Good point. There are narrations of really extravagant miracles in the hagiographies (and in the apocryphal gospels). Back then you were *expected *to include miracles in the biography of a holy man/woman, and not necessarily beneficial miracles, but rather making-a-point miracles. And sometimes it would look quite silly to us. For instance, a bunch of boys mock Elisha for being bald, so he curses them and out of nowhere come two she-bears to kill them? Jesus kills a fig tree for not producing figs out of season? People drop dead from just touching the Ark?
As to “if it did not happen how come people made a note of it”, well, there’s the small issue that save for a relative handful of people, virtually noone in either Ancient Israel or 1st-century Christianity was a firsthand witness to any of the events. People took it on faith if the overall gist what was being preached reached to their hearts and if they found the preachers trustworthy, and if miracle stories accreted, so be it. Perhaps *that *is the miracle.
It is quite clear that the miracles were done by God, not Moses. Daniel didn’t protect himself, God did. And so on.
I think I tried to make this exact point above. It seems far simpler for the Gospel writers to make up the miracles than for Jesus and the disciples to do a Mission Impossible (Miracle Impossible?) bit involving a magic trick to convince people of a miracle.
I don’t want to get into a debate about the authorship of the New Testament, so let’s just say this: most Christians, at least, and scholars working on the basis of confessional Christian premises, would hold that at least John, and probably the letters of Peter and maybe Matthew were written by firsthand witnesses. At the very least, I think the evidence for John is quite strong. It’s possible that he just made it up of course (I don’t believe he did), but I don’t think that the ‘gradual accretion of mythic details’ or the ‘naturalistic/metaphorical meanings’ are good explanations.
On the other hand, it is true that it was important to the early church, when they were deciding which books to accept as canonical, that they be written by, or at least based on the testimony of, people who were there at the time (the apostles). Thus, as the staff report notes, Mark’s gospel was believed to be based on the preaching of Peter.
I know the discussion has kinda moved on since then, but to add, briefly, to what you wrote in post #23, in response to my post #15:
The same sort of claims - that the miracles were the work of God, not the work of men - were made in the case of Swedenborg. He didn’t claim to have figured out a way to contact, conjure or control angels - the angels just showed up one day, on God’s command, and started telling him a bunch of stuff. Steiner and Davis, however, both claimed to have figured out methods to get in touch with spirits and the like, all on one’s own initiative (methods they were more than eager to teach to others).
:dubious: The authors of the gospels, from what little we know about them, lived in exactly the same culture that Jesus did. Paul may have been a little more Romanized, but he was still a Jew living in Palestine.
I can speculate that some ‘miraculous events’ might have originally been predictions of things that would happen in the future that were, in the process of being passed down, repurposed or reinterpreted as things that actually happened already. So Jesus could have told his followers that walking on water would be some kind of sign of something, and this got turned into Jesus walking on water himself. This is argued with more evidence to have happened with other religious traditions such as Islam.
The archetypal example of what I am talking about in Islam is the splitting of the moon referred to in Qur’an 54:1-2, and the transformation of Muhammad from a mortal prophet whose only miracle is the Qur’an to the *al-Insan al-Kamil *(Perfect Man) and greatest prophet.
Qur’an 54:1-2: The Hour is at hand and the moon is split. And if they see a sign they turn aside and say: transient enchantment.
Scholars such as Uri Rubin have argued that these verses originally refer to a kind of eschatological take on a natural lunar eclipse, something like, “You saw what God did right there? You don’t want to mess with that! Repent!” You can find early exegeses that largely advance this interpretation, but equally early tafsir sources show a strong move toward a literal interpretation. These traditions were quickly backed with sahih (sound) hadith, and hold that one day the Meccans (or according to the later Ibn Abbas, some Jewish Rabbis) asked Muhammad to show them a sign, he split the moon in two halves, but they rejected it as sorcery because they were obstinate, and then Muhammad reunited the two halves again.
