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THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS Are they Reliable? (Chapt. 5)

http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/ffbruce/ntdocrli/ntdocont.htm |
1959 | F.F. Bruce

Posted on 02/20/2008 7:20:50 PM PST by blue-duncan

CHAPTER V

THE GOSPEL MIRACLES

Before we leave the Gospels, something ought to be said about the
miracle stories which are found in them. Anyone who attempts to answer
the question which forms the title of this book must recognize that
for many readers it is precisely these miracle-stories which are the
chief difficulty in the way of accepting the New Testament documents
as reliable.

To some extent it is true to say that the credibility of these stories
is a matter of historical evidence. If they are related by authors who
can be shown on other grounds to be trustworthy, then they are worthy
of at least serious attention by the historian. In literature there
are many different kinds of miracle stories; but the Gospels do not
ask us to believe that Jesus made the sun travel from west to east one
day, or anything like that; they do not even attribute to Him such
monstrosities as we find in the apocryphal Gospels of the second
century In general, they are 'in character'-that is to say, they are
the kind of works that might be expected from such a Person as the
Gospels represent Jesus to be. As we have seen, not even in the
earliest Gospel strata can we find a non-supernatural Jesus, and we
need not be surprised if supernatural works are attributed to Him. If
we reject from the start the idea of a supernatural Jesus, then we
shall reject His miracles, too; if, on the other hand, we accept the
Gospel picture of Him, the miracles will cease to be an insuperable
stumbling-block.

No doubt, the historian will be more exacting in his examination of
the evidence where miracles are in question. But if the evidence is
really good, he will not refuse it on a priori grounds. Thus, in a
book which treats the life of Jesus from the purely historical
viewpoint, Professor A. T. Olmstead, a leading authority on ancient
Oriental history, says with regard to the account of the raising of
Lazarus in John xi, which he accepts as the narrative of an
eyewitness: 'As with so many accounts found in our best sources, the
historian can only repeat it, without seeking for psychological or
other explanations.' This may not satisfy the physicist or the
psychologist; for the matter of that, it does not satisfy the
theologian. But it shows that the historical method has its
limitations, just as the scientific method in general has' when it is
confronted with a phenomenon which is by its very nature unique.

Again, the miracle stories of the Gospels can be studied in terms of
Form Criticism; they can be compared with stories of similar wonders
in literature or folklore, and various interesting inferences can be
drawn from a comparative examination of this kind. But this approach
will not lead us to firm conclusions about the historical character of
the Gospel miracles, nor will it explain the significance which these
miracles have in the context of the life and activity of Jesus.

Our first concern about the Gospel miracles should be not to 'defend'
them but to understand them. And when we have learned to do that, we
shall find that their defense can take care of itself. The centre of
the gospel Christ Himself; we must view the miracles in the light of
His Person. It is thus really beside the point to demonstrate how as a
matter of fact many of those miracles are in the light of modern
science not so impossible after all. Interesting as it may be to
restate the healing narratives in terms of faith healing or
psychotherapy, this will not help us to appreciate their significance
in the Gospel record. One very popular preacher and writer has dealt
with several of the miracles from the psychological point of view in a
very able way, without always carrying conviction, as when, for
example, he traces the trouble of the man possessed with a legion of
demons back to a dreadful day in his childhood when he saw a legion of
soldiers massacring the infants of Bethlehem, or another dreadful
scene of the same kind. If this sort of argument helps some people to
believe the Gospel record who otherwise would not believe it, so far
so good. They may even be willing to accept the stories of raising the
dead, in view of well authenticated cases of people who have been
technically dead for a few minutes and have then been restored to
life.

These may make it easier for some people to believe in the raising of
Jairus' daughter, or even of the young man of Nain, but they will
hardly fit the case of Lazarus, who had been four days in the grave.
And these other railings of the dead remind us of the chief Gospel
miracle of all, the resurrection of Jesus Himself. Attempts have been
made to rationalize or explain away the resurrection story from the
very beginning, when the detachment of the temple guard deputed to
watch His tomb were bribed by the chief priests to say: 'His disciples
came by night, and stole him away while we slept' (Mt. xxviii. 13).
That was but the first of many rationalizations. Others have suggested
that Jesus did not really die. George Moore treated this theme
imaginatively in The Brook Kerith, but when we read it we realize that
such a situation could have had nothing to do with the historical rise
of Christianity. Other suggestions are that it was the wrong grave
that the women went to; or that the Jewish authorities themselves had
the body removed, lest it or the grave should become a centre of
devotion and a cause of further trouble. Or the disciples all with one
consent became the victims of hallucination, or experienced something
quite extraordinary in the nature of extrasensory perception. (The
idea that they deliberately invented the tale is very properly
discountenanced as a moral and psychological impossibility.) But the
one interpretation which best accounts for all the data, as well as
for the abiding sequel, is that Jesus' bodily resurrection from the
dead was a real and objective event.

