In modernity we see case after case where people promoting various beliefs quite deliberately just make supernatural stuff up and somehow, over time, these claimed supernatural events get accepted as real by the groups invested in the belief. With respect to the Bible is it likely the same process was at work in manufacturing the “miracles” of the Bible or was there another process at work that constructed and promoted the supernatural myths of the Old and New Testament Bible?
In sum, were the “miracles” ascribed to Jesus and others knowingly created purely from imagination or re-working or earlier myths by the various writers of the Bible, with the somewhat cynical goal that this would strengthen and promote the faith, or was there another mechanism at work?
That’s not true. We can definitely compare the evolution of contemporaneous mythology to determine the likelihood of subsequent revisionism/embellishment to the miracles of Jesus.
Ascribing intention is trickier, of course. It certainly doesn’t hurt the promotion of a new religion to include supernatural phenomena.
I don’t have the time to go look up all the cites, and I don’t feel like writing a TL;DR post anyway, but I do know that a lot of Jesus’ miracles have parallels in stories in Jewish scripture. In addition, a lot of the stories are clearly structured to “fulfill” imagined prophecies in Jewish scripture. I don’t want to be accused of stomping on anyone’s belief, so I’m trying to answer the question as delicately as I can, but the fact is that a lot of supposed messianic prophecies were not messianic prophecies, or not even prophecies at all, so it was never necessary for Jesus to fulfill them, and saying he didn’t, and therefore the stories about him doing so must be made up, is not a challenge to his divinity (full disclosure: I’m Jewish).
So I’m fully prepared to say that a lot of the miracle stories, whether they are miracles that happened to Jesus, or were performed by him, were invented. But history 2,000 years ago is not history now. If people believed that those things must have happened because of who Jesus was, then they did happen. It wasn’t even an article of faith. It was as good as fact. It then becomes question begging to use miracles recorded in the gospels as proof of who Jesus was, but nevermind. The details of the events came from study of Jewish scripture, and oral retellings of the stories.
Invented in the sense Washington throwing a silver dollar across the Potomac was invented, perhaps. Classical literature is full of miracles ascribed to historical figures. The writers adding things seem far more likely, and easier, than Jesus and friends creating miracles. After all, some of the miracles were set at the birth of Jesus, something the writers could not have witnessed, even if the supposed writers actually wrote the gospels,
In modernity and near modernity the “creation” of myth stories we have seen examples of in near history seem overtly and crudely manipulative bordering on cons. I know there is no concrete “answer” to the OP question without a time machine, but I’m thinking that an in depth study of biblical history must tell us something about the intentionality of these mythic claims. They were human beings with the same hopes, fears, ambitions and aspirations we have, not space aliens. Surely we can understand something of their intent.
Choose any religion or sect founded in the last 300 years making extraordinary supernatural claims and the proof they bring to the table for those claims.
The origins of Mormonism - specifically Joseph Smith translating gold plates into the Book of Mormon, and found mummy scrolls into the Book of Abraham - would be a good example, I think.
There are many, many, many examples of the exact opposite, too: People, in modernity and near modernity, who absolutely believed their own miraculous experiences to be authentic.
Everything indicates that Andrew Jackson Davis, who has been called Spiritualism’s “major theologian,” truly did believe that he (and other Spiritualists) were receiving messages from “the other side.”
So per your examples self delusion, mental issues or (however mediated) altered mental states are likely as great or greater a component of myth creation as deliberate intentionality?
That is: Are you saying that they knowingly manufactured fraudulent miraculous claims for public consumption (in which case they were con men), or are you saying that they genuinely believed their own miraculous claims to be 100% authentic (in which case they were, in your opinion, madmen)?
It’s not hard, in my mind, to imagine happy (or unhappy) coincidences. I’m not thinking of Jesus’ miracles so much as those of the Exodus. It’s not impossible (nor even unlikely) that a series of catastrophes hit the Egyptians, which superstition blamed on the Israelite God (or perhaps the Israelites used to their advantage): a polluted river causes frogs to leave the water, and fish to die, bringing flies and diseases and often death. Not hard to imagine that story as evolving into the Exodus tale.
Let’s face it: during the height of the AIDs epidemic, there were plenty of right-wing religious nuts ho said that was the anger of their deity against gays.
So, the bottom line needn’t be miraculous. As a simple example, if Jesus did things like clean wounds thus preventing infection, he might easily become known as a “magic” healer. If he gave something like mouth-to-mouth respiration that revived someone, word of mouth would quickly be how he raised someone from the dead. And so on.
“Con men” to “mad men” covers a lot of shades of gray from someone who is a believer in the overall ethic and supernatural claims of their religion, but has no compunctions about making stuff up or promoting supernatural claims to bolster the belief in the religion to someone doing these things without truly believing in the supernatural nature of the religion at all. Mental issues also covers a lot of territory from seriously delusional people to sincere people who are simply misinterpreting or misunderstanding natural phenomena. The latter does not require that you be innately mentally impaired.
However, you are correct in that my OP assumes that supernatural “miraculous” phenomena cited as Biblical miracles, that cannot be otherwise explained as simply misinterpreting natural phenomena, do not really exist and claims that they happened were intentionally (ie willfully with a goal in mind) or unintentionally (via delusion or misunderstanding) fabricated.
There is some evidence of the actual faking of miracles in or around Jesus’ time. Some of the machines described by Hero of Alexandria (who was roughly contemporary with Jesus) seem to have been designed to be used in the temples of Alexandria in order to fool the rubes into signing up, and parting with their money. One machine, for instance, was a statue of a god that would periodically move its hand to pour out some oil onto a flame, as if offering a sacrifice. The heat from the burning oil in fact powered the mechanism which led to more oil being poured out. Another machine IIRC, was an early coin operated slot machine (which, no doubt, would have seemed pretty miraculous to many people then) that would give out little slips (papyrus, I guess) with prophecies or fortunes written on them when a coin was deposited.
Note that we are in the early Roman Empire period here, not long after Hellenistic Egypt, and its leading city of Alexandria, the intellectual centre of the Hellenistic world, had been incorporated into the Empire. The early Empire, perhaps especially in Alexandria, seems to have been a period of great religious ferment and experimentation, in which different traditional religious ideas from all over the Empire (including Egypt itself), and from beyond its bounds, were being explored, and mixed and matched into new forms. No doubt there were plenty of con men amongst the religious experimenters and enthusiasts. Certainly the city seems to have been full of competing temples of numerous competing (and overlapping) religions or cults, and Hero may well have made his living largely from designing machines that the temples could use to bamboozle and impress potential new converts and contributors.
In this context it may also be relevant to recall the story in Matthew’s Gospel of the “flight into Egypt”, whereby Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus went to live in Egypt for an unspecified length of time to escape Herod. If there is any historical basis to this story (which does not, it should be said, even appear in the other gospels) it is worth realizing that the Egypt they would have fled to was not the Egypt of the Pharaohs and pyramids, but that of the Great Library of Alexandria, its scholars and mathematicians, engineer/inventors like Hero, and all those competing temples and religions. If young Jesus grew up there, he might have picked up an idea or two.