Christ's Testimony Confirmed by His Miracles

Many Rationalists maintain, as a matter of principle, that miracles are impossible, and consequently deny either the historical reality of the Gospel miracles outright, or, at least, their properly supernatural character. So held Paulus and Strauss in the nineteenth century. Others, Renan among them, hold that Christ’s cures were effected simply by mental suggestion, and that these merely natural cures were later exaggerated and idealized by the tradition that grew up around them; Harnack’s own view is, in practice, very close to Renan’s.

Article 1 — The Miracles of Christ

I. Classification of the miracles of Christ. St. Thomas classifies Christ’s miracles according to three broad categories.

(a) Miracles wrought on celestial and irrational creatures: the star of the Nativity (Matt. 2:2); the change of water into wine at Cana (John 2:1–11); the miraculous draught of fishes (Luke 5:1–11; John 21:1–13); the finding of the stater in the fish’s mouth (Matt. 17:23–26); two multiplications of the loaves (Matt. 14:15–21; Mark 6:39–44; Luke 9:12–17; John 6:5–13; and Matt. 15:32–38; Mark 8:1–9); the calming of the storm (Matt. 8:18–27; Mark 4:35–41; Luke 8:22–25); walking on the water (Matt. 14:23–33; Mark 6:47–52; John 6:16–21); and the withering of the fig tree (Matt. 21:18–21; Mark 11:12–14, 20–22).

(b) Miracles wrought on men and women: the resurrection of Jairus’s daughter (Matt. 9:18–26); the resurrection of the widow’s son at Naim (Luke 7:11–17); the resurrection of Lazarus (John 11:1–45); the cleansing of ten lepers (Matt. 8:1–4; Mark 1:40–45; Luke 5:12–14; 17:12–19); the cure of three paralytics (Matt. 9:1–7; Mark 2:1–12; Luke 5:18–26; John 5:1–9); the restoration of sight to several blind men (Matt. 9:27–31; 20:29–34; Mark 8:22–26; 10:46–52; Luke 18:35–43); the cure of the woman with the issue of blood (Matt. 9:20–22; Mark 5:25–34; Luke 8:43–48); the cure of Peter’s mother-in-law (Matt. 8:14–15; Mark 1:29–31; Luke 4:38–39); the cure of the ruler’s son (John 4:46–53); the restoration of a withered hand (Matt. 12:9–13); the cure of the man with dropsy (Luke 14:1–6); and the healing of a whole multitude of the sick (Luke 6:17–18).

(c) Miracles wrought on spiritual substances: the man possessed in the synagogue of Capharnaum (Mark 1:23–28; Luke 4:33–37); the Gerasene demoniacs (Matt. 8:28–34; Mark 5:1–20; Luke 8:26–39); the lunatic boy (Matt. 17:14–20; Mark 9:13–28; Luke 9:37–43); the deaf-mute (Matt. 9:32–34; Luke 11:14); the blind and mute man (Matt. 12:22–24); the daughter of the Chanaanite woman (Matt. 15:21–28; Mark 7:24–30); many others possessed with devils (Matt. 8:16; Luke 4:41; 8:2); the woman with a spirit of infirmity (Luke 13:11–16); and Mary Magdalene (Mark 16:9; Luke 8:2). Beyond these, there are also miracles involving angelic ministry — the angels who attended Christ in the desert (Matt. 4:11) and the angel who strengthened Him in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:43).

(d) Christ, further, gave His Apostles themselves the power of working miracles: “in my name they shall cast out devils” (Mark 16:17; Matt. 10:8; John 14:12); “the devils also are subject to us in thy name” (Luke 10:17). Miracles worked by the Apostles are recorded throughout Acts (3:1–10; 9:32–43; 19:11–12; 20:9–12).

