Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

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§ 91.

JESUS CONSIDERED AS A WORKER OF MIRACLES.

Jesus, in so far as he had given himself out and was believed to be the Messiah, or even merely a prophet, had to meet this expectation when, according to several passages already considered (Matt. xii. 38, xvi. 1, parall.), his Pharisaic enemies required a sign from him; when, after the violent expulsion of the traders and money-changers from the temple, the Jews desired from him a sign that should legitimate such an assumption of authority (John ii. 18); and when the people in the synagogue at Capernaum, on his requiring faith in himself as the sent of God, made it a condition of this faith that he should show them a sign (John vi. 30).

According to the gospels, Jesus more than satisfied this demand made by his cotemporaries on the Messiah. Not only does a considerable part of the evangelical narratives consist of descriptions of his miracles; not only did his disciples after his death especially call to their own remembrance and to that of the Jews the δυνάμεις (miracles) σημεῖα (signs) and τέρατα (wonders) wrought by him (Acts ii. 22; comp. Luke xxiv. 19): but the people also were, even during his life, so well satisfied with this aspect of his character that many believed on him in consequence (John ii. 23; comp. vi. 2), contrasted him with the Baptist who gave no sign (John x. 41), and even believed that he would not be surpassed in this respect by the future Messiah (John vii. 31). The above demands of a sign do not appear to prove that Jesus had performed no miracles, especially as several of them occur immediately after important miracles, e.g. after the cure of a demoniac, Matt. xii. 38; and after the feeding of the five thousand, John vi. 30. This position indeed creates a difficulty, for how the Jews could deny to these two acts the character of proper signs it is not easy to understand; the power of expelling demons, in particular, being rated very highly (Luke x. 17). The sign demanded on these two occasions must therefore be more precisely defined according to Luke xi. 16 (comp. Matt xvi. 1; Mark viii. 11), as a sign from heaven, σημεῖον ἐξ οὐρανοῦ, and we must understand it to be the specifically messianic sign of the Son of Man in heaven, σημεῖον τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ (Matt. xxiv. 30). If however it be preferred to sever the connexion between these demands of a sign and the foregoing miracles, it is possible that Jesus may have wrought numerous miracles, and yet that some hostile Pharisees, who had not happened to be eyewitnesses of any of them, may still have desired to see one for themselves.

That Jesus censures the seeking for miracles (John iv. 48) and refuses to comply with any one of the demands for a sign, does not in itself prove that he might not have voluntarily worked miracles in other cases, when they appeared to him to be more seasonable. When in relation to the demand of the Pharisees, Mark viii. 12, he declares that there shall be no sign given to this generation τῇ γενεᾷ ταύτῇ, or Matt xii. 39 f., xvi. 4; Luke xi. 29 f., that there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet, it would appear that by this generation, γενεὰ, which in Matthew and Luke he characterizes as evil and adulterous, he could only mean the Pharisaic part of his cotemporaries who were hostile to him, and that he intended to declare, that to these should be granted either no sign at all, or merely the sign of Jonas, that is, as he interprets it in Matthew, the miracle of his resurrection, or as modern expositors think, the impressive manifestation of his person and teaching. But if we take the words οὐ δοθήσεται αὐτῇ in the sense that his enemies were to obtain no sign from him, we encounter two difficulties: on the one hand, things must have chanced singularly if among the many miracles wrought by Jesus in the greatest publicity, not one fell under the observation of Pharisees (moreover Matt. xii. 24 f. parall. contradicts this, for there Pharisees are plainly supposed to be present at the cure of the blind and dumb demoniac): on the other hand, if signs personally witnessed are here intended, the enemies of Jesus certainly did not see his resurrection, or his person after he was risen. Hence the above declaration cannot well mean merely that his enemies should be excluded from an actual sight of his miracles. There is yet another expedient, namely, to suppose that the expression οὐ δοθήσεται αὐτῇ refers to a sign which should conduce to the good of the subject of which it is predicated: but all the miracles of Jesus happened equally with his original mission and his resurrection at once for the benefit of that subject and the contrary, namely, in their object for its benefit, in their result not so. Nothing therefore remains but to understand the γενεὰ of the cotemporaries of Jesus generally, and the δίδοσθαι to refer to observation generally, mediate or immediate: so that thus Jesus would appear to have here repudiated the working of miracles in general.

