebted to Tim and Lydia McGrew, epistemologists who specialize in confirmation theory, for very interesting and illuminating discussions of Hume’s “in principle” argument.
31. Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Miracles.”
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with the miraculous events of the Gospels and therefore held that they must be regarded as unhistorical.
In our own day, however, Wolfhart Pannenberg has persuasively argued that Troeltsch’s principle of analogy cannot be legitimately employed to banish all non-analogous events from history. According to Pannenberg, analogy, when properly defined, means that in an unclear historical situation we should interpret the facts in terms of known experience. Troeltsch, however, uses analogy to constrict all past events to purely natural events. But, Pannenberg maintains, the fact that an event bursts all analogies to the present cannot be used to dispute its historicity. When, for example, myths, legends, illusions, and the like are dismissed as unhistorical, it is not because they are unusual but because they are analogous to present forms of consciousness to which no historical reality corresponds. When an event is said to have occurred for which no present analogy exists, we cannot automatically dismiss its historicity; to do that we must have an analogy to some known form of consciousness to which no reality corresponds that would suffice to explain the situation.
Pannenberg has thus reformulated Troeltsch’s principle of analogy in such a way that it is not the lack of an analogy that shows an event to be unhistorical, but the presence of a positive analogy to known thought forms that shows a purported miracle to be unhistorical. Hence, he has elsewhere affirmed that if the Easter narratives were shown to be essentially secondary constructions analogous to common comparative religious phenomena, if the Easter appearances were shown to correspond completely to the model of hallucinations, and if the empty tomb tradition were shown to be a late legend, then the resurrection should be evaluated as unhistorical. In this way the lack of an analogy to present experience says nothing for or against the historicity of an event. Pannenberg’s use of the principle preserves the analogous structure of the past to the present or to the known, thus making the investigation of history possible without thereby forcing the past into the mold of the present. It would therefore seem that Hume’s “in principle” argument fares no better than Spinoza’s objections.
“IN FACT” ARGUMENTS
If, then, there is no “in principle” objection to the identification of miracles, what may be said of Hume’s “in fact” arguments? All of his points have force, but the fact remains that these general considerations cannot be used to decide the historicity of any particular miracle. They serve to make us cautious in the investigation of any miracle, but the only way the question of historicity can be solved is through such an investigation. Hume’s fourth point (that miracles occur in all religions and thereby cancel each other out) does try to preclude an investigation, but it still remains an empirical question whether the evidence for any miracle supporting a counter-Christian claim is as well (or better) attested as the evidence for Jesus’
miracles and resurrection. And if the latter should prove to be genuine, then we
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can forgo the investigation of every single counter-Christian miracle, for most of these pale into insignificance next to the Gospel miracles.
Conclusion
Hence, I think that for the most part the Christian apologists argued correctly against their Deist opponents; and it is sad that the nineteenth century failed to discern this fact. The presupposition against miracles survives in theology only as a hangover from an earlier Deistic age and ought now to be once for all abandoned.
Practical Application
Like the contents of the last chapter, the material shared in this chapter does not, I must confess, admit of much practical application in evangelism. I’ve never encountered a non-Christian who rejected the gospel because of an overt objection to miracles.
Nevertheless, this section is extremely important because the presupposition of modern biblical criticism has been the impossibility or unidentifiability of miracles, so that an open-minded approach to the Scriptures necessitates a prior defense of the rationality of belief in miracles. For example, the infamous Jesus Seminar, a group of radical New Testament critics committed to reforming the church’s view of Jesus, has dismissed most of the New Testament witness to the life of Jesus as unhistorical. In explaining the presuppositions with which its Fellows work, the Jesus Seminar is remarkably candid about its presupposition of the impossibility of miracles. Their Introduction to The Five Gospels states: The contemporary religious controversy turns on whether the worldview reflected in the Bible can be carried forward into this scientific age and retained as an article of faith. . . . the Christ of creed and dogma . . . can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope.32
But why, we might ask, is it impossible in a scientific age to believe in a supernatural Christ? Here things really get interesting. According to the Seminar, the historical Jesus by definition must be a non-supernatural figure. At this point they appeal to D. F. Strauss, the nineteenth-century German biblical critic. Strauss’s epochal book The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined was based squarely in a philosophy of naturalism. According to Strauss, God does not act directly in the world; he acts only indirectly through natural causes. With regard to the resurrection, as we have seen, Strauss states that God’s raising Jesus from the dead “is irreconcilable with enlightened ideas of the relation of God to the world.”33 Now look carefully at what the Jesus Seminar says about Strauss:
32. R. W. Funk, R. W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, “Introduction” to The Five Gospels (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 2.
33. David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot, ed. with an introduction by Peter C. Hodgson, Lives of Jesus Series (London: SCM, 1973), 736.
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Strauss distinguished what he called the “mythical” (defined by him as anything legendary or supernatural) in the Gospels from the historical. . . . The choice Strauss posed in his assessment of the Gospels was between the supernatural Jesus—the Christ of faith—and the historical Jesus.34
Anything that is supernatural is by definition not historical. There’s no argument given; it’s just defined that way. Thus we have a radical divorce between the Christ of faith, or the supernatural Jesus, and the real, historical Jesus. Now the Jesus Seminar gives a ringing endorsement of Strauss’s distinction: they say that the distinction between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith is “the first pillar of scholarly wisdom.”35
But now the whole quest of the historical Jesus becomes a charade. If we begin by presupposing naturalism, then of course what we wind up with is a purely natural Jesus. This reconstructed, naturalistic Jesus is not based on evidence, but on definition. What is amazing is that the Jesus Seminar makes no attempt to defend their naturalism; it is just presupposed.
Gerd Lüdemann, who is the leading German critic of the historicity of Jesus’
resurrection, takes it for granted that a historical approach to Jesus of Nazareth must be a naturalistic approach. “Historical criticism,” he states, “does not reckon with an intervention of God in history.”36 Thus, the resurrection cannot belong to the portrait of the historical Jesus. So what justification does Lüdemann give for this crucial presupposition of the impossibility of miracles? All he offers is a one-sentence allusion to Hume: “Hume . . . demonstrated that a miracle is defined in such a way that ‘no testimony is sufficient to establish it.’”37 In my 1997 debate with Lüdemann on the campus of Boston College, when I challenged him on this point, he showed himself impotent to provide any defense of his presupposition apart from his own incredulity.38
Similarly, Bart Ehrman, a best-selling New Testament scholar and vociferous ex-Christian, naïvely reiterates the argument of Hume against the identification of miracles, apparently without even knowing its provenance. With respect to Jesus’ resurrection, he states, “Because historians can only establish what probably happened, and a miracle of this nature is highly improbable, the historian cannot say it probably occurred.”39 In other words, in calculating the probability of Jesus’
34. Funk, et al ., “Introduction,” 3.
35. Ibid., 2–3.
36. Gerd Lüdemann, “Die Auferstehung Jesu,” in Fand die Auferstehung wirklich statt? ed. Alexander Bommarius (Düsseldorf: Parega Verlag, 1995) , 16.
37. Gert Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 12.
38. See William Lane Craig and Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection: Fact or Figment? ed. Paul Copan with responses by Stephen T. Davis, Michael Goulder, Robert H. Gundry, and Roy Hoover (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2000). See especially Davis and Hoover’s discussion of this issue, along with my final response.
39. Bart Ehrman, “The Historical Jesus,” (The Teaching Company, 2000), pt. 2, p. 50.
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resurrection, the only factor Ehrman considers is the intrinsic probability of the resurrection Pr(R|B). He overlooks all of the other factors in the probability calculus. Moreover, he just assumes that the intrinsic probability of Jesus’ resurrection is insuperably low, which surely requires some sort of justification. But it gets even worse. For Ehrman offers another version of his objection which is even more obviously fallacious. He asserts, “Since historians can establish only what probably happened in the past, they cannot show that miracles happened, since this would involve a contradiction—that the most improbable event is the most probable.”40 In truth, there’s no contradiction here at all because we’re talking about two different probabilities: the probability of the resurrection on our total evidence Pr(R|E & B) versus the probability of the resurrection on our background knowledge alone Pr(R|B). It’s perfectly possible for the former probability to be high and the latter probability to be low. In any case, there is no contradiction here at all.
When I pointed out these faux pas to Ehrman in our 2006 debate on the resurrection at Holy Cross, rather than correct his mistake he pooh-poohed my explanation of the probability calculus as a “mathematical proof for the existence of God.”41 He did not seem to understand that I was not using Bayes’ Theorem to prove God’s existence or even Jesus’ resurrection but rather to explain to him why his own argument based on the improbability of miracles is demonstrably mistaken. It was clear that he understood neither Hume nor Bayes’ Theorem.
