Abstract

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

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?

Healing Miracles

Some Christians believe that misfortune like sickness is a supernatural punishment inflicted by God. It must be demoralising for those who believe it because they might try to lead exemplary lives only to find they still got a cold and became bronchitic or went deaf or developed a cancer. They must wonder whether they had been committing some unknown grave sin or whether God sometimes just let his little critters lose anyway. Or was God subject to whim and fancy? If it were true that God punished people with sickness then it would be useless to study medicine, but habitual sinners should be given a comprehensive immunisation programme. Alternatively all sick people should be burnt at the stake as sinners.

Most of the miracles wrought by Jesus seemed to have been healing miracles. Taking the gospels literally, Jesus’s aim seems to have been to assist the physically, mentally and spiritually sick.

It is not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick; I did not come to invite virtuous people but sinners.

Mk 2:17

Today and tomorrow I shall be casting out devils and working cures; on the third day I shall reach my goal.

Lk 13:32

Curiously, Christians and scholars alike are always pleased to read these statements literally. Thus, for biblical scholar, Geza Vermes, these statements prove Jesus was a charismatic healer. They do not. Jesus was no longer interested in the physical health of the Chosen People but only in their spiritual health so that they stood a chance of entering God’s kingdom.

The Essenes were healers. Josephus records the Essenes’ interest in ancient books which provided for the well-being of the body and the soul, their searches for cures by “investigations into roots and stones” and their practise of exorcisms by invoking the name of a sage like Solomon, chanting his incantations and using drugs from plants. Certainly, the buildings at Qumran, on a recent interpretation were used for extracting essences from plants, and John Allegro has published a scroll fragment that seems to be a report of a doctor doing his rounds in a hospital. So, most people, used to our world view, take them to be primitive doctors, yet, they were more interested in spiritual health.

Both spiritual and physical sickness were caused by demons which had to be driven out to effect a cure, an idea stemming from Babylonia and Persian Zoroastrianism and which entered into Jewish thought with the colonists sent by the Persian kings as “returners from exile”. Noah and Solomon were two who had mastery over the arcane secrets needed to control demons. The Essenes—for whom Noah and Solomon were counted among the Righteous—and the Therapeutae in Egypt were also adepts.

As an Essene, Jesus will have been interested in physical healing, at normal times. But these were not normal times—he thought the world was about to end and God’s kingdom begin. Why should he have continued in the trivial pursuit of healing flesh when the most momentous event of history was imminent? For Essenes the physically sick and infirm were already saved and under the protection of the Angels of Holiness—they did not need special attention. Jesus was intent on winning over people’s hearts for the coming conflict, and discouraging the devils that opposed him.

The above passages therefore refer metaphorically to the political and spiritual sickness of the Jewish people, not to their plagues and poxes. Spiritual sickness was represented in the esoteric language of the Essenes as physical sickness. This is clear in the above quotation from Mark. Jesus plainly says that the sick not the healthy needed the doctor but immediately indicates that his intent is metaphorical by adding that the sick were not physically sick but sinners! In fact, the quotation is a typical Hebrew verse in which the same sentiment is expressed twice in different ways. This poetic form occurs throughout the bible and in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

In the gospels, Jesus was accused of blaspheming by forgiving sins. When curing the paralytic, Jesus says:

My son, your sins are forgiven.

A fragment from Qumran tells of Daniel curing the King, Nebuchadnezzar, who recalls, “I was afflicted with an evil ulcer for seven years. A gazer pardoned my sins”. This story presents healing as being effected without scandal or blasphemy by forgiveness of sins.

Two centuries later rabbis agreed that sins had to be forgiven for someone to be cured of an illness. Was it generally accepted at the time? If so, Jesus did not blaspheme when he forgave sins because it did not imply he was divine.

The gospel impression is that Jesus blasphemously cured illness by forgiving sins. The truth of the matter was that Jesus told people that their sins would be forgiven by God if they sincerely repented and accepted baptism. These actions purified Jewish sinners to allow them to enter God’s kingdom. The forgiveness of sins was the result of the sacraments, not an arbitrary gift by a man pretending to be God.

On the face of it Jesus carried out exorcisms with little ritual. To cure people he often only used his own spittle and to effect exorcism he simply gave a firm command. Tacitus records that the Emperor Vespasian cured blindness with spittle, and cured lameness:

Persons actually present attest both facts, even now when nothing is to be gained by falsehood.

Vespasian attributed the cure to the god Serapis, and plainly it was confirmed by eye-witnesses. One wonders why these miracles are rejected when identical ones by Jesus are accepted. Indeed, editors of the gospels might have inserted them based on the stories attributed to Vespasian.

Jesus’s disciples, and one who was not, expelled spirits by invoking Jesus’s name. Physical disabilities for Essenes code for are degrees of opposition to the fighters for God’s kingdom. They are cured of their opposition not of any physical problem. The point about driving out an unpleasant devil is that the treatment is itself unpleasant. They were obviously driven out by beatings not by words or rituals and, if the devil was opposed to the kingdom of God—manifesting itself in opposition to those calling for it,—then the treatment would be likely to be effective whether the devil felt the blows or not.

In the New Testament spitting is always mentioned as a mark of disgust and hatred, except when Jesus does it, then it is to effect a miracle cure. The cure of the blind man in Mark 8:22-26 is certainly the result of admonitory ill-treatment, as the other cures of this nature are. The man is taken away from the village out of public view and is spat upon, and we can assume otherwise abused, until he is cured of his opposition, whereupon he saw “all things clearly”. Naturally, he was warned not to tell anyone.

If physical sickness were caused by sin, then curing the leprosy or the blindness by applying spit was merely alleviating the symptoms not curing the sin at the root, and what would the point of that be when God’s angelic host would arrive at any minute to obliterate the sinning soul of the leprous sinner? Only the naive can hold on to the idea that Jesus was curing physical sickness when he was expecting the world to end at any time.

Honest Christians admit that the books called gospels were not written by eyewitnesses to the gospel events, though most tell schoolchildren a different tale. In the forty years or so that had passed before they were written down, the stories of Jesus grew and became distorted in the telling. Mainly the distortions were deliberate. The true story could not be honestly told, so the bishops changed the truth into God’s Truth—and so they have done ever since! In that age it was easy because, the lives of great men were customarily enlarged in biography by their admirers, and no one thought anything of it. When stories differed the hearer chose what version they preferred.

