He has certain abnormal powers by which he can perform miracles. He
is ashamed of these powers, but, being extremely compassionate, cannot
refuse to exercise them when afflicted people beg him to cure them, when
multitudes of people are hungry, and when his disciples are terrified by
storms on the lakes. He asks for no reward, but begs the people not
to mention these powers of his. There are two obvious reasons for his
dislike of being known as a worker of miracles. One is the natural
objection of all men who possess such powers, but have far more
important business in the world than to exhibit them, to be regarded
primarily as charlatans, besides being pestered to give exhibitions to
satisfy curiosity. The other is that his view of the effect of miracles
upon his mission is exactly that taken later on by Rousseau. He
perceives that they will discredit him and divert attention from his
doctrine by raising an entirely irrelevant issue between his disciples
and his opponents.
Possibly my readers may not have studied Rousseau's Letters Written From
The Mountain, which may be regarded as the classic work on miracles as
credentials of divine mission. Rousseau shows, as Jesus foresaw, that
the miracles are the main obstacle to the acceptance of Christianity,
because their incredibility (if they were not incredible they would not
be miracles) makes people sceptical as to the whole narrative, credible
enough in the main, in which they occur, and suspicious of the doctrine
with which they are thus associated. "Get rid of the miracles," said
Rousseau, "and the whole world will fall at the feet of Jesus Christ."
He points out that miracles offered as evidence of divinity, and failing
to convince, make divinity ridiculous. He says, in effect, there is
nothing in making a lame man walk: thousands of lame men have been cured
and have walked without any miracle. Bring me a man with only one leg
and make another grow instantaneously on him before my eyes; and I will
be really impressed; but mere cures of ailments that have often been
cured before are quite useless as evidence of anything else than desire
to help and power to cure.
Jesus, according to Matthew, agreed so entirely with Rousseau, and felt
the danger so strongly, that when people who were not ill or in trouble
came to him and asked him to exercise his powers as a sign of
his mission, he was irritated beyond measure, and refused with an
indignation which they, not seeing Rousseau's point, must have thought
very unreasonable. To be called "an evil and adulterous generation"
merely for asking a miracle worker to give an exhibition of his powers,
is rather a startling experience. Mahomet, by the way, also lost his
temper when people asked him to perform miracles. But Mahomet expressly
disclaimed any unusual powers; whereas it is clear from Matthew's story
that Jesus (unfortunately for himself, as he thought) had some powers of
healing. It is also obvious that the exercise of such powers would give
rise to wild tales of magical feats which would expose their hero to
condemnation as an impostor among people whose good opinion was of great
consequence to the movement started by his mission.
But the deepest annoyance arising from the miracles would be the
irrelevance of the issue raised by them. Jesus's teaching has nothing
to do with miracles. If his mission had been simply to demonstrate a new
method of restoring lost eyesight, the miracle of curing the blind would
have been entirely relevant. But to say "You should love your enemies;
and to convince you of this I will now proceed to cure this gentleman
of cataract" would have been, to a man of Jesus's intelligence, the
proposition of an idiot. If it could be proved today that not one of the
miracles of Jesus actually occurred, that proof would not invalidate a
single one of his didactic utterances; and conversely, if it could be
proved that not only did the miracles actually occur, but that he had
wrought a thousand other miracles a thousand times more wonderful, not
a jot of weight would be added to his doctrine. And yet the intellectual
energy of sceptics and divines has been wasted for generations in
arguing about the miracles on the assumption that Christianity is at
stake in the controversy as to whether the stories of Matthew are false
or true. According to Matthew himself, Jesus must have known this
only too well; for wherever he went he was assailed with a clamor for
miracles, though his doctrine created bewilderment.
So much for the miracles! Matthew tells us further, that Jesus declared
that his doctrines would be attacked by Church and State, and that the
common multitude were the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
His disciples, in their relations with the political and ecclesiastical
organizations, would be as sheep among wolves.