This is not very consistent with the numerous narratives of miracles in the gospels, but it accords fully with the fact that in the preaching and epistles of the apostles, a couple of general notices excepted (Acts ii. 22, x. 38 f.), the miracles of Jesus appear to be unknown, and everything is built on his resurrection: on which the remark may be ventured that it could neither have been so unexpected nor could it have formed so definite an epoch, if Jesus had previously raised more than one dead person, and had wrought the most transcendent miracles of all kinds. This then is the question: Ought we, on account of the evangelical narratives of miracles, to explain away that expression of Jesus, or doubt its authenticity; or ought we not, rather, on the strength of that declaration, and the silence of the apostolic writings, to become distrustful of the numerous histories of miracles in the gospels?

This can only be decided by a close examination of these narratives, among which, for a reason that will be obvious hereafter, we give the precedence to the expulsions of demons.

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§ 92.

THE DEMONIACS, CONSIDERED GENERALLY.

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§ 93.

CASES OF THE EXPULSION OF DEMONS BY JESUS, CONSIDERED SINGLY.

Among the circumstantial narratives which are given us in the three first gospels of cures wrought by Jesus on demoniacs, three are especially remarkable: the cure of a demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum, that of the Gadarenes possessed by a multitude of demons, and lastly, that of the lunatic whom the disciples were unable to cure.

In John the conversion of water into wine is the first miracle performed by Jesus after his return from the scene of his baptism into Galilee; but in Mark (i. 23 ff.) and Luke (iv. 33 ff.) the cure of a demoniac in the synagogue of Capernaum has this position. Jesus had produced a deep impression by his teaching, when suddenly, a demoniac who was present, cried out in the character of the demon that possessed him, that he would have nothing to do with him, that he knew him to be the Messiah who was come to destroy them—the demons; whereupon Jesus commanded the demon to hold his peace and come out of the man, which happened amid cries and convulsions on the part of the demoniac, and to the great astonishment of the people at the power thus exhibited by Jesus.

But many difficulties oppose themselves to this natural conception of the case. The demoniac is supposed to learn that Jesus was the Messiah from the people in the synagogue. On this point the text is not merely silent, but decidedly contradicts such an opinion. The demon, speaking through the man, evidently proclaims his knowledge of the Messiahship of Jesus, in the words, οἶδά δε τίς εἶ κ.τ.λ., not as information casually imparted by man, but as an intuition of his demoniacal nature. Further, when Jesus cries, Hold thy peace! he refers to what the demon had just uttered concerning his messiahship; for it is related of Jesus that he suffered not the demons to speak because they knew him (Mark i. 34; Luke iv. 41), or because they made him known (Mark iii. 12). If then Jesus believed that by enjoining silence on the demon he could hinder the promulgation of his messiahship, he must have been of opinion, not that the demoniac had heard something of it from the people in the synagogue, but contrariwise that the latter might learn it from the demoniac; and this accords with the fact, that at the time of the first appearance of Jesus, in which the Evangelists place the occurrence, no one had yet thought of him as the Messiah.

In the above history of the cure of a demoniac, we have a case of the simplest kind; the cure of the possessed Gadarenes on the contrary (Matt. viii. 28 ff.; Mark v. 1 ff.; Luke viii. 26 ff.) is a very complex one, for in this instance we have, together with several divergencies of the Evangelists, instead of one demon, many, and instead of a simple departure of these demons, their entrance into a herd of swine.

To their mention of this command, Mark and Luke annex the question put by Jesus to the demon: What is thy name? In reply, a multitude of demons make known their presence, and give as their name, Legion. Of this episode Matthew has nothing. In the above addition we have found a supplementary explanation of the former part of the narrative: what if this question and answer were an anticipatory introduction to the sequel, and likewise the spontaneous production of the legend or the narrator? Let us examine the reasons that render it probable: the wish immediately expressed by the demons to enter the herd of swine, does not in Matthew presuppose a multitude of demons in each of the two possessed, since we cannot know whether the Hebrews were not able to believe that even two demons only could possess a whole herd of swine: but a later writer might well think it requisite to make the number of the evil spirits equal the number of the swine. Now, what a herd is in relation to animals, an army or a division of an army is in relation to men and superior beings, and as it was required to express a large division, nothing could more readily suggest itself than the Roman legion, which term in Matt. xxvi. 53, is applied to angels, as here to demons. But without further considering this more precise estimate of the Evangelists, we must pronounce it inconceivable that several demons had set up their habitation in one individual. For even if we had attained so far as to conceive how one demon by a subjection of the human consciousness could possess himself of a human organization, imagination would still fail us to conceive that many personal demons could at once possess one man. For as possession means nothing else, than that the demon constitutes himself the subject of the consciousness, and as consciousness can in reality have but one focus, one central point: it is under every condition absolutely inconceivable that several demons should at the same time take possession of one man. Manifold possession could only exist in the sense of an alternation of possession by various demons, and not as here in that of a whole army of them dwelling at once in one man, and at once departing from him.