So too that is today, for Christian believers smile at rational argument against their beliefs. The only way that irrational beliefs can be held while living an otherwise rational life in a rational world is if they have no effect whatsoever on real life. Christianity is like that, and that is its only remaining strength. People can believe it and feel pious but it hasn’t the least effect on their lives. It has become a lapel sticker for the respectable classes.

Miracles from Older Miracles or Prophecies

Several of Christ’s miracles were invented to fulfil messianic prophecies. The disciples of Jesus thought that the scriptures were full of texts foretelling the advent of their messiah. Passages are quoted as referring to Christ which, the context shows, could not have been the intention. In his first two chapters, Matthew has five miracles taking place “that the prophecy might be fulfilled” regarding the messiah. Matthew, writing many decades after Christ’s advent, believing miracles to have been fulfilled, arranged his account such that they were. It was done under the religious conviction that the cause of God and the church required it to be done, and that therefore it was justifiable. This has ever since been God’s Truth.

People in that age were not so scientifically precise as to require proof before making an assertion, or desist from making it without proof. Historians happily constructed entirely fictitious speeches for historical figures without a qualm, though the better ones were fairly meticulous in composing speeches of the sort that their hero would have made!

The apostolic writers go beyond this though. No devout disciple would allow any rival to outdo him. “Signs and wonders” were a feature of the age. Nothing could match a miraculous display of divine power. Hence the history of all the gods and demigods of illiterate and superstitious people, including that of Christ, is loaded down with miraculous feats.

Disciples of all religions considered it a religious duty to supply omissions by guessing, conjecture or creativity. They used assumption for proof, made positive assertions when there was no proof and even when the proof was contrary. Religious history is full of this kind of elasticity of conscience and it goes on today with equal vigour. Pious lying is justifiable. Paul (Rom 3:7) says:

If the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory, why am I judged a sinner?

It is no sin to lie for the glory of God. God often justified a lie, the ancient people felt. The bible is full of proof of this. The prophets often disclose it, and the apostles were their strict imitators. Ezekiel has God saying, “If a prophet is deceived, I the Lord deceived that prophet” (Ezek 14:9) . Jeremiah asks God: “Wilt thou be to me as a liar” (Jer 15:8)? The writer of Kings (1 Kings 22:23) has God putting a lying spirit into the mouth of his own prophets.

If God might habitually depart from the truth, it was sufficient for the apostles. The case of Paul lying for the glory of God proves they were morally capable of doing this. New Testament writers had to build a reputation for Jesus and his band of disciples. If the facts did not fit then they were eased into place.

When they sat down to write the history of their messiah, long after his death, they found they had not the evidence before them that the prophecies had been fulfilled. It was all-important to show that the prophecies had been fulfilled to the letter in his practical life. The difficulty was easily surmounted.

Miraculous stories were so numerous, and so varied in character, that there was no little difficulty in finding those which seemed to be the fulfillment of any messianic prophecy in the scriptures. A story had long been going the rounds that the parents of a young god had to flee with him out of the country, to save his life from being destroyed by its jealous ruler. The parents were the parents of some Eastern god but they supposed it must refer to Jesus, because it seemed to fit a possible prophecy in the Jewish scriptures.

The story of the darkness at the crucifixion they incorporated as a part of the history of Jesus, because they had seen a text in Joel which they supposed presaged such an event, and they knew such events happened at the death of gods and great kings. And so for the other miracles now found related as a part of the history of Jesus.

Moses and the prophets were considered by the evangelists as archetypes of the coming saviour. The important incidents of their lives were worked over to make them fit the life of Jesus as the Messiah, the second Moses, for Moses prophesied: “A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up like unto me”. The transfiguration of Jesus therefore follows the model of the transfiguration of Moses on Mount Sinai.

Images of Jesus raising the dead suggest he was the equal of Elijah and Elisha who had done the same. Elijah was considered the last prophet to appear and for some was identified with Jesus himself rather than John the Baptist. Both Elijah and Jesus raise a widow’s son. However Jesus had to be their superior. They could only reanimate the body just after it had died but Jesus could raise Lazarus who had been dead four days. Elisha could only make three gallons of oil, but Jesus could make over thirty gallons of wine. The miracle of feeding one hundred men with twenty loaves is far excelled by the latter, who feeds five thousand men with five loaves.

Elisha met an unfordable stream in his travels and made a passageway across it, but Jesus did better by walking on the surface of water. Moses had to send the leper outside the camp before he could heal him, but Jesus could heal him instantly with a single touch. The same slaughter of the infants is commanded by Herod, in order to destroy Jesus, that Pharaoh had ordered to effect the destruction of Moses, and which even then was an ancient myth. Many of the miracles in the life of Jesus are improved copies of earlier miracles. The new prophet had to excel over the old ones. Since Jesus did better, it proved he was more than merely a prophet like them, but was a god.

Among Christians, it was almost universally agreed “that to deceive and lie is a virtue when religion can be promoted by it”. (Laurenz Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History). They not only practised it but reduced it to system. They justified it as meritorious to lie in a good cause. That is God’s Truth.

Even the most pious and devout professors of religion did not consider a rigid conformity to truth morally necessary in their desire to promote the glory of God and the salvation of souls. The Christians’ elasticity of conscience was and is such that they do not even realise that they are lying! Even when lying was being avoided, Christians still exaggerated and invented, drawing copiously upon their imaginations to supply omissions or colour in the pictures of history.

Accept Christians as pious liars and miracles as misreported natural events. Accept pious lying and reject reason.

Miracles Before Christianity

Christian clerics are fond of the sin of omission, so fond of it that they commit it habitually. By carefully omitting any reference to anything that might create doubt in the minds of their sheep, whose accumulated pennies keep them in comfort, they keep the sheep loyal. Most of them think that the Christian God’s claim to fame is that he performed miracles, so any miracles performed by non-Christians might cause doubt in the minds of the Simple. C D F Moule says, in the book entitled Miracles (1965) that he edited:

Little or no attention is paid to the comparative study of ancient writers on the subject outside the bible.