As regards details of time and place, some well known difficulties
arise when we compare the various accounts of resurrection
appearances. Some of these difficulties might be more easily solved if
we knew how the Gospel of Mark originally ended. As appears from the
textual evidence, the original ending of this Gospel may have been
lost at a very early date and the narrative breaks off short at xvi.
8. (The verses which follow in our Bible are a later appendix.) But
when we have taken note of the difficulty of harmonizing all the
accounts we are confronted with a hard core of historical fact: (a)
the tomb was really empty; (b) the Lord appeared to various
individuals and groups of disciples both in Judaea and in Galilee; (c)
the Jewish authorities could not disprove the disciples claim that He
had risen from the dead.

When, some fifty days after the crucifixion, the disciples began their
public proclamation of the gospel, they put forward as the chief
argument for their claims about Jesus the fact of His rising from the
dead. 'We saw Him alive,' they asserted. Paul quotes the summary of
the evidence which he himself received . 'He appeared to Cephas (i.e.
Peter) then to the Twelve, then He appeared to above five hundred
brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain until now (c. AD 54,
nearly twenty five years after the crucifixion) but some are fallen
asleep; then He appeared to James [His brother], then to all the
apostles' (see I Cor. xv. 5-7). It is noteworthy that in their public
references to the resurrection they did not appeal to the testimony of
the women who had actually been first at the sepulchre; it would have
been too easy to answer: 'Oh, we know what value to attach to the
visions of excitable women!'

As it was, the public proclamation of Christ as risen, and as
therefore demonstrably the Messiah and Son of God, made an immediate
and deep impression on the Jerusalem populace, so much so that the
priestly authorities had soon to take steps in an attempt to check the
new movement. But they were unsuccessful. If, however, Jesus had
really not risen, they could surely have provided sufficient evidence
to prove it. They had all the necessary power, and it was to the
interest of the Roman authorities to help them. It could not have been
such an insuperable difficulty to find and produce the body of Jesus,
dead or (only just) alive. It was to the interest of the Sanhedrin to
produce His body, or else to procure certified evidence of its
disposal. The fact that the first story put about to counter the
Christians' claim was that the disciples had stolen the body simply
means that the Sanhedrin did not know what had happened to it. It must
be remembered that to the apostles and their opponents alike
resurrection meant one thing-resurrection of the body. And if we ask
why the Sanhedrin did not sponsor a more convincing story than that of
the disciples' theft, the answer no doubt is that (as Arnold Lunn puts
it) they knew what they could get away with.' They must have reviewed
and regretfully dismissed several beautiful hypotheses before they
settled on this as the least improbable one.

But, while Christ's resurrection was proclaimed by the early
Christians as a historical event, it had more than a merely historical
significance for them. First of all, it was the grand demonstration of
the Messiahship of Jesus. It did not make Him Messiah, but it proved
that He was Messiah. As Paul says, He was 'declared to be the Son of
God with power, . . by the resurrection of the dead' (Rom. i. 4).
Again, it was the grand demonstration of the power of God. That power
had been displayed many times in the world's history, but never with
such magnificent completeness as in the resurrection of Christ. Nor is
this display of God's power simply an event in history; it has a
personal meaning for every Christian, for the same victorious power
that raised Jesus from the dead is the power which operates in His
followers, achieving in their lives triumph over the dominion of evil.
Properly to appreciate the power of God in the resurrection of Christ,
one must appreciate it in one's own experience. That is why Paul
prayed that he might thus know Christ, and 'the power of his
resurrection' (Phil. iii. 10).

