MetaCatholic

It’s always risky to comment on a short summary of a longer discussion one wasn’t present at. Nonetheless, I was struck by this bit of James Crossley’s summary of SBL. He’s referring to his response to Richard Bauckhams’s new stress on eyewitness testimony behind the gospels.

The point of my paper was a thought experiment: ‘What if…Richard Bauckham is right about eyewitnesses’. As Bauckham used bits and pieces from eyewitnesses, I pointed out, does this mean they were eyewitnesses to miracles? If they were eyewitnesses to miracles then did the miracles really happen? If so, and given the use of approaches from professional historians and the general rhetoric of ‘doing good history’, then the discipline of history would have to be completely revolutionised, something akin to ID replacing/seriously challenging evolution. If the eyewitnesses did not see miracles did they then invent stories. I explicitly did not make a single judgment on the rights and wrongs or accepting the supernatural (lots of ‘rightly or wronglys’ in there). I wanted to see what the answer might be and what happens next. In direct relation to all this, I also discussed the idea of re-writing history (esp. haggadic stuff but replace that with whatever model you like) and whether eyewitnesses you (sic) create fictive stories.

I would suggest that if we are talking about doing history, then first of all we need to note that “the miraculous” and “the supernatural” are anachronistic concepts with which we read the stories. They are not the ways in which the eyewitnesses and / or story-tellers narrated the powerful deeds they are talking about. Things attributed directly to acts of God or his messengers, human and angelic, occupy a spectrum that ranges from things we would now explain by other scientific or naturalistic narratives, through to things that we are unable to explain and therefore classify as (possibly fictive) miracles. It is, broadly speaking, we who distinguish the nature of the events, whereas they distinguished the degree of power or divine immediacy.

Let us assume, for a moment, that continuing research into mind-body relationships allow us a better understanding of psychosomatic illness, which might well include such things as skin complaints (leprosy) and back problems (the paralytic). It is also conceivable that other acts of healing might find similar explanations. Our response then would be to move these events from one potential category to another, and what was hitherto thought of as miraculous becomes seen as naturalistic, and therefore “historical” within the post-Enlightenment frame of reference.

Now I am not, generally, a fan of seeking naturalistic explanations for miracles. Too many of them seem to belong to taming the difficult and making scripture palatable for a particular philosophy. But it does seem to me that this example illustrates that there is not just a problem with the nature of the material, but also with our (alien) categorisation of it.

Good history, it seems to me, deals with what people narrate about what they saw, then with how they conceptualised its signification, and only then with how we appraise it. It does seem to me to be difficult, historically speaking, not to attribute the power of healing, for example, to Jesus.

• It was attributed to others also.
• It exists in every stratum of the material.
• It is presented in a variety of contexts and ways.
• It helps account for his popularity and hence threat-significance to the authorities better than a simple teaching picture does.
• It seems to belong to the non-challenged “facts” that the earliest Christians assert as apologetic.
• It helps account for the place of healing among the expectations of the church.

Thus a reading of the evidence does point towards Jesus being widely perceived to be a healer. How we assess that is not, strictly speaking, a historical question, but a philosophical one. One may wish to go on to question whether an Enlightenment philosophy of history is the best one available, or whether the discipline needs challenging. Or one may wish to draw attention to the way in which some people seem to undergo spontaneous remission from or recovery in their illnesses even today, and assert that with fuller understanding we will be able to reach a better appreciation of the question. (Before you say so, I know I haven’t touched on the different and more difficult question of the nature miracles.)

It does, however, seem to me that historians, precisely as historians,need to recognise that within the culture of the past, we need to see the common acceptance of acts of spiritual power as part and parcel of people’s lives, not as supernatural disruptions of ordinary existence. This is part of the framework by which they interpreted the world, which the historian must enter into sympathetically (though not uncritically). The antithesis between “seeing miracles” and “telling stories” is anachronistic in its starkness, and one that gets in the way of an appropriate assessment of the evidence.