On a par with the gospels are the elaborations of the lives of Apollonius, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Pythagoras by their biographically inclined admirers. In the stories of Alexander the Great, only those written years later contain the story of the sun becoming obscured and the earth enveloped in darkness at the time of his death. Similarly all the contemporary notices of Caesar’s death make no mention of “the sheeted dead” rising from their graves, which appears in Virgil’s account written later.

Nor are the miracles of Pythagoras recorded by his biographer Iamblicus, such as his walking on the air, stilling the tempest, raising the dead, related of him by any contemporaneous writers. Compare also Damos’ life of Apollonius with that of his later biography by Philostratus, which reveals the same exaggeration.

Religious history is thickly studded with miracles wrought in all ages and countries, wrought by gods, demigods, saviours and even simply famous men, as we have seen. They come to us as well authenticated as those reported in the Christian bible—not very well!

Christians believe all the miraculous reports in the bible are true while those reported in Pagan holy works are fables or fiction. Pagans reported the miracles of transmuting water into blood, sticks into serpents, and stones into frogs. They performed all the miraculous feats of Moses with the single exception of turning dust into lice, which they would not have wanted to report. Why do Christians unreasonably accept as true the miracles of Jesus but reject all others as phony?

Josephus was a soldier on the Jewish side in the war and wrote his account of it, The Jewish War, only a few years later. He reports an astonishing miracle, a heifer giving birth to a lamb in the middle of the temple. He comments:

I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it.

So this was attested by eyewitnesses. Why do Christians not believe it? The truth is that reciting stories of miracles is a ploy. They do not really believe miracles. They are like most people, but pretend or, by some peculiar form of self-deception, persuade themselves that Christian miracles are genuine but all other miracles are bogus. Rational people will make no distinction between any of them. Divinities of all religions are able to do miracles according to their supporters, and Christians themselves believe that Satan is no less adept at miracle working than Jesus. Skeptics want to know how they can tell which is which.

Originally magicians used an enchanting rod or magic wand when they wanted to perform a miracle. The Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians and other nations, including the Jews used this technique. Moses always performed his miracles with an enchanting rod he called “the rod of God” or “the rod of divination” (Ex 4). Why would God want to conduct his real miracles using the same conjurers’ paraphernalia as the Pagans’, unless they were the same conjuring tricks?

If Jesus Christ caused a fig tree to wither away by merely cursing it, then Zoroaster, from nowhere in a modest back garden, instantly made a tree appear, of such magnificent proportions that no rope could be found large enough to reach around it. If Jesus Christ resurrected Lazarus and the widow’s son of Nain, then Krishna, restored two boys to life who had been killed by the bites of serpents. If Jesus turned water into wine, then Bacchus did the same six hundred years earlier. Whether Christian or Pagan, the only evidence is the story itself.

In fact, the Pagan religions have better evidence for often the ancients built impressive monuments in commemoration of miracles. This was the highest tribute they could pay in memorial of some outstanding feat or person, and therefore good evidence of them. Christians can find no such evidence of any miracles reported in their bible.

The historian Pausanias states upon current authority that Æsculapius raised several people from the dead and names Hippolytus among the number. He points to a stone monument erected as confirmation of one of the most astounding miracles ever wrought. Yet no Christian will credit the literal truth of the story.

Tacitus says that Vespasian saw a priest of the god Serapis, Basilides, in the Temple, when he was certain the man was miles away. He sent soldiers to check that the man was where he was supposed to have been and confirmed he was. If Christians are impressed by Padre Pio, why are they not impressed by this testimony, verified by a down-to-earth soldier?

Strabo tells us the ancient temples are full of tablets describing miraculous cures performed by virgin-born gods of those times. One case was of two blind men restored to sight by the son of god, Hercules, in the presence of a large multitude of people, who acknowledged the miraculous power of the god with loud acclaim. The sin-atoning gods of the orient performed the same type of miracles as those of Jesus Christ, such as cures, casting out devils and raising the dead.

If the account of miracles by Jesus Christ proves him to have been a god, then the world must have been full of gods long before his time. How can anyone conclude otherwise? Indeed the miracles of the Christian god are puny compared with those of some of his own followers and less than miracles reported by Catholic Christians in historic times.

Before the ecumenical movement got anywhere, the Roman Catholic church was looked upon and styled “the mother of Harlots and Abomination” by the Protestants. Yet the Catholic religion must have divine sanction, if miracles are proof. In 1797 AD, the virgin Mary, in several pictures situated in different parts of the country, opened and shut her eyes for six or seven months continually. No less than sixty thousand people actually saw this miracle performed, including many bishops, deacons, cardinals, and other officers of the church, whose names are given.

A withered elm tree was suddenly restored to full life and vigour by contact with the body of St Zenobis. This miracle took place in the most public part of the town, in the presence of many thousands of people. It is recorded by contemporary historians, and inscribed upon a marble column which stood where the tree stood. Perhaps Christians are worshipping the wrong man.

Were some phenomena really witnessed on which these stories were constructed, but which got magnified from a molehill to a mountain before they found their way into history? Or, were they manufactured as a pious fraud, which was rather a fashionable business with the early disciples of the Christian faith? Either answer will explain the miracles of the Christian bible.

If they really were miracles, then God’s moral purpose has to be called into account. Why does he give a few people supposedly unequivocal evidence of his power while leaving all the rest of us to believe His earthly representatives who can easily be impersonated by devils, and often seem like them. Who but a devil would cure a tree when he could save mankind from destroying the world?

Classic Writers on Miracles

Greeks like Herodotus did not see divine intervention in an anthropomorphic way but as the balancing of a tension. Whether actions are divine or human there is a balance of action and reaction. The cosmos is orderly and hamonious and just, so that Nature continually adjusts itself to compensate for the actions taken in it. This idea of Nature being subject to an underlying order comes from the Persian religion. The universe is in a balance and any action in it provokes a reaction to re-establish the balance of order. The stronger the action the greater the reaction, whether it is success or failure. A great man has changed the balance in things and risks a reaction that will change his fortune. A freeman should act according to his virtue but is aware of the danger of reaction. To act is to suffer, but learning is by suffering. It is a motive for moderation. Those who reject it out of pride are guilty of “hubris” or wilfulness provoking the reaction of Nemesis.

