[Dialogue] spong on miracles

[KroegerD at aol.com]

August 30, 2006 
Did Jesus Really Perform  Miracles?  
For many people the title of this column represents a silly question. The  
pages of the gospels are filled with stories of supernatural happenings  
associated with Jesus. Most people, however, have very little sense of the  actual 
content or meaning of these miracle accounts or how differently they are  
portrayed in each gospel. Some of these miracles have to do with the world of  
nature. Jesus is described as having power over the forces of the natural world.  
He stills the storm. He walks on water. He expands the food supply apparently  
feeding multitudes with a finite number of loaves. He even assists the 
disciples  in catching fish. In what is perhaps the most bizarre miracle story in the 
 Bible, Jesus pronounces a curse on a fig tree, which then begins to shrivel 
and  die. Did these things really happen? Can they happen? Is there any other 
way to  read these narratives except as supernatural events? A post-Newtonian 
world  wants to know.  
Next there are Jesus' healing miracles. Mark, the first gospel writer (70-72  
C.E.), has not completed his first chapter before he tells the story of Jesus 
 healing a man who was "possessed by an unclean spirit." Later in this same  
chapter, Jesus heals Simon Peter's mother-in-law of a fever. He then is said 
to  have conducted massive healings and to have cast out numerous demons, about 
 which no details are given. To conclude this opening chapter, Mark says that 
 Jesus also cleansed a leper. On reading these ancient stories we become 
aware,  at the very least, that first century diagnoses differed widely from those 
in  the twenty-first century.  
Miracles continue to dot Mark's landscape. In chapter two, it is a paralyzed  
man who is enabled to walk. In chapter three, it is a man with a withered 
hand  who is healed on the Sabbath. In chapter five, it is a woman with a chronic 
 menstrual discharge who finds healing when she touches Jesus and then, 
perhaps  in the most dramatic narrative in his gospel, Mark next relates the 
account of  Jesus raising from the dead the daughter of Jairus, a leader of the 
synagogue.  Before Mark's story is complete, more accounts are given of epileptics 
who are  cured by casting out demons, deaf people who are enabled to hear, 
mute people  who are enabled to speak and blind people who are enabled to see. 
There is no  doubt in the minds of many Christians that Mark saw the life of 
Jesus as  surrounded by the presence of supernatural miraculous power.  
However, Mark is quite restrained when describing miraculous events connected 
 with both Jesus' entry into this world and his exit from this world. For  
example, there is in his gospel no narrative of a miraculous birth of Jesus and  
no story of a dramatic exit into heaven at the end of his life. Even the 
account  of Jesus' resurrection is muted in Mark. In this gospel the risen Christ 
makes  no appearance to anyone. Mark gives us only a picture of an empty tomb 
and tells  us of an announcement made by "a young man dressed in a white 
robe." His text  ends quite suddenly with the 8th verse of chapter 16.  
When Matthew writes his gospel about a decade later, he copies into it some  
ninety percent of Mark. In Matthew's text we discover a tendency to exaggerate 
 or to heighten the miraculous. For example, it is Matthew who introduces the 
 virgin birth tradition together with a magical star in the sky. The purpose 
of  this star is twofold. First it announces to the world Jesus' birth, and 
then it  wanders so slowly through the sky that the magi are able to follow it 
to their  destination. Matthew adds an earthquake to the story of the 
crucifixion that  was, he says, so powerful that it opened the graves of the dead 
enabling  deceased people came back to life and to be "seen by many." Matthew 
places a  second earthquake into his story of Easter and transforms Mark's 
messenger from  "a young man in a white robe" to a supernatural angel, who causes the 
Temple  guards around the tomb to fall into a deathlike stupor, while this 
angel rolls  back the stone from the sepulcher before making the resurrection 
announcement.  In a direct contradiction of Mark, who said the women did not see 
the risen  Christ on Easter morning but rather fled in fear, Matthew says that 
the women  were granted the first resurrection sighting and that the raised 
Jesus was so  physical they could even "grasp his feet." Other than these 
changes, Matthew  proceeds to copy into his text all of the other miracle stories 
attributed to  Jesus in Mark.  
Luke, writing perhaps a decade after Matthew, also has Mark in front of him  
as he writes, but is less dependent on Mark than Matthew had been, copying 
only  about fifty per cent of Mark's gospel into his text. It is interesting to 
note  how Luke treats this Marcan material. Sometimes he tempers Mark's  
supernaturalism. For example, Mark had two feeding of the multitudes stories in  his 
gospel, but Luke uses only one of them. He also omits Mark's account of  
Jesus cursing the fig tree. On other occasions, however, Luke expands the  
miraculous tradition. He adds a second 'raising from the dead' story, involving  a 
widow's son in the village of Nain. He also adds a narrative about the ten  
lepers who were cleansed but only one, a Samaritan, returns to give thanks.  
Furthermore, Luke fashions new details in his account of the virgin birth.  First, 
he adds the story of the birth of John the Baptist to a post-menopausal  
couple. This fulfilled a promise made to John's father Zechariah by the angel  
Gabriel, who then struck Zechariah mute because he did not believe. Next this  
same angel tells Mary that she is to be a virgin mother. Then angels split the  
midnight sky to sing to hillside shepherds. The angels are busy in Luke. Luke  
alone tells us that the unborn John the Baptist actually saluted the unborn  
Jesus when they were both in their mothers' wombs to demonstrate that John knew 
 of Jesus' superiority to him even before they were born. Can this be 
history?  Finally Luke 'supernaturalizes' the resurrection story more dramatically 
than  any gospel writer before him. Mark's young man in a white robe, who became 
a  supernatural angel in Matthew, now becomes two supernatural angels. The  
resurrection in Luke becomes identical with physical resuscitation. After forty 
 days of resurrection appearances Luke culminates the Easter story with 
Jesus'  gravity-defying exit into the sky as he returns to his heavenly origins.  