The third and last circumstantially narrated expulsion of a demon has the peculiar feature, that in the first instance the disciples in vain attempt the cure, which Jesus then effects with ease. The three synoptists (Matt. xvii. 14 ff.; Mark ix. 14 ff.; Luke ix. 37 ff.) unanimously state that Jesus having descended with his three most confidential disciples from the Mount of the Transfiguration, found his other disciples in perplexity, because they were unable to cure a possessed boy, whom his father had brought to them.

With this whole history must be compared an analogous narrative in 2 Kings iv. 29 ff. Here the prophet Elisha attempts to bring a dead child to life, by sending his staff by the hands of his servant Gehazi, who is to lay it on the face of the child; but this measure does not succeed, and Elisha is obliged in his own person to come and call the boy to life. The same relation that exists in this Old Testament story between the prophet and his servant, is seen in the New Testament narrative between the Messiah and his disciples: the latter can do nothing without their master, but what was too difficult for them, he effects with certainty. Now this feature is a clue to the tendency of both narratives, namely, to exalt their master by exhibiting the distance between him and his most intimate disciples; or, if we compare the evangelical narrative before us with that of the demoniacs of Gadara, we may say: the latter case was made to appear one of extreme difficulty in itself; the former, by the relation in which the power of Jesus, which is adequate to the occasion, is placed to the power of the disciples, which, however great in other instances, was here insufficient.

Of the other more briefly narrated expulsions of demons, the cure of a dumb demoniac and of one who was blind also, has been already sufficiently examined in connexion with the accusation of a league with Beelzebub: as also the cure of the woman who was bowed down, in our general considerations on the demoniacs. The cure of the possessed daughter of the Canaanitish woman (Matt. xv. 22 ff.; Mark vii. 25 ff.) has no further peculiarity than that it was wrought by the word of Jesus at a distance: a point of which we shall speak later.

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§ 94.

CURES OF LEPERS.

Among the sufferers whom Jesus healed, the leprous play a prominent part, as might have been anticipated from the tendency of the climate of Palestine to produce cutaneous disease. When, according to the synoptical writers, Jesus directs the attention of the Baptist’s messengers to the actual proofs which he had given of his Messiahship (Matt. ix. 5), he adduces among these, the cleansing of lepers; when, on the first mission of the disciples, he empowers them to perform all kinds of miracles, the cleansing of lepers is numbered among the first (Matt. x. 8), and two cases of such cures are narrated to us in detail.

Here, in the first place, the supposition that the leper was precisely at the crisis of healing is foreign to the text, which in the two first Evangelists speaks merely of leprosy, while the πλήρης λέπρας of the third can mean nothing else than the Old Testament expression ‏מְצֹרָע כַּשָּׁלֶג‎ (Exod. iv. 6, Num. xii. 10; 2 Kings v. 27), which, according to the connexion in every instance, signifies the worst stage of leprosy. That the word καθαρίζειν in the Hebraic and Hellenistic use of the Greek language, might also mean merely to pronounce clean is not to be denied, only it must retain the signification throughout the passage. But that after having narrated that Jesus had said, Be thou clean, καθαρίσθητι, Matthew should have added καὶ εὐθέως ἐκαθαρίσθη κ.τ.λ. in the sense that thus the sick man was actually pronounced clean by Jesus, is, from the absurd tautology such an interpretation would introduce, so inconceivable, that we must here, and consequently throughout the narrative, understand the word καθαρίζεσθαι of actual cleansing. It is sufficient to remind the reader of the expressions λεπροὶ καθαρίζονται, the lepers are cleansed (Matt. xi. 5), and λεπροὺς καθαρίζετε, cleanse the lepers (Matt. x. 8), where neither can the latter word signify merely to pronounce clean, nor can it have another meaning than in the narrative before us. But the point in which the natural interpretation the most plainly betrays its weakness, is the disjunction of θέλω, I will, from καθαρίσθητι, be thou clean. Who can persuade himself that these words, united as they are in all the three narratives, were separated by a considerable pause—that θέλω was spoken during or more properly before the manipulation, καθαρίσθητι after, when all the Evangelists represent the two words as having been uttered by Jesus without separation whilst he touched the leper? Surely, if the alleged sense had been the original one, at least one of the Evangelists, instead of the words ἥψατο αὐτοῦ ὁ Ἰησοῦς λέγων· θέλω, καθαρίσθητι, Jesus touched him, saying, I will, be thou clean, would have substituted the more accurate expression, ὁ Ἰ. ἀπεκρίνατο· θέλω, καὶ ἁψάμενος αὐτοῦ εἶπε· καθαρίσθητι, Jesus answered, I will; and having touched him, said: be thou clean. But if καθαρίσθητι was spoken in one breath with θέλω, so that Jesus announces the cleansing simply as a result of his will without any intermediate examination, the former word cannot possibly signify a mere declaration of cleanness, to which a previous examination would be requisite, and it must signify an actual making clean. It follows, therefore, that the word ἅπτεσθαι in this connexion is not to be understood of an exploratory manipulation, but, as in all other narratives of the same class, of a curative touch.

