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MIRACLES AND THE NEW TESTAMENT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

George A. Wells
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Extract

C.S. Lewis, the scholar of English mediaeval and Renaissance literature who died in 1963 and is still widely respected as a Christian apologist, complained that academic biblical scholars simply assume that miracles cannot have occurred in the fashion reported in the New Testament. In a lecture quoted by A.I.C. Heron1, he said: ‘The canon “If miraculous, unhistorical” is one they bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it.’ In fact, as John Kent retorted, they did not rule out in advance the idea of supernatural events, but were able, without it, to give adequate and plausible accounts of how the biblical documents reached their present form, by means of a method ‘based on questions of probability in terms of evidence’, not ‘on an a priori rejection of miracle’.2 Conclusions concerning historical events of any kind are similarly based. ‘No historians’, says the historian R.J. Evans, ‘really believe in the absolute truth of what they are writing, simply in its probable truth, which they have done their utmost to establish by following the usual rules of evidence’.3 To this question of ‘absolute’ truth I shall return.

Type
Research Article
Information
Think , Volume 9 , Issue 26 , Autumn 2010 , pp. 43 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2010

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References

Notes

1 Heron, A.I.C. ‘What is Wrong with Biblical Exegesis?’ In Different Gospels Christian Orthodoxy and Modern Theology, ed. Walker, A. (London: SPCK, 1993) pp. 86–104, p. 94Google Scholar.

2 Kent, J. The End of the Line? The Development of Christian Theology in the Last Two Centuries (London: SCM,1982) p.128Google Scholar.

3 Evans, R.J., In Defence of History (London: Granta Books), p. 219.

4 Heron, p. 97f.

5 Ibid, p. 86.

6 Dodd, C.H. The Founder of Christianity (London: Collins, 1971), p. 32Google Scholar.

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9 Richardson, A.The Miracle Stories of the Gospels (London: SCM, 1941), p. 130Google Scholar.

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12 Ibid, p. 48f.

13 Wiles, M. ‘Miracles in the Early Church’. In Moule, 1965, pp. 221–234, p. 225.Google Scholar

14 Ibid, p. 234.

15 Ibid, pp. 230–32.

16 Hagner, D.A. ‘An Analysis of Recent “Historical Jesus” Studies’. In Religious Diversity in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. Cohn-Sherbok, D. and Court, J.M. (Sheffield: Academic Press, 2001), pp. 81–106, pp. 91, 106Google Scholar.

17 O'Loughlin, T., 2001. ‘The Early Church’, In Religious Diversity, as cited under Hagner above, pp. 124–142, p. 135.

18 Ibid, p. 87.

19 Ibid, p. 89f.

20 Ibid, p. 91.

21 Ehrman, B.D.Jesus Interrupted. Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), p. 173Google Scholar.

22 O'Loughlin, p. 138.

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26 Lampe, p. 165.

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28 Lampe, p. 209.

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30 Lampe, p. 215.

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35 Bauckham, R.Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. The Gospels as EyewitnessTestimony (Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Cambridge, U.K.: 2006), p. 476Google Scholar.

36 Huxley, T.H.Science and Christian Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 226Google Scholar.

37 Ibid, p. 200.

38 Ibid, pp. 203–04.

39 Flew, A. Edition of David Hume's 'Of Miracles' (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1985), p.14.

40 Houston, J.Reported Miracles. A Critique of Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 156, 158Google Scholar.

41 Ibid, p. 134.

42 Ibid, p. 256.

43 Ibid, pp. 122f.

44 Ibid, p. 148.

45 Ibid, p. 161, emphases added.

46 Earman, J.Hume's Abject Failure. The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. viiiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.