Xerxes tried to fetter the sea and Nemesis caught him up in defeat. This was not a miracle to the Greeks, but merely the natural order asserting itself. When the authors of Exodus took up the theme in Herodotus of Xerxes crossing the Hellespont dryshod, and thus violating the natural order of things, they showed Yehouah performing the miracle of holding back the waters for his Chosen People and punishing their enemies immediately by releasing them. The Persian fleet sank in storms. Was that too a miracle? The Athenians had called upon the north wind to save them. Boreas responded by bringing about the storm at sea that sank the Persians, and the Athenians therefter called Poseidon their “Saviour”. Apollo promised the Delphians in an oracle that he could protect his own. A thunderstorm and a fall of rocks put the Persians to flight. Herodotus says that the Persians attributed it to superhuman warriors.

Demeter saved her sacred precinct from the Persians but Herodotus reports no miraculous appearnce of the goddess. Divine spaces were sacrosanct through the natural balance. Modern urbanites have lost awareness of it, but Nature does have its balances. Overfishing depletes the seas. Overfarming ruins the land. Plants and animals moved to new environments are not balanced as they were and get out of control. Prevent disease and the excess population starve. Urban dwellers forget about Nature’s balances and are forced to fight Nature as a consequence. Sensible people do not forget the balances in Nature. It was never Nature’s way that every child conceived must live. Encourage childbirth and families remain in poverty.

Man has gained such a degree of mastery over nature that he must fulfil his responsibility by skill and forethought, lest he suffer from the disturbance he can cause.

Dr A H McDonald

For Plutarch, the world was rational and so there was no such thing as a miracle, for God acts rationally too. Plutarch defended the oracles against their critics with excuses that remind us of present-day Christians—they are like him explaining difficulties away. Thus:

• If sacred oracles have stopped working, how were they ever divine? The answer is that the population of Greece has fallen and the gods know that not so many oracles are needed.
• Oracles are no longer in verse as they were in ancient times. The answer is that even in ancient times they were not always in verse, and some still are delivered as poetry, but fashion changes, and the aptitude for writing poetry has been lost.
• Oracles at Delphi are often in poor verse but Apollo was the god of poetry. How then can they be divine? The answer is the oracle comes from the god, not the poetry which is that of the priestess, who might not be a good poet.

Christians come up with similar “explanations” when challenged on the unreliability of prayer, or the inconsistency of scriptural interpretation.

Plutarch seemed unsympathetic to the idea of a miracle. When he related a story that he thought unlikely, he used the formula, “it is said” or “the story is told”. Plutarch was a priest of Apollo at Delphi, yet he spoke of God as often as he spoke of the gods. He believed that God was eternal, powerful, good, and able to influence humanity. God was philanthropic—he loved humanity. The purpose of Plutarch’s Lives is not simply biographical but to show God acting in the affairs of men. This then was not simply a Judaeo-Christian idea.

The universe was rational and God could not defy reason or act irrationally within it. It did not matter, in Plutarch’s conception, whether God was the Creator of the universe or not. Once immutable cosmic laws had been made, they could not be broken—even by God! Yet, though he warned against excessive credulity, he considered excessive skepticism worse in leading to loss of faith. All of this shows that strong tendencies existed in the latter half of the first century towards characteristics which Christianity ended up claiming exclusively as its own.

Among the portents that were of more than an ordinary character were the appearance of flaming spears and shields in the sky above Italy. Since it was a sign like this that Christians say prophesied the victory of Constantine under the guidance of the God of love, they are falling back upon ancient Pagan divination. Other signs, Plutarch related were statues that wept or sweated, or even spoke, reminiscent of the Christian obsession with the similar miracles most often associated with statues of the Virgin Mary. But Plutarch explains such phenomena in a natural way as caused by fungi growing on the surface and cracks in the stone causing sounds through the action of wind or heat. Even so, it did not mean that the sign was insignificant. The opposite! God sent his signs using natural laws, and so they must appear as natural, though they remained unusual. God could not defy the Reason of Nature by making statues speak but he could and did use natural phenomena to send signs! In some cases, people actually thought they conversed with statues but they were dreaming, and this too was a method used by God to communicate with people.

Plutarch thought it quite possible for men of great virtue to be so loved by a god as to be accepted as a friend by them. The well known friendship of Sophocles and Æsculapius was an example. Plutarch thought it was “still supported by much evidence”. Christians believe equally unlikely things on similar evidence. Yet, Plutarch was equally ready to admit that men, like Numa and Lycurgus, had pretended to converse with gods to impress their subjects with the divine approval of their actions. Christians refuse to consider that possibility!

Plutarch does describe healing miracles, as Christians call them, and tells us of the life of Pyrrhus who had a healing gift. But though Pyrrhus’s gift might be divinely given, and divine assistance might be given in dreams, the cures were not considered miraculous but perfectly natural. Elsewhere, Tacitus relates the story of Vespasian healing a blind man and another man with a withered hand at Alexandria, attributing it to the favour of the heavens and the gods.

However, for Plutarch, not only are “miracles” natural, they have to be moral. The Jewish God can kill 185,000 Assyrian soldiers, innocent men in themselves whatever might have been the intention of their rulers or rather in those days, their own gods! The God of Plutarch could not do any such vile act. God gave confidence and courage to favoured humans and the opposite to those not so favoured. The end was that the victor was victorious because he felt it was his fate, and equally the defeated one felt he too was thus fated.

B S MacKay, whose views these are, thought that Plutarch would have accepted much of the miraculous in the gospels, fitting them into his scheme of things without seeing God breaking natural law, but he would not have accepted any sort of intercourse bewtween God and a human woman. He states as much knowing that the Egyptians accepted it. He rejects the claim of a woman that she was pregnant by Apollo. It shows that it was not miraculous for women to make such claims! Plutarch also vigorously refutes the bodily reception of Romulus in heaven. Some souls went to heaven, but it was “against nature” for bodies to do so. His argument was more relevant to a then contemporary example!

Miracles for the Jews

Christians note first that, according to the Rabbis (BB 15a), the whole story of Job with all its miracles and wonders is a myth.