Ironically, Ehrman sought to defend his position by claiming that because the hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” is a statement about God, it “is a theological conclusion . . . not a historical one.” Since “historians have no access to God,” they “are unable to establish what God does.” This claim, whatever it is worth, is logically contradictory with his claim that the resurrection is intrinsically improbable. For if the historian cannot say anything about God, neither can he say that it is improbable that God raised Jesus. The historian would have to say that the probability of Jesus’ resurrection is simply inscrutable. Thus, Ehrman’s position is literally self-refuting.
Hume had an excuse for his abject failure because the probability calculus hadn’t yet been developed in his day. But today New Testament theologians no longer have any excuse for using such fallacious reasoning.
Moreover, I’ve been surprised to find how often Deistic thinking underlies the flowering dialogue between science and religion on the contemporary scene. For example, in a conference I attended a few years ago at the University of Notre Dame on “Science and Religion in the Post-Positivist Era,” Arthur Peacocke claimed that modern cell biology has “radically undermined” the credibility of the virgin birth because it would require God’s making a Y-chromosome de novo in Mary’s ovum—in other words, it would have to be a miracle! Similarly, the stern 40. Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 3rd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 229.
41. See the transcript at www.reasonablefaith.org/site/PageServer?pagename=debates_main.
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remonstrances one often hears from theologians and physicists against inferring a supernatural cause for the origin and order of the universe often conceal a presuppositional bias against miracles, since such acts of God are essentially miracles on a cosmic scale. The presupposition against miracles tends to dominate the science and religion dialogue today, and yet neither the scientists nor the theologians involved whom I have read or talked to about this issue, not being themselves trained in philosophy, are typically able to muster any robust defense of this presupposition.
In addition, I do think that people to whom we talk about Christ do sometimes have covert problems with miracles. They do not formulate their misgivings into an argument; they just find it hard to believe that the miraculous events of the Gospels really occurred. Insofar as we sense this is the case, we need to bring this presupposition out into the open and explain why there are no good grounds for it. Show unbelievers that they have no reasons for rejecting the possibility of miracles and challenge them with the thought that the universe may be a much more wonderful place than they imagine. In my own case, the virgin birth was a stumbling block to my coming to faith—I simply could not believe such a thing.
But when I reflected on the fact that God had created the entire universe, it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be too difficult for him to create the genetic material necessary for a virgin birth! Once the non-Christian understands who God is, then the problem of miracles should cease to be a problem for him.
Literature Cited or Recommended
Historical Background
Brown, Colin. Miracles and the Critical Mind. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1984.
Clarke, Samuel. A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation. London: W. Botham, 1706.
Diderot, Denis. “Philosophical Thoughts.” In Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works, translated by M. Jourdain. Open Court Series of Classics of Science and Philosophy 4. Chicago: Open Court, 1916.
Hahn, Roger. Pierre Simon Laplace 1749–1827: A Determined Scientist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Houtteville, Claude François. La religion chrétienne prouvée par les faits. 3 vols. Paris: Mercier
& Boudet, 1740.
Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. 3rd ed. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. Chapter 10 of the first enquiry constitutes his case against miracles.
Le Clerc, Jean. Five Letters Concerning the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. London, 1690.
Less, Gottfried. Wahrheit der christlichen Religion. 4th ed. Göttingen: Georg Ludewig Förster, 1776.
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Paley, William. A View of the Evidences of Christianity. 2 vols. 5th ed. London: R. Faulder, 1796; repr. ed.: Westmead, England: Gregg International, 1970.
Sherlock, Thomas. The Tryal of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus. London: J. Roberts, 1729.
Spinoza, Baruch. Tractatus theologico-politicus. Trans. Samuel Shirley, with an introduction by Brad S. Gregory. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989.
Stephen, Leslie. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. 2 vols. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World; Harbinger, 1962.
Turretin, J. Alphonse. Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne. 2nd ed. 7 vols. Translated by J. Vernet. Geneva: Henri-Albert Gosse, 1745–55.
Voltaire, Marie François. A Philosophical Dictionary. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World; Harbinger, 1962. See particularly the article on miracles.
Assessment
Bilinskyj, Stephen S. “God, Nature, and the Concept of Miracle.” Ph.D. dissertation.
University of Notre Dame Press, 1982.
Craig, William Lane and Gerd Lüdemann. The Resurrection: Fact or Figment? Edited by Paul Copan with responses by Stephen T. Davis, Michael Goulder, Robert H. Gundry, and Roy Hoover. Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2000.
Dickens, Charles. “A Christmas Carol.” In Christmas Books, by Charles Dickens. Introduced by E. Farejon. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
Earman, John. “Bayes, Hume, and Miracles.” Faith and Philosophy 10 (1993): 293–310.
———. Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Definitive treatment of Hume’s argument.
Ehrman, Bart. “The Historical Jesus.” The Teaching Company, 2000.
———. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. S.v. “Miracles,” by Antony Flew.
Freddoso, Alfred J. “The Necessity of Nature.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 11 (1986): 215–42.
Funk, Robert, Roy Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar. “Introduction.” In The Five Gospels.
New York: Macmillan, 1993.
Geivett, R. Douglas and Gary Habermas, eds. In Defense of Miracles. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1997.
Hesse, Mary. “Miracles and the Laws of Nature.” In Miracles, edited by C. F. D. Moule.
London: A. R. Mowbray, 1965.
Lüdemann, Gerd. “Die Auferstehung Jesu.” In Fand die Auferstehung wirklich statt? Edited by Alexander Bommarius. Düsseldorf: Parega Verlag, 1995.
———. The Resurrection of Jesus. Trans. John Bowden. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994.
Mill, J. S. A System of Logic. 2 vols. London: 1843.
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McGrew, Lydia and Timothy McGrew. “The Argument from Miracles: The Historical Argument for the Resurrection.” In Companion to Natural Theology, edited by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland. London: Blackwell, forthcoming.
Moreland, J. P. and William Lane Craig. Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview.
Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2003.
Pannenberg, Wolfhart. “Jesu Geschichte und unsere Geschichte.” In Glaube und Wirklichkeit.
München: Chr. Kaiser, 1975.
———. Jesus—God and Man. Translated by L. L. Wilkins and D. A. Priebe. London: SCM, 1968.
Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus. 3rd ed. Translated by W. Montgomery.
London: Adam & Charles Black, 1954.
Sobel, Jordan Howard. Logic and Theism: Arguments For and Against Beliefs in God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Strauss, David Friedrich. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. Translated by G. Eliot. Edited with an introduction by P. C. Hodgson. Lives of Jesus Series. London: SCM, 1973.
Swinburne, Richard. The Concept of Miracle. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
———. ed. Miracles. Philosophical Topics. New York: Macmillan, 1989.
Zabell, S. L. “The Probabilistic Analysis of Testimony.” Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 20 (1988): 327–54.
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The Self-Understanding of Jesus
The Christian religion stands or falls with the person of Jesus Christ. Judaism could survive without Moses, Buddhism without Buddha, Islam without Mohammed; but Christianity could not survive without Christ. This is because unlike most other world religions, Christianity is belief in a person, a genuine historical individual—but at the same time a special individual, whom the church regards as not only human, but divine. At the center of any Christian apologetic therefore must stand the person of Christ; and very important for the doctrine of Christ’s person are the personal claims of the historical Jesus. Did he claim to be divine? Or did he regard himself as a prophet? Or was he the exemplification of some highest human quality such as love or faith? Who did Jesus of Nazareth claim to be?
Historical Background
Before we explore this problem, let’s take a brief look at the recent historical background of Jesus research.
Life of Jesus Movement
During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, post-Enlightenment European theology strove to find the historical Jesus behind the figure portrayed in the Gospels. The chief effort of this quest was to write a life of Jesus as it supposedly really was, without the supernatural accretions found in the Gospels. One after 287
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another of these lives of Jesus appeared, each author thinking to have uncovered the real man behind the mask.
Early lives of Jesus tended to portray him as a spiritual man who was forced to make claims about himself that he knew were false in order to get the people to listen to his message. For example, Karl Bahrdt in his Ausführung des Plans und Zwecks Jesu (1784–1792) maintained that Jesus belonged to a secret order of Essenes, dedicated to weaning Israel from her worldly messianic expectations in favor of spiritual, religious truths. In order to gain a hearing from the Jews, Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, planning to spiritualize the concept of Messiah by hoaxing his death and resurrection. To bring this about, Jesus provoked his arrest and trial by his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Other members of the order, who secretly sat on the Sanhedrin, ensured his condemnation. Luke the physician prepared Jesus’ body by means of drugs to withstand the rigors of crucifixion for an indefinite time. By crying loudly and slumping his head, Jesus feigned his death on the cross, and a bribe to the centurion guaranteed that his legs would not be broken. Joseph of Arimathea, another member of the order, took Jesus to a cave, where he resuscitated Jesus by his ministrations. On the third day, they pushed aside the stone over the mouth of the cave, and Jesus came forth, frightening away the guards and appearing to Mary and subsequently to his other disciples. Thereafter, he lived in seclusion among the members of the order.
