DID JESUS REALLY PERFORM MIRACLES? By John Shelby Spong

For many people the title of this column represents a silly question. The pages of the gospels are filled with stories of supernatural happenings associated with Jesus. Most people, however, have very little sense of the actual content or meaning of these miracle accounts or how differently they are portrayed in each gospel. Some of these miracles have to do with the world of nature. Jesus is described as having power over the forces of the natural world. He stills the storm. He walks on water. He expands the food supply apparently feeding multitudes with a finite number of loaves. He even assists the disciples in catching fish. In what is perhaps the most bizarre miracle story in the Bible, Jesus pronounces a curse on a fig tree, which then begins to shrivel and die. Did these things really happen? Can they happen? Is there any other way to read these narratives except as supernatural events? A post-Newtonian world wants to know.

Next there are Jesus' healing miracles. Mark, the first gospel writer (70-72 C.E.), has not completed his first chapter before he tells the story of Jesus healing a man who was "possessed by an unclean spirit." Later in this same chapter, Jesus heals Simon Peter's mother-in-law of a fever. He then is said to have conducted massive healings and to have cast out numerous demons, about which no details are given. To conclude this opening chapter, Mark says that Jesus also cleansed a leper. On reading these ancient stories we become aware, at the very least, that first century diagnoses differed widely from those in the twentyfirst century.

Miracles continue to dot Mark's landscape. In chapter two, it is a paralyzed man who is enabled to walk. In chapter three, it is a man with a withered hand who is healed on the Sabbath. In chapter five, it is a woman with a chronic menstrual discharge who finds healing when she touches Jesus and then, perhaps in the most dramatic narrative in his gospel, Mark next relates the account of Jesus raising from the dead the daughter of Jairus, a leader of the synagogue. Before Mark's story is complete, more accounts are given of epileptics who are cured by casting out demons, deaf people who are enabled to hear, mute people who are enabled to speak and blind people who are enabled to see. There is no doubt in the minds of many Christians that Mark saw the life of Jesus as surrounded by the presence of supernatural miraculous power.

However, Mark is quite restrained when describing miraculous events connected with both Jesus' entry into this world and his exit from this world. For example, there is in his gospel no narrative of a miraculous birth of Jesus and no story of a dramatic exit into heaven at the end of his life. Even the account of Jesus' resurrection is muted in Mark. In this gospel the risen Christ makes no appearance to anyone. Mark gives us only a picture of an empty tomb and tells us of an announcement made by "a young man dressed in a white robe." His text ends quite suddenly with the 8th verse of chapter 16.

When Matthew writes his gospel about a decade later, he copies into it some ninety percent of Mark. In Matthew's text we discover a tendency to exaggerate or to heighten the miraculous. For example, it is Matthew who introduces the virgin birth tradition together with a magical star in the sky. The purpose of this star is twofold. First it announces to the world Jesus' birth, and then it wanders so slowly through the sky that the magi are able to follow it to their destination. Matthew adds an earthquake to the story of the crucifixion that was, he says, so powerful that it opened the graves of the dead enabling deceased people came back to life and to be "seen by many." Matthew places a second earthquake into his story of Easter and transforms Mark's messenger from "a young man in a white robe" to a supernatural angel, who causes the Temple guards around the tomb to fall into a deathlike stupor, while this angel rolls back the stone from the sepulcher before making the resurrection announcement. In a direct contradiction of Mark, who said the women did not see the risen Christ on Easter morning but rather fled in fear, Matthew says that the women were granted the first resurrection sighting and that the raised Jesus was so physical they could even "grasp his feet." Other than these changes, Matthew proceeds to copy into his text all of the other miracle stories attributed to Jesus in Mark.

