Miracles I
The gods are readily revealed to the inhabitants, for here statues sweat and move and prophesy, and often shouting occurs in the temple when the sanctuary is locked, and many have heard it.Lucian, The Syrian Goddess
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, January 23, 2001
Abstract
Miracles
Christians love miracles. When Christians are asked for proof of the divinity of Jesus Christ, they cite his miracles. Miracles are proof of divinity because they are beyond human power and the laws of nature and so must be attributable only to a god. Yet, Christianity is not the only religion which appeals to miracles as a proof of its divine origin. It is fairly safe to say that every religion makes the same claims. No religion would be complete without them and there have been hundreds of sects studied in history and anthropology.
Lee Siegel, Professor of Religion at the University of Hawaii, pointed out this interesting paradox. Say to a group of Christians that you can tell them all about miracles. Wow! They are agog! Then… “Oh! You mean miracles of nature and its application. Not Real Miracles!” Groan! Yawn! For Christians and others who are supersitious, Real Miracles are supernatural. Real Miracles are therefore not real. Miracles that are demonstrably real are of no interest to them. They are not Real Miracles. God’s Truth!
Miracles involve an utter repudiation of all law, all order and all system. It is the doctrine of God’s whim and fancy which the Essene precursors of Christianity rejected. They believed in miracles but not that God was whimsical because everything had been foreordained. The doctrine which accepts every event that ever occurred as the harmonious operation of nature is more beautiful and more rational than a lawless god’s caprices chosen, not to make the people better, more moral or more righteous—for miracles cannot do this—but to make them gape. What a smart god is the Christian God!
Yet whatever they might believe of the scriptures or the New Testament, few Christians give the possibility of a miracle a second thought in their everyday lives. No Christian farmer will sit back and pray that his cows are fed or his fields planted. If he does, he goes out and feeds the cows and plants the crops anyway, showing he has no belief that the miracle will occur without a human to help it. If such prayers were more easily answered than they are, the world would be chaotic.
Fortunately they are not answered at all, and we can rely on the discoveries we have made through careful observation that nature works in certain fairly predictable ways that we can make use of. Now that really is a miracle. If you want to believe in a good god then believe that he has been good enough to set nature in motion and has now gone away. Nature is the miracle, and thankfully it is quite harmonious.
The age of miracles is gone. It has died as science and human understanding has progressed. Nature is the miracle. Understand her and there is no need of all the other petty conjuring tricks that simple, primitive and uneducated people call miracles. It is illiterate, ignorant and superstitious people who recount the longest list of miraculous acts, who invent a god to bring order into an imperfect world then have him violating his own laws for trivial reasons.
The miracles which occur today are the miracles of science. It is a miracle when a simple and frightened youth is saved from death row, having been terrified into confessing to the rape and murder of a young girl, and the true murderer is identified and given a life sentence. DNA analysis allowed this because nature is harmonious, not subject to the quirks of superbeings.
The Appeal to Miracles
The appeal to miracles can no longer be thought of as such good evidence as it once was. What most people in unsophisticated times considered miraculous, few now would. Even so, Professor G F Woods of London University, author of Theological Explanation, thinks it highly likely that Jesus survived his death! But then Woods is a divine and has to allow for miracles somehow, and he does so by claiming we just do not know the limits of nature. He makes this claim even though he admits that by common sense we as humans accept “general standards of natural probaibility”. In fact, Woods is forced to contradict his “common sense”—or rather years of rational experience—by allowing that some unknown happenstance can make the impossible possible. It is the usual Christian desperation and dishonesty.
Admittedly, even sophisticated people can be gulled by clever illusionists still, but in ancient times, as today in less sophisticated societies, tricksters were considered prophets or gods. Miracles are the work of God, and so must be out of the scope of men. Today, people are much more aware of what can be done by mechanics and trickery.
