In response to a reader question following on a previous article on the historicity of the virgin birth.
I didn’t mean to spend two months focused on Jesus, but I’m now not going to be surprised if it ends up becoming three. I suppose it’s also periodically necessary to spend long chunks of my time on this dispatch focused on things related to biblical studies, Ancient Judaism, and Christian Origins, if for no other reason, then so that it will be clear to the reader that I am in fact a Christian, however idiosyncratic of one I have become, and however struggling, bad at the job, and self-resenting of one I have become. Between the long stretches where I sound like a pantheist, a Hermeticist wizard, a Vedant, and/or a pop culture freak, it is good every so often to sound like I might be a Christian (at least bhaktically).
In a few previous posts, I’ve engaged a (relatively) recent treatment of the zealotic Jesus hypothesis by Dale Martin, I’ve clarified what I take to be the relation between historical Jesus studies, Christology, and ethics as disciplines, I’ve written on what kind of resurrection I think Jesus is likely to have had and what sort of historical event we can take it to have been, and I’ve written on the origin, character, and historicity of the virgin birth stories in Matthew and Luke. A reader has inquired, given these posts: what about Jesus’s miracles?
The miracles of Jesus have never been, for me, the thing that captivated me about him or his portraiture in the Gospels. How to explain this? I have been a lifelong nerd for mythology, comparative religion, science fiction, fantasy, comic books and superheroes, magic, and the works, and so in theory, Jesus being able to cast out and censure demons, heal illnesses, exercise power to manipulate matter in the form of transmutation and conjuration, and wield authority over the riotous forces of nature, like sea and storm, should logically be very compelling for me. They just never have been. If anything, they have been stories I’m naturally inclined to find embarrassing, especially when deployed in apologetic contexts as though they were proofs for Jesus, or as though the miracles performed in Jesus’s name in the early or subsequent church were special evidence of Christianity’s truth. To be clear, and I’ll talk about this further below, it’s not that I don’t believe in the philosophical possibility of the miraculous. I’m inclined by nature to believe in most extraordinary things in a passive way: Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known dictum about the interchangeability of science and magic at certain levels of arcane knowledge (and ignorance) has always felt intuitively true to me. My wife is fairly certain that we have a ghost living in our home; an unexplained child’s handprint on the mirror here, noises and other anecdotal pieces of evidence there, have led her to this conclusion, and I’ve simply never thought about it, because I accept the possibility as a given and I am unbothered by the company. (Perhaps, I remarked, if it is a child’s ghost, they may feel at this point like they are part of our small family: who would want to deprive them of that?) I have had a series of extraordinarily odd dreams in my lifetime, including but not limited to what seemed to me in hindsight to be detailed previews of the following day, and at least one where I engaged in what I have since described to myself as a conference with other prosopa worn by my hypostasis in other lives (in this world or some other I couldn’t say). I have written before that I’m fairly certain I’ve had at least one encounter with what I’d be likely to describe as a demon, with the caveat that I think such things lurk in the imaginal and have real trouble assuming any kind of concrete existence in the material world. I know people who insist they have been co-agent and patient to miracles, magic, and the like, or people who believed in their ability to perform such feats. Once, my grandfather and I went to the local Hindu Temple while he was recovering from a shoulder surgery. A priest meeting with us who did not speak English touched his shoulder. “Careful,” said another priest, whose English was fairly posh, “he may have just healed you.” We all chuckled. I later asked him if it had worked; he said he felt no different, but appreciated the thought.
All of this to say, my direct relationship to paranormalcy is fairly spartan. I’ve had more experiences, I suspect, than the average person would be willing to report but fewer than what many people I’ve known describe. I’m a decent enough philosopher and theologian to know that materialistic naturalism is stupid, and that as an explanation of the world’s formal and final causality it fails on numerous levels. And, believing that God is the infinite wellspring of being from whom all things proceed out of nothing into being, and to whom they return in well-being and eternal well-being, the infinite Mind in and through whom all things dwell as thoughts in the divine imaginarium, the unending Life that vivifies and illumines every soul, and that it is from these principles—God in God’s trihypostatic modes of existence—that the material world is derived as theophany, as divine incarnation and embodiment, I feel strongly that those imaginal experiences, where the concrete is conceptualized and the conceptual is corporealized in our experience (some of it waking, some of it dreamlike), are in fact more real than those merely concrete material facta that we can measure. The wonder of contemporary science, especially quantum physics, of course, is that even those data are products of experience and focus: not objective givens, but as much the fruit of our particular capacities of consciousness as are dreams, illusions, and visions. We descend to the underworld of things and come back up by the gates of horn or ivory, or we go up and come back down with the revelation of the true shape and administration of the cosmos, but either way, it is we who see, we who must do something with what we see.