Similar to Bahrdt’s theory was Karl Venturini’s life of Jesus in his Natürliche Geschichte des grossen Propheten von Nazareth (1800–1802). As a member of a secret society, Jesus sought to persuade the Jewish nation to substitute the idea of a spiritual Messiah for their conception of a worldly Messiah. But his attempt backfired: he was arrested, condemned, and crucified. However, he was taken down from the cross and placed in the tomb alive, where he revived. A member of the secret society, dressed in white, frightened away the guards at the tomb, and other members took Jesus from the tomb. During forty days thereafter he appeared to various disciples, always to return to the secret place of the society. Finally, his energy spent, he retired permanently.
Much of the early Life of Jesus movement was spent in trying to provide natural explanations for Jesus’ miracles and resurrection. The high water mark of the natural explanation school came in H. E. G. Paulus’s Das Leben Jesu (1828), in which Paulus devised all sorts of clever explanations to explain away the substance of the Gospel miracles while still accepting the form of the factual accounts.
But with his Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (1835), D. F. Strauss sounded the death knell for this school. According to Strauss, the miraculous events in the Gospels never happened; rather they are myths, legends, and editorial additions. Jesus was a purely human teacher who made such an impression on his disciples that after his death they applied to him the myths about the Messiah that had evolved in Judaism. Thus, out of the Jesus of history evolved the Christ of the Gospels—the Messiah, the Lord, the incarnate Son of God. Though such
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a mythological Jesus never actually existed, nevertheless the myth embodies a profound truth, namely, the Hegelian truth of the unity of the infinite and the finite, of God and man—not, indeed, of God and the individual man Jesus, but of God and mankind as a whole. Strauss was a self-confessed pantheist, and it was this truth that the myth of the God-man embodied.
The reaction in Germany against Strauss was virulent, but the Life of Jesus movement did not return to a supernatural view of Jesus. The question of miracles was dead, and the chief issue that remained was the interpretation of the man behind the myth. With the rise of liberal theology in the second half of the nineteenth century, Jesus became a great moral teacher. The kingdom of God was interpreted by Albrecht Ritschl and Wilhelm Herrmann as an ethical community of love among mankind. Although Jesus employed apocalyptic language, his real meaning, according to Ritschl, was ethical. He lived in complete devotion to his vocation of founding this kingdom and therefore serves as the model of the ethical life for all people. According to Herrmann, Jesus completely identified with the moral ideal of the kingdom of God and is thus God’s unique representative among men.
Up until this point all of the researchers shared the optimistic view that a purely human Jesus was discoverable behind the Gospel traditions, that indeed a life of Jesus was possible. By this time New Testament criticism had evolved the two-source hypothesis—that is, that the synoptic problem was to be solved by postulating Matthew and Luke’s use of Mark and another source of sayings of Jesus, arbitrarily designated Q. It was believed that in these two most primitive sources the true, historical Jesus was to be found.
This optimism received a crushing blow at the hands of William Wrede in his theory of the “Messianic secret.” Wrede was exercised by the question, why does Jesus, according to Mark, always seek to conceal his identity as the Messiah, commanding people to tell no one who he really is? Wrede’s ingenious answer was that since Jesus never made such divine claims about himself, Mark had to come up with some reason why people are unaware of Jesus’ messianic claims, which the Christian church had written back into the Gospel traditions and had asserted were made by Jesus. To get around this problem Mark invented the “Messianic secret”
motif, that is, the notion that Jesus had tried to conceal his identity, and Mark wrote his Gospel from the perspective of this motif. The consequence of Wrede’s theory was that it now became clear that even the most primitive sources about Jesus were theologically colored and that therefore a biography of the historical Jesus was impossible.
Albert Schweitzer and the End of the Old Quest
Thus, according to Albert Schweitzer, the historian of this intriguing movement, the old Life of Jesus movement ground to a halt in nearly complete skepticism.
The liberal Jesus who went forth proclaiming the ethical kingdom of God and the brotherhood of man never existed but is a projection of modern theology. We do
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not know who Jesus really was, says Schweitzer; he comes to us as a man unknown.
What we do know about him is that he actually believed the end of the world was near and that he died in his fruitless attempt to usher in the eschatological kingdom of God. Schweitzer intimates that Jesus may have been psychologically deranged; hence his eschatological expectation and suicidal course of action. Schweitzer thus not only pronounced the final rites over the liberal Jesus, but he was instrumental in the rediscovery of the eschatological element in Jesus’ preaching.
The net result of the old quest of the historical Jesus was the discovery of theology in even the earliest sources of the Gospels. This was taken to imply that a biography of the man Jesus could not be written. The theology of the early church had so colored the documents that it was no longer possible to extract the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith.
Dialectical and Existential Theology
This conviction characterized theology during the first half of the twentieth century.
For dialectical and existential theology, the Jesus of history receded into obscurity behind the Christ of faith. Karl Barth took almost no cognizance of New Testament criticism regarding Jesus. It is the Christ proclaimed by the church that encounters us today. The events of the Gospels are geschichtlich, but not historisch, a distinction that could be rendered as historic, but not historical. That is to say, those events are of great importance for history and mankind, but they are not accessible to ordinary historical research like other events. Even though the later Barth wanted to place more emphasis on the historicity of the events of the Gospels, he never succeeded in placing them in the ordinary world of space and time. What really mattered to him was not the historical Jesus, but the Christ of faith.
Similarly, Bultmann held that all that could be known about the historical Jesus could be written on a 4 x 6 index card1 but that this lack of information was inconsequential. Like Strauss, he held the Gospel narratives to be mythologically colored throughout. And he, too, sought by demythologizing to find the central truth expressed in the myth. He turned, not to Hegel, but to Heidegger for the proper interpretation of the Christ-myth in terms of authentic existence in the face of death. It was this Christ-idea that was significant for human existence; as for the historical Jesus, the mere “dass seines Gekommenseins”—the that of his coming—that is to say, the mere fact of his existence, is enough.
The New Quest of the Historical Jesus
Some of Bultmann’s disciples, however, such as Ernst Käsemann, could not agree with their master that the mere fact of Jesus’ existence was enough to warrant our acceptance of the meaning of the Christ-idea as constitutive for our lives today.
Unless there is some connection between the historical Jesus and the Christ of 1. As Bultmann finely put it, “In my opinion, of the life and personality of Jesus we can now know as good as nothing” (Rudolph Bultmann, Jesus [Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1951], 11).
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faith, then the latter reduces to pure myth, and the question remains why this myth should be thought to embody a truth that supplies the key to my existence. Thus, New Testament criticism heralded a “new quest of the historical Jesus,” but this time considerably more cautious and modest than the old quest.
Those pursuing the new quest are painfully conscious of the presence of theology in the Gospel narratives and are reluctant to ascribe to the historical Jesus any element that may be found in the theology of the early church. Indeed, James Robinson actually differentiates between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of history.
The latter is the Jesus who really lived; the former is the Jesus that can be proved as a result of historical research. Robinson says that the new quest concerns only the historical Jesus, not the Jesus of history. Accordingly, Robinson believes that because of the presence of theology in the Gospels, the burden of proof rests on the scholar who would ascribe some fact to the historical Jesus, not on the scholar who would deny that fact. In other words, we ought to presuppose that unless some putative feature of the historical Jesus can be proven to be authentic, we ought to regard it as inauthentic, as a product of Christian theology.
Robinson’s distinction between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of history is one that has been made in so many words by a number of prominent Jesus scholars. For example, John Meier, whose voluminous and ongoing study of the life of Jesus, A Marginal Jew, has made him perhaps the most eminent Jesus researcher, differentiates between the historical Jesus and the person who actually lived. According to Meier the historical Jesus or the Jesus of history (Meier uses the terms synonymously) “is a modern abstraction and construct. By the Jesus of history I mean the Jesus whom we can ‘recover’ and examine using the scientific tools of modern historical research.”2 Meier notes that “this definition is not some arbitrary invention of mine; it is the commonly accepted one in present Jesus-of-history research.”3 Meier contrasts the historical Jesus with what he calls “the real Jesus.”
The opening lines of Meier’s first chapter of his first volume cleanly distinguish the two: “The historical Jesus is not the real Jesus. The real Jesus is not the historical Jesus.”4 Now we might think that by “the real Jesus” Meier means the human person who actually lived and wrought. But that would be a mistake. For Meier the real Jesus is also a modern abstraction and construct, but a fuller one. Meier characterizes the real Jesus as “a reasonably complete record of public words and deeds” of Jesus.5 Later he refers to the real Jesus as “a reasonably complete biographical portrait.”6 So neither the historical Jesus nor even the real Jesus are for Meier the person who actually lived. In addition to these two abstractions, there is a third abstraction lurking in the wings which Meier calls the “total reality” of 2. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: vol. 1: The Roots of the Problem and the Person, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 25.