Even if the miracle is neither of these, the likelihood of some event happening has to be judged. The Connecticut Yankee in the court of king Arthur escaped death because his almanac told of an eclipse of the sun. It was a miracle to king Arthur and his knights! Yet it was inevitable. It was certain to anyone who knew of the cycles of the earth and the moon around the sun. Pigs do not fly, and an account of them flying has to be credited with an extremely low probability, but more information could increase it. Perhaps the pigs were not flying but being hurled. This sort of thing happened when cities were seiged to spread disease to the defenders.
Proof is satisfying certain tests, the satisfaction of which requires no further testing, for proof is passing the tests. Evidence is not necessarily proof, though Christian theologians like to think that it is. Any old test will not serve to prove something, nor will any old evidence. Passing a critical test will serve as proof, and certain evidence might be so compelling, once verified, as to serve as a critical test. Most evidence, however, adds only a degree of probability to something having occurred and cannot be proof. A lot of such evidence, if independent, accumulates the probabilities that something occurred until it might become possible to say it is unlikely it did not. Thus an accumulation of circumstantial evidence, none of which is proof in itself, can add up to Woods’ “highly likely”, or at least “likely”.
The steps in a proof depend upon our experience of what is obvious, and new discoveries can change it. For long Christians were taught that certain theological matters to do with their Christian beliefs were obviously true. Some of these were natural matters to do with supposed natural evidence of the existence of God, while others were revealed matters, not discoverable by human reason but supposed to have been revealed by God, and therefter propagated by Christian professionals called clergymen. These revelations were contained in the bible. Thus the biblically attested miracles of Jesus were assumed to be proof of his divinity. They showed that he was God in the sense that an identity card proves who anyone is to those enquiring. This “proof” therefore depends on people believing the literal truth of the bible. As it still is for modern day Fundamentalists, it was the ultimate test and brooked no further question.
Now the situation is quite different. So many “facts” averred in the bible are now known to be untrue or vanishingly unlikely that no intelligent and normally critical human being can accept any of it without further evidence. In small matters of situation and history there sometimes is confirmation, but never on the important matters that establish a new revealed “truth”. Woods thinks “it is profitless to discuss whether the miracle stories are all true or false”. The individual probabilities have to be considered, and the best that can be had is a balance of probabilities. But as soon as the probability of a miracle is not nil, it is no longer a miracle. Frankly, it must be admitted that the probabilities of miracles, determined from what we have observed in nature in the light of scientific research is nil. That is the proper meaning of a miracle. It cannot happen naturally, and so must be supernatural, and therefore divine. Since miracles do not happen, they are not and can never be proof of the divine. In the words of Bishop Butler:
Probability is the very guide to life.
Dr Mary Hesse, a Cambridge lecturer in the philosophy of science, says quantum statistical notions of mechanics are no more amenable to the scientific acceptance of impossible events than Newtonian mechanics. Notionally, quantum mechanics can allow for impossible things to occur, but the probabilities of any such things actually happening are so small on the macro scale that they never could occur and so remain impossible. They are only possible on the tiny scale of things that quantum mechanics was devised to explain. Dr Hesse dislikes the popular dilution of the word “miracle” to mean remarkable recoveries from illness or lucky escapes. If Padre Pio could appear in two places at the same time by bifurcating his body into two, then quantum mechanics is no more able to explain it than Newtonian mechanics. It remains impossible for a man to do, but not for an electron. It is the impossibility of miracles that distinguishes them.
Scientific laws are not rules applied by a God, but are simply uniformities in Nature that we have noticed in our experience. No law of nature devised by us matters to an event whether it obeys it or violates it, but when such a law is violated it is a challenge to our whole experience and demands that the weight of testimony to it has to be sufficient to preclude error. The philosopher Hume thought that no such incontestable testimony of a miracle had ever been produced, and so none had ever been shown to have occurred, but since no law precludes them, they remain notional possibilities.
The scientist’s inclination to follow the uniformity of Nature that has imposed itself on human consciousness is, for the Christian, a “prejudice” against miracles. It is doubtless a way of putting it but one which is “prejudiced” itself against common sense and human experience of Nature over millennia. The sun rises daily but we are “prejudiced”, in the Christian view, to imagine it will rise tomorrow. The Christian has to think it might not, and not for any catastrophic reason, but simply because violations of Nature’s uniformity can sometimes happen.
