So far in this series my concern has been to establish what history can and cannot say about Jesus and therefore to illuminate what theology uniquely has to tell us about Jesus’s significance. To that end, I treated the virgin birth, which I suggested the historian has reason to be skeptical of as an event of history: not simply because historians as a rule have a disinclination towards the miraculous, but even leaving this to the side, because of our six sources for the life of Jesus in the New Testament, it is only two, late sources—M & L—that mention the story, they disagree on its details in irreconcilable ways, and they have a clear set of literary and theological reasons that they might want to give Jesus a divine birth story. Collectively, all of that suggests, I posited, that the virgin birth stories are a literary icon of theology about Jesus, fairly profound mystical and philosophical contemplation on Jesus’s significance, in fact, rather than a strict birth certificate. Then I asked if we can know whether Jesus performed miracles. Here I thought that history was more favorable: Q, Mark, M, L, and John all have a thaumaturgical Jesus who variously exorcises demons, heals the sick, and/or demonstrates miraculous power over nature, in ways that would have coded for ancient people across the spectrum of ancient holy men, healers, and magicians. Though Paul does not give us traditions about Jesus’s miracle-working, it seems clear that his own practices of divination, thaumaturgy, and his beliefs about what the pneuma of Jesus enables for his allegiant in the lives of the ekklesia, it is hard to imagine that Paul would not have believed or known about a miracle-working Jesus, or that he would have begrudged the attribution. All of this collectively suggests that Jesus was at least perceived to be a miracle worker in his lifetime and afterwards, whatever we think about the philosophical possibility of miracles themselves. Certainly, things like exorcism and faith healing are at a minimum social phenomena, which the data suggest apply to Jesus. Theologically, I proposed that even if we admit the possibility of the miraculous and we see Jesus’s performance of miracles as essential, we have to be cognizant that as they now exist in the Gospels the miracle stories are always carrying a pretty hefty weight of rhetorical, literary, and theological communication about who Jesus is. When, for example, Jesus heals the blind, the point is not generally “Hey, on this one occasion Jesus did a magic trick,” but that Jesus heals our blindness with his teaching; and so on.
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