M. Newby. Miracles and History: Mutually Exclusive?

Introduction

Since the late 18^th Century, source criticism has significantly improved the academic community’s ability to sort historical information from theology and mythology directly from scripture. 

That, combined with the archaeological discoveries of the 20^th Century, such as the Nag Hammadi library and the Dead Sea Scrolls, have led to great and enthusiastic strides being made in determining an historical outline of the life and times of Jesus, his contemporaries, and of early members of the church such as the Apostle Paul. 

That outline, though, remains void of detail. When you consider that there are more accounts of the life and times of Jesus than any other person alive in his day, it prompts the question: why can’t we say more about the historical Jesus?

This essay attempts to determine whether or not any of the miracles ascribed to Jesus Christ can be described as historical, and to what extent the historical method can engage with miracles.  

What is a miracle?

Enlightenment-era philosopher David Hume describes a miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the deity or by the interposition of some invisible agent” (Hume, 1748). We can summarise this in plain English as “a suspension of the laws of nature by God or some other supernatural force.” 

This definition does fall short in one critical area. The context of Hume’s enquiry into miracles was an Enlightenment-era fascination with the truth of religion, and so he defines “miracle” in a strictly real-world sense. A complete definition might also describe miracles in anthropological terms, as a feature of mythology or as a literary device, for example. 

With that noted, we’ll move on. For the purposes of this essay, which aims to explore miracles in a historical sense, Hume’s definition of “miracle” is more or less satisfactory. 

What is history?

Put simply, history is the study of the past. Unlike physics, the study of history can rarely be boiled down to first principles of known facts. A (marginally) more complete definition of history is the study of events that may or may not have occurred in the past. 

The fun of history is that not all history is historical. The past is inherently unverifiable. Historians have, however, developed a series of tools to elevate today’s thinking about the past from guesswork to, at the very least, educated guesswork. This set of tools, called the historical method, can give us a degree of confidence in our assumptions about the past. 

The gold standard is, of course, to combine, compare and verify with the archeological record. But when it comes to the events described in the New Testament, for which there is scant archeological evidence, historians rely on source criticism to determine its historicity.

Put very simply, source criticism is, according to Gilbert Garraghan and Jean Delanglez (1946), concerned with:

• When a source is produced – sources written closer in time relative to the events they describe are considered more authoritative.
• The context in which a source was produced – Who produced it, where they were, what pre-existing material, be it history, mythology, or cultural traditions, might have influenced them, what genre the source is, what the author was trying to achieve 
• The credibility of the information – determining whether what’s described is believable, both in terms of our own experience and through corroborating or contradictory independent sources

Historical sources of the life of Jesus

There are countless accounts of the life and deeds of Jesus. However, with the first question of source criticism in mind, this essay will limit itself to the earliest account of Jesus’s life. Through research here sumamrised, the author has determined this to be the Gospel of Mark. 

The Gospel of Mark is one of four narrative accounts of the life of Jesus considered to be canonical by Christian tradition. 

Scholars have noted an interdependence of the canonical Gospels since as early as the 5^th Century. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke in particular are known among scholars as the Synoptic Gospels as they contain vast passages of the same text that would be statistically impossible to have occurred verbatim in independent works.

In Against Heresies, St Augustine posited that the Gospel of Mark was a simplification of what he believed to be the earlier Gospel of Matthew. Since the late-18^th Century, however, scholars have broadly accepted that the shorter and simpler Gospel of Mark is probably the oldest of the three Synoptic Gospels, and the Gospel of John. 

In preparation for this essay, the author has personally researched the Synoptic Gospels and the arguments for what is known as Markan Priority set out by Johann Jakob Griesbach and his successors. The author has done so using the NRSVue English translation of the bible, and referencing the Nestle Aland Novum Testamentum Graece.

A stunningly simple example of Markan Priority can be found when comparing Mark Chapter 6 and Matthew Chapter 13, describing The Rejection of Jesus at Nazareth: 

• And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. (Mark 6:5)
• And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief. (Matthew 13:58)

In Greek, the bolded words above are δύνατο and ποίησεν in Mark and Matthew respectively. Both of these terms occur frequently in existing Ancient Greek sources, according to the University of Michigan’s Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. Their meanings, and this discrepancy as it has been translated, can be considered accurate. 

The significance of this difference is as follows: Either, in the case of Markan Priority, the author of Matthew was uncomfortable saying the Christ couldn’t do something, so tweaked Mark’s wording to say he simply chose not to do it.

Or, if Matthew came first, that the scribe who wrote Mark escalated Jesus’s decision to not act into something the Messiah had no agency over.  Making the discrepancy utterly inexplicable.