The Christian prejudice is a singular one that demands we consider that night can be followed by night and by night again before another day dawns. Science can explain a prolonged period of darkness in various non-miraculous ways but the Christian has to believe in the miraculous. The sun has not risen. Day is truly night! But even if this were possible as a violation of Nature’s normal uniformity, and remarkably unlikely, it remains natural and not supernatural, and so Hesse challenges it as a miracle. Then, if something so remarkable can happen as a natural fluctuation in the regularity of Nature, how is anyone to distinguish it from a supernatural intervention in Nature by God performing a miracle?
Christians think what humans cannot do must be the work of God. The miracle proves the divine and the divine explains the miracle in the typical circular reasoning beloved of Christians. Woods describes this as “unsatisfactory”. The trouble today is that there are many more alternative explanations for supposed miracles than there were in ancient times. He means explanations known by human reason. The explanations were there even though no one knew them. That is what the Christians still do not get. What is worse for the clergymen trying to relieve more sheep of their fleece, is that the sheep are now more inclined to believe that a natural explanation exists even when it is not yet known.
People today are ready to accept that some things are uncaused, and any such event could not therefore have been caused by God. Uncaused events are known in science such as the emission of an electron by an excited atom, or a sub-atomic particle by an unstable atomic nucleus, but Woods does not say what sort of uncaused event that could be a miracle he is thinking about. On the other hand, he assumes that natural wonders “it may in a sense be said” are evidence of God. At one time illness was said to have been caused by demons. Combustion was said to have been caused by the emergence of phlogiston. Further back, rain was said to have been God fertilising the earth—he was self-dating in heaven! What “may in a sense be said” means nothing. Only Christians believe what is said is true without question. The wonders of nature ought to inspire observers of them with amazement at Nature, not some figmentary Creator assumed to be necessary to explain it. Even then, the wonders of Nature are not, for Christians, miraculous enough.
Woods looks at pseudo-scientific explanations of supposed miracles—notional ways that God could intervene from His supernatural dimension in our natural dimensions. He concludes that they “are insufficient”, but even so they can be used prudently! He is directing clergymen in training to a way they can gull the credulous, so long as they are not indiscrete about it. To press insufficient analogies too far may be counter-productive, inducing incredulity instead of belief. It is not something that churchmen often need to worry about.
Woods concludes that no one can say miracles are impossible because we do not know what is possible in Nature. They may be highly improbable but no one can say they are impossible. Even so, he says miracles cannot be taken as proof of the divine. Those who already believe in God take them as such proof, but those who do not have other explanations. Intelligent people cannot think it proper to believe something before they can accept proof of it, so the Christians cannot be right. No proof can require a priori belief in what is to be proved. It looks like proof only to the ignorant.
Woods says there are no metaphysically neutral scales, by which he means some assumption about God’s existence is inherent in any of them. Only the positions of belief or disbelief are tenable. There is no intermediate position. Agnosticism is sitting on the fence, and so is avoiding the question. One of the two positions must true and the other false. The neutral position in respect of belief is disbelief. That is what Christians cannot accept, and that is why they claim that skeptics already have a position equivalent but opposite to the Christian one.
If belief were to be taken as just as good as disbelief on all issues, it would be impossible to know anything. Christians would have to acknowledge that their rejection of all other religions is purely arbitrary. Whatever has to be proved must begin with disbelief, and all proofs must be designed to test a positive assertion. It is not for the Christian who skeptically rejects my God, Harvey the Rabbit, to have to prove “Harvey Does Not Live!” Christians can therefore be justifiably skeptical about Harvey worshippers until they are able to demonstrate that “Harvey Lives!” Equally, Harvey worshippers must make the same demands of Christians. The neutral position for all is that none of these entities exist, and none of these beliefs are true until they are shown to be so. The neutral position is not to believe in Harvey, not to believe in Santa and not to believe in God. The disbeliever can then demand of the believer, “Show me your proof!”