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§ 95.

CURES OF THE BLIND.

It seems probable that Matthew was led to add a second blind man by his recollection of a previous cure of two blind men narrated by him alone (ix. 27 ff.). Here, likewise, when Jesus is in the act of departure,—from the place, namely, where he had raised the ruler’s daughter,—two blind men follow him (those at Jericho are sitting by the way side), and in a similar manner cry for mercy of the Son of David, who here also, as in the other instance, according to Matthew, immediately cures them by touching their eyes. With these similarities there are certainly no slight divergencies; nothing is here said of an injunction to the blind men to be silent, on the part of the companions of Jesus; and, while at Jericho Jesus immediately calls the blind men to him, in the earlier case, they come in the first instance to him when he is again in the house; further, while there he asks them, what they will have him to do to them? here he asks, if they believe him able to cure them? Lastly, the prohibition to tell what had happened, is peculiar to the earlier incident. The two narratives standing in this relation to each other, an assimilation of them might have taken place thus: Matthew transferred the two blind men and the touch of Jesus from the first anecdote to the second; the form of the appeal from the blind men, from the second to the first.

If then, according to the meaning of the narrators, the blind instantaneously receive their sight as a consequence of the simple word or touch of Jesus, there are the same difficulties to be encountered here as in the former case of the lepers. For a disease of the eyes, however slight, as it is only engendered gradually by the reiterated action of the disturbing cause, is still less likely to disappear on a word or a touch; it requires very complicated treatment, partly surgical, partly medical, and this must be pre-eminently the case with blindness, supposing it to be of a curable kind. How should we represent to ourselves the sudden restoration of vision to a blind eye by a word or a touch? as purely miraculous and magical? That would be to give up thinking on the subject. As magnetic? There is no precedent of magnetism having influence over a disease of this nature. Or, lastly, as psychical? But blindness is something so independent of the mental life, so entirely corporeal, that the idea of its removal at all, still less of its sudden removal by means of a mental operation, is not to be entertained. We must therefore acknowledge that an historical conception of these narratives is more than merely difficult to us; and we proceed to inquire whether we cannot show it to be probable that legends of this kind should arise unhistorically.

If we have been unable to receive as historical the simple narrative given by all the synoptical writers of the cure of the blind man at Jericho, we are still less prepared to award this character to the mysterious description, given by Mark alone, of the cure of a blind man at Bethsaida, and we must regard it as a product of the legend, with more or less addition from the evangelical narrator. The same judgment must be pronounced on his narrative of the cure of the deaf man who had an impediment in his speech κωφὸς μογιλάλος; for, together with the negative reasons already adduced against its historical credibility, there are not wanting positive causes for its mythical origin, since the prophecy relating to the messianic times, τότε ὦτα κωφῶν ἀκούσονται—τρανὴ δὲ ἔσται γλῶσσα μογιλάλων, the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped, the tongue of the dumb shall sing (Isa. xxxv. 5, 6), was in existence, and according to Matt. xi. 5, was interpreted literally.

