You demur to the parallel that I draw between the Old Testament and the
New Testament; “The Battle of Beth-horon can be disentangled from the
miracle of the stopping of the sun, just as the battles of Salamis and
Regillus can be disentangled from the visions which are said to have
accompanied them: and so of other Old Testament narratives. But is it
possible,” you ask, “that the life of Christ can be disentangled from
miracles? Do not His own words and doctrine imply a continual assumption
that He had power to do ‘mighty works’ superior to those of ordinary
men?”
You could not have put your question more happily: for you unconsciously
illustrate the almost universal confusion—common to a great number of
theologians and agnostics as well as to the ordinary Bible
reader—between “miracles” and “mighty works.” You are really asking not
one but two questions. Your first question asks about “miracles;” by
which you mean some kind of suspension of a law of nature, or, if you
prefer it, some act not conceived as explicable in accordance with any
natural law by the person who is attempting explanation. Your second
question asks about “mighty works,” a phrase of constant occurrence in
the New Testament, by which phrase we may understand works superior to
the works of ordinary persons, but not necessarily suspensions of the
laws of nature. Works may be “mighty” and yet quite explicable in
accordance with natural law.
You seem to expect a No to your first question and a Yes to your second.
I answer Yes to both. (1) The life of Christ can be disentangled from
“miracles.” (2) Christ always assumed that He could do “mighty works,”
and from them His life cannot be separated.
It is a law of human nature that the mind influences the body. By acting
on the imagination and the emotions men have in all ages consciously or
unconsciously effected instantaneous cures in accordance with natural
laws. There has been much quackery and deception mixed up with cures of
this kind; but no physician, and no man of any general information,
would doubt that such cures have been and still are performed. The
Jansenists, subjected to the test of hostile observation, had some
undeniable successes of this nature. Every one has heard of the
so-called “miracles” of Lourdes; and no unprejudiced person would deny
that amid possible exaggerations and (I greatly fear) some frauds, they
have contained an element of reality. “Faith-healing” is going on in
England during this very year; and in the very place where I am now
writing I heard a captain of the Salvation Army just now give out a
notice that, besides a “free and easy meeting,” and a “holiness
meeting,” and sundry other meetings, there is to be a meeting on one
evening this week for the purpose of “casting out devils.” If I go
there, I shall probably see attempts, with partial success, to excite a
paralytic to motion, or to arouse some one from a dull stupor
approximating to insanity. These attempts, even though immensely
assisted by the intense interest and sympathetic demonstrations of the
spectators, will probably produce only a temporary effect; and when it
passes away the patient will very likely be worse than before. But the
law of nature is the same with all; in modern times with the Jansenists,
the miracle-workers of Lourdes, the “faith-healers,” and the Salvation
Army, and in ancient days with the priests of Æsculapius. Cures can be
effected by a strong emotional shock, sometimes of a gross kind such as
mere terror or violent excitement, sometimes of a much purer kind, an
ecstatic hope and trust. A marked distinction must of course be made
between those cures which can, and those which cannot, be effected by
appeal to the emotions. Paralysis (called in the New Testament “palsy”),
mental disease (often called in the New Testament “possession”), and
various kinds of nervous disorder, are all susceptible of emotional
cure: but the loss of a limb cannot be so cured. The cure of a man sick
of the palsy by the emotional method would be a miracle for spectators
of the first century, but it would not be a miracle for us now; that is
to say, it would be explicable by us, but not by them, in accordance
with known natural laws: but the restoration of a lost limb by faith
would be a miracle for them and for us alike: we know nothing of any
natural law in accordance with which such an act could be performed by
any degree of faith.
Now it will be admitted by all that the great majority of Christ’s
“mighty works” were acts of healing, and that many of these were
expressly attributed by Him to faith. “Seeing their faith” is the
preface, in each of the three Synoptic Gospels, to the account of the
cure of the paralytic man, and it is a very curious preface; for it
seems to shew that Jesus recognized a kind of sponsorial and contagious
efficacy of faith in that instance (as also in the case of the father of
the epileptic boy); and we know by modern experience of “faith-healing”
how great is the influence of a sympathetic and trustful audience.