III. The miracles of Christ are historically certain, for several converging reasons: (1) the witnesses who relate Christ’s miracles also relate other facts never seriously called into question, and these same witnesses were willing to suffer death — and in fact did suffer it — in testimony of the truthfulness of their whole narrative; (2) the miracles recorded were public facts appealing directly to the senses, and so were open to the ordinary judgment of those who actually witnessed them; (3) the principal miracles of Christ were performed publicly, witnessed by such figures as Nicodemus, Jairus, the Centurion, Zacchaeus, Lazarus himself, and by scribes, Pharisees, priests, and members of the Sanhedrin; (4) regarding several miracles, a formal juridical inquiry was actually held by Christ’s own enemies (cf. John 5:10–16; 9:7–34; 12:9–10; Acts 4:16); (5) the very simplicity of the Gospel narrative bears its own witness to its underlying sincerity; and (6) the miraculous facts are intimately woven into the rest of Christ’s life — His preaching, His Passion, His death — so that to deny the miracles is not to trim the Gospel narrative but effectively to destroy it whole: “many believed in his name, seeing his signs which he did” (John 2:23), and several of Christ’s most important discourses were occasioned directly by some miracle (cf. John 5, 9). It was precisely because of these miracles, and above all because of the raising of Lazarus, that the chief priests and Pharisees conspired against Him, saying, “what do we, for this man doth many miracles?” (John 11:47).

IV. The miracles of Christ are genuinely supernatural. Rationalists concede that raising the dead lies beyond the powers of nature, and accordingly deny outright the historical truth of such particular miracles; other miracles they treat as purely natural effects, regarded as wonderful only through simple ignorance of physical, chemical, biological, or psychological law. To these assumptions several replies may be made. (1) The Pharisees, notwithstanding their open hostility, could not themselves deny the reality of the raising of Lazarus. (2) The scribes and Pharisees instead attributed Christ’s evident miraculous power to some superhuman but non-divine agency, such as Beelzebub (cf. Mark 3:22ff.) — an admission, in effect, that the power itself was real and more than merely natural. (3) The instantaneous restoration of sight to a man born blind, the instantaneous cure of leprosy, the sudden change of water into wine, the multiplication of loaves, and the raising of Lazarus are all, on examination, clearly beyond the power of any created agent whatsoever. (4) The divine origin of these miracles is further confirmed by reflection on their surrounding circumstances and their consistent results: Christ worked His miracles solely for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. (5) Confirmation comes, too, from the sheer absurdity of the naturalistic hypotheses devised to explain them away: it is well established that the power of suggestion, whether through hypnotism or otherwise, is effective only in cases of functional disorder, and that such suggestion works only gradually, whereas Christ’s miracles of healing were wrought instantaneously; suggestion, moreover, cannot work at all on a person who is simply absent, and yet Christ healed both the centurion’s servant and the daughter of the Chanaanite woman, though neither was present when He spoke. (6) The Epistles of St. Paul — whose authenticity is admitted by nearly all Rationalists, Galatians and the two Corinthian epistles dated by Harnack and Jülicher themselves to about A.D. 53–54 — formally assert the working of genuine miracles by the Apostles, wrought explicitly in the name of Christ; a fortiori, Christ Himself must have worked miracles in His own right. (7) Neither the Apostles nor the later Fathers could possibly have appealed so confidently, and so repeatedly, to the miracles of Christ, had there been any serious doubt whatever about their reality among Christ’s own Jewish contemporaries and adversaries.

V. The miracles of Christ were wrought expressly in confirmation of His divine mission. (A) Christ Himself declared this fact on several distinct occasions. When John the Baptist’s disciples asked, “art thou he that art to come, or look we for another?” Our Lord replied simply by pointing to what they had themselves heard and seen: “the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, the poor have the gospel preached to them” (Matt. 11:4–6) — precisely the works Isaiah had foretold as marks of the Messianic age (Is. 35:5; 61:1). Again: “the works that I do in the name of my Father, they give testimony of me” (John 10:25). (B) Christ raised Lazarus from the dead expressly “that they may believe that thou hast sent me” (John 11:42), and it is recorded in several places that many people came to believe precisely because of His miracles (cf. John 2:23; 3:2; 6:2; 7:31; 11:45). (C) Christ Himself pointed to this proof of His divine mission as most certain and manifest when He said of His unbelieving enemies: “if I had not come, and spoken to them, they would not have sin: but now they have no excuse for their sin” (John 15:22).