Finally, John, writing some thirty years after Mark and apparently not  
dependent on Mark at all, adds miracle stories that appear to have been unknown  to 
earlier generations of Jesus' followers. John tells us of Jesus turning water 
 into wine, restoring an invalid of thirty-eight years to wholeness, healing 
a  man born blind and raising the four-days-dead Lazarus from his tomb in a 
very  public way. Yet, John omits any reference to a miraculous birth. In this 
gospel  the resurrected Jesus has become so physical that he says to Magdalene 
at the  tomb, "don't cling to me" and allows Thomas to inspect his wounds. 
Still his  body is portrayed as having the ability to walk through walls and to 
disappear  instantaneously. There is an ascension that is spoken of and assumed 
in John,  but it is never described.  
These gospel miracle stories raise many questions among those who dare to  
think about them. These questions are: If Jesus publicly raised from the dead  
Lazarus, the brother of close disciples Mary and Martha, why did this story not 
 appear until the tenth decade in the Christian tradition? Since modern 
medicine  does not acknowledge demon possession as a legitimate diagnosis, what are 
these  narratives about? If Jesus actually had the power to transform five 
loaves of  bread into a sufficient quantity of food to feed thousands after 
which baskets  of leftovers could be gathered, then why does God allow human 
starvation in  various parts of the world until this very day? If miraculous power 
is  attributed to a supernatural, intervening deity, where did this God go 
when the  Holocaust was carried out in Auschwitz and Treblinka, when the Tsunami 
wave  killed hundreds of thousands in the Indian Ocean or when Hurricane 
Katrina bore  down on New Orleans? If the resurrected body of Jesus was as physical 
as Luke  and John suggest, why did no one other than believers see him? On 
what basis do  those who believe in miracles believe that God decides to 
intervene here and not  there, to save this life and not that life, to cure this 
illness and not that  one? The questions go on and on.  
The whole issue of miracles is far more complex than most people imagine and  
far more revealing than a cursory look at the gospels will reveal. Are there  
other ways to view these two thousand-year-old miracle stories than as  
manifestations of supernatural intervention? Was it miracles that caused people  in 
the first century to believe that Jesus was divine? Or were the miracles  
attributed to him because they had already been convinced that he was divine and  
this was the only way they knew how to say it? Were these stories of Jesus'  
supernatural power acts of history that really happened? Or were they  
interpretive attempts to describe experiences for which human language has no  proper 
vocabulary?  
I intend to address these and many other questions in a series of columns  
that will appear periodically over the fall. I have four goals in mind in doing  
this series. First, I want to separate Jesus from a pre-modern supernatural  
framework in which he has been captured for far too long so that when this  
supernatural framework dies, as it is doing, Jesus will not die with it. Second, 
 I want to show people that reading the New Testament as if it is literal 
history  is one of the least edifying things that one can do spiritually and one 
of the  most naive things that one can do intellectually. Third, I want to 
demonstrate  that a commitment to Jesus as Lord is not a commitment to believe 
the  unbelievable or to defend the indefensible. Finally, I want to set the 
stage for  developing a new appreciation for the sacred text that Christians call 
the Holy  Bible, which will enable twenty-first century people to enter its 
pages and hear  its message anew without having to turn their minds into first 
century pretzels.   
Those, I believe, are lofty goals. I hope my readers will find this study  
worthwhile.  
John Shelby Spong  
_Note from  the Editor: Bishop Spong's new book is available now at 
bookstores everywhere  and by clicking here!_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060762055/agoramedia-20)   
Question and Answer
With John  Shelby Spong 
Margaret Little of Huntsville, Alabama, writes:  
Thank you for this thorough treatment of such an important topic in your  
column, "Born Gay." I was in conversation with my United Methodist pastor  
recently about this very issue and the comments of a preacher who had been  invited 
to speak to our church, comments upholding his outdated and prejudiced  views. 
My pastor said that his own position was that although some say  
homosexuality was somehow biological/genetic, it was the same as saying that  alcoholism 
was genetically caused. In other words, one may have the genetic  
predisposition for the condition but one chooses how they respond to it. I  realized that 
we are on different planets. My predicament is whether to stay  with this 
church I have been a member of for 30 years, and among people I love  and continue 
to do the work I do with a Grief Support Group, stay with my son  and 
grandchildren or leave. More and more I am part of the church alumni and  even though 
I have stayed I have lost a lot of joy in my experience there.  
Dear Margaret,  
I hope you will stay because I believe Christianity can only be reformed by  
those who are inside the church not by those who have left. There does appear 
to  be some kind of genetic predisposition toward alcoholism. But 
homosexuality is  in a very different category.  
We don't choose to be white or black, male or female, left-handed or  
right-handed, gay or straight. We awaken in each instance to the reality of what  we 
are. Nothing external to our humanity activates our self-understanding. It  
simply is. Alcohol distorts life for the alcoholic. Homosexuality does not  
distort the life of the gay person. Your pastor's understanding is simply one  
more version of the idea that homosexuality is a sickness or addiction that  
needs to be cured if possible and if not possible, it needs to be suppressed.  
Wholeness never came to anyone who tried to suppress his or her deepest  
identity.  
Your pastor is trying to be a liberal but he is about 100 years out of date.  
John Shelby Spong
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