Elsewhere, “Thy faith hath made thee whole,” “According to your faith be
it unto you,” “Great is thy faith, be it unto thee even as thou wilt,”
“Thy faith hath saved thee,” “If thou canst believe, all things are
possible,” “Believe ye that I am able to do this?” “Be not afraid, only
believe”—these and similar expressions lead us to conclude that many of
the “mighty works” of Jesus were conditional on faith. Perhaps it might
startle you if I were to say that Jesus was not able to perform a
“mighty work” unless faith was present; yet if I said this, I should
only be repeating what St. Mark (vi. 5), the earliest of the
Evangelists, says on a certain occasion, that on account of the general
unbelief at Nazareth Jesus _was not able_ (οὐκ ἐδύνατο) to do there any
mighty work, “save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk and
healed them.” This confession is so frank and almost scandalizing in its
plainness that we cannot be surprised that the later Evangelist, in his
parallel narrative, softens it down by omitting the words “was not
able,” and by inserting “many.”[14] We need by no means infer from this
narrative that Jesus attempted “mighty works” and failed. It may be that
He did not attempt them because He discerned the faithlessness of those
around Him, and felt His own consequent inability. But, interpret it as
we may, this passage remains a most important confirmation of the other
passages in which Jesus Himself implies the necessity of faith. Where
there was no faith, there Jesus “_was not able_ to do any mighty work;”
and this limit to His power Jesus Himself recognized.
Here then we find at once a remarkable difference between most of the
“mighty works” of Jesus and the “miracles” of the Old Testament. The
former were conditional on faith, and, this condition suggests that many
of them may be explicable on natural laws; the latter have no condition
attached to them and there is nothing to suggest that they are
explicable on any natural law. Indeed the miracles of the Old Testament
are very often wrought, not as a natural response to belief, but as a
rebuke to unbelief: thus the hand of Moses is made leprous one moment
and pure the next, in order to inspire him with faith; Gideon lays out a
fleece on the grass, and the laws of nature are suspended for the
purpose of making it wet to-day and dry to-morrow, simply in order that
his unbelieving heart may be encouraged by a sign from God; the
faithless Ahaz is encouraged by God in the Old Testament to ask for that
very favour which Christ in the New Testament systematically refused to
the Pharisees—a sign from heaven: and for the sake of Hezekiah (who asks
“What shall be the sign that the Lord will heal me?”) the dial goes
miraculously backward! Could contrast be more complete?
It follows that we shall be acting hastily if we place the “mighty
works” of Jesus on the same level as the “miracles” of the Old
Testament, inasmuch as the former are (in the strict sense of the term)
“mighty works,” while the latter (again in the strict sense of the term)
are “miracles.” But in addition to this reason, derivable from the
nature of the works themselves, there is another reason, derivable from
the evidence, for drawing a distinction. Besides the direct testimony of
the Gospels, we have other testimony, indirect but even more cogent, to
prove that Jesus wrought wonderful cures. The earliest of the Gospels
was probably not composed in its present shape till more than a
generation had passed away after the death of Christ; and, during the
lapse of thirty years evidence—especially if handed down by oral, and
that too Oriental, tradition—may undergo many corruptions. But the
letters of St. Paul are earlier, some of them much earlier; and many of
them are of such an unaffected, personal, informal nature that it is
absolutely impossible to suppose that they were written to express a
conviction that the writer did not feel, or to make the readers believe
in truths which were no truths. Now in his letters St. Paul quietly
assumes that many of his fellow-Christians, and he himself in
particular, had the power of working wonderful cures without the
ordinary means[15]. He even sets down this power as one among many
“gifts” or “graces” vouchsafed to the Church, and he places it by no
means high in the list. A man must be absolutely destitute of all power
of literary and historical criticism, if he can persuade himself that
these expressions in St. Paul’s letters had no basis of fact, and that
they were inserted, though unmeaning both to the writer and to the
hearers, in order to delude posterity into a false belief. There is
nothing in the Epistles to indicate the nature of the diseases which
were cured by St. Paul and his followers. We may conjecture with much
probability that they were nervous diseases, paralysis, “possession,”
and the like, such as might be acted on by the “emotional shock” of
faith: and the conjecture is confirmed by the fact that, in the time of
Josephus, healers of demoniacs were very common in Palestine; and
certain Jews of Ephesus are recorded in the Acts of the Apostles to have
tried an experiment, after Paul’s manner, in attempting to cure a case
of one “possessed.” But be this as it may, the fact that St. Paul and St
Paul’s contemporaries unquestionably cured some kinds of diseases in the
name of Jesus, and did this after some sort of system, by the utterance
of the name of Jesus, without the ordinary means, is a very strong
confirmation of the accuracy of the Gospels in attributing to Jesus the
power of working instantaneous cures. It would be strange indeed that
the Disciples, and not the Master, should have had such powers.