3. Ibid., 1:34.
4. Ibid., 1:21.
5. Ibid., 1:22.
6. Ibid., 1:24.
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Jesus, which is “everything he . . . ever thought, felt, experienced, did, and said.”7
Since even this is not a living, flesh-and-blood person but a description, one cannot help but wonder what has happened to the actual person Jesus of Nazareth.
Robinson’s further claim that there exists a differential burden of proof upon Jesus researchers, such that only those who regard some element of the Gospels as authentic are required to provide evidence in support of their assertion, seems to underlie a great deal of New Testament criticism, although it has been sharply criticized.8 For example, the only way in which the scholars involved in the much publicized Jesus Seminar of the Westar Institute can make the judgment that so much of the Jesus tradition in the Gospels is doubtful or inauthentic would seem to be by presupposing an approach much like Robinson’s.9 Otherwise, the greatest percentage of the tradition would have to be classified under the unexciting but straightforward label “cannot be proven authentic or inauthentic” (a category which the Seminar does not countenance). For almost all of the typical “criteria of authenticity” employed in such studies to detect historical sayings and events in the life of Jesus—such as dissimilarity to Christian teaching, multiple attestation, linguistic Semitisms, traces of Palestinian milieu, retention of embarrassing material, coherence with other authentic material, and so forth10—can only be properly used positively, to demonstrate authenticity. In other words, the criteria state sufficient, not necessary, conditions of historicity. Treating the criteria of authenticity as necessary rather than sufficient conditions of historicity would lead to the reconstruction of a historical Jesus who was utterly unaffected by the Jewish milieu in which he was raised and who had no impact whatsoever on the early church which followed him, which is crazy. The criteria are therefore not designed to be employed negatively. Failure to meet the criteria does not imply the inauthenticity of a saying or event—unless, that is, one is tacitly presupposing Robinson’s principle that Jesus traditions are to be assumed to be inauthentic unless and until they are proven to be authentic.
More specifically, one of the more celebrated members of the Seminar, John Dominic Crossan, seems to presuppose Robinson’s methodology in his much discussed work The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991).
After sorting out Jesus traditions into various strata from early to late and determining the number of times a saying of Jesus is attested, Crossan chooses to “bracket the singularities”—that is, to ignore any saying only singly attested, even if it is found in the earliest, first stratum. The reason he gives for this procedure is that the saying could have been created by the source itself. But by the same token it 7. Ibid., 1:21.
8. See Morna Hooker, “On Using the Wrong Tool,” Theology 75 (1972): 570–81.
9. See Robert W. Funk and Roy W. Hoover, eds., The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
10. For helpful discussions, see Robert H. Stein, “The Criteria for Authenticity,” in Gospel Perspectives I, ed. R.T. France and David Wenham (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1980), 225–63; Craig A. Evans,
“Authenticity Criteria in Life of Jesus Research,” Christian Scholar’s Review 19 (1989): 6–31.
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could very well be authentic. Multiple attestation of a saying counts positively in favor of its authenticity, but the want of multiple attestation cannot be taken as a strike against authenticity— unless one is assuming that sayings are presumed to be inauthentic until proven authentic. Without this assumption there can be no grounds for thinking that the historical Jesus which Crossan reconstructs on the attenuated basis of multiply attested material alone, while bracketing or ignoring all other traditions about him which are not multiply attested, will not be but a pale shadow or lopsided distortion of the person who actually lived.
Or again, Bart Ehrman, a best-selling New Testament scholar, while explaining factors like multiple attestation and dissimilarity positively as critieria of authenticity, repeatedly inverts them to try to demonstrate inauthenticity. For example, he renders the negative verdict, “Some of the best known traditions of Jesus’ birth cannot be accepted as historically reliable when gauged by our criteria,”11 when at most he should have said that these traditions cannot be positively proven to be historical when gauged by these criteria. In fact, the Virgin Birth and Jesus’ being born in Bethlehem are multiply and independently attested, but Ehrman doubts their historicity because they are not more widely attested. Similarly, he rejects the historicity of such events as the Virgin Birth, Jesus’ claiming to be the Son of Man, his Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, his passion predictions, and the crowd’s calling for Jesus’ crucifixion—all of which are multiply and independently attested—on the grounds that they are not dissimilar to early Christian beliefs.12 So to argue is to pervert the criteria; for while multiple attestation and dissimilarity are positive evidence for authenticity, single attestation and similarity to Christian beliefs are not evidence of inauthenticity—unless, once more, one is assuming that the Gospels are inauthentic until they are proven to be authentic on some point.
During the previous generation the assumption enunciated by Robinson that Jesus traditions are to be ascribed to the theological activity of the early church unless they can be positively proven to have originated in Jesus’ life and ministry took on the status of a sort of methodological dogma of critical scholarship. But increasingly this dogma has been called into question. Most scholars today would be reluctant to adopt such a methodological approach to the Gospels, even given their theological coloring. Such an approach assumes that history and theology are mutually exclusive categories, such that wherever theology is present in the Gospels, that automatically counts against their historical accuracy. But what justification is there for this assumption? Some feature of the Gospel portrait of Jesus, such as the dividing of his garments at the crucifixion or the piercing of Jesus’ side, could be both historical and regarded by the evangelist as pregnant with theological significance. Since one cannot assume a priori that history and theology are mutually exclusive, the only way to justify that conclusion with respect to the Gospels 11. Bart Ehrman, “The Historical Jesus,” (The Teaching Company, 2000), pt. 1, p. 53. The context makes clear that Ehrman means that these traditions should be regarded as historically unreliable.
12. Ibid., pt. 1, p. 49; pt. 2, pp. 37, 38, 48.
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would be to carry out a historical examination of the Gospels. But since such an investigation aims to discover whether the presence of theology in the Gospels precludes their historical credibility, this examination cannot itself be based on the assumption that these categories are mutually exclusive in the Gospels.
Of course, Robinson would contend that such an examination was carried out in the first quest and yielded a negative verdict concerning the compatibility of history and theology in the Gospels. But such an examination was far from conclusive. The Roman historian A. N. Sherwin-White has compared the Gospels quite favorably with Roman history with respect to external confirmation of narrated events.13 In the book of Acts, he asserts, the historicity of the narrative is indisputable.14 Yet Acts is just as much propaganda as the Gospels. Moreover, in the Gospels wherever Jesus comes into the Jerusalem orbit, the external confirmation inevitably begins. Therefore, in Sherwin-White’s judgment, the historical trustworthiness of the accounts of the Galilean ministry, which is by nature less susceptible to external confirmation, ought to be presumed. Thus, according to Sherwin-White’s analysis, not only are the categories of history and theology not mutually exclusive, but the Gospels enjoy such external confirmation that their trustworthiness ought to be presumed even in cases where specific confirmation is lacking. It can be safely concluded that the assumption that the Gospels’ status as theological documents militates against their also being historically reliable narratives has not been substantiated and that therefore the methodological principle of “inauthentic until proven authentic” is unfounded. The pursuit of such a methodology threatens to construct a theoretical and historical Jesus which is in fact very unlike the man who actually lived—in which case the whole enterprise becomes rather pointless.
A Third Quest
In recent years some biblical scholars have spoken of a third quest of the historical Jesus, a quest which one observer has aptly characterized as “the Jewish reclamation of Jesus.”15 One has reference to a movement of increasing momentum among Jewish scholars studying the New Testament which assesses Jesus appreciatively and seeks to reincorporate him as far as possible into the fold of Judaism. Spear-headed by the work of men like C. G. Montefiore ( The Synoptic Gospels, 1909), Israel Abrahams ( Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, 1917, 1929), and Joseph Klausner ( Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching, 1922), the movement has 13. A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 186–89.
14. Sherwin-White’s contention has been powerfully driven home by the epochal study by Colin Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, ed. Conrad H. Gempf, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 49 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1989). Through a painstaking analysis of papyrological, epigraphical, and other evidence Hemer demonstrates convincingly the wealth of historical material contained in the book of Acts and thus, by implication, Luke’s care as a historian.
15. Donald A. Hagner, The Jewish Reclamation of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1984).
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swelled in recent years and includes among contemporary scholars Samuel Sandmel ( We Jews and Jesus, 1965), Schalom Ben-Chorin ( Bruder Jesus: Der Nazarener in Jüdischer Sicht, 1967,) David Flusser ( Jesus, 1969), Pinchas Lapide ( Der Rabbi von Nazareth, 1974), and, perhaps most significant, the Qumran scholar Geza Vermes ( Jesus the Jew, 1973; The Religion of Jesus the Jew, 1993). A number of non-Jewish scholars have also devoted themselves to demonstrating the rightful interpretation of Jesus in the context of Jewish thought and culture, principally E. P. Sanders ( Jesus and Judaism, 1985). Confluent with this movement is the Scandinavian school of thought headed by Birger Gerhardsson ( Memory and Manuscript, 1961), which sees rabbinic models of teaching and transmission of tradition as the key to understanding Jesus’ teachings, and its extension by the German New Testament scholar Rainer Riesner ( Jesus als Lehrer, 1981), who shows that memorization and recitation were commonly employed techniques in the home, synagogue, and elementary school, and finds many typical mnemonic aids in Jesus’ teaching, which would facilitate its accurate preservation.
