Are the Miracles in the Bible True?

Finally it is by no means clear what motivation the gospel writers would have had to invent these stories about Jesus in the first place. Their central claim is that Jesus was the Jewish messiah — and the messiah was supposed to be primarily a military hero rather than a miracle worker (see Is. 11:1-10, 16:5; Jer. 23:5, 33:15; Zech 6:12-14). It would have been far more apt for them to have invented tales of heroic military exploits than ones of healings and exorcisms. For these reasons, very few New Testament scholars (after decades of throwing every skepticism at the Bible) dispute the basic historical character of most of the gospel miracle stories. Radical scholars whose had their heyday in the early twentieth century simply have not persuaded many colleagues (Protestant, Catholic, or secular) that their portrait of a Jesus who never worked miracles is historically believable.

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This answer is long because Church teaching on the historicity of the gospel accounts of the miracle stories is somewhat complex. Below is an essay that ties together the various facets of Church teaching. It also gives arguments defending the historical character of the gospels as they pertain to accounts of Jesus' many miracles.

Are the gospels historically reliable?

Yes. The Church “unhesitatingly affirms” the historical character of the gospels. She also teaches that the gospels tell us far more than simply historical facts about Jesus. The Bible was written that we might believe in God's plan of salvation which culminates in God raising Jesus from the dead. The gospels are the living witnesses of the fulfillment of God's promise to reunite the whole world under the reign of Jesus.

Discussion

In affirming the inspired and inerrant character of the text Dei Verbum had this to say:

Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture, firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred scriptures.

Determining what the Biblical writers are really affirming is the hard part, since it is only this true meaning of the Bible that is really inspired and inerrant. In other words, it is easy to find “errors,” “deceptions” and “fraud” in the text when an interpreter mistakenly forces an inspired writer to say and mean things that he did not wish to affirm (see Catechism 109). The possibility cannot be excluded that Biblical writers sometimes use modes of expression where they really do not intend to record events according to standards of modern historiography. They may feel perfectly free to ignore certain extraneous details while highlighting others, bend time and space, and change the order of certain events, omitting some and extending others &#0151 all to present the historical Jesus in light of the resurrection faith of the early Church.

It is for this reason that Dei Verbum is very careful to insist that, while paying attention to the inspired and inerrant character of the text, interpreters must also pay attention to the literary forms in which the sacred text is expressed (see also Catechism 110). This is because “truth is differently expressed in various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts.” To understand “what the sacred writer wanted to affirm in his work, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic patterns of perception, speech and narrative, which prevailed at the age of the sacred writer.” In short, it is idle to accuse the sacred writer of “errors” in the details of his writings if the writer did not intend those details to achieve some idealized standard of modern historical exactitude. In truth, even modern history is invariably told from a point of view; the idea that any history can really ever amount to just unvarnished “facts” is one of the more dubious claims of the enlightenment. All historical writings inevitably involve the perspective of the historian.

But are the gospels historically reliable? Do the gospel writers intend their writings to describe events that actually happened? The short answer is yes. The Catholic Church unhesitatingly affirms the historical character of the four gospels. The gospels are much more than biographies of Jesus or historical reconstructions of Jesus' ministry but they are not less than either history or biography. As the Historicity of the Gospels puts it “Of the many elements at hand they reported some, summarized others, and developed still others in accordance with the needs of the various churches.” In the course of reporting summarizing and developing, the gospel authors tell us what actually happened but it is clear that the manner that they tell us is meant to communicate much more than just historical fact. They tell the story of Jesus in light of resurrection faith and with their overarching purpose to present to the world its Lord and savior.

Much is sometimes made of the fact that the order of events is somewhat different in each of the gospels and that the words of Jesus are a bit different even when Gospel writers appear to be recounting the same event. This is hardly a novel discovery. As the Historicity of the Gospels puts it, “The truth of the gospel account is not compromised because the Evangelists report the Lord's words and deeds in different order. Nor is it hurt because they report His words, not literally but in a variety of ways, while retaining the same meaning. As St. Augustine says: “It is quite probable that each Evangelist felt duty-bound to narrate his particular account in the order which God suggested to his memory. At least this would seem to hold true for those items in which order of treatment would not affect the authority or truth of the gospel.”