Anyway, all of that to say, I find it a basic element of any classical theism—which, as I’ve written many times, I take to entail monism/nondualism, idealism, panentheism, and panpsychism—that God can do miracles if God wants to. That’s not quite the same as saying that God actually does. There’s also a venerable tradition of classical theism holding that nature as it is does express God’s normative will, even if one takes nature to be in some way fallen or disrupted: this is more closely associated, I would argue, with sapiential than apocalyptic kinds of discourse, with visions of reality that emphasize the way God’s Wisdom is already present and realized in the created order rather than emphasizing the ways that it is not yet so manifest. This tradition would fairly ask: why do we need God to intervene with miracles in a world that already reflects logic, wisdom, and life? Would not an interventionist God, too, end up being a God that competes with our agency in some way?
Perhaps, one would argue, because nature is not always fair to our needs: circumstances of birth, wealth, opportunity, disposition to vice, chance occurrences beyond anyone’s control, negative fortunes produced by the choices of others, and more all place us in need of divine intervention from time to time. It’s a matter of justice on this read: God must act to demonstrate his goodness in the face of evil. Such is a problem, of course, for God in a way it would not be for gods, and was not when God was a god in his human theography. When Yhwh was a domestic and liturgical deity of Ancient Israel and Judah, sharing a cosmos with other gods and goddesses and cosmic monsters of the Ancient Near East, the problem of evil was simply a measure of Yhwh’s own strength against the forces that opposed him; perhaps his strength waxed and waned, perhaps other things were stronger, or perhaps he prevailed, but no existential crisis need be implied. Only once Yhwh was envisioned in his “cosmic” or “mystical” body, sovereign over and replete throughout a universe of his own creation, did the problem of evil become an actual philosophical conundrum: why and how suffering and sin in a world created by an omnipotent deity? Sapiential and apocalyptic answers to this question vary and abound. Among the Greek philosophers whose theology was infused into the biblical portraiture by Hellenistic Jews and Early Christians, and later by Muslims, a popular answer was to change the terms of what counted as evil. Stoics and several Middle and Late Platonists solve the problem of theodicy this way: natural disasters and other evils are really God’s way of managing creation, and are not evils in themselves. Moral evil, by contrast, is just the misperceived Good. Evil has no true substantial existence. Christian philosophers debated whether to accept this hamartiology completely or only in part—whether to retain an apocalyptic insistence that evil is to some extent the product of a qualified dualism in reality, which was also popular among the Old Academicians and the Middle Platonists, or to embrace a more sapiential perspective that mitigated the human ability to indict God for evil and to blame suffering either on ignorance or wickedness. In some sense, of course, these are not incompatible alternatives—one presumes that if there are gods beneath God, then they may be susceptible to ignorance and evil like any other creature, and if they rule over some aspect of material reality, this indeed would be disastrous. But they have often been posed in the history of philosophy as opposites.
So perhaps miracles are more intelligible if one holds that things are wrong in the world and in need of being set right, by the only power competent to do so, and which will manifest itself by changing our ordinary experience of reality, perhaps by defying the laws of nature. The problem with this definition is its presumption, of course: the presumption that we have a comprehensive understanding of nature that is beyond serious critique or substantial revision.1 If anything, contemporary science casts serious aspersions on the modernist assumption that we either do or can comprehensively understand the natural world. I find it still important to hold that the natural world is defined by a comprehensive, totalizing logic, but the notion that humans can possess that logic is tantamount to hubris: I’m not even sure gods look with that awakened consciousness on the raw truth of things. Buddhas might, and perhaps the talented mage or miracle-worker or kabbalist or saint has learned, to quote Doctor Who for a moment, the “base code of the universe” and can perform surgical changes to the phenomenal structure of reality with skillful hands operative beneath the surface with this primordial language. But that is precisely where the real philosophical problem with miracles recurs: not with the question of their possibility, as though the abstract question were whether God really could make people float or whether one could coax water into becoming wine or lead into gold, but with the question of convenientia and intention. Does God intervene? Are miracles the sort of thing God actually does, whether he can or not?