Luke, writing perhaps a decade after Matthew, also has Mark in front of him as he writes, but is less dependent on Mark than Matthew had been, copying only about fifty per cent of Mark's gospel into his text. It is interesting to note how Luke treats this Marcan material. Sometimes he tempers Mark's supernaturalism. For example, Mark had two feeding of the multitudes stories in his gospel, but Luke uses only one of them. He also omits Mark's account of Jesus cursing the fig tree. On other occasions, however, Luke expands the miraculous tradition. He adds a second 'raising from the dead' story, involving a widow's son in the village of Nain. He also adds a narrative about the ten lepers who were cleansed but only one, a Samaritan, returns to give thanks. Furthermore, Luke fashions new details in his account of the virgin birth. First, he adds the story of the birth of John the Baptist to a post-menopausal couple. This fulfilled a promise made to John's father Zechariah by the angel Gabriel, who then struck Zechariah mute because he did not believe. Next this same angel tells Mary that she is to be a virgin mother. Then angels split the midnight sky to sing to hillside shepherds. The angels are busy in Luke. Luke alone tells us that the unborn John the Baptist actually saluted the unborn Jesus when they were both in their mothers' wombs to demonstrate that John knew of Jesus' superiority to him even before they were born. Can this be history? Finally Luke 'supernaturalizes' the resurrection story more dramatically than any gospel writer before him. Mark's young man in a white robe, who became a supernatural angel in Matthew, now becomes two supernatural angels. The resurrection in Luke becomes identical with physical resuscitation. After forty days of resurrection appearances Luke culminates the Easter story with Jesus' gravity-defying exit into the sky as he returns to his heavenly origins.

Finally, John, writing some thirty years after Mark and apparently not dependent on Mark at all, adds miracle stories that appear to have been unknown to earlier generations of Jesus' followers. John tells us of Jesus turning water into wine, restoring an invalid of thirty-eight years to wholeness, healing a man born blind and raising the four-days-dead Lazarus from his tomb in a very public way. Yet, John omits any reference to a miraculous birth. In this gospel the resurrected Jesus has become so physical that he says to Magdalene at the tomb, "don't cling to me" and allows Thomas to inspect his wounds. Still his body is portrayed as having the ability to walk through walls and to disappear instantaneously. There is an ascension that is spoken of and assumed in John, but it is never described.

These gospel miracle stories raise many questions among those who dare to think about them. These questions are: If Jesus publicly raised from the dead Lazarus, the brother of close disciples Mary and Martha, why did this story not appear until the tenth decade in the Christian tradition? Since modem medicine does not acknowledge demon possession as a legitimate diagnosis, what are these narratives about? If Jesus actually had the power to transform five loaves of bread into a sufficient quantity of food to feed thousands after which baskets of leftovers could be gathered, then why does God allow human starvation in various parts of the

world until this very day? If miraculous power is attributed to a supernatural, intervening deity, where did this God go when the Holocaust was carried out in Auschwitz and Treblinka, when the Tsunami wave killed hundreds of thousands in the Indian Ocean or when Hurricane Katrina bore down on New Orleans? If the resurrected body of Jesus was as physical as Luke and John suggest, why did no one other than believers see him? On what basis do those who believe in miracles believe that God decides to intervene here and not there, to save this life and not that life, to cure this illness and not that one? The questions go on and on.

The whole issue of miracles is far more complex than most people imagine and far more revealing than a cursory look at the gospels will reveal. Are there other ways to view these two thousand-year-old miracle stories than as manifestations of supernatural intervention? Was it miracles that caused people in the first century to believe that Jesus was divine? Or were the miracles attributed to him because they had already been convinced that he was divine and this was the only way they knew how to say it? Were these stories of Jesus' supernatural power acts of history that really happened? Or were they interpretive attempts to describe experiences for which human language has no proper vocabulary?

I intend to address these and many other questions in a series of columns that will appear periodically over the fall. I have four goals in mind in doing this series. First, I want to separate Jesus from a pre-modern supernatural framework in which he has been captured for far too long so that when this supernatural framework dies, as it is doing, Jesus will not die with it. Second, I want to show people that reading the New Testament as if it is literal history is one of the least edifying things that one can do spiritually and one of the most naive things that one can do intellectually. Third, I want to demonstrate that a commitment to Jesus as Lord is not a commitment to believe the unbelievable or to defend the indefensible. Finally, I want to set the stage for developing a new appreciation for the sacred text that Christians call the Holy Bible, which will enable twenty-first century people to enter its pages and hear its message anew without having to turn their minds into first century pretzels.

Those, I believe, are lofty goals. I hope my readers will find this study worthwhile. John Shelby Spong