[A]nd this method of cure is of great force unto this day; for I have seen a certain man of my own country whose name was Eleazar, releasing people that were demoniacal in the presence of Vespasian, and his sons, and his captains, and the whole multitude of his soldiers. The manner of the cure was this: He put a ring that had a root of one of those sorts mentioned by Solomon to the nostrils of the demoniac, after which he drew out the demon through his nostrils; and when the man fell down immediately, he abjured him to return into him no more, making still mention of Solomon, and reciting the incantations which he composed. And when Eleazar would persuade and demonstrate to the spectators that he had such a power, he set a little way off a cup or basin full of water, and commanded the demon, as he went out of the man, to overturn it, and thereby to let the spectators know that he had left the man; and when this was done, the skill and wisdom of Solomon was shown very manifestly.
Josephus explicitly emphasizes his own status as eyewitness (historēsa) at the beginning of the story. We have no reason to doubt it. Apparently there were quite a few Jewish exorcists in the first century. This is, in fact, confirmed by Jesus himself when he defends himself against the accusation that he is driving out demons with the aid of the prince of demons: “If I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your own exorcists [Greek: sons] cast them out? Therefore they will be your judges” (Matt 12:27; Luke 11:19).
So Josephus tells of demons being driven out by a Jewish exorcist. What is most revealing in this is the way he proceeds: by calling on the name of Solomon, with magical formulae that supposedly come from Solomon, and by causing the victim to smell a magical root. That draws the demon out of the possessed person. Finally, the demons are also adjured not to return. We know from Luke 9:49 that another Jewish exorcist used the name “Jesus” in his treatment of possessed persons—further proof of the activity of Jewish exorcists! Apparently they too were successful.
But the difference between them and Jesus is striking: in his exorcisms Jesus never made use of a “name.” He acted on his own authority. Above all: he never employed magical practices. Finally, he did not stage any demonstrations as Eleazar did in causing the expelled demon to upset a basin.
Besides Eleazar we can mention two other Jewish names: Honi the Circle-Drawer (first c. BCE) and Chanina ben Dosa (first c. CE). Both were charismatics, wonder workers, and people who healed by prayer. Honi was famous for his prayer for rain. It is said that during a period of severe drought he drew a circle, placed himself within it, and said that he would not leave that circle until God caused it to rain. Thereupon it rained so heavily that he had to beg God for a suitable amount of rain (m. Ta‘anit 3.8). Both these men worked their miracles through insistent prayer—and that in itself is completely atypical of Jesus.12
So if we look at Jesus’ environment we see that it did indeed contain healers and miracle workers. We even find a certain number of well-attested accounts of miracles. But they are clearly different from the stories about Jesus’ miracles. Moreover, there was no miracle worker in antiquity besides Jesus from whom we have such a large number of plausibly attested miracles handed down to us.
Structural Matters
This fact is not changed by the way New Testament exegesis, since the introduction of the so-called form-critical method, has demanded a comparison among New Testament, Old Testament, Jewish, and Hellenistic miracle narratives. Not only have the structures of all the texts in question been investigated; their motifs have also been compared in detail. This has revealed a large number of common motifs and has shown that the basic structure of miracle stories is frequently repeated.
To make it clear to the reader what we are talking about I will quote from the influential book by Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, where he gives a list of typical and frequently recurring motifs in miracle stories.13 The list given here is only partial and is much more refined in Bultmann’s work.
Information on the length of the illness
Dangerous character of the illness
Ineffective treatment by doctors
Doubts about the miracle worker
Approach of the miracle worker to the sick person
Removal of the onlookers
Touching the sick person with the hand
A miracle-working word
Description of the success
Demonstration of the success
Dismissal of the healed person
Impression of the miracle on those present
Of course, the motifs vary among individual texts. Sometimes there are more, sometimes fewer, and sometimes they are accompanied by additional motifs. This is therefore an ideal list divorced from all the particularities of a given text. Further work has been done on the motifs in New Testament miracle stories since Bultmann. Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz have materially refined and expanded the list.14
What should we say about the whole matter? Making such lists is a good thing. Abstracting the typical features of a text can help us better understand individual texts. In addition, the process reveals the “international” form-language of the time that was used to tell about miracles. But as helpful as such lists can be, they are also deceptive because they promote the impression that the gospels’ miracle texts are freely composed fantasies based on an inventory of motifs that was available at the time. In addition, we should consider that this inventory of motifs, composed two thousand years after the fact, has been cobbled together out of all possible literary directions and angles. These lists are made up on the basis of texts that are fundamentally different in their form and intent. They include temple inscriptions, magical texts, fairy tales, ancient novels—and also historical works.15
We should also consider that the motif complex “miracle story” is to a degree simply a given on the basis of the thing itself. The healer must approach the sick person or the sick person the healer. Otherwise the two would not encounter one another. Normally (except in the case of healings at a distance) the healer will also touch the sick person and speak a powerful word. Could the healer keep silence and remain at a distance? Likewise, the success of the healing must be marked in some way. Otherwise there would be no need to tell the story in the first place. The fact that those present then react in some way to the miracle is also typically human. It could not be otherwise, and it is an integral part of the miracle.