The Tanakh, I think, has an interesting track record in thinking about this problem, because its general theographic flow is from a highly interventionist to a highly remote and laissez-faire deity. In the more mythical portions of the Bible, like Genesis 1-11, and the more legendary accounts, like the patriarchal tales and the Exodus, God is very involved, personally appearing and doing things in the world on behalf of his suffering people. As the biblical narrative moves ever more deeply and inexorably, though, into genuine historiography, God slowly disappears from view until he is so transcendent that he is no longer a character in the story itself. Late biblical authors of the Persian and Hellenistic periods opt for what we could call a theistic or theological naturalism, in which stories of preternatural or supernatural occurrences, if they occur at all, are not the direct work of God but the work of subordinate entities closer to home.
The most miracles that ever occur in the Hebrew Bible happen in the Book of Exodus, and they are acts of divine warfare by Yhwh against the gods of Egypt, including Pharaoh, who hold Israel captive (Exod 12:12). The plagues are very specifically targeted against Egyptian deities in control of various aspects of the natural world—the plague of darkness, for instance, targeting the sun deity, Re or Amun-Re—and the plague of the firstborn targeting Pharaoh as the god-king of the Egyptians. Yhwh’s miraculous deliverance of the people through the parted waters of the sea and his theophany to them on Mt. Sinai are also manifestations of power in a salvific mode, simultaneously disclosing Yhwh as creator of the world within which he is uncontested champion among other deities.
Yet noticeably, the miracles begin to disappear from view in the Bible the more established the people of Israel become in the Land of Canaan. Moses banishing snakes with his bronze totem and finding water from rock with his staff gives way to generations of charismatic warrior-heroes, some of whom, like Samson, demonstrate superpowers, but most of whom only deal in the miraculous insofar as they have exchanges with angelic beings. Elijah and Elisha are perhaps exceptions to this rule, but one has to consider the largely domestic and interpersonal basis on which they engage. Elijah has a few truly explosive encounters on what could be described as a “national” stage, but these are apparently not enough to convince the Israelite king to repent, and so are not on the level that Yhwh’s mighty deeds were enough to save Israel from Egypt. And the major and minor prophets are not recorded as miracle-workers: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel get messages from God, but they don’t cast out demons, heal, or perform amazing feats of nature-defying wonder. So even if we were to admit the miracles attributed to Elijah and Elisha as historical, we would still be faced by the fact that the overall trend of the Hebrew Bible is in the direction of a more naturalist—even if theistically naturalist—attitude towards the relationship of God and the world, one that denies both determinism (as though the national history of Israel and the peoples that surround her were fated from above) and direct intervention (as though Israel and Judah can count on God to simply jump in and save them from the consequences of their actions). The Deuteronomistic literature even seems to imply the ultimate inefficacy and unreliability of miracle-working prophets next to the authority of the (Deuteronomic) Law (Deut 13:1-4), a point frequently employed by Jewish interlocutors with Christianity against the notion that Jesus’s miracles should make him particularly attractive to would-be Jewish believers. When the Torah was redacted into its present form, with Deuteronomy narratively placed as its conclusion and therefore final interpretive word within the text, the point of this kind of rhetoric is likely to transition the reader away from the focus of the last several books (which does involve a miraculous, interventionist God) and towards the more mundane task of living in the world according to Torah.