Jewish scholars have for the most part concentrated their attention on the ethical teachings of Jesus, with a view toward emphasizing his continuity, rather than rupture, with Judaism. The New Questers’ criteria of authenticity are generally eschewed, the Gospels’ record of Jesus’ teaching being treated with much more trust, especially in light of its consonance with Jewish ethical teaching. But even the assimilation of this single facet of the historical Jesus, namely, Jesus as ethical teacher, to first-century Judaism has not been without its difficulties for Jewish scholars. Jesus’ sense of personal authority to correct the Torah and contradict Jewish tradition goes down hard for faithful Jews. As Ben-Chorin admits, “The sense of the unique, absolute authority that is evident from this way of acting remains deeply problematic for the Jewish view of Jesus.”16 When Jewish scholars do consider the personal claims or self-understanding of Jesus, the majority conclude that Jesus did believe himself to be the Messiah, though, of course, they consider him to have been tragically deluded in this opinion.
Another interesting feature of contemporary scholarship’s understanding of Jesus to which the third quest has contributed significantly is what one critic has called “the eclipse of mythology.”17 From Strauss through Bultmann, the category of myth was taken to be key to the Gospel portrait of Jesus, and any historical reconstruction would have to proceed by means of “demythologizing” this portrait.
Today, however, scarcely any scholar thinks of myth as an important interpretive category for the Gospels. The Jewish reclamation of Jesus has helped to make unnecessary any understanding of the Gospels’ portrait as significantly shaped by mythology. Although contemporary scholars may be no more prepared to believe 16. S. Ben-Chorin, Jesus in Judenthum (Wuppetal: R. Brockhaus, 1970), 41, cited in Hagner, Reclamation, 105.
17. Craig A. Evans, “Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology,” Theological Studies 54
(1993): 3–36.
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in the supernatural character of Jesus’ miracles and exorcisms than were scholars of previous generations, they are no longer willing to ascribe such stories to the influence of Hellenistic divine man ( theios anēr) myths;18 rather Jesus’ miracles and exorcisms are to be interpreted in the context of first-century Jewish beliefs and practices. Vermes, for example, has drawn attention to the ministries of the charismatic miracle workers and/or exorcists Honi the Circle-Drawer (first century b.c.) and Hanina ben Dosa (first century a.d.), and interprets Jesus of Nazareth as a Jewish hasid or holy man. In contrast to Schweitzer’s assessment of the place of miracle with respect to the old quest, today the consensus of scholarship holds that miracle-working and exorcisms (bracketing the question of their supernatural character) most assuredly do belong to any historically acceptable reconstruction of Jesus’ ministry.
Assessment
As we enter the twenty-first century after his death, Jesus of Nazareth, now as always, continues to exert his power of fascination over the minds of men and women. From sensational films and popular-level speculations to scholarly debates in academic societies, journals, and monographs, Jesus is a matter of controversy.
Who did this first-century Galilean take himself to be? A political or social revolutionary? A practitioner of magical arts? A sort of social gadfly, the Jewish equivalent of a Greek cynic philosopher? A Jewish rabbi or prophet? The Messiah? The Son of God? Who did Jesus think that he was?
The Historical Jesus
In asking such a question, I take for granted that we want to know what Jesus thought about himself. The primary object of the quest of the historical Jesus is Jesus himself, not some abstraction manufactured by the historian. To regard Meier’s abstractions as the object of historical inquiry is at best misleading and implies some bizarre conclusions as well. Neither Meier’s “total reality of Jesus,” nor
“real Jesus,” nor “historical Jesus” is a flesh-and-blood human being who actually lived. The entities referred to by Meier are in fact collections of propositions or statements. The total reality of Jesus seems to be the collection of all true propositions about Jesus. The real Jesus seems to be the collection of all true propositions about the public life of Jesus. The historical Jesus seems to be the collection of all propositions about Jesus which can be rendered probable by historical research.
What is evident is that these collections of propositions are none of them persons and, as such, are not the object of the historian’s study. Rather historians study the persons and events referred to by those propositions. If “Jesus” refers, not to 18. For a critique, see Barry L. Blackburn, “‘Miracle Working’ in Hellenism (and Hellenistic Judaism),”
in Gospel Perspectives VI, ed. David Wenham and Craig Blomberg (Sheffield, England: JSOT Press, 1986), 185–218; see also Edwin Yamauchi, “Magic or Miracle? Diseases, Demons, and Exorcisms,” in Gospel Perspectives VI, 89–183.
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the man Jesus, but to the abstraction called “the historical Jesus,” then virtually every sentence about Jesus in Meier’s massive volumes turns out to be false. For the historical Jesus, contrary to Meier’s assertions, was not born in Nazareth, did not speak Greek, and did not die by crucifixion. As a collection of propositions the historical Jesus is not a human being and so was never born, never spoke any language, and could not die. Only a person can do such things, and on Meier’s account the historical Jesus is not a person. As such the historical Jesus is not the object of the historian’s inquiry. What Meier and the rest of us really want to know is whether the person Jesus of Nazareth was born in Nazareth, spoke Greek, was executed by crucifixion, and so forth.
Meier states that the failure to distinguish between the real Jesus and the historical Jesus has led to “endless confusion” in the quest of the historical Jesus.19 In fact, it is the distinction as drawn by Meier which is terribly confused. As a good historian Meier is really after the Jesus who actually lived, and to assign Jesus’
proper name to collections of propositions can only lead to confusion.20
Now, obviously, there is some sort of distinction to be drawn between what Jesus was actually like and what historical inquiry can establish about Jesus; but it is not a distinction between two Jesuses. We try to find out what Jesus was actually like by means of what historical inquiry can establish about Jesus. Because historical inquiry is uncertain, our conclusions will be provisional. But they will be conclusions about Jesus, that is, about the actual person who is the referent of our descriptive statements. In both ordinary language and in the history of research, phrases like “the historical Jesus” and “the real Jesus” typically refer to the individual who actually lived, and to use them as names of classes of propositions is misleading. We can draw the needed distinctions in a more philosophically discriminating and less confusing way. By so doing we shall avoid the illusion that in investigating Jesus historically we are not studying the real Jesus who actually lived and wrought.
19. Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1:21.
20. For similar confusion see James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making I (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), 126–27, 130–31, 827, 876, 882. Dunn recognizes that although the historical Jesus is always identified as a construction of historical research, in practice the phrase is used to refer to Jesus himself. It seems to me that this slide is inevitable and unremarkable for any historian who is not a narrative non-realist. For his part Dunn distinguishes between Jesus himself and Jesus remembered—as though accurate memories of Jesus would not be memories of Jesus himself! Although Dunn asserts that the only reasonable objective for a quest of the historical Jesus is Jesus remembered, he inconsistently goes on to argue that from the impact Jesus made on the traditions about him, we can, in fact, discern something of the person who made that impact. This leads Dunn to the bizarre conclusion that “the Jesus tradition is Jesus remembered. And the Jesus thus remembered is Jesus . . .” (p. 335), from which it follows that Jesus himself is a tradition! Once again the person Jesus of Nazareth has disappeared from view. What Dunn should say, and wants to say, I think, is that in the Synoptic tradition we find preserved memories of what Jesus said and did; those memories are largely accurate; we can, therefore, know a good deal about Jesus; and there is no competing portrait of Jesus that is as historically credible as the one delivered to us by the tradition and that can be used to overturn the conclusions drawn on the basis of that tradition.
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As we have seen, scholars involved in the quest of the historical Jesus have enunciated a number of so-called criteria for detecting historically authentic features of Jesus. It is absolutely crucial to the study of the historical Jesus that these criteria be correctly stated and applied. As already mentioned, it is somewhat misleading to call these “criteria,” for they aim at stating sufficient, not necessary, conditions of historicity. This is easy to see: suppose a saying is multiply attested and dissimilar but not embarrassing. If embarrassment were a necessary condition of authenticity, then the saying would have to be deemed inauthentic, which is wrong-headed, since its multiple attestation and dissimilarity are sufficient for authenticity. Of course, the criteria are defeasible, meaning that they are not infallible guides to authenticity. They might be better called “Indications of Authenticity.” Had the expression not already been appropriated, the medieval “Signs of Credibility” would have been the perfect cognomen for the criteria.
In point of fact, what the criteria really amount to are statements about the effect of certain types of evidence upon the probability of various sayings or events. For some saying or event S, evidence of a certain type E, and our background information B, the criteria would state that, all things being equal, Pr (S⏐E&B) > Pr (S⏐B). In other words, all else being equal, the probability of some event or saying is greater given, for example, its multiple attestation than it would have been without it.