The scholarly maneuvers that resulted in the literal side pretty much completely winning out and becoming the orthodox interpretation are cast by Rubin as part of an effort to read back a triumphant Muhammad into the text and to secure his place as the greatest of the prophets. This literal interpretation also figured into the succession debates that became the Sunni-Shia split.
Today, you can find many apologetic ‘proofs’ online with photos of lunar rilles, claiming that NASA has proven the moon splitting to have really happened, as well as tales of Indian kings that saw it happen. So investment in its historicity is still being made.
This makes me think of the infamous “Lost Day” Christian glurge email that still periodically makes the rounds. It’s somehow comforting to know this isn’t unique to Christianity.
Why not? If Confucius can become a kind of god, complete with temples, statues, and incense burned in his honour, so can Karl Popper, given a coupla thousand years. The actual writings of Confucius were intensely human-oriented: there is no hint he considered himself a “god” - his goal was to become, as best he could, a “gentleman”.
The thing to remember is that the intelectual content of the foundational formation of a religion has essentially very little to do with the final form of the religion. If all you had was the foundational works, and nothing else - no knowledge of the history -you would not be able to accurately predict the present form of a religion. Reading the OT would not lead one to predict modern day Rabbinical Judaism, and reading the NT one would not be able to predict modern day Roman Catholicism.
A minister told me that, centuries ago, people had a very different idea of history than we do: They thought that communicating the spirit of what happened was what mattered, not so much the facts. The authors of the Bible could have made up miracles without being purposely dishonest. Also, what you consider miraculous depends on your world view. Sometimes I put a pair of socks in the dryer and only one comes out. I say, “Hmm, that’s funny”; I don’t think that God took one of my socks to punish me for my sins.
I can think of a couple of “miracles” that I think represent manufactured events:
Passover - you would think that God would already know which houses had the Isrealites and which ones had the Egyptians. Of course, if it was the Israelites themselves that went into the homes and killed the first-born sons, then they would need a sign as to which homes were the correct ones…
The Battle of Jericho (Joshua, chapter 6) - I heard a story that the reason they waited until a particular moment to shout and sound the trumpets was as a signal for the engineers who had dug underneath the walls to surface, thus destabilizing the walls and causing them to fall.
Also, some people believe that if you read John’s account of Jesus’s death particularly critically, you will read clues that indicate that Jesus didn’t actually die, and managed to heal himself while in the tomb.
This one makes no sense. One would rather think that the Egyptians would notice an invading squad of murderous slaves visiting every house in the country!
A better example is the case of the staffs changing into snakes. Aaron throws his staff on the floor and it turns into a snake; the Egyptian priests do the same - their staffs turn into snakes, too - but Aaron’s snake eats the Egyptian priest’s snakes. Exodus 7:12
Here we have ‘competitive miracles’: the Egyptian priests are perfoming the same “trick” as Aaron - only, his is more carnivorous (hence, presumably, superior).
The inference is that the Egyptian priests are faking their “miracles” but that Aaron’s is the real thing. However, it can be read that this staff-into-a-snake trick was well known in the “trade”, but that Aaron was simply better at it (or at least, git a better snake for his staff to “transform” into).
This one is quite a neat explanation, and makes a lot of sense - too bad that it appears that Jerico was actually abandoned in the era in which it was supposed to have fallen to assault. In short, it is a good explanation for an event that was probably completely mythological.
Which is another point with the OT miracles and “extraordinary events”, which by the time they got written down were often several hundred and sometimes over a thousand years in the nominal past. So there may have been a siege of Jericho but it would not have been in the appropriate time frame for Joshua; or there may have been a siege in Joshua’s appropriate time frame, but it was not at Jericho; or there may have been knocking around in Canaanite tradition a story of a siege in a whole different place; and Joshua - if he existed - may or may not have been the conqueror he’s portrayed as anyway; but whichever it was it got a “retcon” into Joshua conquering at Jericho by the time it got written down later because that’s what fit the narrative and who the heck could say it was not so?
The actual writings of Confucius were intensely human-oriented: there is no hint he considered himself a “god” - his goal was to become, as best he could, a “gentleman”.