Thus here also the natural explanation will not serve us, and we have still before us the narrative of a man born blind, miraculously cured by Jesus. That the doubts already expressed as to the reality of the cures of the blind, apply with increased force to the case of a man born blind, is self-evident. And they are aided in this instance by certain special critical reasons. Not one of three first Evangelists mentions this cure. Now, if in the formation of the apostolic tradition, and in the selection which it made from among the miracles of Jesus, any kind of reason was exercised, it must have taken the shape of the two following rules: first, to choose the greater miracles before those apparently less important; and secondly, those with which edifying discourses were connected, before those which were not thus distinguished. In the first respect, it is plain that the cure of a man blind from his birth, as the incomparably more difficult miracle, was by all means to be chosen rather than that of a man in whom blindness had supervened, and it is not to be conceived why, if Jesus really gave sight to a man born blind, nothing of this should have entered into the evangelical tradition, and from thence into the synoptical gospels. It is true that with this consideration of the magnitude of the miracles, a regard to the edifying nature of the discourses connected with them might not seldom come into collision, so that a less striking, but from the conversations which it caused, a more instructive miracle, might be preferred to one more striking, but presenting less of the latter kind of interest. But the cure of the blind man in John is accompanied by very remarkable conversations, first, of Jesus with the disciples, then, of the cured man with the magistrates, and lastly of Jesus with the cured man, such as there is no trace of in the synoptical cures of the blind; conversations in which, if not the entire course of the dialogue, at least some aphoristic pearls (as v. 4, 5, 39), were admirably suited to the purpose of three first Evangelists. These writers, therefore, could not have failed to introduce the cure of the man born blind into their histories, instead of their less remarkable and less edifying cures of the blind, if the former had made a part of the evangelical tradition whence they drew. It might possibly have remained unknown to the general Christian tradition, if it had taken place at a time and under circumstances which did not favour its promulgation—if it had been effected in a remote corner of the country, without further witnesses. But Jesus performed this miracle in Jerusalem, in the circle of his disciples; it made a great sensation in the city, and was highly offensive to the magistracy, hence the affair must have been known if it had really occurred; and as we do not find it in the common evangelical tradition, the suspicion arises that it perhaps never did occur.

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§ 96.

CURES OF PARALYTICS. DID JESUS REGARD DISEASES AS PUNISHMENTS?

But another passage, and that a synoptical one, is adduced in vindication of the superiority of Jesus to the popular opinion in question. This passage is Luke xiii. 1 ff., where Jesus is told of the Galileans whom Pilate had caused to be slain while they were in the act of sacrificing, and of others who were killed by the falling of a tower. From what follows, we must suppose the informants to have intimated their opinion that these calamities were to be regarded as a divine visitation for the peculiar wickedness of the parties so signally destroyed. Jesus replied that they must not suppose those men to have been especially sinful; they themselves were in no degree better, and unless they repented would meet with a similar destruction. Truly it is not clear how in these expressions of Jesus a repudiation of the popular notion can be found. If Jesus wished to give his voice in opposition to this, he must either have said: you are equally great sinners, though you may not perish bodily in the same manner; or: do you believe that those men perished on account of their sins? No! the contrary may be seen in you, who, notwithstanding your wickedness, are not thus smitten with death. On the contrary, the expressions of Jesus as given by Luke can only have the following sense: that those men have already met with such calamities is no evidence of their peculiar wickedness, any more than the fact that you have been hitherto spared the like, is an evidence of your greater worth, on the contrary, earlier or later, similar judgments falling on you will attest your equal guilt:—whereby the supposed law of the connexion between the sin and misfortune of every individual is confirmed, not overthrown. This vulgar Hebrew opinion concerning sickness and evil, is indeed in contradiction with that esoteric view, partly Essene, partly Ebionite, which we have found in the introduction to the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the rich man, and elsewhere, and according to which the righteous in this generation are the suffering, the poor and the sick; but both opinions are clearly to be seen in the discourses of Jesus by an unprejudiced exegesis, and the contradiction, which we find between them authorizes us neither to put a forced construction on the one class of expressions, nor to deny them to have really come from Jesus, since we cannot calculate how he may have solved for himself the opposition between two ideas of the world, presented to him by different sides of the Jewish culture of that age.