I have laid stress upon the fact that Jesus wrought “mighty” but natural
cures, in the first place, because it ought to increase our appreciation
of His personal influence and power over the souls of men, to know that
He not only possessed this power in an unprecedented degree but also
communicated it to His disciples; and secondly, because the fact that He
performed these “mighty works” has naturally led people, from the
earliest times down to the present day, to infer that He performed
“miracles.” Even at the present time you will find that the great mass
of Christians make no distinction at all between healing a paralytic or
a demoniac or a dumb man, and restoring a severed ear or blasting a
fig-tree; all alike seem to them “miracles.” If this is so even in these
days, in spite of physiology, you cannot be surprised that the first
Christians and their followers made no such distinction; they assumed
that the man who could heal a paralytic by a word could heal any other
disease in the same way, and do any other work he pleased contrary to
the course of nature. This belief would prepare the way for attributing
to Jesus other works of a very different kind, real “miracles,” that is,
suspensions of the laws of nature. Considering the multitude of such
acts recorded in the Old Testament as having been performed by Moses,
Elijah, Elisha and others, we may well be surprised to find how very few
have been attributed to Jesus: and I believe it can be shown that each
of these few has originated from some misunderstanding, and without any
intention to deceive. Of almost all of these real “miracles,” said to
have been wrought by Christ, I believe we are justified in saying with
Bishop Temple that, if we take each by itself, we cannot find for it any
“clear, and unmistakeable, and sufficient evidence.”[16] So far from
being an exaggeration this is rather an understatement of the case:
there is not only no “clear and unmistakeable and sufficient evidence”
for them, there is also very strong indirect evidence against some of
them. In some future letter I may deal in detail with these miracles;
for the present I will select only one.
This one shall be the most striking of all the miracles in the New
Testament, a miracle exceeding in wonder even the raising of Lazarus. It
is found only in St. Matthew’s Gospel, and describes an incident that
followed immediately on the death of Jesus. Here are the exact words:
“And the earth did quake, and the tombs were opened; and many bodies
of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised; and coming forth
out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered into the Holy
City and appeared unto many.”
Have I at all exaggerated this miracle in declaring it to be more
startling than even the raising of Lazarus? It records the resurrection,
not of one man, but of many. Nor are we allowed by the author to suppose
that he referred to visions of the dead, appearing unto friends; for he
tells us that “the _tombs were opened_, and many _bodies_ of the saints
arose.” Moreover this would appear to have been a miracle not wrought in
private as many of the mighty works of Jesus were, nor a sight
vouchsafed to a chosen few (like the manifestations of Jesus after
death); for these “bodies” went into Jerusalem, during the Passover, at
a time when the city was thronged with visitors, and “appeared unto
many.” What subsequently became of these “bodies”—whether they remained
on earth till the Ascension when they ascended with Jesus, or whether
they lived their lives over again and were buried a second time, or
whether they went back to their tombs again after they had appeared in
Jerusalem—is a question of some difficulty, which has exercised the
minds of commentators and has been answered rather variously than
satisfactorily. Be this as it may, the miracle must be confessed by all
to be stupendous.
Now for the evidence of it. I have been quoting from St. Matthew’s
account of this miracle. What would a dispassionate and intelligent
heathen say of it, coming for the first time to the study of our four
Gospels? Would it not be something of this sort: “Here you call on me to
believe a miracle that appears to me to be motiveless and is certainly
singularly startling: but I will suspend my judgment of it till I hear
the accounts given by your other three Evangelists. What do they say of
the effect produced upon the disciples and bystanders by this earthquake
and this most extraordinary resurrection? There were present the women
that loved and followed Jesus, there was the Roman centurion, there were
‘many’ who witnessed the appearances of the dead: even to those who were
not present, an earthquake rending the rocks in the neighbourhood could
not be imperceptible: what therefore is said on these points by other
contemporary authors as well as by your four Gospels? Tell me that
first; and then I will tell you what I think of the miracle.”
In answer to this request, which I think we must characterize as a very
natural one, we should have first to admit that no profane author makes
any mention of the resurrection of these numerous “bodies,” nor of the
earthquake that accompanied it. Then we should have to set down the four
records of the four Evangelists as follows:
[Transcriber’s Note: The following four quotations were originally
printed side-by-side. They are transcribed one after another so as to be
readable on modern reading devices, which often cannot handle multiple
columns.]
Mark xv. 37-39.
37. And Jesus uttered a loud voice and gave up the ghost.
38. And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the
bottom.
39. And when the centurion, which stood by over against him, saw
that he so gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was the Son
of God.
Matt. xxvii. 50-54.
50. And Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and yielded up his
spirit.
51. And behold the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top
to the bottom [_and the earth did quake, and the rocks were
rent:_
52. _And the tombs were opened: and many bodies of the saints that
had fallen asleep were raised;_
53. _And coming forth out of the tombs after his resurrection they
entered into the holy city and appeared unto many._]
54. Now the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus,
when they saw [_the earthquake and_] the things that were done,
feared exceedingly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.