Jesus on the cross had been a spectacle of foolishness and weakness,
so far as the eyes of men could see. But when we look at the cross in
the light of the resurrection, then we see in Christ crucified the
power and the wisdom of God. And only thus can we properly consider
the miracle stories of the Gospels. If Christ is the power of God,
then these stories, far from being an obstacle to belief, appear
natural and reasonable; from Him who was the power of God incarnate,
we naturally expect manifestations of divine power. Our estimate of
the miracles will depend on our estimate of Christ. They are related
in the Gospel record just because they are illustrations of that power
which was supremely revealed in the resurrection and which in the
gospel is freely put at the disposal of all believers. Seen from this
point of view, the miracle stories appear instinct with evangelical
significance.

So the question whether the miracle stories of the Gospels are true
cannot be answered purely in terms of historical research. Historical
research is by no means excluded, for the whole point of the gospel is
that in Christ the power and grace of God entered into human history
to bring about the world's redemption. But a historian may conclude
that these things probably did happen and yet be quite far from the
response which the recorders of these events wished to evoke in those
whom they addressed. The question whether the miracle-stories are true
must ultimately be answered by a personal response of faith-not merely
faith in the events as historical but faith in the Christ who
performed them, faith which appropriates the power by which these
mighty works were done.

This response of faith does not absolve us from the duty of
understanding the special significance of the several miracle stories
and considering each in the light of all the available knowledge,
historical and otherwise, which can be brought to bear upon it. But
these are secondary duties; the primary one is to see the whole
question in its proper context as revealed by the significance of the
greatest miracle of all, the resurrection of Christ.

If we do proceed to ask what the independent non-Christian evidence
for the Gospel miracles is, we shall find that early non-Christian
writers who do refer to Jesus at any length do not dispute that He
performed miracles. Josephus, as we shall see, calls Him a wonder-
worker; later Jewish references in the rabbinical writings, as we
shall also see, attribute His miracles to sorcery, but do not deny
them, just as some in the days of His flesh attributed His powers to
demon possession. Sorcery is also the explanation given by Celsus, the
philosophic critic of Christianity in the second century.' The early
apostles referred to His miracles as facts which their audiences were
as well acquainted with as they themselves were; similarly the early
apologists refer to them as events beyond dispute by the opponents of
Christianity.

The healing miracles we have already touched upon; they generally
present little difficulty nowadays, but the socalled 'nature miracles'
are in a different category. Here in particular our approach to the
question will be dictated by our attitude to Christ Himself. If He was
in truth the power of God, then we need not be surprised to find real
creative acts performed by Him. If He was not, then we must fall back
on some such explanation as misunderstanding or hallucination on the
part of the witnesses, or imposture, or corruption of the records in
the course of their transmission or the like.

Take the story of the changing of the water into wine in John ii, a
story in many ways unique among the miracle stories of the Gospels. It
is possible to treat it as one writer does, who suggests that the
water remained water all the time, but that Jesus had it served up as
wine in a spirit of good-humoured playfulness, while the master of the
ceremonies, entering into the spirit of the harmless practical joke,
says: 'Of course, the best wine! Adam's wine! But why have you kept
the best till now?' -but to do so betrays an almost incredible
capacity for missing the whole point and context of the story, while
it is ludicrous to link such an account with the following words:
'This beginning of signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested
his glory' (verse l 1), to say nothing of its irrelevance for the
purpose of the fourth gospel: 'These things are written that you may
believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God' (Jn. xx. 31). such
a reconstruction is not even worthy to be dignified with the name of
rationalization. Whatever difficulties the story as it is told by John
may contain, it is clear that something of a very wonderful and
impressive nature happened, in which the disciples saw the glory of
God revealed in their Master.

'This beginning of signs did Jesus.' The miracles of e fourth Gospel
are always called 'signs', and elsewhere in the New Testament the word
for 'miracle' or 'wonder' regularly linked with the word for 'sign'.
'Signs and wonders' is a frequent phrase, as if to teach us that the
miracles are not related merely for their capacity of getting wonder
in the hearers and readers, but also cause of what they signified. Our
Lord did not esteem very highly the kind of belief that arose simply
from witnessing miracles." His desire was that men should realize what
these things signified. They were signs of the messianic age, such as
had been foretold by the prophets of old. So also are the miracles in
Acts, for they, too, are wrought in the name of Jesus and by His
power, transmitted through His apostles. They are 'mighty works',
signifying that the power of God has entered into human life; they are
'the powers of the age to come' (Heb. vi. 5), signifying that the age
to come has in Christ invaded this present age. Many people were
simply attracted by the wonder of these deeds, but others saw what
they signified, and could say with John: 'The Word became flesh, and
pitched his tabernacle among us; and we beheld his glory' (see Jn. i.
14).