The question of the preternatural in the later literature of the Hebrew Bible is ultimately subordinate to this trend in the direction of “theistic” or “theological naturalism.” Proverbs, Job, and Qoheleth don’t seem very interested or gullible about what we might define as magic, or stories of miracles and angels active in the world (there are angels in Job, but they are in heaven; the only divine being implied to be operative on earth is the adversary, and when God appears it is in a tempest), and neither is Ben Sirach. Neither, really, is Wisdom of Solomon, even though Wisdom’s worldview is more “enchanted,” so to speak, than Ben Sirach, but obviously less so than the variety of other Jewish texts written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek around this time, from apocalypses like the Book of Watchers and Jubilees, the Apocalypse and Testament of Abraham, and so on to novellas like Tobit, Joseph and Aseneth, or the dramatic Exagogē of Ezekiel the Tragedian. Across the board, no matter the interest or disinterest of an author in what we might call an “enchanted” view of the world, God is not an interventionist in late Jewish literature. Sapiential texts disregard claims to special divine revelation; in novellas like Ruth and Esther where God either does not appear or, in the latter, is not even named; in the apocalypses and other angel-featuring texts, it is the angels, not God, that do stuff. God is at this point so transcendent as to disappear from view entirely or to simply sit enthroned in heaven, delegating power and authority to lesser intermediaries. (It’s good to be the king, as Mel Brooks observed.) This is an important observation, since even if we want to suggest that nature is more complicated than we imagine, as we said we ought to above, we are still confronted by the biblical tradition’s insistence of God’s transcendence as the precondition of his imminence in nature, his non-obvious presence in and to the world, and the increasing sparsity even of delegated appearances by lesser divine beings in history. After all, most of the spectacular Jewish literature written in Greek that features such things is set in the distant past of Israel’s patriarchs and prophets, not in the then-contemporary world of Hellenistic Jewish antiquity. Like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, or Vergil’s much later Aeneid, even this more “enchanted” category of texts can be read as being as much about the end of the age of magic as about magic (broadly conceived) itself: an ancient Jewish reader of Tobit, for example, would likely have felt that this is stuff that happened back then, and God doesn’t necessarily do those kinds of things anymore.
Humans, when they can engage in extraordinary kinds of activity in the more “enchanted” literature, are usually engaging in things we might better classify as apotropaic magic (like Tobias and Sarah on their wedding night exorcising Asmodeus) or in mystical practices that do not imply supernatural powers (like Enoch’s divine ascent). Humans do, in these texts, acquire some divine powers and prerogatives from time to time, but this usually coincides with a transfer of status, realm, and mode of being, becoming angels or gods in heaven after or instead of death. There is some sense common to all of these texts that while the world is patient to divine and daimonic powers operative within it, and potentially (at least for the Hellenistic works) full of many kinds of extrahuman being, the basic way that the world works is the way that the world works: it may be resolved in some future age, or in some other world up above, or in some new creation, but the knowledge of how to manipulate its secret logic to achieve paranormal ends is illegitimate for humans at the present time. Indeed, in both The Book of Watchers and Jubilees, magic is one of the fundamental things the Watchers taught to corrupt the earth, and that their semi-divine offspring, whose spirits survived the flood as demons, enable today.
Now, that said, this is a textual tradition, and tells us something but not everything about what ordinary people believed and did. Ancient Judaism came of age in a world that was replete with belief in magic and miracles of all kinds.2 Anthropologically, a shamanic-style belief in the immediacy of many kinds of spiritual powers in the world that the trained expert might channel exists in many cultures; I am not the first to think that this kind of proto-religious (and natural) experience and skill (technē) probably stands behind several of the theophanic and paranormal kinds of experience recorded in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, even when there are also clearly many intermediary layers of organized religious praxis between that wild, raw consciousness of the sacred and the text.3 Moses seeing God in the Burning Bush and Elijah hearing God not in the profound natural theophanies but in the still small voice in the quiet, both on Horeb, suggest an experience of God in nature that is small and out of the way, even as the events of the Exodus, Isaiah’s vision of Yhwh enthroned in the Temple, the Psalmist’s language of God’s storm cloud chariot and warfare with the Sea and its monstrous children, and Ezekiel’s vision of God by the River Chebar all suggest more profound experiences of God in and beyond the natural order. In Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, and the Mediterranean, there were many specialists in all areas of expanded awareness about the sacred dimension of the human and cosmic orders, as well as of the spiritual powers resident in the profane aspects of life. These people could be consulted or canned, celebrated or maligned, but they were everywhere.