J Kuhn drew attention (1929) to the similarities between the later chapters of the Wisdom of Solomon (c 50 BC) and Revelation, conventionally dated around 100 AD. It illustrates the Essene view of the relationship of heaven and earth and might have explained Plutarch’s bewilderment. The Wisdom of Solomon is apocalyptic and looks to a day of the “visitation” of God and a “day of decision” when the good and wicked are separated out, yet the future seems then to continue. The reference to “fashioned anew” (WS 19:6) is the meaning of the kingdom of God expected by Jesus. The world would be refashioned without corruption, thus matching heaven. It could only imply that earth and heaven were united, or earth became a part of heaven. For those chosen to inhabit the new world, history would continue but it would be forever peaceful and uncorruptible. The propaganda of the Persians to the colonists of Yehud was being accepted as a heavenly prophecy when it was a promise that Yehud would flourish under Persian hegemony:

And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of Yehouah, and their offspring with them.

Isaiah 65:19-23

J Fictner (1938) notes that fire in Daniel did not harm the righteous thrown into it but killed the wicked who threw them in (Dan 3:21f). In the Wisdom of Solomon, fire does not just not harm the righteous but benefitted them as a moral lesson (WS 16:22-28). Moreover:

What was not destroyed by fire was melted when simply warmed by a fleeting ray of the sun, to make it known that one must rise before the sun to give thee thanks, and must pray to thee at the dawning of the light.

Wisdom of Solomon 16:27f

J P Ross tells us that the mentality of the authors of the Jewish scriptures was that nature had no independent existence. Everything that happened in it was an act of God. Nature was supernatural! It meant that people describing an alleged miracle could write whatever they would have expected to have seen. They expected miracles and felt free to describe the most remarkable things as “natural”. When every incident was an act of God, the object then was to decide what that act said about the attitude of God. That was what the Essenes set themselves to do. They believed they had the right methods of interpreting God’s acts. Even the acts of men were controlled by God, offering theologians problems about free will.

Barnabas Lindars SSF, notes that Exodus is not history but the cult legend of the Jews solemnly recited at their national festival. The deliverances of Israel at times of crisis were explained by the miraculous acts of God and became salvation history and sacred history. Yehouah is assisiting His people in the holy war. When Israel lost out, Yehouah was angry with the Israelites and was punishing them—again the miraculous intervention of God explained the act. In prophecy, miracles get more outrageous until eventually comes apocalypse when they equal the creation of the world but in reverse!

Lindars emphasises the folklore motif of the three fold tale proclaiming that events in the Elijah and the Elisha cycles are not history. In the story of fire from heaven falling on Ahaziah’s messengers (2 Kg 1), “the fact that there are three of them is a sure sign of folk tale”. Whatever Elijah was doing stretching himself on the dead son of the woman of Zerephath, he did it three times. “Folk lore loves to have things in threes!” writes Lindars. Moreover the same stories about widows and sons recur for Elisha (2 Kg 4:1-7), though some differences are introduced to make them seem independent.

The story of Elijah with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel occurred in a drought, and Lindars sees it as a rain making ritual. Baal is Yehouah, the god of the winter sun and therefore of the rainy season. He has to be roused from sleep to bring the winter rain in a storm. Elijah’s four pots of water poured on the sacrifice are to induce it, like the water pouring at the feast of tabernacles held at the beginning of October just as the first rains were arriving. Elijah repeats the ritual three times, praying. Then a bolt of lightning announced the awakening of God and the start of the rains. Fire from heaven is, of course, lightning. The people called out Elijah’s name, “Yehouah is (my or our) God”, showing that Elijah was just a personification of this whole procedure.

In the Elisha cycle, beginning where the Elijah cycle is ending (2 Kg 2), there is a threefold visit told in thoroughly folkish manner, Elijah parts the Jordan with his mantle, perhaps another seasonal ritual, this time to regenerate the flow of the Jordan in April (cf Joshua 3-4), then Elijah is taken up in a whirlwind and a fiery chariot with a mention of horses, all suggesting solar mythology. Lindars says:

The miraculous elements have a deeper purpose than recording miracles to impress the credulous.

It does not matter that it seems to be to provide a mythical basis for ancient seasonal rituals. What matters is that here a good Catholic scholar tells us that the normal purpose of miracles is “to impress the credulous”! Elisha begins a ministry of miracles including bringing down bears to kill naughty children and feeding 100 men with only twenty loaves of the first fruits. This is plainly enough simply a sacramental meal—a eucharist! Lindars concludes:

The miraculous element in the gospel tradition need not be denied outright, but it has certainly been exaggerated, and needs to be treated with agnostic reserve.

The theology of redemption has never been allowed to rest upon such flimsy supports alone!

So, there we have it. The miracles of the bible are a flimsy basis for belief. Do the sheep know what the shepherds really think?

The Apostles and After

Professor Lampe notes that both Mark and John deny the value of signs and wonders, but Luke marvels at them, thinking them good evidence. In Acts, he writes that through the “hands of the apostles many signs and wonders took place among the people”. Lampe is impatient with conversions by conjuring tricks, the way Britain was evangelized, according to the Venerable Bede.

One of the tiresome features of a particular kind of Christian apologetic, common to the Church from the second century onwards, is a tendency to assume that the truth of Christian doctrine may be proved by the ability of believers to perform apparently impossible feats.

Professor G W H Lampe, DD

Lampe speaks of early Christian preachers “confronting the heathen and endeavouring to convert them” in the most direct way by performing a miracle. Do modern Christians really think that these peripatetic preachers could call upon God to break His laws of Nature at a whim? In as much as these romances are true at all, these miracles must have been conjuring tricks such as those used by Indian fakirs ad professional stage magicians. The first of these were precisely the travelling magi abandoned with the collapse of the Persian empire, whence the very word “magic”.

In the Acts of John, S John addressed the Ephesians from a high pedestal, inviting them to call upon Diana to strike him dead. If they refused, he promised to call upon Yehouah to kill them all! The fearful and gullible crowd—typical Christians—were persuaded, pleading with the apostle not to call upon his God to slay them, convinced by his confidence that he could! His response seems to have been to pray for the evil goddess to be put to flight, inciting the crowd to wreck the temple of Diana and kill the priest. In the Acts of Peter, the apostle defeats Simon Magus in a miracles contest rather like Vincent Price and Peter Lorre in occult movies. Lampe says:

All this belongs to the realm of popular fiction.