Thus the healing miracles were signs of the messianic age, for was it
not written in Isaiah xxxv. 5 f.: 'Then the eyes of the blind shall be
opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then shall the
lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing'?
Besides, the power that was effective in conquering these ailments was
the same power that could prevail over evil in all its forms; the
authority by which Christ said to the paralytic, 'Rise, take up your
bed, and walk,' was the same authority by which He said, 'Son, your
sins are forgiven.' The visible operation of His healing power was the
evident token of His forgiving power (Mk. ii. 10 f.). So, then, all
the miracles of healing are in a sense parables of the soul's
deliverance from sin, and therefore the Prominent place they occupy in
the Gospel story is amply justified.

So also the nature miracles were signs of the messianic age, which was
to be a time of unprecedented fruitfulness; this was betokened by the
sign of the wine and the multiplication of the bread. The messianic
age was also depicted as a marriage feast, and the miracle performed
by Jesus at the marriage in Cana was thus a sign of the abundant joy
of that age, a token that, as He and His disciples proclaimed, the
kingdom of heaven had drawn near. It also signified that in spite of
the proverb, 'The old is better,' the new order which He came to
introduce was as superior to the old order of Judaism as wine is
superior to water.

The other great nature miracle is the feeding of the multitude with
the loaves and fishes. There are two narratives of this kind in the
first two Gospels, one where 5,000 were fed with five loaves and two
fishes (Mt. xiv. 15 ff., Mk. vi. 35 ff.), and another where 4,000 were
fed with seven loaves and a few fishes (Mt. xv 32 ff.; Mk. viii. 1
ff.). These have frequently been taken for duplicate accounts of one
event, but this is an oversimplification. These two feedings belong
respectively to two parallel series of similar incidents, one series
being enacted on Jewish soil, the other on Gentile soil to the north
and east of Galilee. The incidents are selected in order to show how
Jesus repeated on this occasion among the Gentiles acts which He
performed among the Jews. Indeed, it has been suggested that there is
significance in the difference between the two words for 'basket' used
in the two accounts, the one in the first account being a basket with
special Jewish associations, that in the second account being a more
general word. Since Peter was the chief authority behind the second
Gospel, it is not incredible that the apostle who used the keys of the
kingdom of heaven to open the door of faith, to the Jew first and then
to the Gentile, should have related these two similar miracles in his
gospel preaching to show how Christ was the bread of life for Gentiles
as for Jews.

The feeding miracles, according to the plain sense of the narrative,
were acts of superhuman power. In truth, to rationalize them robs them
of all point. It is easy to say that the example of the boy's handing
over his bread and fish led all the others to share their provisions
too, so that there was enough for all; but that is not the gospel
story. Here, again, our estimate of Christ makes all the difference to
our approach to the miracle. The multiplication of the loaves was a
token of the messianic feast; it signified the abundance of provision
that men might find in Christ, the true bread of God. If the bread
represents the harvest of the land, the fish will represent the
harvest of the sea. We may recall, moreover, the early Church's use of
the fish as a symbol of Christ. In this case, the majority of those
who saw the miracle saw as a miracle only; but it is rather striking
that in Mark Jesus helps His disciples to understand the real
significance of the multiplication of the bread in a passage (Mk.
viii. 1921) which comes only a few verses fore the declaration of
Peter at Caesarea Philippi:

'When I broke the five loaves among the 5,000, how many baskets full
of fragments did you take up? They say to Him, Twelve. And when I
broke the seven among the 4,000, how many baskets full of fragment!
did you take up? They answer, Seven. And He said to them, Do you not
understand yet?'

Between these words and the incident at Caesarea Philippi comes,
significantly enough, the healing of the blind man of Bethsaida who
received his sight gradually, first seeing men as trees walking, and
then seeing all things clearly (Mk. viii. 22 ff. a parable of the
disciples, who had hitherto perceived His Messiahship dimly, but were
now, through their spokesman Peter, to declare outright, 'You are the
Messiah.' Was it not this that Jesus meant when He asked, 'Do you not
understand yet?' And was not this the great truth of which the feeding
miracles, like all the others, were signs?

