Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

We are already—it was pretty much inevitable—involved in the history of how people have dealt with Jesus’ miracles. That is a broad field, but it cannot be altogether avoided. Precisely from the way in which people have dealt with the miracle stories in the four gospels over the last three hundred years we can learn a great deal about how to approach these miracles in appropriate fashion. How have people treated Jesus’ miracles?

Enlightenment

Biblical miracles have lived a hard life since the European Enlightenment. While before that they were almost a matter of course, something that illuminated Jesus’ divinity, afterward they became an embarrassment. Nowadays they are sometimes simply disputed. The principle of analogy is applied; it can be formulated, somewhat simplified, as: “What does not happen now did not happen then either. If no one today can walk on a lake, Jesus did not walk on water.”

The theologians of the Enlightenment period found the matter somewhat more difficult, of course. Since they did not want to frivolously deny the miracle stories found in the Bible, some of them undertook to explain those stories “rationally” and make them “understandable” for enlightened people. With authors such as K. F. Bahrdt (1740–1792), K. H. G. Venturini (1768–1849), or H. E. G. Paulus (1761–1851), this could take abstruse forms.⁹ Since “secret orders” had been growing in Europe since the eighteenth century, it seemed plausible that there were such “secret orders” in Jesus’ time as well. And who might have belonged to such a society? Obviously, the mysterious Essenes. So Jesus belonged to the Essenes and shared their goal: bringing the superstitious people to a genuine religion of reason.

Of course, in doing so Jesus had to use some slick means in order to reach the people to begin with. Therefore, even though he only wanted to be a wise enlightener, he appeared in the role of Messiah and worked with well-organized and skillfully applied staging. For the multiplication of the loaves, for example, bread had already been collected in a cave; it was then handed to Jesus out of the darkness by Essene assistants and distributed by the disciples. The Syrophoenician woman’s daughter received medicine from a disciple who took it from Jesus’ portable medicine chest while Jesus himself engaged the mother in conversation. To walk on the lake Jesus used floating planks. And so on.

We smile at this, and yet the rationalizations of Jesus’ miracles have continued until today. How often do we still hear that the miraculous multiplication of loaves consisted in the fact that, after Jesus’ table prayer, some of those assembled reached into their pockets, took out some bread, and shared it with their neighbors. That was infectious. Because eventually all shared their bread with one another, everyone was satisfied. Or we read with astonishment that the calming of the storm was nothing more than that after Jesus’ word of command the storm simply subsided, not in nature, but in the perception of the disciples. Jesus took away their fear.

As much as all that falls short of the essence of Jesus’ miracles, the attempts at explanation are right about one thing: reason may not be dismissed when we are faced with miracles. Rationality must also have access to Jesus’ miracles.

History of Religions

Does this rational access consist in the application of the techniques of comparative religion? Yes and no! Obviously, Jesus’ miracles must be compared to all those reported in the Old Testament, in Judaism, and in antiquity. As a result we see that, in fact, there are a few well-attested miracles there as well, and their historicity cannot be doubted. These include, for example, the healing of two men by Vespasian (9–79 CE), recounted for us by Tacitus and Suetonius.¹⁰ According to Tacitus (ca. 58–120 CE) this happened in the year 70.