The ultimate Christian excuse for the problems generated by its dogmas is the usual one of it is a divine mystery because mere humans cannot hope to understand the mind of God. Christians habitually destroy most of what they want to say when they fall back on their ultimate excuse. Why is an almighty being unable to give a mere mortal a convincing account of His aims? Since He is so vastly beyond us, He ought to be able to do convincingly what the doctors of theology try to do but cannot do convincingly. Their final excuse, that they cannot explain it because it is beyond us, tells us clearly that an almighty God had no part in it. No one has to resort to quantum mechanics to tell their children things that benefit them in the world. God ought to be better equipped, being almighty, to tell all humanity what they ought to know for their own salvation, if He thinks that is what they need. The ones who are really failing are, of course, the clerics whose scam this is. It proves that God is not in it. One gets the impression that some, like Professor Woods, end up complaining at God’s incompetence! The miraculous cannot properly be expressed by the language and models we currently have. Did God fail to see this? Did He overlook it? Is there nothing He can do about it? Why does He leave His faithful shepherds so badly prepared? The Christian God could not have been so stupid and negligent. Harvey Lives!
The Word “Miracles” in the Bible
The English word “miracle” is known only from 1137, though it has a Latin root. In English it has always had the clerical supernatural sense of an act of God that violates God’s own rules of nature to authenticate a divine message.
In the case of the miracles of Jesus, it is a fraught device because a man who can do miracles proves himself not to be a human being. Human beings cannot do miracles, only gods can. So when Jesus does his miracles he proves that he cannot be what he is presented as by Christian theologians—simply a man. A man who can do miracles or can call upon them willy-nilly, does not have to suffer on a cross, yet the Christian has to believe that he did to experience the misfortunes of mankind.
But then logic has never been a strong point of Chistians. From the earliest times, Christians have dishonestly used it with success to persuade others to believe, but their critics have always pointed out that they themselves simply believe. In short, they cannot be persuaded by reason not to believe. Miracles are one of the impressive acts of Jesus and others in the bible that they cite to persuade people to step into the lobster pot—fishers of men!
The Latin meant something wonderful—today it is fashionable to say, awesome! Niagara Falls is awesome but it is not a miracle. Miracles have to imply God’s finger waggling about somewhere. Now since the word “miracle” in English has come to have this singularly supernatural meaning, surely we have to be careful when translating words from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek as “miracle”. Yet, unsurprisingly to a skeptic, we find that miracle is the word of choice for several different biblical words.
”Morpheth” in the Jewish scriptures appears in English (AV) as “miracle”, (Dt 29:3) but also as the less miraculous, “wonder” (Dt 13:1). The Revised Version disagrees about “miracle” (Dt 29:3) and also makes it “wonder”. The Hebrew “pele” which means “wonder” is translated as “miracle” (Jg 6:13) but also as “wonder” (Isa 29:14). Today it seems like nitpicking because nowadays a wonder is a miracle anyway, but was it then? The word “oth” means “sign” and so it is translated (Dt 13:1), but we also find in the plural it is “miracles” too (Dt 11:3), though it is revised (RV) to “signs”.
In the New Testament, “dynamis” which means “power” suddenly finds it means “miracle” (Mk 9:39). Again the editors of the Revised Version felt some guilt and made it “mighty works”. In Hebrews 2:4 it is again “miracles” in the Authorised Version but is reduced to “mighty work” in the Revised Version. The word “semeion” meaning “sign” and usually translated as “sign” suddenly becomes a “miracle” in Luke 23:8, and then becomes freely translated as “miracle” when it occurs in John. “Terata”, normally “wonders”, becomes “miracles” in some places (Jn 4:48; Acts 2:22). Even the ordinary word “erga” meaning “deeds” or “works” means “miracles” when they are the deeds of Jesus (Jn 5:20; 7:3; 10:25; 15:25).