Luke xxii. 46-7.
46. And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father,
into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said this, he gave
up the ghost.
47. And when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God,
saying, Certainly this was a righteous man.
John xix. 30, 31.
30. And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
31. The Jews, therefore, because it was the preparation, &c.
You see then that this extraordinary incident, startling enough to be
the very centre of a galaxy of wonders, is omitted by _three out of the
four Evangelists_. You see also that two of the Evangelists agree with
St. Matthew in placing a centurion at the foot of the cross, and in
assigning to him expressions of faith: but neither of them mentions the
“earthquake” as being even a partial cause of the centurion’s faith, nor
is there so much as a hint of any resurrection of the “bodies of saints”
from the tombs.
Now if you and I, with full knowledge of the facts, were writing a
biography of a great man, we might undoubtedly exhibit many variations
and divergences in our story. Every biographer who knows everything
about a man must omit something; many things therefore that you would
omit, I should insert, and _vice versâ_. But suppose we were writing in
some detail the description of the great man’s execution (as the
crucifixion is written in great detail by the Evangelists), and, in
particular, the emotion and utterances of the soldier who superintended
the execution. Is it possible under these circumstances that you should
relate (and with truth) that the soldier’s emotion was caused in part by
an earthquake which happened at the moment of the man’s death—adding
also that a large number of people rose at the same time bodily from the
graves—and that I, with a full knowledge that both these facts are true,
should make no mention at all either of the earthquake or of this
stupendous resurrection? I say that such an omission of facts is
absolutely impossible in any sincere and straightforward biographer, _on
the supposition that he knows them_. The argument that “it is unsafe to
argue from silence” is quite inapplicable here: nor is it in point to
allege the silence of a courtly historian who writes the life of
Constantine but omits the Emperor’s execution of his son. The answer is
that we have not here to do with courtly historians, but with simple
unsophisticated compilers of tradition whose main object was to set down
in truth and honesty all that could shew Jesus of Nazareth to be the Son
of God. Now it is impossible that the Evangelists should not have
recognized in this miracle, if true, a cogent proof—cogent for the minds
of men in these days—of the divine mission of Jesus: we are therefore
driven to the conclusion that they omitted it either because they had
never heard of it, or because although they had heard of it, they did
not believe it to be true.
You must not however suppose that this evidently legendary narrative was
added with any intent to falsify. Like many of the miraculous accounts
in the Old Testament, this story is probably the result of
misunderstanding—an allegory misinterpreted. The death of Christ
abolished the gulf between God and man; it tore down the veil between
the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, whereby Christ took mankind, in
Himself and with Himself, into the direct presence of the Father: and
this spiritual truth found a literal interpretation in two of the
Gospels which mention the “rending of the veil.” But Christ’s death did
more than this. It struck down the power of death itself: it broke open
the tombs, and prepared the way for the Resurrection of the Saints; and
this spiritual truth, being misinterpreted as if it were literally true,
gave rise to a tradition (which does not however seem to have been
widely received) that at the moment of Christ’s death certain tombs were
actually broken open, and certain of “the Saints” rose bodily from the
dead and walked into Jerusalem.[17]
Footnote 14:
St. Matthew ix. 58, “And he _did not many_ mighty works there because
of their unbelief.” For a demonstrative proof that the Gospel of St.
Mark contains the earliest tradition, see the beginning of the article
“Gospels” in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.
Footnote 15:
To the same effect is _James_ V. 14, 15: “Is any among you sick? Let
him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him,
anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of
faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.” There can
he no doubt that this refers to literal healing; and it is interesting
as an indication that probably these early Christian attempts at
healing were often tentative. For it will hardly be maintained that
_all_ who were thus anointed were healed: otherwise death would have
been exterminated in the early Christian church.
Footnote 16:
Bishop Temple excepts only the Resurrection, which is not here under
consideration. His words are “It is true too that, if we take each
miracle by itself, there is but one miracle, namely our Lord’s
Resurrection, _for which clear, and unmistakeable, and sufficient
evidence is given_.”—_Bampton Lectures_, p. 154.
Footnote 17:
In the early apocryphal work called _Christ’s Descent into Hell_, a
striking description is given of the joy of the saints and the terror
of Satan, when Christ descends to Hades and rescues the dead, leading
them up to Paradise. In one of the versions of this work, the number
of those “risen with the Lord” is mentioned as “twelve thousand men.”
XVI
THE GROWTH OF THE GOSPELS