Outside of the canonical Gospels, with the exception of the Gospel of Thomas, the majority of New Testament Apocrypha are considered by scholars to have been written in the 2^nd Century or later. Due to this, their vast number, and because the earlier Gospel of Thomas is a sayings gospel with no narrative or miracles to speak of, the author is considering them outside of the scope of this essay.

The author is therefore satisfied that the Gospel of Mark is the earliest account of Jesus’s life available to us now.

Miracles in the gospel of Mark

In an early draft of this essay, the author wrote out a summary of every instance of what could be defined as a miracle in (the NRSVue version of) the Gospel of Mark. For the sake of the wordcount, included here instead is broad categories of miracles in the Gospel of Mark, with an illustrative example:

• God’s direct intervention (Mark 1:10-11)
• Command over nature / the natural order (Mark 4:39)
• Making resources go further (Mark 6:40-44)
• Command over demons or spirits (Mark 5:6-13)
• Miraculous ability to heal (Mark 1:41-42)
• Miraculous ability to raise the dead (Mark 5:28-42)
• Ability to see the future (Mark 13:2)
• Achieving things through others (Mark 6:7:13)
• Mastery over death (Mark 16)

Source Criticism of Mark: When

As the earliest account of the life and times of Jesus available to us, the Gospel of Mark is necessarily the most authoritative source we have. But can we get specific about when it was written?

The aforementioned prophecy of the Destruction of the Temple, as it appears in Mark, leads scholars to date the Gospel of Mark to around the time of the First Jewish-Roman War which, thanks to Roman records, we know to have occurred 66-74AD, around 30 – 40 years after the events described in the Gospel. 

Source Criticism of Mark: Context

The Gospel of Mark was written in Greek by someone who, according to Dr Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus podcast episode 24, The Genius of The Gospel of Mark (2023), expressly wanted to reshape the idea of what the Jewish Messiah could be, i.e. not a warrior king, but a crucified criminal. 

Mark immediately establishes Jesus as the Son of God from chapter 1 line 11 in which God directly says as much, and every miracle thereafter is further establishing Jesus’s divinity. 

There is also a clear literary motif throughout the Gospel of Mark, first described in The “Messianic Secret” in Mark by Heikki Räisänen (1990). With every miracle proving the divinity of Jesus as Christ, he expressly forbids witnesses from telling anyone, which they dutifully ignore. This repeated theme is then beautifully subverted in the closing lines of the Gospel when the Marys are asked by the young man dressed in white to tell the disciples of Jesus’s resurrection, but they are too scared “and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). 

It is interesting that there are therefore no quoted sources of Jesus’s resurrection in which the author of Mark got his story. The Marys tell no one. This brings the genre of the Gospel into question. 

Finally, it seems important to note that Jesus’s local contemporaries seemed to be prone to mistakenly believing in resurrections. Throughout the Gospel of Mark, people seem to believe that Jesus himself is the resurrected John the Baptist (Mark 6:14, Mark 8:28).

Source Criticism of Mark: Credibility

Miracles are, by their nature, incredible. However, the method with which we determine the credibility of events described in the past is not limited to believability. There is also the matter of independent sources. 

Unfortunately, none of Mark’s miracles can be independently corroborated, except for the resurrection.

In Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, Paul himself says: 

… Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me (1 Corinthians 15:7-8) 

A direct, first-hand source independent of Mark. And, further, independent of the early Church, there is the Testimonium Flavianum, in which the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus says: 

…He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life… (Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18, Chapter 3, 3)

It is important to note that Josephus’s account is thought to have been edited by Christian scribes through the ages but that is beyond the scope of this essay. 

Summarising

The Gospel of Mark is certainly the most authoritative account of Jesus’s life available to us today, but its genre and the clear intent of the author undermine its reliability as an account of actual history. 

The miracles described in the Gospel of Mark serve a clear literary purpose and all but one have no known corroboration from independent sources. 

The resurrection of Jesus is the only miracle described in our oldest source for the life and times of Jesus that can be independently corroborated. But, in Mark itself, our primary source, the resurrection is said to be revealed to two women who never tell anyone else. Calling the author’s sources into question.  

While Paul is an eye-witness account of the resurrected Jesus, from Mark we know of at least one case of mistaken-identity-cum-suspected-resurrection, in that at least a few people saw Jesus as the resurrected John the Baptist. This could well explain Paul’s account. 

Concluding

All we can say for certain is that people believed that a miracle occurred, that Jesus was resurrected, at the time our sources were written. 

But a miracle could occur today, and by definition it could not be measured in terms of credibility. Therefore, in the same way theoretical physics breaks down at the singularity, the historical method breaks down as it engages with miracles. 

It is this author’s view that this conclusion does not prove miracles to be false, but that miracles and history are mutually exclusive.