(11 votes, average: 4.45 out of 5)
Loading...In my discussion of whether the historian can deal with the category of miracle, I’m now at the point where I can deal directly with the miracles ascribed to Jesus. This is an issue that I have dealt with in several books, including, most recently, Jesus Before the Gospels. It will take three posts for me to cover the waterfront here. This is how I began dealing with the issue in the book.
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Why not consider the possibility that Jesus staged miracles to gain attention for a movement? Is it because historical scholars still view Jesus with idealistic, saintly personality traits?
Some of the miracles were nearly impossible to stage – walking on water, controlling the weather, etc., and were likely embellishments. But others, like the healing miracles could have been staged. Why not consider this possibility? Fake faith healers attract very large followings of people in the name of religion. There is a long list of these healers, and there are millions of people who thirst to enable them.
Your answer might be, “It is likely he wouldn’t have gotten away with it.” However, the Gospels document populations who didn’t take his miracles seriously, and Jesus consequently condemned entire cities to Hell for questioning his miracles. Shouldn’t those passages offer credence that miracles were associated with his movement during his lifetime? I suppose Gospel writers could have invented the cursing passages to scare people into converting to their movement, but it seems like odd, erratic behavior to associate with Jesus.
I’m always open for evidence for any hypothesis. And generally I don’t subscribe to hypotheses for which no evidence exist. The evidence that there are others who fake miracles to deceive others is not evidence that Jesus did, any more than the evidence that some people pose as impostors of, say, police officers counts as evidence that the police officer who lives next door to me is an impostor.
“is not evidence … any more than the evidence that some people pose as impostors of, say, police officers counts as evidence that the police officer who lives next door to me is an impostor.”
I can’t help asking: Is this the neighbor you occasionally mention in your lectures and podcasts? I have to admit that he sounds amusing – he must be quite a character.
You state in the first paragraph, “So abundantly attested are Jesus’s miracle-working abilities…, Jesus was almost certainly a healer and an exorcist.” Even Paul’s letters associate the performance of miracles with the very early Christian movement. You then state, “Supernatural miracles can never be established as probable occurrences,” which I entirely agree with. If Jesus performed public healing and exorcism miracles during his lifetime, which is “abundantly attested,” then such acts would have been staged. And the fact that the Gospels document people who recognized the questionable nature of the miracles, increases the probability.
I’m not saying Jesus definitely staged miracles. I’m just wondering why biblical historians don’t consider the possibility of staged miracles behind a concept that is “so abundantly attested.”
There is a huge difference between claiming to be a police officer versus someone claiming he/she performs healing miracles. Performing the duties of a police officer is challenging, but possible. Truly healing people of different types of horrible afflictions using supernatural powers is not possible. Anyone who claims they can cure blindness simply by touching eyes is not being truthful. Documented public acts of doing so is automatic proof they were staged.
Are you referring to this statement that I made? This is it in full: “So abundantly attested are Jesus’ miracle-working abilities that even scholars who are otherwise skeptical of the supernatural biases of our sources sometimes claim that whatever else one can say about him, Jesus was almost certainly a healer and an exorcist.” By putting the keywords in your ellipsis you end up ascribing to me the view I’m opposing.
Yes. Sorry. I was meaning to respond to your comment regarding no evidence. I was highlighting the quote from your article that suggests there is evidence that Jesus was considered a miracle worker during his lifetime – the quote being from E.P. Sanders – a well-respected biblical scholar, and not something I was claiming. I was also trying to present the idea that evidence for performing “miracles” is the same as evidence for staging miracles.
Are you referring to this statement that I made? This is it in full: “So abundantly attested are Jesus’ miracle-working abilities that even scholars who are otherwise skeptical of the supernatural biases of our sources sometimes claim that whatever else one can say about him, Jesus was almost certainly a healer and an exorcist.” By putting the keywords in your ellipsis you end up ascribing to me the view I’m opposing.
Let’s say you hear stories of a magician who tours the country from multiple people from multiple audiences who claim they saw the magician cause someone to disappear and another person to levitate. You interview several amazed people who swear by what they saw. Others express doubt even though they don’t understand how the magician did it. We soon learn there are other magicians who use tricks to deceive people into thinking they see persons disappearing and levitating.