The clappies naturally do not mind about all this, but anyone sensible should be asking what the writers meant when they put these words down. Why are we to assume that they meant a miracle when the wrote a wonder and even more, why a miracle when they simply wrote a deed? Given that the gospel writers were trying to impress their audience, do the Christian bible readers ever think why the translators and editors of these modern versions should be made to appear even more miraculous than was intended? Given that they might already have been stretching credulity to impress anyway, perhaps many of the signs, wonders and miracles would be better toned down rather than exaggerated. Why at least cannot they be simply translated for the best equivalent consistently, with honesty? God’s Truth!
The Miracles of Jesus
At the time of the gospel stories, everyone believed in the supernatural, and gods were expected to show their supernatural powers. Not that anyone had to see the wonders but that they should be spoken about! Apollonius of Tyana, Jesus’s contemporary, was a miracle worker especially noted at the time. The early Christian saints had greater supernatural power than Jesus himself if the stories about them are to be believed. Even Plotinus, a philosopher, performed miracles.
It seems fair to ask why, if Jesus’s miracles were so impressive, the Jews were so ready to ignore them and turn against their would-be king? As his miracles seem to have had little effect toward convincing the people of his claims, they cannot have been so impressive and certainly no better than those of other wonder workers. Jesus’s frustration seems to show in his criticising the people for their unbelief, calling them fools, and so on. If his tricks were intended to convince them that he was a god, they failed.
The truth is that Jesus did no miracles and said so! Miracles were invented for him afterwards. In Mark 8:11-13, the evangelist records an incident which proves that all the miracles and cures in the gospel are misinterpretations, distortions or concoctions—Jesus is adamant “there will be no sign” for this generation, the offspring of the wicked. Though the author of Mark says there will be no signs for this generation, and that it is false Christs and false propehets who provide signs and wonders to deceive, he nevertheless lists twenty or so miracles of Jesus. What does that make the Son of God on the gospel’s own testimony? At best, Mark is declaring that Jesus’s miracles are not evidence of any divinity, but rather that he is a false prophet for performing gratuitous tricks.
Wriggling on this hook, Christian apologists declare that a sign is not really a sign, or that it is not a sign in itself. They try to say the miracles are not signs of anything except Jesus’s “authority” or “faith”, or the “believer’s faith”, and so on. In the end, the shepherds are content that the sheep should think the miracles are a sign of the divinity of the Son, but they themselves, when pressed, will say they are not signs. It all shows that Christians will take impossible contradictions as proof of their faith. That is perhaps what Mark was getting at.
Though most of Mark is a parade of Jesus’s signs, he says Jesus refused to give one! There are two reasons why Jesus refused, besides the obvious one that he was not a god. First, the coming of the kingdom itself would be sign enough, and Jesus sighed with exasperation (Mk 8:12) that he had not managed to impress upon them its imminence. Second, the interpretation of signs was one of God’s mysteries—the Dead Sea scrolls prove it to be an essential Essene skill—that the Master had to reveal with discretion. In Matthew 16:3 he says to his inquisitors:
Can ye not discern the signs of the times?
As an Essene he could discern them but he was not ready to explain them to those who had not sincerely repented and joined the elect.
In a more complete version of the same incident in Matthew 12:38-42 the evangelist says the sign shall be the sign of the prophet Jonah. The sign turns out to be a hindsight prophecy of Jesus rising after three days because Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly (Mt 12:40; Jonah 1:17). For those for whom the Bible is infallible, here is a problem—Jesus was only three days and two nights in the metaphorical whale’s belly, even counting part days as days—Steuart Campbell (The Rise and Fall of Jesus) builds an intriguing but far-fetched theory on this. Luke mentions Jonah but omits the analogy between sojourns in bellies and in tombs, either realizing that they did not match, or because he had no knowledge of the passage in Matthew, it having been added later. Justin Martyr, discussing the parallel of Jonah and Jesus does not mention this reference in Matthew, suggesting it did not exist in about 140 AD.
Jesus did not give signs like some sort of conjurer, he read them like an augurer. A healing miracle would be a plain enough sign, but he did not perform any such tricks—he was never a faith healer but a politico-religious leader. All the apparent signs are parables recorded as true stories or deliberate distortions of brutal events which would outrage the faithful. He healed people of their spiritual malaise, the result of hopeless submission, and drove out his opponents, called demons, with sticks.