As regards the above-mentioned cure, the synoptical writers make Jesus in his reply to the messengers of the Baptist, appeal to the fact that the lame walked (Matt. xi. 5), and at another time the people wonder when, among other miracles, they see the maimed to be whole and the lame to walk (Matt. xv. 31). In the place of the lame, χωλοὶ, paralytics, παραλυτικοὶ are elsewhere brought forward (Matt. iv. 24), and especially in the detailed histories of cures relating to this kind of sufferers (as Matt. ix. 1 ff. parall., viii. 5, parall.), παραλυτικοὶ, and not χωλοὶ, are named. The sick man at the pool of Bethesda (John v. 5) belongs probably to the χωλοῖς spoken of in v. 3; there also ξηροὶ, withered, are mentioned, and in Matt. xii. 9 ff. parall. we find the cure of a man who had a withered hand. As however the three last named cures will return to us under different heads, all that remains here for our examination is the cure of the paralytic Matt. ix. 1 ff. parall.

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§ 97.

INVOLUNTARY CURES.

Occasionally in their general statements concerning the curative power of Jesus, the synoptical writers remark, that all kinds of sick people only sought to touch Jesus, or to lay hold on the hem of his garment, in order to be healed, and that immediately on this slight contact, a cure actually followed (Matt. xiv. 36; Mark iii. 10, vi. 56; Luke vi. 19). In these cases Jesus operated, not, as we have hitherto always seen, with a precise aim towards any particular sufferer, but on entire masses, without taking special notice of each individual; his power of healing appears not here, as elsewhere, to reside in his will, but in his body and its coverings; he does not by his own voluntary act dispense its virtues, but is subject to have them drawn from him without his consent.

Of this species of cure again a detailed example is preserved to us, in the history of the woman who had an issue of blood, which all the synoptical writers give, and interweave in a peculiar manner with the history of the resuscitation of the daughter of Jairus, making Jesus cure the woman on his way to the ruler’s house (Matt. ix. 20 ff.; Mark v. 25 ff.; Luke viii. 43 ff.). On comparing the account of the incident in the several Evangelists, we might in this instance be tempted to regard that of Luke as the original, because it seems to offer an explanation of the uniform connexion of the two histories. As, namely, the duration of the woman’s sufferings is fixed by all the narrators at twelve years, so Luke, whom Mark follows, gives twelve years also as the age of the daughter of Jairus; a numerical similarity which might be a sufficient inducement to associate the two histories in the evangelical tradition. But this reason is far too isolated by itself to warrant a decision, which can only proceed from a thorough comparison of the three narratives in their various details. Matthew describes the woman simply as γυνὴ αἱμοῤῥοοῦσα δώδεκα ἔτη, which signifies that she had for twelve years been subject to an important loss of blood, probably in the form of excessive menstruation. Luke, the reputed physician, shows himself here in no degree favourable to his professional brethren, for he adds that the woman had spent all her living on physicians without obtaining any help from them. Mark, yet more unfavourable, says that she had suffered many things of many physicians, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse. Those who surround Jesus when the woman approaches him are, according to Matthew, his disciples, according to Mark and Luke, a thronging multitude. After all the narrators have described how the woman, as timid as she was believing, came behind Jesus and touched the hem of his garment, Mark and Luke state that she was immediately healed, but that Jesus, being conscious of the egress of curative power, asked who touched me? The disciples, astonished, ask in return, how he can distinguish a single touch amidst so general a thronging and pressure of the crowd. According to Luke, he persists in his assertion; according to Mark, he looks inquiringly around him in order to discover the party who had touched him: then, according to both these Evangelists, the woman approaches trembling, falls at His feet and confesses all, whereupon Jesus gives her the tranquillizing assurance that her faith has made her whole. Matthew has not this complex train of circumstances; he merely states that after the touch Jesus looked round, discovered the woman, and announced to her that her faith had wrought her cure.

It is not difficult to see what might give rise to this branch of the evangelical miraculous legend, in distinction from others. The faith of the popular mind, dependent on the senses, and incapable of apprehending the divine through the medium of thought alone, strives perpetually to draw it down into material existence. Hence, according to a later opinion, the saint must continue to work miracles when his bones are distributed as relics, and the body of Christ must be present in the transubstantiated host; hence also, according to an idea developed much earlier, the curative power of the men celebrated in the New Testament must be attached to their body and its coverings. The less the church retained of the words of Jesus, the more tenaciously she clung to the efficacy of his mantle, and the further she was removed from the free spiritual energy of the apostle Paul, the more consolatory was the idea of carrying home his curative energy in a pocket-handkerchief.

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§ 98.

CURES AT A DISTANCE.