You seem to be arguing that since it is impossible for someone to magically disappear or levitate, then the performances simply never happened. Since there is no evidence the magician was staging the disappearances or levitations, then we can only conclude the shows never happened. Why do we not consider the possibility that our magician was also using tricks and deception, rather than ignore the abundantly attested testimony that the performances happened?
I don’t think there’s good reason to think people during Jesus’ lifetime claimed he did these miracles, and so I don’t feel much of a need to come up with naturalistic explanations of them. If you’re interested in Jesus as a doer of magic though, you may be interested in Morton Smith’s book, Jesus the Magician. (In antiquity, “magic” was not understood to entail works of deception, smoke and mirrors; there’s a ton of scholarship on ancient magic that you can find just by googling it.
“even scholars who are otherwise skeptical of the supernatural biases of our sources sometimes claim that whatever else one can say about him, Jesus was almost certainly a healer and an exorcist.”
But if you could convince someone that he had been possessed by a demon and that you had cast the demon out, would that not qualify you as an exorcist, even if there is no such thing as a demon? Exorcising a demon is psychology; while walking on water, or not, is physics, and much harder to falsify.
If you think exorcism is all psychology, then yes. But those who “believe” in exorcism do not think it is a psychological phenomenon but a physical one. There really is a demonic being actually possessing someone else’s body.
I was possibly unclear. I was only suggesting that the scholars you mention may not have believed that Jesus’ apparent ability to heal and exorcise demons came from supernatural powers, but rather came from mundane psychological reasons.
Ah, right. Yeah, probably so.
Do you think that one major reason healings and exorcisms seem more credible to otherwise skeptical scholars is because those “miracles” might reasonably have psychosomatic explanations?
Probably.
Dr. Erhman, considering your points (a) and (b) above, were any miracle workers of that era considered miracle workers during their lifetime?
Yup! As today still.
I too, have great skepticism of the signs and wonders attributed to Jesus, however I keep banging my head on what Paul attests of himself in 2 Corinthians 12:12. 1 Cororinthians 12: 9 -10 specifically states healing and mighty works (miracles?). Does is boil down to what one defines as such?. Yet by 2nd century, clearly the Gospel writers were providing their definitions of such. So how do you sidestep Pauls attestation of such?
Me too. Oh boy I wish I knew…
What degree of plausibility could you attribute to considering an opposite hypothesis, that originally, Jesus was not known as a miricle worker? If Mark, is the first gospel, and in that gospel, most miracles Jesus performs are accompanied by a command to “not” tell anyone. I always found this command perplexing, since in the other gospels the miracles were “signs and wonders” to the crowds, and not something private and secretive.
So… could the explanation be that the original stories about Jesus did not include “Miracles” but rather just “teachings”? Obviously there were “rumors” of Jesus’s resurection going on thus the ending of Mark. Then could the author of Mark wanted to embelish the story by adding miracles, but since such was not previously passed down orally, the command to not tell of such signs and wonders, was inserted into the story with the miracles, explaining why such was not in the stories? (secret miracles)
Then… since now there was a story including the miracles in circulation, gospels written afterwards included miracles without such command since now miracles have been made part of the story. Seems each gospel tries to out do the previous creating more myth than reality.
I”ve often expressed considerable doubt that Jesus was considered a miracle worker in his lifetime; for me it makes sense that after his followers believed he was raised they started assigning miracles to him during his life. But if they did think of him as a miracle worker at the time, it would not have been unprecedented, and can be explained on grounds other htan saying he *was* a miracle worker (as scholars seem to do, even when not convinced he did miracles!)
Continuing….
Jewish miracles traditionally were more wonders, such as the miracles attributed to Elijah and Elisha. Demons are not a Jewish traditional belief, but rather come from the Greek (daimon). A story about a Jewish Rabbi casting out demons would be viewed outlandish in Jewish tradition. I don’t think a Jew would be able to wrap their head around it, and Paul does not include such gift in 1Cor 12 except for possibly discernment of the pneuma, in which pnuma is greek belief, not Jewish. So I find a hard time believing any stories of Jesus or anyone else casting out demons existed before inserted in the Gospels written by greeks to greeks. The story of the feeding of 5000 would be a plausible Jewish wonder, as well as turning water into wine or possibly even walking on water.
Healing is a gift according to Paul, but that does not it means miracle per se. Possibly a physician as Luke was thought to be. So it seems to me, the miracles in the Gospels may be mostly 3rd + Greek generation creations, rather than from first generation oral traditions when the gospels were written.
