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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2010
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.
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.
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3 Evans, R.J., In Defence of History (London: Granta Books), p. 219.
4 Heron, p. 97f.
5 Ibid, p. 86.
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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.
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18 Ibid, p. 87.
19 Ibid, p. 89f.
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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.