Over on the new Duke Newt, Maxim Cardew has an interesting post discussing how and whether the issue of “miracles” can be addressed in historical Jesus studies.  I won’t take the time to fully engage the many issues Maxim raises in connection with Hume, Strauss, and others.  What I want to state simply and clearly is: of course an historian has to deal with “miracles.”  Who cares if this has to do with Jesus or with some other person or persons in another time period.

What I mean by that is that the historian of any period is focussed on understanding that particular period and the worldviews and practices of those living in that period (I would hope).  So, for instance, an historian studying relics in medieval England or Europe would have a hard time if she wasn’t permitted to discuss the notion of “miracles” or “healings” as though this was historically off-bounds.  In some respects, a person would be at a loss to explain things without the acknowledgment that the historical subjects in the medieval period did indeed believe that “miracles” took place and that there were people and objects with access to miraculous powers.  Similarly, if one is studying Lucian of Samosata’s critique of Alexander of Abonuteichos (in the second century), the historian has to face the fact that Alexander was viewed by some as performing “miracles” even though some contemporaries like Lucian (in a Hume like fashion) called it all bunk.  It even seems that Lucian is in the minority in rejecting Alexander’s supposed “miracles” (methinks he dost protest too much).  So there’s another “miracle-worker” from the perspective of the historian.

It is one thing to say people in a period believed that such and such could perform miracles (that he or she was a “miracle-worker” or “healer” or “god” by reputation among contemporaries) and quite another to say that the miracles did happen and can be confirmed historically (not at all what the historian can do, in my opinion). To turn to the modern period, would an historian of modern Christianity not be allowed to designate Benny Hinn (spelling?) a “miracle-worker” or “healer” or whatever insofar as his followers believe he can perform “miracles” and he is perceived to be a “miracle-worker” (or have access to miraculous powers from God, or whatever) by some of his contemporaries.  However, this is not to say that the “miracles” are real and that they really took place (I don’t always compare Jesus to Benny Hinn, so don’t worry).

The historian needs to deal with the fact that some contemporaries of Jesus believed that Jesus was a “miracle-worker” or “healer” (and we need to clearly define what we mean by those terms).  To avoid the subject because we (the modern historians) know or think we know that “miracles” don’t exist will lead us towards historical misunderstanding.  This is not to say that “miracles” exist for the historian (so Hume and Strauss can give a sigh of relief).  Nonetheless “miracle-workers” exist for the historian if historical subjects have the category (or one like it) and apply it to another historical subject we are studying (e.g. Jesus).

To clarify, I do not believe that the statement “Jesus was perceived as a miracle-worker” or “Jesus performed miracles from the viewpoint of some of his contemporaries” is in the least bit theological or problematic for the historian.  Historical Jesus researchers, just like historians of the Venerable Bede or Alexander of Abonuteichos, must deal with what they find in their sources and place that in cultural context, developing categories that work best for the period in question.

(We’ll see if this makes any sense in the morning — listening to Van Morrison’s Saint Dominic’s Preview with beer in hand here).

UPDATE: Maxim Cardew now has a second post further delving into the issue and clarifying Maxim’s points.  By the way, my post was never meant as a “refutation”; moreso these were my midnight ramblings in connection with the issue of miracles and Jesus;)  You may have noticed how much I avoided talking about Hume — he reminds me too much of my logic and argumentation course in second year undergrad (not that I have anything against logic).

My previous discussion of Tacitus and Josephus concluded with the observation that the execution of Jesus under the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate is one of the most secure things we can know about the peasant from Nazareth with a high degree of probability using modern historical methods.  This is because reference to the execution is attested in multiple, independent sources (criterion of multiple, independent attestation), including sources which refer to Jesus only incidentally, as an aside.  Historical methods are limited in what they can reveal to us, particularly in the case of ancient history and especially in the case of studying an obscure Galilean villager who lived two thousand years ago (our knowledge of Galilee is quite limited, let alone our knowledge of an individual living there).  When historical approaches can reveal something to us, it is only with certain levels of likelihood or probability, not certainty or “truth.”  So cases of “high probability” that x or y happened are the best you can get in doing history (in the modern sense).

(Joachim Patenier, The Baptism of Christ [1515; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna])

A second highly probable thing about Jesus accessible through historical methods is his immersion or baptism by John the Baptist.  Scholars of early Christianity have developed a set of criteria for establishing the historical “authenticity” of particular activities or sayings attributed to Jesus in our sources, and multiple attestation is an important one.  Another is known as the criterion of embarrassment.  The principle here is: if a source reports some incident or saying even though the author of that source was hesitant about reporting it and somewhat embarrassed by the incident or saying, that author is not likely to have completely made up that incident or saying.  On the other hand, the author in question could have simply omitted it to avoid any difficulty.  In other words, when our sources report something in a round about way that reveals some embarrassment, there is a higher likelihood that it actually did happen.

One of the most illustrative cases in which this criterion plays a key role relates to the immersion of Jesus by John the Baptizer.  The actual incident of Jesus being baptized in this case is attested in the gospel of Mark and in both Matthew and Luke.  However, if one is using the two-source hypothesis, this would entail only one independent source for the incident, since Matthew and Luke are here drawing their material from Mark, the earliest ancient biography of Jesus.  The Gospel of John completely omits the baptism itself and the Q-sayings source may or may not have included the actual baptism (Q did have material about John the Baptist and Jesus interacting).  The so-called Gospel of the Hebrews and Gospel of the Nazoreans each report the immersion, so they may or may not (depending on their reliance on the synoptic traditions) supply further independent attestation.  So the criterion of multiple attestation is not much help here.