Since scholars today generally don’t take the noncanonical gospels as evidence of miracle-working, when you say that Jesus’ miracle working abilities are “abundantly attested”, are you talking about the attestation of the New Testament gospels? Since they are so interdependent, that doesn’t strike me as “abundant” attestation.
There certainly is interdependence among the Gospels in that, e.g., Matthew and Luke both borrowed from Mark. But a number of stories are in Matthew not in Mark (so not interdependent there) or in Luke (so too there) and in Luke not in either of the others, and in John not in any of the three, etc. When you count them up, we have stories in Mark, M, L, John at a minimum, all independent of each other. And in abundance.
Not sure how relevant it is, but I find reports of miraculous healing and exorcism to be quite believable in many cases. Psychosomatic effects and psychogenic illness are very real and can be very serious. A gifted, charismatic healer or exorcist could well produce real improvement in sufferers, no supernatural miracles needed.
Unrelated question: I was watching an apologist on youtube, @Testify support his contention that Peter might have had a scribe write II Peter by saying that “Cicero had different people write his letters for him, causing significant stylistic differences in how they were written.”
Why, in your opinion, is that a good defense or not for II Peter being written by Peter?
I’ve written abou tthis extensively in my books (Forged and more in Forgery and Counterforgery) to show why it absolutely doesn’t work. I have some discussions on the blog as well: look up teh word “secretary” and you’ll find the discussions. Tiro’s letters for Cicero, btw, do NOT have significant stylistic differences from Cicero’s other letters. We know about them only because Cicero refer s to them. And he, btw, was not writing an essay. And was not doing it in some language other than his own…. But apart from that, secretaries were not used in this way, as I try to show.
Thank you!
Hello Professor Ehrman, I hope you’re doing well. I have a question about the errors and contradictions in the New Testament. I wanted to know if the New Testament has contradictions, so I read your book “Jesus Interrupted” and I learned that there are contradictions in the bible. Then I see if this is what Christians agree with, and the fundamentalists will say that there are no contradictions, and provide explanations for the contradictions, for example, the ones you’ve listed in “Jesus, Interrupted.” Is there any place or piece of scholarly writing where I can find at least one contradiction in the New Testament with purported refutations of a contradiction along with why the refutations don’t work? I want to make an opinion on whether or not the New Testament is truly errant and has contradictions. I know you’ve said before that in theory, any contradiction is reconcilable, but I want to know if there is at least one place in the New Testament where there is beyond doubt that there is a contradiction. My second question is, do Christian scholars agree that there are contradictions in the New Testament?
Yes, this was a view that was pressed on my hard once I lefte evangelical colleges and went to a mainline Christian school, Princeton Theological Seminar (a seminary training Presbyterian pastors). Among biblical scholars, only fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals would say there are no contradictions. Everyone else says there are, usually lots of them — e.g., professors at every major theological seminary and divnity school in the country. If you want to see a discussion back and forth about contradictions, check out the thread of posts I did in April 2019 (just go to the archives for the month) with a guy named “Firth” (or just look up his name). We had a bunch of back-ad-forths, and you can decide yourself who you think has the better argument.
I have read many times that in recent literature, inspired by anthropology, Christ is read as a shaman figure. Is it efficacious in your view to transfer a concept from the anthropology of superstition (derived from a tradition that was founded historically in the study of Polynesian, Native American and African cultures) onto a first century Palestinian context? Or is it better to remain with the language of “son of God” taken from the Judeo-Roman world itself?
My personal view is that it has limited value, that it’s better to situation Jesus in his own world to see what categories are then. At most it has heuristic value.
Could you give some examples of historians who argue that Jesus performed miraculous healings? Are you saying that is EP Sanders’ point of view? That is not my recollection. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a historian conclude that Jesus actually performed miraculous healings or exorcisms. What I think historians typically say is that Jesus was an itinerant preacher whose work likely also included healings and exorcisms and perhaps that he was regarded as a legitimate healer by his contemporaries. That’s very different from saying that he actually performed miracles.
He sometimes would say things like “Jesus was a miracle-worker and exorcist.” I don’t think he personally believed Jesus could do miracles, but he does seem to say that he was known to have done them. Same with Dale Allison I think.
