If the Logos is reason, why do Christians despise it?

Miracles II

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

Healing Miracles
Miracles from Older Miracles or Prophecies
Miracles Before Christianity
Classic Writers on Miracles

Abstract

The age of miracles is gone. It has died as science and human understanding has progressed. 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. 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. Illiterate, ignorant and superstitious people recount miraculous acts, invent a god to bring order into an imperfect world, then have him violating his own laws for trivial reasons. The wonders of nature ought to inspire observers with amazement at Nature, not some figmentary Creator assumed to be necessary to explain it. The wonders of Nature are not, for Christians, miraculous enough.

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 tribed 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!

Page Tags: Jesus's Miracles, Miracles of Jesus, Miracles, Healing Miracles, Miracles from Older Miracles or Prophecies, Fallacious Argument from Miracles, Christian, Christians, Miracle, Miraculous, Nature

Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.