The shepherds will happily say that now about stories in books that were not accepted as canonical, but they must still have been influential in persuading the simple to convert to Christianity. It is what Christians call truth. Eusebius relates the legend of Abgar, king of Edessa, whom Thaddeus supposedly healed merely with the name of Jesus. When Pagans retorted that their own legendary heroes had done more remarkable things, the preachers replied that they were the work of demons, whereas their own tricks were the work of God. They were too stupid to notice that by this argument they destroyed miracles as evidence of divinity. Pagans were not only skeptical that the Christian incarnated God could still a storm with a rebuke, but whether he could even have healed a boil in this manner.

Christians assume the truth of their mythical story books to prove what they say. Lampe cites Eusebius as believing the miracles of Jesus on the grounds that otherwise a large number of people must have been involved in a conspiracy of lies. He meant the twelve apostles and the seventy others sent evangelizing—82! It is an argument still used, though the 82 people are not specifically mentioned but rather the 500 mentioned by Paul. The whole assumes a lot of impossible things and ignores history itself, including that Eusebius was writing 300 years later.

In fact, the apostles supposedly who martyred themselves to the cause, are not witnesses but part of the legend. No one knows anything about them that is not mythical. Mythical characters cannot be called upon as proof of the historicity of the myth. The original evangelists, whether the twelve or the 82 did not spread Christianity to the extent described, if at all. By the time that Eusebius wrote his Church history, Christianity had spread on the popular appeal of Judaism and the mystery religions of which it became an amalgam. The canon of accepted books was effectively set after Marcion tried to get rid of Christianity’s Jewish roots, around 150 AD, so the mythology of Christianity was fixed relatively early on. That is why the Christian story was able to spread relatively uniformly, but even so, the New Testament itself testifies to deep differences in the early years.

Galen and Strabo observed that religions are necessary for the hoi polloi, and are generated by myths, parables and miracles. Galen, in an Arabic fragment of his commentary on Plato, specifically says, according to Maurice Wiles:

Most people are unable to follow any demonstrative argument comsecutively. They need parables, and benefit from them—just as now we see the people called Christians drawing their faith from parables and miracles…

While simple Christians took it that “with God all things are possible” and so miracles were almost natural, their critics wanted to know how God could make the diagonal of a square equal to the length of its side. The argument completely evaded Christian comprehension, and the response of Christians to pages like these proves that they are “unable to follow any demonstrative argument consecutively”.

But, Origen admitted in his Commentary on John that the miracles of Jesus, even in his day, were losing their power to persuade and were becoming merely tales (mythoi). He accepted the miracles, but as metaphors. The eyes of the spiritually blind were those that were being opened, and so on, including Paul, the apostle to the gentiles who was similarly “cured”. Celsus had noted the self-defeating nature of the Christian argument that rival miracles were demonic. It is therefore an argument known for 18 centiries but still ignored by the faithful. They must have their miracles as proof of divinity. Origen had no answer except to reassert that Christ’s miracles were divine but others were demonic.

Since the Christian argument from miracle could so easily be turned back on to them, they had to have supporting arguments ready. “Distracting arguments” would be better descriptions. The miracles of Jesus were divine because of his exemplary character. In effect, Christians were invited to believe in the divinity of Christ because of his miracles, and believe that his miracles were a sign of his divine nature and not a demonic nature because of his divine nature!

Admittedly, Origen was a man who could argue, but often he had to resort to assertion, and elsewhere, he denied what Christians still want to accept. Thus Origen declares that God cannot do what is shameful or contrary to Nature. So, he evades the question and re-admits miracles by saying that Nature can be transcended. Christians think they win arguments by defining the terms to suit themselves. They cannot make their arguments coherent by a miracle!

The corollary of the accusation that false prophets perform miracles is the statement (Jn 10:41) that “John [the Baptist] did no miracle”. It looks like Christian denigration. Yet, in the Mandaean tradition there are indeed few miracles attributed to John although Hivil Ziva does raise him up to heaven. John was remembered as a prophet. The Mandaeans are considered to be influenced by Gnosticism and the Gnostics are so reserved about the value of miracles that they say in Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic Christian work, that miracles like raising the dead and healing the sick are the work of the Archons—the evil rulers of the spheres of heaven, effectively demons. Paul the apostle is fond of citing them.

The Fallacy of Miracles

Is Jesus divine because of his miracles, particularly that he raised the dead? If so, then why is he singled out as special when others have done the same long before? Moses parted the sea, changed a stick into a serpent, and changed water into blood. Must he not have been divine? We have seen Elisha and Elijah do the same sort of miracles as Jesus—Elisha raised the dead, resurrected himself, healed a leper, fed a hundred people with twenty barley loaves and a few ears of corn, and healed a blind man (2 Kings 4:35; 13:21; 5:14; 4:44; 6:11), while Elijah made an inexhaustible bowl of flour and an inexhaustible jar of oil, and also raised the dead (1 Kings 17:14, 22). Why are they not equal to Jesus, if such miracles denote divinity? Indeed, someone in the Jewish scriptures far surpasses Jesus in raising up dead bodies—Ezekiel raised “a great, an immense army”, and all in one go (Ezekiel 37:1-10). In fact, the miracle of stopping the sun in its daily rotation (Joshua 10:12-13) was a vastly greater miracle than just raising the dead, as their relative incidences in the bible show.

What of miracles caused by supernatural entities other than God? They might be caused by good or evil spirits, or by more than one of them. It cannot be said with assurance that God is necessarily the cause. Even Jesus himself says miracles do not prove divinity:

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

Matthew 24:24

The elect, unfortunately for them, are too smug to consider that they might have been deceived. Moule, in his book of scholarly papers presented to fellow scholars at a Cambridge University seminar, notes that there were other miracles reported other than those in the bible. Either other gods could bring them about, or, if only the Christian God could, then He appeared to other people using different names! Either way, Christianity had no sound basis for dismissing these foreign gods.

Woods bluntly says that miracles cannot be assumed to be divine. First, how can Christ’s miracles, assuming they are true, do anything toward proving his personal divinity, when he did not claim to be their author but, like the apostles who are reported to have performed the same miracles, merely the agent or instrument in the hands of the Father? “The Father he doeth the work”, is his own declaration. And the apostles seem to have accepted his word and his view of the matter. For proof listen to Peter:

Ye men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles, and wonders, and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves do know.