Hi Dr Ehrman this is sort of on topic to the post but regardless of whether you think History can prove miracles or not what is your opinion on Bayes theorem. I have heard William Lane Craig cite it numerous times when talking about the evidence for the ressurection in debates (such as with you) and interviews. However I don’t really understand what it is (I’m awful at Maths) so was just wondering if you might be able to enlighten me on what it actually is and whether William Lane Craig is right in that it can be used to determine what happened in History or if he’s wrong and it has no place whatsoever in a Historian’s enquiry regarding what actually happened in the past?
It’s a very complicated mathematical model used in a variety of disciplines to establish the probabilities of something happening (or having happened) based on estimated likelihoods of numerous variables. It is used to help make financial projections, in medicine, and evolutionary biology, along wiht other fields. The only ones I’ve ever heard of using it for history are people interesetd in Jesus. But maybe it is used more widely — someone else on the blog may know. The interesting thing is that it has been used by Craig (I doubt if he knows how to use it, but maybe he does) and R. Swinburne to show that it is most probable that Jesus was raised from the dead, and by Richard Carrier to show that it is most probably that Jesus never existed. Hmmm… Something odd about this picture.
I presume this will come down to Paul never having mentioned healing miracles by Jesus as proof of his divinity or something. Paul tells us virtually nothing about Jesus’s life or ministry generally, however, so this is perhaps not surprising. Paul does, however, claim (1 Cor. 12:9-10) that healing and other miracles are among the gifts of the Spirit to different believers. Does this suggest that he assumes (or assumes his readers assume) that Jesus was the archetype for this sort of testimony? Possible, but I don’t know.
I have always found it peculiar that there isn’t an early Christian text collecting the stories of people healed by Jesus, or of those fed by the multiplied fish and loaves of bread. Seems it would have been a logical place to start…
Dear Professor Ehrman,
I have an unrelated question about Paul’s conversion. In Galatians, Paul mentions a “physical ailment” that caused him to preach to the Galatians. I know Paul’s statement about the Galatians offering him their own eyes, along with his later remark about writing big letters, has led to speculation that he had poor eyesight or an eye condition, which makes a lot of sense to me.
I’ve been thinking about how this could relate to Paul’s conversion story in Acts. Is it possible that while he was persecuting Christians, Paul was afflicted with an eye disease and believed it was a punishment from God for his actions? Could this have influenced his conversion, later mythologized in Acts as a three-day blindness until he was healed?
I understand that this is just speculation and may have been theorized before, possibly by you. But I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this possibility.
I think it’s possible. But I think there are lots of other possibilities as well, and that the various passages are not necessarily to be linked up to give just one option to explain all of them. But who knows?
I think we can consider the writer of Mark to have made efforts to explain why Jesus’ miracles weren’t known publically in Capernaum by having Jesus demand secrecy, perhaps as a means of addressing any question of why his miracles hadn’t been known in that region during his lifetime:
Jesus commanded secrecy for all the healings/exorcisms he performed publically in Capernaum (Mark 1:32-24; 1:40-45; 5:21-24a, 35-43).
Where Jesus does perform a healing miracle/exorcism in Capernaum and doesn’t demand secrecy, it’s either in front of Jewish Scribes or Pharisees (1:21-27; 2:1-12; 3:1-6) – believed to deny, or cover up his powers? – or only witnessed by his inner circle (1:29-31).
No secrecy is demanded for miracles performed in Galilee (5:25-34; 6:53-56), or Decapolis (5:1-20; 8:22-26* 9:14-29; 10:46-52), or where secrecy was asked for; his fame went out anyway (7:24-30; 31-37).
Matthew and Luke include the secrecy commands only where Mark has them aside from Matthew 9:27-31). Nor does John. By the time of these later writings; it would fit the theory to speculate that Jesus’ miracles were by then accepted and so no secrecy clause was required.
* some MSS add “nor tell anyone in the village” to the end of v.26.
Would Jesus have become popular in the Roman world without the gospels’ miracle stories? Was the purpose of the stories, and the gospels as a whole, to make him famous?
I don’t think there’s anyway to know, but if you want to see why faith in Jesus became massively popular, and eventually the official religion, of the Empire, see my book Triumph of Christianity (it’s what the books’ about). The Gospels themselvees were not written for outsiders but for members of the Christian communities, to educate, inform, encourage, and exhort them.
In the Talmud, Jesus is referred to as a “sorcerer.”