This is where evidence of embarrassment comes in handy for the historian.   The way that New Testament scholars explain this is that the embarrassment arises from the implications of a superior teacher or mentor in relation to an inferior student or protégé.  At the time when the authors of the synoptics were writing (late first century) there were apparently still groups of followers of John the Baptizer (cf. Acts 19:1-7), which might raise the question: why not join a movement devoted to the superior baptizer rather the inferior baptized one.  An early follower of Jesus might be concerned to assert that Jesus is superior to John the Baptist, even though Jesus’ baptism by John might imply otherwise.

Each of the gospels deals with this in different ways.  The earliest, Mark, presents a saying in which John explicitly identifies his inferiority to Jesus, in terms of not being worthy to even undo Jesus’ sandals, and a dove, interpreted as the Spirit, confirms Jesus special status (Mk 1:7-11).  Mathew uses Mark but adds in a further interchange in which John tries to prevent Jesus from being baptized by him, which would imply Jesus’ inferiority, but Jesus gives the green-light in terms of “fulfilling righteousness” (Mt 3:13-15).  Luke goes about dealing with the embarrassment in an interesting way.  Mark, Luke’s source, has that Jesus was “baptized by John in the Jordan” but Luke takes out John here and changes the phraseology so that there’s an ambiguity about who exactly baptized Jesus: “when Jesus also had been baptized… ” (Lk 3:21-22).

Finally, the Gospel of John (1:29-34) is usually out in left-field in comparison to the synoptic gospels, but the material on John the Baptist and Jesus is one of the very few cross-overs.  How does the author of the gospel of John show what scholars call “embarrassment” here?  The gospel of John omits the baptism of Jesus altogether but still presents John’s proclamations about the superiority of Jesus (e.g. the “Lamb of God” that takes away the sins of the world) and the descent of the dove indicating Jesus’ special status.

So all of our sources for the relation between John the Baptist and Jesus reveal what could be called an embarrassment at the implications of the baptism itself, one gospel to the point of omitting the immersion altogether.  Mark, Matthew, and Luke could have likewise simply omitted this incident to avoid having to explain, but they included it despite their embarrassment.  It is highly unlikely that the authors of these sources made up the baptism, and in historical terms it is highly probable that Jesus was actually baptized by John the Baptist.  There are important corollaries of this piece of information, particularly relating to the apocalyptic worldview of John the Baptist, but I’ll have to save those for another post.

As I’m preparing to introduce second year students to the study of the historical Jesus, I am trying to pinpoint key issues and differences among scholars in order to highlight the problems in getting at that Galilean peasant.  Soon enough, I’ll come to scholars (e.g. E.P. Sanders) who might point to the ways in which the Galilean Jesus was concerned to observe the Judean (Jewish) practices outlined in the Torah or Law, including some or most of its ritual observances.  The proposal there would be that the difference between Jesus and many of his contemporaries was in the interpretation or application of those ritual laws, not in whether they were valid or not.

As I’m re-reading John Dominic Crossan’s book, however, I am starkly reminded of where his peasant Jesus diverges from some other portraits.  For Crossan, Jesus significantly diverged from the apocalyptic message of his mentor, John the Baptist.  John the Baptist’s warning of the imminent end and the impending kingdom of God in the near future was replaced by Jesus’ message focussed on transforming present arrangements in a way that acknowledged the kingdom of God in the present.

The central point of what Jesus was all about is centered on the implications of Jesus’ call for “open commensality” (meal practices open to anyone) in this present kingdom of God and it is related to the charge that Jesus was a glutton and a drunkard.  Crossan’s claim to find in Jesus an egalitarian view on gathering together at the meal and a randomness in Jesus’ notion of the gathered community that will have a part in the kingdom or reign of God (e.g. parable of the feast in Gospel of Thomas 64 // Luke 14:15-24) becomes the interpretive key for all other aspects of the historical Jesus.

Crossan’s focus on this issue has implications regarding the degree to which Jesus was an observer of Judean customs and ritual ways as outlined in the Torah.  You could even say that Crossan’s approach here determines the question of Jesus’ observance or non-observance of ritual requirements (apart from any other evidence or lack thereof):

it was obviously possible for the first Christian generations to debate whether Jesus was for or against the ritual laws of Judaism.  His position must have been, as it were, unclear.  I propose, from those preceding complexes [themes that converge in sayings of Jesus that center on open or egalitarian notions of meal practices, including the view that Jesus ate with sinners and was a glutton/drunkard], that he did not care enough about such ritual laws either to attack or to acknowledge them.  He ignored them, but that, of course, was to subvert them at a most fundamental level.  Later, however, some followers could say that, since he did not attack them, he must have accepted them [e.g. Crossan may be thinking of Matthew].  Others, contrariwise, could say that, since he did not follow them, he must have been against them [e.g. Crossan may be thinking of Mark].  Open commensality profoundly negates distinctions and hierarchies between female and male, poor and rich, Gentile and Jew.  It does so, indeed, at a level that would offend the ritual laws of any civilized society.  That was precisely its challenge (Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant [New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992], 263).

Are the sayings of Jesus pertaining to meals and eating the primary (or only) means by which his relation to Judean ritual customs can be determined? may be a question to ask.  There will be more to come on such things in future posts.