Two more miracles may be mentioned, as both have been widely
misunderstood. The one is the story of the coin in the fish's mouth
(Mt. xvii. 24 ff.). This has been dealt with in terms of Form
Criticism. The question must frequently have arisen in the early
Jerusalem church, whether the Jewish Christians should continue to pay
the temple tax, the half-shekel due from each adult Jewish male.
According to some Form critics, they came to the conclusion that,
although they were under no obligation to pay it, they would do so,
lest they should cause offense to their fellow Jews. This, then, was
the 'life-setting' of the story. But when we are told that, by a sort
of legal fiction, the decision was thrown back into the lifetime of
Jesus so as to be invested with His authority, we must demur. The
whole question came to an end with the destruction of the temple in AD
70, and when it was debated in the Jerusalem church there must have
been many who would have a good idea whether such a thing had taken
place in Jesus' lifetime or not. The 'life-setting' in the Jerusalem
church probable enough; but what it explains is not the invention of
the story, but its recording. When the problem of the temple tax
arose, the natural question was: 'Did our Master say anything about
this? Did He pay the half-shekel?' Then the incident was remembered,
and recorded for a precedent. A 'life-setting' in the early Church
does not preclude a prior 'life-setting' in the life of Jesus
Himself.

But, apart from what the story signifies, some have felt a difficulty
in the miracle implied in the words of Jesus with which the incident
closes. (We are not told that Peter did find a coin in the fish's
mouth; but we are clearly intended to understand that he did.) It is
again, easy to say that Peter caught a fish which he soil for a
shekel, thus getting enough to pay his own tax and his Masters, and
this time the rationalization does not greatly impair the significance
of the story. But some rationalizers seem to suppose that the miracle
consisted in Peter's finding the coin in the fish's mouth. There was
nothing miraculous in that; such objects have often been found in the
mouths or stomachs of fish "The miracle", if such it be, is that Jesus
knew in advance that Peter would find the coin there, so that once
more we are brought to realize that we must first make up our minds
about Christ before coming to conclusions about he miracles attributed
to Him

The other miracle is the cursing of the barren fig tree (Mk. xi. '2
ff.), a stumblingblock to many. They feel that it is unlike Jesus, and
so someone must have misunderstood what actually happened, or turned a
spoken parable into an acted miracle, or something like that. Some, on
the other hand, welcome the story because it shows that Jesus was
human enough to get unreasonably annoyed on occasion. It appears,
however, that a closer acquaintance with fig trees would have
prevented such misunderstandings. 'The time of figs was not yet,' says
Mark, for it was just before Passover, about six weeks before the
fully formed fig appears. The fact that Mark adds these words shows
that he knew what he was talking about. When the fig leaves appear
about the end of March they are accompanied by a crop of small knobs,
called taqsh by the Arabs, a sort of forerunner of the real figs.
These taqsh are eaten by peasants and others when hungry. They drop
off before the real fig is formed. But if the leaves appear
unaccompanied by taqsh, there will be no figs that year. So it was
evident to our Lord, when He turned aside to see if there were any of
these taqsh on the fig tree to assuage His hunger for the time being,
that the absence of the taqsh meant that there would be no figs when
the time for figs came. For all its fair show of foliage, it was a
fruitless and hopeless tree.'

The whole incident was an acted parable. To Jesus the fig tree, fair
but barren, spoke of the city of Jerusalem, where He had found much
religious observance, but no response to His message from God. The
withering of the tree was thus an omen of the disaster which, as He
foresaw and foretold, would shortly fall upon the city.

But, as Mark records the incident, the withering of the tree had a
personal significance for the disciples; it taught them to have faith
in God (Mk. xi. 22). And this is the moral which the miracle stories
have for us today. They are recorded as signs of divine power; and
even if we could prove their historicity up to the hilt we should
still miss the point of their narration if we failed to see in them
tokens of the activity of God in history, culminating in the
appearance of Christ on earth. As the Gospel parables are oral lessons
of the kingdom of God, so the Gospel miracles are object lessons,
acted parables of the kingdom. Like the Gospel story as a whole they
challenge us to have faith in God, as He is revealed in Christ. When
we turn from our attempts at rationalizing them so as to make them
more acceptable to the spirit of our age, and try rather to understand
why they were recorded by the evangelists, we shall be in a position
to profit by them as the evangelists intended we should. We shall
learn then by experience 'that it is true of the miracle-stories, as
of every part of the gospel record that ' these things were written
that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and
that believing ye might have life in His name" (Jn. xx. 31)'.