Acts 2:22

A man who was among the closest to Jesus, Peter, declares with assurance that miracles were not performed by Jesus as a god, but as “a man approved of God”. Peter banishes at once all thought of his miracles attesting to his divinity. God performed all the signs and wonders on Jesus’s behalf. Indeed, Peter unequivocally declares that Jesus was not a god but a man—special perhaps, but still a man!

An alternative criterion of a divine miracle is its nature. It is divine when it has a character suitable for the good God. It is a moral criterion. Healing miracles are all of the right character, Christians always think, but critics of Christianity look askance and say, “If God can heal a few paralytics, blind, deaf and dumb people in the bible stories, then He is a monster for letting anyone suffer at all”. God can prevent suffering like this but does so only in a few gratuitous demonstrations of His power. It is anything but moral for an almighty God of love to act in this arbitrary way.

Needless to say, Christians will not see it. For example, Professor Woods says the gospel miracles show a “subtle harmony” of “a will which is good”, and, “though the acts are infrequent” they show an “unchanging purpose” of this good will, and though they are “exceptional” they “perfect” nature by making it “whole”. This is at best nervous and desperate waffling that simply does not hold up, and at worst is the rambling of a deranged mind. If God can “infrequently” and “exceptionally” “perfect” nature through His “subtle harmony” making it “whole” merely to demonstrate His “unchanging purpose” instead of actually completing whatever His “unchanging purpose” is, then we need to know why He does not do the job and make all things whole once and for all.

The plain truth is that the miracles thought of in this way prove there is no almighty good God because any such God could not be playing games. If He could do it, He would do it! God made Nature, according to Christian belief. Why did He not make it perfect? Either He is not good, or He is not almighty.

If we begin to think that divine miracles may easily be done, the problem of evil is intensified.

Professor G F Woods

In a world created and sustained by an all powerful perfectly good and loving God, the absence of miracles occurring by the second rectifying the imperfection of the original Creation is a problem for Christian theologians to answer. They will answer it to the satisfaction of their sheep who pride themselves on believing anything that no one need believe. Not to the satisfaction of others.

Satan as Miracle Worker

So, evil gods such as Satan, accepted within Christianity, could also induce miracles. Indeed, among all the workers of miracles reported in the bible the Devil turned out among the best, in which case the miracles of Jesus are no proof that he is good. He could have been the Devil denigrating Yehouah’s eternal laws given to His prophet Moses. Christians then are the dupes of Satan in opposing God! Christians have happily broken God’s laws ever since Jesus and Paul abrogated them without giving a thought to the possibility that God could hardly have looked more foolish by sending a book of His absolute laws then sending his own son to break them in public. So, through miracles, the Devil beguiles a billion simple and uncritical people into being Christian and doing his bidding, causing every possible vile mess in the world, as we have recently seen. Yet Christians will insist on miracles being a holy sign.

No miracle could beat the Devil “transforming himself into an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14). It must better even Christ’s transfiguration. According to Paul (2 Thess 2:9) he was endowed “with all power and signs, and lying wonders”. If he had “all power”, no other being could have had more. All is everything, and God would no longer have been almighty. You could argue at best that God could only have equalled the Devil by also having “all power”, either being able to draw upon such power as there was. How then does miraculous power prove a supernatural being is a god and not a devil? S John (Rev 13:13) says the “Evil One” has power to make,

fire come down from heaven in the sight of men,

and

to deceive those that dwell on the earth by means of those miracles which he hath power to do.

Though here the devil’s power sounds more restricted, we can still ask, What can a miracle prove to mankind, what end can it serve, or what good can possibly arise from the display of the miracle-working power, when a demon can “deceive those that dwell upon the earth?” How do we know the apostles themselves were not deceived in ascribing some of the miracles they record to Jesus instead of the devil? A miracle can prove nothing and performing it can accomplish nothing.

Yet, to reject the miracles is not to reject Jesus as historic. No person who is acquainted with Grecian history doubts that Alexander the Great was born in Macedonia, and founded a city in Egypt bearing his own name. Yet not one of those readers will credit for a moment what one of his biographers relates of him, that he stopped the sun in its course, or that he had no human father.

We all accept Pythagoras as a real being while we reject the story of his walking on the air. Are we morally bound to accept Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, as mere fabulous beings, because their biographers relate the incredible story of their being suckled by a wolf?

Many other illustrations might be given in proof of the falsity of the assumption that, because a portion of a man’s biography is found to be incredible, the whole must be rejected as false, as unworthy of credence. This would be to annihilate history. For no biography of any person, and no history of any nation, can be accepted as fully pure, unmixed truth. There is always more or less chaff with the grain and it is our duty to separate them. An important criterion is to reject the miraculous!

Christian Arguments

We hear from Christians that the best evidence for Jesus’s miracles is that they are often cited, or multiply attested, as the scholars prefer to put it to sound cleverer. The multiple attestations are… Matthew, Mark, Luke and John… Oh, and Josephus says he worked wonders. Who would claim that Matthew and Luke are independent of Mark? The so-called multiple attestation of the miracle stories gets to look weak from the outset, and is only slightly improved by claiming that the gospel authors got them from different sources. Looking at all the miracles, only one is testified to by all four gospels. Is this multiple attestation?

The success of Jesus in gaining large numbers of followers also proves the miracles, apparently. Quite why a man can only get many followers by being a miracle worker is difficult to understand. Perhaps the apologists mean that Jesus could only claim to be a miracle worker and get lots of followers if he really did miracles. Doubtless this is true, but who says Jesus claimed to do miracles other than people that wrote about him afterwards—people trying to get lots of followers! The synoptic gospel writers succeed in depicting Jesus as a modest man, and as an Essene he must have been, humility being their main yardstick of personal devotion. Of course John pictures Jesus as an egomaniac, and John’s version is the favourite one these days. Wonder why?

Christians also argue the recording of Jesus’s miracles is quite close to their date by the standards of the time. Miracles were often attributed to great men but rarely so soon after they had died—more usually centuries later. The reason is that many of the miracles were misinterpretations of “deeds” described metaphorically. They were simply acts of conversion of critics, doubters and even opponents to the belief in the coming kingdom. So, they really happened but they were not miracles. Only Christians who took the metaphors literally thought they were.