Our language reflects their successive iterations over centuries of the region’s history. In Greek, a sorcerer was originally a goēs, a necromancer because someone sang the funeral dirge in which the shade of the departed was summoned and channeled; after the encounter with Persia in the fifth century BCE this person is now a magos, someone who practices mageia, representing the Greek fascination with and revulsion by the Persian maguš-. Among the Greeks, Egyptians, and Jews too, were renowned as the next best magicians after Persians, possessing the most ancient, exotic, and potent ritual knowledge in the Greek mind; if one had to consult the phantasmagoria, one wanted a Near Eastern ghost, as the popular assumption was that Greek and Roman ghosts wouldn’t know anything useful. If the New Testament is to be believed, Jewish exorcists were in abundance in the Greco-Roman world, and in high demand. The Egyptian priest’s union of medicine and magic was otherwise divided in the Greek world into the persons of the skeptical physician, casting aspersion on magic and the miraculous as charlatanry, and the traveling thaumaturge or holy man, who, whatever his intentions, met the demand for supply among the poorer classes who could not afford professional, well-trained physicians and to the public appetite for the strange, the paranormal, and the exotic, for arcane knowledge and secret wisdom, for technologies of the self that might open transcendence in this life or the next through secret practices and gnostic mysteries. Many people believed in this stuff, and many didn’t; nor did the line exclusively fall between educated and uneducated (since there were well through Late Antiquity in fact Platonist philosophers who believed in the efficacy of magic (Plotinus allegedly resisted the magical assault of someone many miles away). A large general readership, no matter their belief or disbelief, consumed literature about miraculous tales in ancient science fiction, to borrow Robyn Faith Walsh’s description, and later authors freely satirized what they took to be popular gullibility about impossible things in their work. In a nutshell, ancient people were surrounded by the praxis of magic and the claim of the miraculous but were not, as we popularly imagine, immediately or automatically susceptible to belief in it. Plenty of ancient people thought that miracles were ridiculous or dismissed them as superstition—including people that were otherwise very strong believers in and worshipers of their gods, strong believers in spirits of all kinds resident in the natural world, of various possibilities for human transcendence, and so on.
I bring this up because any treatment of the miraculous in the life of Jesus is going to have to deal with what the miracles are meant to do in the stories that report them, and what they would have or could have meant to the people who wrote and read them. In a world with literary genres that included myth, legend, and mythic historiography, in which history as a genre was usually infused with mythic elements, and/or myth was often historicized, and in which folklore and outright fiction were written about and consumed for pleasure, it cannot be taken for granted that the miracle stories of the Gospels were taken at face value as objectively true by ancient readers. I’m not saying that the Gospels are mythology or legend—that’s not their genre—but they are clearly bioi that involve elements of what ancient people would have regarded as myth, that many ancient readers would have been inclined to read carefully for this reason.4 And the Evangelists themselves, even if they believed the miracle tales about Jesus, must have known that some of their readers wouldn’t, and others would.
Then there is the problem that the miracles in the Gospels are both pluriform, not uniform, and that they do not all do the same thing rhetorically for the different goals of the Evangelists. Sometimes, in fact, the Evangelists either fail to get the function of some miracles in one another’s works or they ignore them in favor of other uses. Take the healing of the blind man in Mark 8:22-26. In Mark’s Gospel, this story, where Jesus has to take a mulligan to finish a half-done healing of a blind man, is in apposition to a later healing of one blind Bartimaeus, which goes off without a hitch (Mk 10:46-52). Between these two is a lot of stuff essential to Mark’s Gospel: the Petrine confession, Jesus’s logion about taking up the cross, three Passion Predictions, the Transfiguration, and the words to James and John b. Zebedee about Jesus’s baptism and cup. The rhetorical effect is that just as Jesus has healed these blind men, albeit with some effort, so Jesus has shifted (theoretically) the mentality of the disciples away from their previous assumptions about what his messianic identity means and towards a fuller vision. Whatever Mark sees in these stories, Matthew doesn’t: he keeps a story about Jesus healing (this time two blind men) after the third Passion Prediction (20:29-34), but has dropped the prior miracle, where Jesus fails to heal the man; so too Luke (Lk 18:35-43). Here we see both that the details of miracle stories shift from author to author and that the rhetorical effect they are played for, the heavy lifting they do in their texts, changes based on the needs and interests of the Evangelist. Just as Jesus’s sayings can be changed if the text demands it, so his miracles.