What are some of the factors that might serve the role of E in increasing the probability of some saying or event S? The following are some of the most important: (1) Historical congruence: S fits in with known historical facts concerning the context in which S is said to have occurred; (2) Independent, early attestation: S
appears in multiple sources which are near to the time at which S is alleged to have occurred and which depend neither upon each other nor upon a common source; (3) Embarrassment: S is awkward or counterproductive for the persons who serve as the source of information for S; (4) Dissimilarity: S is unlike antecedent Jewish thought-forms and/or unlike subsequent Christian thought-forms; (5) Semitisms: traces in the narrative of Aramaic or Hebraic linguistic forms; (6) Coherence: S is consistent with already established facts about Jesus.
Notice that these “criteria” do not presuppose the general reliability of the Gospels. Rather they focus on a particular saying or event and give evidence for thinking that specific element of Jesus’ life to be historical, regardless of the general reliability of the document in which the particular saying or event is reported. These same “criteria” are thus applicable to reports of Jesus found in the apocryphal Gospels, or rabbinical writings, or even the Qur’an. Of course, if the Gospels can be shown to be generally reliable documents, so much the better! But the “criteria” do not depend on any such presupposition. They serve to help spot historical kernels even in the midst of historical chaff. Thus we need not concern ourselves with defending the Gospels’ general reliability or every claim attributed to Jesus in the Gospels; if even some of his radical personal claims are authentic, that will be enough to give us insight in Jesus’ self-understanding.
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Denial of Christ’s Divine Claims
In 1985 a prominent New Testament scholar named Robert Funk founded a think tank in Southern California which he called the Jesus Seminar. The ostensible purpose of the Seminar was to uncover the historical person Jesus of Nazareth using the best methods of scientific, biblical criticism. In Funk’s view the historical Jesus has been overlaid by Christian legend, myth, and metaphysics and thus scarcely resembled the Christ figure presented in the Gospels and worshiped by the church today. The goal of the Seminar is to strip away these layers and to recover the authentic Jesus who really lived and taught.
In so doing, Funk hopes to ignite a revolution which will bring to an end what he regards as an age of ignorance. He blasts the religious establishment for “not allowing the intelligence of high scholarship to pass through pastors and priests to a hungry laity.”21 He sees the Jesus Seminar as a means of disabusing laymen of the mythological figure they have been taught to worship and bringing them face-to-face with the real Jesus of history.
The degree to which the Gospels have allegedly distorted the historical Jesus is evident in the edition of the Gospels published by the Jesus Seminar. Called The Five Gospels because it includes the so-called Gospel of Thomas along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, their version prints in red only those words of Jesus which the fellows of the Seminar determine to be authentic, actually spoken by Jesus. As it turns out, less than 20 percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus are printed in red.
The real, historical Jesus turns out to have been a sort of itinerant, social critic, the Jewish equivalent of a Greek Cynic philosopher. He never claimed to be the Son of God or to forgive sins or to inaugurate a new covenant between God and man. His crucifixion was an accident of history; his corpse was probably thrown into a shallow dirt grave where it rotted away or was eaten by wild dogs.
These conclusions play havoc with the popular apologetic for Christian faith based on the claims of Christ. According to popular apologetics, Jesus claimed to be God, and his claims were either true or false. If they were false, then either he was intentionally lying or else he was deluded. But neither of these alternatives is plausible. Therefore, his claims cannot be false; he must be who he claimed to be, God incarnate, and we must decide whether we shall give our lives to him or not.
Now certainly the majority of scholars today would agree that Jesus was neither a liar nor a lunatic; but that does not mean that they acknowledge him as Lord.
Rather, many would say that the Jesus who claimed to be divine is a legend, a theological product of the Christian church. Thus, the dilemma posed by traditional apologetics is undercut, for Jesus himself never claimed to be God.
Defense of Christ’s Divine Claims
Obviously, Jesus of Nazareth didn’t go about Palestine introducing himself to people as God. The Gospels do not portray him in such a way, nor is it consistent 21. Robert Funk, “The Issue of Jesus,” Forum 1 (1985): 8.
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with the Christian doctrine of the incarnation, which holds that Jesus as a man had an ordinary human consciousness, even if it was supernaturally informed.
Rather Jesus’ divine self-understanding is evident explicitly in the Christological titles he used by way of self-reference and implicitly by his teaching and behavior.
THE CHRISTOLOGICAL TITLES
Those who deny that Jesus made any personal claims implying divinity face the very severe problem of explaining how it is that the worship of Jesus as Lord and God came about at all in the early church. It does little good to say that the early church wrote its beliefs about Jesus back into the Gospels, for the problem is the very origin of those beliefs themselves. Studies by New Testament scholars such as Larry Hurtado of the University of Edinburgh, Martin Hengel of Tübingen University, C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge, and others have proved that within twenty years of the crucifixion a full-blown Christology proclaiming Jesus as God incarnate existed. How does one explain this worship by mono-theistic Jews of one of their countrymen whom they had accompanied during his lifetime, apart from the claims of Jesus himself? The great church historian Jaroslav Pelikan points out that all the early Christians shared the conviction that salvation was the work of a being no less than Lord of heaven and earth and that the redeemer was God himself. He observes that the oldest Christian sermon, the oldest account of a Christian martyr, the oldest pagan report of the church, and the oldest liturgical prayer (1 Cor. 16:22) all refer to Christ as Lord and God. He concludes, “Clearly it was the message of what the church believed and taught that ‘God’ was an appropriate name for Jesus Christ.”22 But if Jesus never made any such claims, then the belief of the earliest Christians in this regard becomes inexplicable.
In the Gospels there are a number of self-descriptions used by Jesus which provide insight into his self-understanding. Until recently, critical scholars have been quite skeptical of the authenticity of such self-descriptions. In 1977 a group of seven British theologians, headed by John Hick of the University of Birmingham, caused a great stir in the press and among laymen by publishing a book provocatively entitled The Myth of God Incarnate. In it they asserted that today the majority of New Testament scholars agree that the historical Jesus of Nazareth never claimed to be the Messiah or the Lord or the Son of God or indeed any of the divine titles that are attributed to Christ in the Gospels. Rather, these titles developed later in the Christian Church and were written back into the traditions handed down about Jesus, so that in the Gospels he appears to claim these titles for himself. Thus, the divine Christ of the Gospels who appears as God incarnate is a myth and ought to be rejected.
22. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), 173.
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Today no such skeptical consensus exists. On the contrary, the balance of scholarly opinion on Jesus’ use of Christological titles may have actually tipped in the opposite direction.
Messiah
For example, it is increasingly acknowledged as likely that Jesus of Nazareth did consider himself to be Israel’s promised Messiah. Israel’s ancient hope for an Anointed One ( mashiach) of God had revived in the century immediately preceding Jesus’ birth. Of the various sorts of messianic figures in Jewish hope, the most important and widespread was the expectation of a mighty king of Davidic descent who would throw off Israel’s oppressors and restore the Davidic throne in Jerusalem. Written during the period of Roman occupation of Jerusalem prior to its destruction in a.d. 70, the pseudepigraphical Psalms of Solomon breathe out passionately the Jewish yearning for a royal messianic deliverer: See, Lord, and raise up for them their king,
the son of David, to rule over your servant Israel
in the time known to you, O God.
Undergird him with the strength to destroy the unrighteous rulers, to purge Jerusalem from gentiles
who trample her to destruction;
in wisdom and in righteousness to drive out
the sinners from the inheritance; . . .
He will gather a holy people
whom he will lead in righteousness;
and he will judge the tribes of the people
that have been made holy by the Lord their God.
He will not tolerate unrighteousness (even) to pause among them, and any person who knows wickedness shall not live with them. . . .
He will judge peoples and nations in the wisdom of his righteousness.
And he will have gentile nations serving under his yoke, . . .
And he will purge Jerusalem
(and make it) holy as it was even from the beginning,
(for) nations to come from the ends of the earth to see his glory,
. . .
And he will be a righteous king over them, taught by God.
There will be no unrighteousness among them in his days, for all shall be holy,
and their king shall be the Lord Messiah. (17.21–32)
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The psalmist goes on to extol “the beauty of the king of Israel”: he will be “compassionate to all the nations,” “free from sin,” “not weaken(ing) in his days,”
“powerful in the holy spirit,” “faithfully and righteously shepherding the Lord’s flock” (18.34–42). More than a warrior king, the royal Messiah would be a spiritual shepherd to Israel.
It is, of course, indisputable that the New Testament church regarded Jesus as the promised Messiah. The title Christos (Messiah) became so closely connected with the name “Jesus” that for Paul it is practically a surname: “Jesus Christ” (cf.
the less frequent “Christ Jesus”). The very name borne by the followers of Jesus within ten years of his death—Christians—bears witness to the centrality of their belief that Jesus was the Messiah. Mark’s Gospel opens with the words “the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (1:1), just as John’s Gospel closes with the explanation that it was written “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (20:31). The question, then, is whether they arrived at this common conviction on their own, or did it represent Jesus’ own self-understanding?