Jesus was a pious man and upholder of the law. He knew that God was loath to give miraculous signs to any generation. He had however told His people in Deuteronomy 18:21-22 how to distinguish a true prophet from a false prophet. It was simple—if the pronouncements of the prophet turned out to be false, then the Lord hath not spoken it and the prophet is a fake. Only when pronouncements come true are they spoken in the name of the Lord. And fake prophets shall die (Dt 18:20). Sadly on these criteria Jesus, as he himself came to realize, is unmistakably a false prophet. His most important prediction—that the kingdom of God would be seen within a generation—is still untrue 50 generations later. And Jesus was himself crucified. The significance of a generation—to a Jew 40 years—relates to the 40 years of conflict before the general resurrection of the righteous on the third day of the kingdom.
So, if Jesus did no miracles, how did they originate? Explaining the miracles at this distance is obviously an uncertain art. The gospels are not homogeneous. They were written long after the events they record allowing a lot of time for expansion and exaggeration, and they were heavily altered by later hands. Clearly the miracles also came from different sources. If Jesus were the leader of an apocalyptic band of rebels many miracles can be explained as misunderstood parables. The parables were illustrations used in speeches and were often coded, so that only those with ears could hear. However, even if some represent real events they are generally not unexplainable.
When Jesus died, John gives no miracles. Mark and Luke mention the darkness of the sky for three hours and the tearing of the veil in the Temple. The grosser effects—the earthquake, the bursting open of graves and the dead walking—are the product of the fervid imagination of Matthew, one of his sources or a later editor. If any one of these spectacular events really happened, on an occasion as memorable anyway as the death of a god, surely they would have been widely remembered and would have appeared in the other accounts.
The synoptic gospels give six instances of apparent exorcism. The Apostles, the 70 disciples and even a non-disciple were all described as exorcists. Each subject was cured by a firm command, and in one significant incident the demon is told never to go back (Mk 9:25) implying that normally the cures were often only temporary—the demon returned later. Mary Magdalene had had seven devils driven from her—or was it the same one that kept returning? When these cures are not simply Nazarene code, the subjects were probably hysterical. A paralytic was healed and there were twelve other healings (but some were probably the same incident reported twice) in which a simple ritual was apparently used. Finally there were five instances of non-healing miracles—calming a storm, the loaves and fishes, walking on water at night, a large catch of fish, and a catch of a fish with a coin in its mouth just right for paying the Temple tax.
Jesus dines with a leper on his way into Jerusalem. Today we might do that willingly, knowing leprosy is not highly contagious and that we have ways of treating the disease. But in the society in which he lived Jesus would have done no good encouraging people to fraternise with lepers. You can hardly blame Pharisees or anyone else thinking ill of someone who did this. It was not a question of hypocrisy but practical hygiene. Leprosy is a horrible and disgusting disease which was incurable. It made sense to avoid lepers and to quarantine those who had the disease. Lepers were forbidden entry into Jerusalem and lived in a leper colony to the east of the city because the prevailing winds were from the west and people thought the disease was transmitted on the winds. If Jesus stayed with Simon the Leper he stayed in a leper colony. It is hardly surprising that the Elders of Jerusalem were annoyed. Of course, Jesus was expecting the world to end and God’s kingdom to begin at any time, so he might not have been too bothered himself, but that would have been no consolation to those who were not expecting an apocalypse—and they turned out to be right!
Simon was not a leper. The word was code, perhaps for a Nazarene spy or agent, perhaps the man who procured the upper room or the foal and the ass. Perhaps it simply was code for a Nazarene. Who knows? But it is not unusual for clandestine organisations to use code to cover their operations and that is surely what happened here.
There was an historical king Midas, and he appears in Greek mythology. Everything he touched turned into gold. If Midas really existed, did he really turn things into gold? If we worshipped Midas instead of Jesus, the priests and pastors would tell us he did indeed, but we do not worship him, and it is obvious that he did not. The Greeks who told the story of Midas and his golden touch were using metaphor to explain Midas’s riches and good fortune.