The apologists tell us the criterion of embarrassment applies if some story created theological difficulties for the church such as the baptism of Jesus by John seeming to make Jesus sinful and subordinate to John. Thus, Christians tell us it is unlikely that the church would have gone out of its way to create the Beelzebul dispute (Mk 3:20-30, Mt 12:22-32) suggesting that Jesus was an agent of Satan. The honesty of the gospel writer in depicting Jesus here as being criticised proves the church was not inventing miracles to make Jesus seem better than he was.

That, though, is not the point. In all these cases, the church had no choice but to include the passage because the story was being circulated. It had to be included to rebut it. Jesus was attacked by some of the Nazarenes because the band was not being successful and was splintering. The speech Jesus is shown as making was actually a unity speech. Jesus himself rebuts the accusation about Beelzebub in the gospels, but the accusation must have been made and the tale circulated by Palestinian Jews who had left Palestine because of the war.

The only miracle common to all the gospels is the feeding of the multitude. Christians maintain the feeding of the multitude is supported by “an unusually strong attestation of multiple sources”. (John P Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus). Who the people are and where they have come from is unclear in the story, but the Scrolls from the Dead Sea caves explain the situation—they are attending the Essenes’ Festival of Renewal at Pentecost.

The disciples are the ones who supply or locate the food available because they are acting as ministers to the main body of Nazarenes. Jesus commands the crowd to assemble on the grass, then behaves as the Head of a Jewish household starting a meal. Even Christian commentators have seen the central actions of Jesus as akin to the Last Supper and the Christian eucharist. Jesus is the head of the household, the Nazarenes being organized as a brotherhood.

The detail that the bread is barley (krithinos) bread is found only in John’s version (6:9,13) of the gospel story. The same Greek adjective krithinos occurs in the Septuagint version of Elisha’s feeding miracle. It might be a harmonization with the scriptures or intended to place the event at Passover, rather than Pentecost when it really happened. Most likely, however, is that the Essenes used barley bread in their rituals because they were the Poor Ones (Ebionim) and poor people ate cheap bread.

Jesus regularly spoke of the coming kingdom of God under the image of a banquet in parables, sayings and actions. Besides the feeding miracle and the Last Supper, Jesus seemed to be often attending meals and banquets. The Essenes, of course, were united in a table fellowship that imitated the eschatological banquet (messianic meal) and this is one of the strong pieces of evidence that Jesus was offering salvation in God’s kingdom to all repentant Jews. They could not be offered the messianic meal unless they had repented and been baptized.

The attestation of the feeding miracle in all four gospels indicates that it was important to the first Christians, and based on some real Essene practice. It was not a miracle except in the sense that Catholics will describe the service of the mass as a miracle. The people who participated will have felt that they were partaking of the bread of life and guaranteeing themselves a place in God’s kingdom. That will have had the additional benefit of making them willing martyrs for the cause.

Plainly, Jesus was reputed to have worked miracles during his lifetime. Jews such as the Talmudists accepted the miracles of Jesus (Baraitha Bab Sanhedrin 43a). What though were the miracles? The central one that gave him his fame as a doer of “paradoxa erga” was the temporary capture of Jerusalem from the Romans. This was a startling enough deed and could not have been viewed with any equanimity by Romans. For that reason it was suppressed. Indeed, the whole life of Jesus was suppressed for a century, while the new faith was organized as a mystery. The revelation to initiates after a period of tuition would have been that God had appeared as a rebel against the established order showing that its days were numbered.

History Ignores Jesus’s Miracles

The absence from three hundred histories of that age of the slightest allusion to Jesus or any of his miracles proves with a cogency that no sophistry can contradict that there never was the miraculous being that his disciples claim. The absence of every event of his life from any record except those by his own disciples settles the conclusion beyond argument. The godlike achievements ascribed to him are fictional. He was not famous enough in his day to be an object of general attention.

Christian censors destroyed many famous old histories which naturally no longer exist. Why, though, would they destroy any history that told of the exploits of Jesus? They would not have—unless the reports were not what the bishops of the church wanted anyone to read. Again we have a choice. Either Jesus was a nonentity or altogether imaginary, or his true story was not the one in the gospels and had to be expunged. Such a choice banishes the last shadow of faith in Christian history.

A few lines are found in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews alluding to Jesus, but it is a forgery. All responsible critics, even of the Christian school, reject it as an interpolation. The passage is not found in any edition of Josephus before Eusebius. Since he used Plato to argue that falsehood might be used as a medicine for the benefit of the churches, the suspicion has fallen upon him as being the forger. Another Christian Father, Origen, who lived before Eusebius, admitted Josephus made no allusion to Jesus. Of course the passage was not, then, in Josephus.

Anyway, in this passage we read that Jesus was a doer of “paradoxa erga”. Here is that word “erga” meaning “works”, or is it “miracles”? We must admit it hardly means miracles. “Paradoxa” means “contrary to favourable opinion”, so Josephus, if he wrote it, is saying that Jesus’s works were unacceptable, not that they were wonderful. They were unacceptable to Romans because Jesus was a zealot.

We have to conclude that Jesus led an obscure life or his own followers have erased his history from the records. Not even Christ’s famous biographers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, are noticed in history till well over a century after the birth of Jesus. And then the notice was by a Christian writer, Irenaeus.

On the face of it Jesus was so obscure that the authorities had to pay one of his disciples to turn traitor and betray him so that they could arrest him. A god, from off the throne of heaven appears on earth and, despite his miracles and a final public crucifixion near a great and crowded city, no one except a few immediate friends noticed! And even his friends, who believed him to have been God, forgot when he was born and which year he died. Plainly Jesus received little attention outside of the circle of his own credulous followers. How can anyone not believe then that much of the gospel story has been invented later to elevate Jesus in the supernatural rankings believed by his followers.

Jesus’s history would stand before the world as much more instructive if stripped of the wild, the weird, and the miraculous. He would be much more interesting viewed and respected as a man than worshipped as a god, guilty of the frequent violation of his own laws. The Hidden Jesus: The Secret Testament Revealed (AskWhy! Publications £12.99 $30) tells this story of Jesus as a historical figure and explains the critical principles which support the reconstruction.

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