Unless Jesus himself made messianic pretensions, it is difficult to explain the unanimous and widespread conviction that Jesus was the Messiah. Why, in the absence of any messianic claims on Jesus’ part, would Jesus’ followers come to think of him as Messiah at all, and why was there no non-messianic form of the Jesus movement? Craig Evans reflects, “The force of this point seems lost on many who claim that the recognition of Jesus as Messiah originated only in the post-Easter setting. Had there been no messianic element in Jesus’ teaching or activity . . . then it is very hard to understand where post-Easter Messianism came from. The resurrection alone cannot account for this widespread belief, for there is no pre-Christian messianic tradition that viewed resurrection as in some way evidence of a person’s messianic identity.”23 With respect to this last point, Martin Hengel emphasizes that the notion “that a righteous man via resurrection from the dead was appointed as Messiah, is absolutely without analogy. Neither resurrection nor translation [into Paradise] have anything to do with Messiahship.
Indeed, the suffering righteous man attains a place of honor in Paradise, but there is never any question of messianic majesty and transfer of eschatological functions in this connection.”24 “Had he been crucified for messianic claims, then—and only then—belief in his resurrection would have had to become belief in the resurrection of the crucified Messiah.”25
23. Craig Evans, “Authenticating the Activities of Jesus,” in Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, ed.
Bruce Chilton and Craig Evans, New Testament Tools and Studies 28/2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999), 25.
24. Martin Hengel, “Jesus, the Messiah of Israel: The Debate about the ‘Messianic Mission’ of Jesus,”
in Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, 327.
25. Martin Hengel, The Son of God, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 63, citing N. A.
Dahl, “Der gekreuzigte Messias,” in Der historische Jesus und der kerygmatische Christus, ed. H. Ristow and K. Matthiae (1960), 161.
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The Gospels unambiguously present Jesus as having a Messianic sense of identity.
Of the texts in which Jesus displays his conviction that he was indeed the Messiah, the most famous is Peter’s confession:
And Jesus went on with his disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” And they told him, “John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; and others one of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him “You are the Christ.”
And he charged them to tell no one about him. (Mark 8:27–30 rsv) That people should be interested in the nature of Jesus’ pretensions is both natural and to be expected. Luke and John independently attest that John the Baptist had been confronted with a similar question, which forms the backdrop for his prediction of the coming of one “mightier than I . . . the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie” (Luke 3:15–16; John 1:19–27 rsv). The disciples, who had left their families and livelihoods to follow Jesus, would certainly have asked themselves who it was that they were following. Peter’s answer receives independent attestation from John 6:69 (esv), where Peter declares to Jesus, “We have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (cf. Mark 1:24; Acts 3:14).
The mention of John the Baptist brings to mind the account of John’s final message to Jesus found in the Q material shared by Matthew and Luke. From prison John sends disciples to Jesus with the following question: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matt. 11:3; Luke 7:19 rsv). The expression “he who is to come” obviously harks back to John’s proclamation, independently attested in Mark and John, of “him who comes after me” (Mark 1:7; John 1:27). The credibility of such an embassage by John is supported not only by its presence in such early tradition, but also by the awkwardness of John’s apparently wavering faith (criterion of embarrassment). Jesus’ answer to John appeals to the signs that would herald the establishment of God’s kingdom in Israel:
“Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me” (Luke 7:22–23 esv; cf. Matt. 11:4–6). The signs mentioned by Jesus are a blend of prophecies from Isaiah 35:5–6; 26:19; and 61:1. The latter prophecy explicitly mentions being God’s anointed one. That Jesus’ contemporaries saw these signs as earmarks of the Messiah’s coming is evident from a remarkable passage in the Dead Sea scrolls kept by the Essenes at Qumran (4Q521). The passage first predicts the advent of Messiah: “[For the hea]vens and the earth shall listen to his Messiah [and all t]hat is in them shall not turn away from the commandments of the holy ones.” It then goes on to describe what the Lord will do at that time: “He will honor the pious upon the th[ro]ne of the eternal kingdom, setting prisoners free, opening the eyes of the blind, raising up those
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who are bo[wed down.] . . . and the Lord shall do glorious things which have not been done, just as he said. For he will heal the injured, he shall make alive the dead, he shall proclaim good news to the afflicted.” Here we have associated with the Messiah just that same pastiche of prophetic signs listed by Jesus in answer to John’s question! The criteria of Palestinian milieu and coherence with other authentic material, coupled with the criterion of embarrassment, as well as the story’s presence in early tradition reinforce one another in leading to the conclusion that Jesus in fact saw himself as God’s Messiah.
Even more convincing than Jesus’ sayings in demonstrating his messianic self-understanding are Jesus’ deeds. Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem at the beginning of the last week of his life is a dramatic, public, provocative assertion of his messianic status. This event is multiply attested by Mark and John (Mark 11:1–11; John 12:12–19). Although their accounts differ in various circumstantial details, they fully agree on the core of the story: that one week before his death Jesus of Nazareth rode into Jerusalem seated on a colt and was hailed by the crowds who had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the annual Passover feast with shouts of
“Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” in anticipation of the coming of the Davidic kingdom.
In every other account of Jesus’ movements, he goes by foot. What, then, is he doing when he mounts a donkey’s colt and rides down the Mount of Olives into Jerusalem? The answer is that Jesus is deliberately fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9–10 (esv):
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Behold, your king is coming to you;
righteous and having salvation is he,
humble and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a donkey.
I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall speak peace to the nations;
his rule shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.
Jesus is deliberately and provocatively claiming to be the promised king of Israel who will inaugurate his reign of peace. His action is like a living parable, acted out to disclose his true identity.26
26. For other examples of acting out Scripture in Judaism see Craig Evans, “Jesus and Zechariah’s Messianic Hope,” in Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, 373–88.
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Skeptical critics have challenged the historicity of the narrative because Zeche-riah 9:9 was not interpreted as a messianic prophecy until later Judaism. But the spirit of Zechariah’s prophecy pervades Psalms of Solomon 17–18, which also connect the images of a king and a shepherd of the people (cf. Zechariah 11) and speak of his dominion of peace. In any case, this consideration, far from detracting from the historical credibility of the narrative, actually supports it, for it makes improbable the early church’s developing such a story based on Zechariah 9:9 (which is not even cited as a proof text by Mark, in contrast to the later accounts in Matt.
21:4–5; John 12:15–16) alone, in the absence of any such event. So by the criterion of dissimilarity, in this instance from antecedent Judaism, we should see the event as belonging to our picture of the historical Jesus. Jesus himself might well have interpreted the passage messianically, especially given its more irenic and humble portrayal of Israel’s king. As for the crowd, it was Jesus’ own disciples, who already doubtless believed in his Messiahship and who accompanied him to the feast, who initiated the acclamation of Jesus as he rode from Bethphage into Jerusalem.
Skeptical scholars have also questioned the historicity of the incident because so public a demonstration would have provoked Jesus’ immediate arrest by the Roman authorities. But this conjectural objection is very weak. According to Mark’s account
“he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple. And when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve” (11:11
esv). Jesus doesn’t cleanse the temple; he doesn’t even give a stirring speech. He just looks around—and leaves. His triumphal entry into the city was not something that the Roman authorities were expecting or would have understood, nor would a man on a slow-moving donkey with no show of weapons have appeared to them as a military threat; and Jesus’ procession probably just melted into the Passover crowd once it got to Jerusalem. Nonetheless, the Triumphal Entry displays Jesus’
royal messianic self-consciousness and reveals who he took himself to be. He identified himself with the Shepherd-King predicted by Zechariah.
The clearest indication of Jesus’ messianic self-consciousness emerges by reflecting on his execution. The plaque nailed to his cross recording the charge for which Jesus was crucified is multiply attested as stating that Jesus was executed as “the King of the Jews” (Mark 15:26; John 19:19). This was never a Christian title for Jesus, so by the criterion of dissimilarity as well it probably represents the actual charge against him. Therefore, according to Craig Evans, “the majority of scholars . . . accept the titulus and its wording as historical and genuine.”27 Indeed, Dunn says that “his execution on the charge of being a messianic pretender (‘king of the Jews’) is generally reckoned to be part of the bedrock data in the Gospel tradition.”28
27. Craig Evans, “Authenticating the Activities of Jesus,” 24.
28. James D. G. Dunn, “Can the Third Quest Hope to Succeed?” in Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, 34. Cf. Wright’s judgment: “There can be no doubt, historically speaking, that Jesus was executed as a messianic pretender” (N. T. Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2: Jesus and the Victory of God [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996], 522).
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The speculation on the part of certain skeptical scholars that Jesus was arrested simply as a troublemaker or disturber of the peace is therefore wholly implausible.