The fact that many of the same stories appear in each of the four gospels but with sometimes different details and in a very different order further suggests that the gospel writers were motivated by much more than rigid historical facticity as modern thinkers often suppose that history should be told. The gospels are not merely a blow-by-blow description of historical occurrences and the evangelists are not just artless chroniclers of dates and events. Rather gospels are very meticulously compiled inspired commentaries of the actual deeds and sayings of Our Lord. The gospels were not written to be disinterested reports of Jesus but were crafted that readers might believe, and that believers might be confirmed in their faith. They are historical, but the history they give us is presented in terms of inspired theology. Both this theology and the needs of their Biblical writer's audience have helped to shape what they have told us.

Splitting the Difference Between Two Extremes

There is a sense in which the Catholic position on the history of the New Testament goes right down the middle between the two extremes. One extreme holds that the accounts are pure theology and myth with little or no basis in historical fact. Under this view the Gospels are witnesses to the faith of the early Church but not to the actual sayings and deeds of Jesus Christ. This was the view of Rudolf Bultmann and a variety of other scholars whose heyday was in the first half of the twentieth century.

The other extreme claims that the gospels are little more than brute facts which must correspond in a positivistic way to the actual events. This is the view of Biblical Fundamentalism. According to the 1993 document Interpreting the Bible in the Church, the Pontifical Biblical Commission states that fundamentalism “places undue stress upon the inerrancy of certain details in the biblical texts, especially in what concerns historical events or supposedly scientific truth. It often historicizes material which from the start never claimed to be historical. It considers historical everything that is reported or recounted with verbs in the past tense, failing to take the necessary account of the possibility of symbolic or figurative meaning.”

The Catholic Church rejects both extremes of radical historical criticism and Biblical fundamentalism. And there admittedly is some room for disagreement between the two extremes, which is why interpreters sometimes suggest that a given event is more theologically shaped than historical in every detail. We at CUF tend to think that some modern commentators are often a bit too quick to dismiss the historicity of a given detail particularly when that there is a catechetical truth which hangs upon the historicity of the account.

The Challenge of the Enlightenment

How then can we know that the gospels are historically reliable? The central assertion of those attacking the gospels in the last three hundred years has been to argue that the gospels only witness to the early Church's belief about Jesus. They do not, as the argument goes, provide reliable testimony to the actual historic ministry of Jesus. The miraculous events in particular as described in the gospels are largely legendary embellishments having no more than a kernel of truth in the life of the actual Jesus of history. Can we answer the criticism that the gospels are little more than early Christian legend and folklore?

In fact, the evidence that Jesus did perform miracles is nothing short of overwhelming. There are attestations to Jesus' miracles in each of the gospels. According to the most prevalent modern Gospel source theory, this amounts to at least three independent witnesses that hold that Jesus was a miracle worker. In addition nearly all of the noncanonical “gospels” and “acts” of the period, though not scripture, do indeed bear witness to later historical testimony about Jesus as a healer of the sick and an exorcist. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus even attests that Jesus “the so called Christ” was a doer of great signs and wonders. Beyond this, there is very good reason to believe that Jesus' miracles were continued through the ministry of the apostles in the early Church. Paul asserts that he himself performed under Jesus' power “signs and wonders” in both the letters to the Romans (Rom. 15:19) and to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 12:12). Paul was not telling tall tales but writing pastoral letters to real life communities in which his own credibility as an apostle hung in the balance. Falsely claiming to have performed miracles would be a highly damning assertion to make if it were not true and believed true by the Roman and Corinthian communities who had witnessed them.

Many scholars have noted also that if the gospel writers were to invent tales of miracles they would not have included details which were potentially embarrassing. When in Mark's gospel Jesus' first round of miracles draws large crowds, his own friends try to seize him and declare him mad (Mk. 3:20-22). Matthew and Luke exclude the part about his own friends trying to seize him. Mark also records Jesus marveling at the lack of faith of his own people and actual inability to do many mighty works among them (Mk 6:1-6). Later also in Mark, Jesus must make two attempts to heal a blind man, for after the first attempt the man's sight was not fully restored (Mk 8:22-26). Again, if Mark (who critical scholars hold is the earliest gospel writer) had wanted to invent miracle stories to build up a legendary Jesus what would be his possible motivation for including details such as these — unless of course the events really happened more or less in these strange ways.