Add one other thing: language is always socially shaped. That is its nature. Our speech is much more strongly affected than we suspect by existing forms and structures. We write our letters according to models of which we are scarcely aware. Politicians’ statements are stereotypical to the point of banality. Even declarations of love are usually preformed down to the last detail. Those who think they speak in a form they themselves have created independently, one that has never existed before and owes its shape only to the particular situation, deceive themselves mightily. New types of forms succeed but rarely. And scarcely have they begun to exist before they become common property. Because all that is so, we can conclude nothing about the historicity of an event solely from the form in which it is related—neither that what is told is historical nor that it is unhistorical.
Therefore, the crucial question about Jesus’ miracles is not about their form. Ultimately, the issue is always a decision: are miracles possible? And what is a miracle, after all? I will now address this question.
The Concept of Miracles
The biblical concept of miracle is not equivalent to the apologetically colored notion of miracles in the neoscholasticism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As we have already seen, the gospels speak of Jesus’ “deeds of power” and “signs.” Obviously these refer to miracles. But in the Old and New Testaments, the concept of miracle was still wide open. It was not about “natural laws” in the modern sense and most certainly not about breaking them. For the Bible a miracle is something unusual, inexplicable, incomprehensible, disturbing, unexpected, shocking, something that amazes and that
explodes the ordinary, something by which God plucks people out of their indifference and causes them to look to him. But—in precisely the opposite direction—miracles could also appear in the midst of the everyday: for example, in the experience that God continually supports and sustains the created order (Ps 136:4-9). For biblical people God is constantly speaking to his people, and therefore every happy result, every story of rescue, even the glory of creation can be experienced as a miracle.
Since the appearance of modern thought, however, miracles have fallen into the slipstream of enlightened criticism. The world is to be explained in secular terms, that is, with respect for its own laws and processes. In view of this paradigm shift, theology sought to protect miracles and in the course of its apologetic defense it defined them more clearly, as “events contrary to nature.” So this means that God breaks natural laws. From time to time he intervenes directly in the world’s causal connections in order to demonstrate his power in a plausible way.
But the Bible spoke of things that were unusual, amazing, having sign-character, and not of a rupture of natural laws at certain points in time. This openness of the original biblical concept of miracle makes room for today’s theology to formulate the uniqueness of miracles more appropriately, that is, more in accordance with the nature of creation.
If we are better to understand the nature of miracles, we have to consistently apply what theology has discovered regarding the notion of “grace” to the question of miracles. It often happens that theological problems attached to a particular point have long since been resolved in other parts of theology. What has today’s theology of grace to say in this regard?16 It says that when a person receives grace from God two freedoms encounter one another: the freedom of God and that of the human being. God never intervenes in the world by avoiding human freedom and independence. God does not replace by his own action what human beings ought to do. God does not put divine freedom in place of human freedom. Divine grace does not destroy human action but makes it possible and builds it up.
At the same time the theology of grace insists, as a consequence of the theology of creation, that God does not act as an “intra-worldly cause” (causa secunda). That is, God does not intervene directly in the world, going around the lawful course of creation. It is true that God is constantly and unceasingly at work, but in his own way. He acts as the world-transcending cause outside and beyond the world (causa prima). So the doctrine of grace arrives at the formula: God must do everything, and the human being must do everything. Where God’s work happens in history it is entirely and completely the work of God—but at the same time it is entirely and completely human work.17
These insights from the doctrine of grace must now be applied to miracles, for a miracle, as we have said, is only a special case of God’s constant work in the world. If we see a miracle as part of what God has always been graciously bringing about in the world, we must say that a genuine miracle is done by God, but precisely not in such a way that God sets aside human action and the laws of nature. Rather, every miracle is at the same time always a bringing to the fore what human and nature are able to do. Natural laws are thus not broken but elevated to a higher level. The miracle exalts nature; it does not bore holes in it. It does not destroy the natural order of things but brings it to its fulfillment.18
This view of miracles has the advantage, in any case, that natural scientists are not deprived from the outset of any opportunity to consider the theological concept of miracles possible. Indeed, they cannot do otherwise than proceed as they do, since they have to speak of natural laws that—at least statistically—are not broken. Their scientific presuppositions and premises obligate them to reckon with a homogeneous field of physical causes.19 Theology has no right to try to talk them out of that position.