This dynamic affects the question of historicity because it shows us that our sources do not have a rigid approach to traditions of Jesus’s thaumaturgy (that’s what “miracle-working” is in Greek). Of our available sources on the life of Jesus—again, for good measure, Paul, Q, Mark, M, L, John—Mark, M, L, and John have the bulk of the miracle material; Q has two miracle stories, the healing of the centurion’s servant (Matt 8:5-13//Lk 7:1-10) and an exorcism (Matt 9:32-34//Lk 11:14-23), and Q’s Jesus responds to John the Baptist’s question about his identity by invoking the miracles he’s performing (Matt 11:2-6//Lk 7:18-23) and appears to have a specialist’s knowledge of what demons do once exorcised (Matt 12:43-45//Lk 11:24-26). Paul doesn’t know anything about a miracle-working Jesus, but insofar as Paul himself is a miracle worker, the sort of person who believes in and practices what a modern scholar of religion would label divination, and does so, he believes, by the pneuma of the risen Jesus, it may well be that Paul knew traditions of a miracle-working Jesus and understands himself to stand in the same tradition as a charismatic wonder-worker.
So this leads to a thorny problem. On the question of the virgin birth, I wrote that historiography has no good reason to conclude from Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 that Jesus was born from a virgin historically, not on the basis of the impossible of the miraculous but on the grounds of the tenuous character of our sources. The miracles of Jesus, though, stand on different epistemic grounds. Paul does not talk explicitly about a miracle-working Jesus but his own miracle-working activity as an essential part of his participation in the Jesus Movement certainly complements the consistent tradition of Q, Mark, M, L, and John that Jesus performed miracles. All of our earliest sources about Jesus include a belief in his career as an exorcist, a healer, and a wonder-worker, to the point that most historians of Jesus’s life take this as a reliable feature of his public ministry (whether or not such scholars believe that miracles are possible or that Jesus actually performed them, it seems clear that Jesus presented and was understood as a miracle-worker).
Yet the miracles attributed to Jesus as we have them now cannot be regarded as eyewitness accounts (as, for example, Catholics often claim one can adduce for the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima). They cannot be regarded as dry historiography, as though they were a catalogue of the deeds of Jesus uncovered by modern investigation. They are instead stories that circulated, were expanded, in some cases were wholesale invented, and were cherished by different communities of Jesus-followers and then included in the Gospels for their value in making the larger points about Jesus that the Evangelists wanted to make.5 And that removes our possibility of historical certainty about Jesus’s miracle-working one step further, because the Evangelists are writing forty+ years after his lifetime.
Take an isolated example, the miracle of the wine at the wedding of Cana (Jn 2:1-11). The point of this story is pretty nakedly the surface-level symbolism in Jesus changing water derived from vessels of Jewish purification—something John takes a moment to explicitly observe in the text—into wine that is praised as being both the best wine and the last to be served, implying that other, less good wine was served first; this is the first of Jesus’s signs demonstrating his glory in John’s Book of Signs. The author of John also almost certainly knows that conjuring wine at a wedding festival would have reminded non-Jewish readers of Dionysus, who is also good at that sort of thing (even if the story is not necessarily a direct rip-off from a pagan antecedent). To ask whether this is a historically plausible thing for Jesus to have done is actually in this case to miss the point of what the Gospel of John, as a book, is trying to do, which is less to give an exact biography of Jesus and more to craft an account that will win the faith of its readers that he is the messianic Son of God (20:31). Miracles in the Gospels are vessels of the meaning that the Evangelists intend to convey about who Jesus is more than they are biographical reports: that’s why the details change as much as they do and why the miracle stories can be displaced or elided when convenient or inconvenient. When Jesus feeds thousands of people in the wilderness with miraculously conjured bread (Jn 6:1-14), you are supposed to think that he’s a new Moses and this is new manna—not least because that’s what Jesus then goes on to say himself in the remainder of John 6. This is theology (or Christology), not history: the multiple attestation of this particular event or others like it across our sources can, in each instance, have the same theological motivation, not merely a historical one. Similarly, when in Mark 2:1-12 Jesus heals the paralyzed man lowered through the roof of the house where he’s preaching, the explicit point of the story that Mark gives us is that Jesus wants to demonstrate the Son of Man’s authority to forgive sins by showing his power to heal the man. Is it possible that this is a historical story about something Jesus did? Sure, but Mark’s not an eyewitness, and he has already baked the point he wants to make into the story, to the extent that we do not have here a bare report on top of which we can detect superadded material but a narrative that is from beginning to end shaped by Mark’s argumentum for Jesus. So, whatever the historicity of the tale, we only get it in a literary context animated by generic and rhetorical interests, not as straight primary data.