Jesus is similar. He too did miracles and they were equally metaphorical or misunderstood sayings and deeds. Why then are the miracles of Jesus not considered to be metaphors, for that is what some of them are. The feeding of a multitude with five loaves and two fishes might be copied from Elisha who carries out a similar miracle in 2 Kings 4, but both are probably coded incidents representing a mass communion. Each was a spiritually feeding, the precursor of the Christian Eucharist in which a morsal or a wafer suffices. Raising the dead girl was a metaphor of raising up Israel to become God’s wife after she had been deserted for adultery with the Romans. The turning of water into wine was metaphorical—the blessing of water for use as “new wine” for ritual purposes and acquired the significance of similar tales told of Dionysus, whose mysteries were widely popular at the time. The date of the event, 6 January, is the date of the festival of Dionysus when a ritual changing of water into wine was also enacted.
The various incidents of raising the dead are not reported in all the gospels. In Mark the daughter of Jair is raised, in Luke the son of the widow of Nain and in John it is Lazarus. By anyone’s standards, raising the dead is no mean feat so it is difficult to understand how some of them had not been heard of by others. Such astonishing feats could not have been forgotten and so all subsequent accounts must contain them—they don’t, so can carry no credibility. If they have meaning it is Nazarene code.
In Mark the daughter of Jair is raised. A crisp command, “Girl! Get up!” suffices for the cure. Other cures are made to fall into the categories of faith healing or psychological techniques. In fact, the illnesses were metaphors for spiritual failings like apostasy, apathy and defeatism. He would say to the cured person, “Thy faith hath made thee whole”, meaning that they had recovered their faith in Israel and her God. Mark tries to suggest that Galilaeans did not have enough faith in him for his healing to be effective, an attempt to disassociate Jesus from by Galilaeans—who were known as rebels. The gentile bishops could say Jesus could not have been a Galilaean rebel because Galilaeans had no faith in him.
Now, suppose I say that I will perform a miracle but it will be done in a locked room, and you have to take it on trust that the miracle actually occurred. Afterwards, you will be dashing from friend to friend telling them of the astonishing miracle you saw performed—well, that is you didn’t actually see it but it was done—definitely! Miracles are often like this, and especially those that Jesus was supposed to have done.
We are told Jesus would order, “See thou tell no man”, after the feat was performed—but apparently they did tell. Now if the miracles were proof of Jesus’s divine status, why were they held in secret, and then supposedly kept secret afterwards? It is a contradiction in logic to say that private miracles were designed to dissolve public skepticism. And yet many, if not most, of his reputed miraculous achievements were of this character.
When he cured a blind man, he not only “led him out of the town” (Mk 8:23), but forbade him from returning to the city, for fear he would publish it. When he resurrected Lazarus, he did not call the whole country around to witness it, but performed the act before a private party.
The reanimation of Jair’s daughter was in the same concealed manner, in a private room, where nobody was admitted but his three confidential disciples (Peter, James, and John) and the parents, none of whom make any report of the case. How, therefore, the reporter (Mark) found it out, when he was not present and no one was allowed to speak of it, or why he should betray his trust by publishing it, if told, is a “mystery of Godliness”. That simply means that the Christian can admit to neither of the possible alternatives.
When Jesus cleansed the leper, he sent him to the priest, enjoining him to “say nothing to any man”. The dumb man, when restored to speech, was not allowed to exhibit any practical proof of the fact by using his tongue. His miraculous ambulation on the water was not only alone, but in the dark. His transfiguration took place in the presence again of only his three favourite companions.
The ultimate miracle, the resurrection, which conclusively proves that Jesus is divine, is described as taking place in the night and without a single witness to report it. Facts like these are not likely to persuade anyone who does not believe that pigs fly, or that aliens kidnap them to Alpha Centauri on nights when no one is watching. Would a real god insist on a right to privacy? Or are these confidence tricks? Then again, why does this miraculous resurrection count as proof of divinity and other reported already in the Jewish scriptures, and, for that matter, the raising of Lazarus, do not?
Moses and Exodus