The view of miracles presented here is favored above all, however, by the fact that it can take seriously the independence of nature and the human. This is immediately apparent in Jesus’ healing miracles: in the gospels they occur only when someone “believes.” Jesus says to the woman with the hemorrhage, “Daughter, your faith has made you well: go in peace, and be healed of your disease” (Mark 5:34). So it was her faith that healed the woman, her belief in Jesus as the savior. But it was her faith, and if she had not had such faith she would not have been healed of the “scourging blows” (thus the underlying Greek word) of her illness. Here we find a fully independent meaning of “faith” in the context of miracle stories. It appears nowhere else in antiquity. Ancient miracle stories were always about whether or not the witnesses or recipients of the action are persuaded of the reality of the miracle. Here, in contrast, the sick person herself must believe; otherwise, she will not be healed.
We find many similar passages in the gospels.20 Again and again faith in God is demanded—in God, who is now acting in Jesus. This is about God’s creative power, but also about Jesus, who in every miracle stands in God’s stead. If that faith is not present, the miracle cannot happen. In Nazareth, Mark says quite explicitly, Jesus could not work any miracles because they did not believe in him there (Mark 6:5-6). So Jesus is elementally dependent on faith if he is to heal. In Mark 11:23 Jesus dares a radically pointed statement: “Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you.” Human action in miracles cannot be more sharply emphasized: without faith, nothing happens. This is the proper context for the observation that Jesus healed only individuals. He did not perform any group healings. It was only the apocryphal Acts of apostles that began to tell of mass healings. This again shows that the inbreaking of the reign of God is not a spectacle. God’s action is tied to the faith of concrete people. The reign of God needs believers who freely open themselves to it.
What is true of people is also true of so-called nature. It too must “share” in the action, must participate, must play its part. Natural laws are not broken; they are put in service of a new and greater whole. No ordinary human action, certainly not one undertaken in freedom, puts the corresponding natural laws (such as the principle of inertia) out of effect. When a human being acts by free decision, then spirit, person, freedom, or whatever we call it interferes with the material world—but not as if human freedom eliminated natural laws; it does not abrogate but “elevates” them. In this connection we can speak of the “plasticity,” the “malleability,” of matter or nature.21 Analogously to the synergy between spirit and matter, God’s action, when it enters the world through the faith of a human being, does not destroy the laws of matter but raises them to a new level.
Therefore I have no problem, in the case of Jesus’ miracles, with taking into account all the “natural” forces that can otherwise be observed in great physicians and healers or experienced educators. As the acts of human freedom do not abrogate the physical laws but put them at their service, so in the case of Jesus his existence altogether in harmony with the will of God called upon the powers of the world, extending into a profound depth that is impenetrable to us even today. To set aside these natural abilities of Jesus would mean denying him his real humanity.
No one can define where the limits of “nature” in this sphere lie, unless one would lay claim to having an absolutely complete and comprehensive knowledge of all the powers at work in nature. Who would dare to make such an assertion? Professional medicine is aware that, for example, in some malignant carcinomas, there can be “spontaneous healings” that cannot be explained but may have to do with holistic phenomena such as “inner attitude” and “unconditional will to heal.” We also know about the so-called placebo effect, the observation that the expectation of being healed can activate the body’s powers of self-healing, even if the treatment has not involved the application of any effective pharmacological means. Apparently every person has powers of self-healing, but they require the kairos, the right moment, the right constellation, and often the right person to
set them in motion—the person of the healer.
In summary, we need not defend ourselves against the natural dimensions of biblical miracles. That is no denial of their divine dimension. Here again the old scholastic axiom applies: “grace presupposes nature and perfects it.” The biblical miracles would lose their strangeness or embarrassing character if, finally, what the theology of grace has long since worked out were applied to them. Let me again emphasize that taking seriously the “natural” dimensions of a miracle by no means excludes the action of God. God always acts in and through the world’s autonomy.
Demons
The view of miracles described here is also compatible with Jesus’ exorcisms. I have already pointed out that in antiquity in general, and also in Judaism, all that is chaotic and destructive could be attributed to demonic powers. This was true in particular of psychoses and mental illness in general. If a sick person’s identity was disturbed, or if she or he had lost all self-control, it was all too easy to assume that the person was possessed by a demon.
Beyond that, it is important to keep in mind that at the time it was simply assumed that there was such a thing as “possession” in this sense and also that someone who was possessed could be freed from his or her demons through exorcisms. This made it easy for sick people, the handicapped, the oppressed, people in hopeless situations—in short, all those who were socially stigmatized—to slip into the role of a possessed person. Normally this was a completely unconscious move. Those who were pushed to the edges of society thus had a “social construct” at their disposal that made it possible for them to give expression to their socially hopeless situation “in a language of symptoms which is publicly acceptable.”22 They thus succeeded in being noticed, having people pay attention to them and “treat” them. Cecile Ernst, in a study on the driving out of devils in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for which—in contrast to the biblical exorcisms—we have extensive biographical material at our disposal, has demonstrated precisely this phenomenon.23
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