The miracles of Jesus can exercise, and have, any scholar at much greater length and detail than I’ve had time for here. So, I’ll conclude these observations insufficiently with the following. First, I think it’s possible for God to perform miracles, but I also observe that biblical and philosophical reflection on the God-world relationship trends away from determinism and interventionism. This is something we have to contend with even if we hold, as we should, that nature is more complicated than the dead, disenchanted universe of modernity implies: just because God can activate nature in strange ways does not mean that God does. Second, the biblical tradition includes miracles, several of which have clearly influenced the Evangelists who attribute miracles to Jesus, making him like Moses, Elijah, and Elisha (we have not even had time to put Jesus into conversation with the Sign Prophets that Josephus talks about in the first century CE). This on the one hand establishes a theological typology, presenting Jesus as the next, and perhaps last, great prophet in Israel’s history, who, like Moses and Elijah especially, is a miracle-worker in addition to his prophetic ministry. But we then will also have to contend with the fact that the miracles for all three of these figures are vessels of meaning that, once clearly established, supersedes the relevance of the miracles themselves. Moses’s miracles are vessels of Yhwh’s creative and salvific power in redeeming Israel from Egypt: once Israel is free, has received the Torah, and is in the Land, Moses advises the people to disregard miracle-working prophets. Elijah’s miracles are great stories, but they are not the norm for subsequent prophets, and Elijah himself does not find God in traditional theophanic circumstances but in the “still small voice” (1 Kgs 19:11-13). Likewise, the miracles reported of Jesus in the Gospels are meant to make theological points that are more important to later communities of Jesus’s followers. They may stem from well-established traditions about Jesus’s exorcisms, healings, and thaumaturgy, but the way we have them now, they are largely meant to make points about Jesus rather than to describe in generically strict historical terms what Jesus actually did. Third, though, there does endure a solid historical tradition of Jesus as exorcist and healer that is likely the grounds on which other kinds of miracles were often aggregated or attributed to him. Largely in the context of the synagogues of Galilee and Judea, where he preached his kerygma of the Kingdom and his halakha for how to observe the Torah in the communities that met in them, Jesus seems to have been reputed early on as an exorcist and a healer.6 Several of these healings, too, are undergirded by a theme of restoring the Judean poor to whom Jesus preaches to states of ritual purity so that they might once more enjoy the presence of God in the Temple.7 Whether these miracles attributed to Jesus by the early tradition, visibly expanded by the later authors and texts of the tradition into forms that are not now historical, are events of genuine miraculous authenticity—that is, whether they represent either a direct intervention in the flow of history by a sovereign God or whether they represent some preternatural ability of the historical Jesus, to which modernist, materialist scientists and philosophers are now insensitive—is a decision of faith.8
AJ Levine makes this point in her wonderful, short introduction, Signs and Wonders: A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2022).
The authoritative sourcebook remains Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Collection of Ancient Texts, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2006). Also good is David Collins, S.J., ed., The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
James Kugel, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (New York: Mariner, 2017) is instructive here, as is Richard Elliott Friedman, The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery (New York: Little, Brown, & Co., 1995).
I borrow the language of “mythic historiography” from M. David Litwa, How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
Bart Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016) has a lot to say on how stories about Jesus that we find in the Gospels came to be, but does not necessarily focus on Jesus’s miracles in that text.
See Jordan J. Ryan, The Role of the Synagogue in the Aims of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017).
This is the argument of Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity Within First-Century Judaism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), partially anticipated by the relevant sections of Jonathan Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and idem, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
“God is at this point so transcendent as to disappear from view entirely or to simply sit enthroned in heaven, delegating power and authority to lesser intermediaries.”
I suppose this is why miracles in the classical tradition become increasingly conceived as manifestations of the true essence or potential of nature, as opposed to being supernatural additions imposed upon an otherwise purely natural entity.
As someone who has witnessed a genuine miracle only once - a friend of mine who had severely torn his knee ligaments experienced a total restoration of his leg (I was there when It happened; he proceeded to jump about the room) about a week after the Vicar at the Anglican Church I was attending asked us to pray for him - but was brought up around environments where miracles were continuously sought, I too find a “fairly spartan” approach a healthy middle ground.
A "relationship to paranormalcy" that is "fairly spartan" is oh so healthy. I find that just a very little bit of such "food" can be very nourishing, however, kind of like elven lembas bread. Myrrh-streaming icons have been a blessing to me in this way.