One may profitably compare here Josephus’s account of another Jesus arrested during a feast in Jerusalem in a.d. 62:
Four years before the war, when the city was enjoying profound peace and prosperity, there came to the feast at which it is the custom of all Jews to erect tabernacles to God, one Jesus, son of Ananias, a rude peasant, who, standing in the temple, suddenly began to cry out, “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds; a voice against Jerusalem and the sanctuary, a voice against the bridegroom and the bride, a voice against all the people.” Day and night he went about all the alleys with this cry on his lips. Some of the leading citizens, incensed at these ill-omened words, arrested the fellow and severely chastised him. But he, without a word on his own behalf or for the private ear of those who smote him, only continued his cries as before. Thereupon, the magistrates, supposing, as was indeed the case, that the man was under some supernatural impulse, brought him before the Roman governor; therefore, although flayed to the bone with scourges, he neither sued for mercy nor shed a tear, but, merely introducing the most mournful of variations into his ejaculation, responded to each stroke with “Woe to Jerusalem!” When Albinus, the governor, asked him who and whence he was and why he uttered these cries, he answered him never a word, but unceasingly reiterated his dirge over the city, until Albinus pronounced him a maniac and let him go.29
The parallels between the proceedings against these two Jesuses reinforce the historical credibility of the Gospel accounts. Notice Albinus’s principal concerns: who Jesus was, whence he came, and why he was doing such things. Doubtless these would have been Pilate’s concerns as well. The difference in the respective outcomes of these inquests is most plausibly explained by the fact that whereas Jesus ben Ananias was deemed a harmless troublemaker, Jesus of Nazareth had made messianic pretensions which had to be treated much more seriously.30 Had Jesus simply been disrupting the temple or disturbing the peace during Passover season, his case need not have gone any further than did the case of Jesus ben Ananias.
Virtually all critics acknowledge that during the ensuing week Jesus did cause some sort of disruption in the temple, an action multiply attested in all four Gospels, resulting in a temporary cessation in the commercial activities there. The last sentence of Zechariah’s prophecy, which prompted Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, is: “There shall no longer be traders in the house of the Lord on 29. Josephus Jewish Wars 6.300–309.
30. In Evans’s view, in contrast to Jesus ben Ananias, “Jesus [of Nazareth] provided the grounds for a sentence of death from both the Jewish authorities (i.e., capital blasphemy) and the Roman authorities (i.e., treason and sedition). . . . The messianic dimension of Jesus’ activities is unmistakable” (Craig A. Evans,
“What Did Jesus Do?” in Jesus under Fire, ed. J. P. Moreland and Michael J. Wilkins [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1995], 111).
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that day” (Zech. 14:21 at).31 Jesus’ assertion of his authority in the temple, the supreme locus of Jewish religious life and authority, fits with his royal messianic self-consciousness. At his trial, according to the Synoptics, a centerpiece of the case brought against Jesus was a saying on his part having to do with the temple’s destruction and Jesus’ rebuilding it in three days (Mark 14:58), a saying also attested in John 2:19. In Jewish thinking God is the one who built the temple (Ex.
15:17; Jub. 1.17; cf. 1 En. 90.28–29; 11Q Temple 29.8–10) and who threatens the destruction of the temple ( Jer. 7:12–13; 26:4–6, 9; cf. 1 En. 90.28–29). The charges brought against Jesus, that he threatened the destruction of the temple and promised to rebuild it, show that he was being charged with arrogating to himself divine roles.32 Jesus’ refusal to respond to these charges provokes the high priest’s direct demand: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed?” (Mark 14:61
at). The connection between the charge and Caiaphas’s question may be seen by the messianic reading given to 2 Samuel 7:12–14 by one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The passage in Samuel concerns David’s desire to build for God a temple, and the Lord’s reserving that right for David’s son Solomon:
When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be his father and he will be my son. (2 Sam. 7:12–14 rsv) In scroll 4Q174 this passage is quoted and interpreted as a prophecy of the Messiah: “He is the branch of David who will arise with the interpreter of the Law who
[ ] in Zi[on in the la]st days according as it is written: ‘I will raise up the tent of David that has falle[n]’ (Amos 9:11), who will arise to save Israel” (1:10–13). It is the Messiah, the Davidic branch prophesied by Isaiah and Jeremiah (Isa. 11:1; Jer.
33:14–16), who will build the temple and will be God’s Son. Caiaphas’s question, given such messianic expectations, would have been natural, demanding whether Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, God’s Son, who would fulfill this prophecy by destroying the present temple and replacing it with his own. Jesus’ pretensions to be the Messiah could in turn be presented to the Roman authorities as treasonous; hence, his execution as “King of the Jews.” The conspiration of so many factors, each enjoying ratification independently by factors such as multiple attestation, Palestinian milieu, dissimilarity, and so forth, makes for an extraordinarily powerful case that Jesus of Nazareth did regard himself as the promised Messiah. Hengel concludes, “If Jesus never possessed a messianic consciousness of divine mission, 31. Following the nrsv translation “traders” rather than “Canaanites.”
32. Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993), 900. Gundry argues that the historical authenticity of the charges brought against Jesus is further supported by the lack of harmony between Mark 14:58 and 13:32. The false witnesses had evidently mingle-mangled Jesus’ prediction of the temple’s destruction with his predictions of his resurrection in Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:34, a confusion which is not apt to be a later Christian creation.
De Christo
nor spoke of the coming, or present, ‘Son of Man,’ nor was executed as a messianic pretender—as is maintained by radical criticism untroubled by historical arguments—then the emergence of Christology, indeed, the entire early history of primitive Christianity, is incomprehensible.”33
This is not to say that Jesus thought of himself as the man to lead a violent revolt against the Roman authorities and to establish David’s throne by force. Such a move would be wholly inconsistent with the ethical teachings of Jesus. More than anything else, this rejection of the militaristic aspects of the messianic office by Jesus provides the key to Wrede’s Messianic Secret motif, as Wrede himself later came to see.34 To claim openly to be the Messiah, given the popular image of the Messiah as a military conqueror, would have tended to obscure rather than elucidate the true nature of God’s kingdom and Jesus’ mission.
In concluding that Jesus understood himself to be the promised Messiah, we have not yet arrived at a clearly divine self-understanding. Scholars typically take Messiah to be a purely human figure and identify a number of Jewish reformers as would-be Messiahs. For example, during the second Jewish revolt (132–135) Bar Kokhba may have been regarded by his followers as the Messiah ( Jerusalem Talmud Ta’anit 4.5).35 Still, the concept of the Messiah is often of an extraordinarily exalted figure, and the leaders of renewal movements who are typically identified as messianic pretenders were not, in fact, given and did not claim that title, so far as we know.36 Figures like Judas the Galilean and Simon bar Giora may have aspired to be king over Israel, but that office is obviously not in itself messianic—not every Jewish king is the Davidic Messiah.37 In the Psalms of Solomon Messiah was to be not merely a military ruler but much more a spiritual leader of his people: There will be no unrighteousness among them in his day
for all shall be holy,
and their king shall be the Lord Messiah. . . .
He will strike the earth with the word of his mouth forever; he will bless the Lord’s people with wisdom and happiness.
And he himself (will be) free from sin, (in order) to rule a great people. . . .
33. Hengel, “Jesus, the Messiah of Israel,” 327. Cf. Wright’s conclusion: “Messiahship . . . was central to Jesus’ self-understanding” (Wright, Christian Origins and the Question of God, 2: 538).
34. See Werner Zager and Hans Rollmann, “Unveröffentlichte Briefe William Wredes zur Problema-tisierung des messianischen Selbstverständnisses Jesu,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 8 (2001): 274–322.
35. See discussion of the sources in Craig A. Evans, Jesus and His Contemporaries: Comparative Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2001), chap. 4.
36. For a review of messianic claimants around Jesus’ time see Evans, Jesus and His Contemporaries, chap.
2. A great deal of Evans’s case for identifying many Jewish revolutionaries, e.g., Menachem the son of Judas the Galilean, as messianic figures is, one has to say, based on inference and conjecture.
37. Cf. Josephus’s comment: “Now Judea was full of robberies; and as the several companies of the seditious lighted upon any one to head them, he was created a king immediately” ( Antiquities of the Jews 17.10.8 [285]).
The Self-Understanding of Jesus
309
And he will not weaken in his days, (relying) upon his God, for God made him
powerful in the holy spirit
and wise in the counsel of understanding,
with strength and righteousness. . . .
Faithfully and righteously shepherding the Lord’s flock, he will not let any of them stumble in their pasture. . . .
This is the beauty of the king of Israel
which God knew,
to raise him over the house of Israel to discipline it. (17.32–42) It scarcely needs to be said that the typical revolutionary, reformer, or prophet could hardly aspire to such a status. In rabbinic tradition Bar Kokhba himself, having claimed to be the Messiah, was slain because he could not pass a certain superhuman test which laid down necessary conditions of messianic status.38 While such a legend or defamation doubtless reflects later disillusionment with the man, still the requirement that Messiah display supernatural powers is striking.