The cures performed at a distance are, properly speaking, the opposite of these involuntary cures. The latter are effected by mere corporeal contact without a special act of the will; the former solely by the act of the will without corporeal contact, or even local proximity. But there immediately arises this objection: if the curative power of Jesus was so material that it dispensed itself involuntarily at a mere touch, it cannot have been so spiritual that the simple will could convey it over considerable distances; or conversely, if it was so spiritual as to act apart from bodily presence, it cannot have been so material as to dispense itself independently of the will. Since we have pronounced the purely physical mode of influence in Jesus to be improbable, free space is left to us for the purely spiritual, and our decision on the latter will therefore depend entirely on the examination of the narratives and the facts themselves.

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§ 99.

CURES ON THE SABBATH.

Jesus, according to the gospels, gave great scandal to the Jews by not seldom performing his curative miracles on the sabbath. One example of this is common to the three synoptical writers, two are peculiar to Luke, and two to John.

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§ 100.

RESUSCITATIONS OF THE DEAD.

The Evangelists tell us of three instances in which Jesus recalled the dead to life. One of these is common to the three synoptists, one belongs solely to Luke, and one to John.

In the third history of a resurrection, which is peculiar to John (chap. xi.), the resuscitated individual is neither just dead nor being carried to his grave, but has been already buried several days. Here one would have thought there was little hope of effecting a natural explanation; but the arduousness of the task has only stimulated the ingenuity and industry of the rationalists in developing their conception of this narrative. We shall also see that together with the rigorously consequent mode of interpretation of the rationalists,—which, maintaining the historical integrity of the evangelical narrative throughout, assumes the responsibility of explaining every part naturally, there has appeared another system, which distinguishes certain features of the narrative as additions after the event, and is thus an advance towards the mythical explanation.

In order, in this dilemma, to arrive at a decision, with respect to all the three narratives, we must refer to the peculiar character of the kind of miracles which we have now before us. We have hitherto been ascending a ladder of miracles; first, cures of mental disorders, then, of all kinds of bodily maladies, in which, however, the organization of the sufferer was not so injured as to cause the cessation of consciousness and life; and now, the revivification of bodies, from which the life has actually departed. This progression in the marvellous is, at the same time, a gradation in inconceivability. We have indeed been able to represent to ourselves how a mental derangement, in which none of the bodily organs were attacked beyond the nervous system, which is immediately connected with mental action, might have been removed, even in a purely psychical manner, by the mere word, look, and influence of Jesus: but the more deeply the malady appeared to have penetrated into the entire corporeal system, the more inconceivable to us was a cure of this kind. Where in insane persons the brain was disturbed to the extent of raging madness, or where in nervous patients the disorder was so confirmed as to manifest itself in periodical epilepsy; there we could scarcely imagine how permanent benefit could be conferred by that mental influence; and this was yet more difficult where the disease had no immediate connection with the mind, as in leprosy, blindness, lameness, etc. And yet, up to this point, there was always something present, to which the miraculous power of Jesus could apply itself; there was still a consciousness in the objects, on which to make an impression—a nervous life to be stimulated. Not so with the dead. The corpse from which life and consciousness have flown has lost the last fulcrum for the power of the miracle worker; it perceives him no longer—receives no impression from him; for the very capability of receiving impressions must be conferred on him anew. But to confer this, that is, to give life in the proper sense, is a creative act, and to think of this as being exercised by a man, we must confess to be beyond our power.

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§ 101.

ANECDOTES HAVING RELATION TO THE SEA.

As in general, at least according to the representations of the three first Evangelists the country around the Galilean sea was the chief theatre of the ministry of Jesus; so a considerable number of his miracles have an immediate reference to the sea. One of this class, the miraculous draught of fishes granted to Peter, has already presented itself for our consideration; besides this, there are the miraculous stilling of the storm which had arisen on the sea while Jesus slept, in the three synoptists; Matthew, Mark, and John; the summary of most of those, the walking of Jesus on the sea, likewise during a storm, in incidents which the appendix to the fourth gospel places after the resurrection; and lastly, the anecdote of the coin that was to be angled for by Peter, in Matthew.

If, before we proceed further, we take a retrospect of the series of sea-anecdotes hitherto examined, we find, it is true, that the two extreme anecdotes are altogether dissimilar, the one relating mainly to fishing, the other to a storm; nevertheless, on a proper arrangement, each of them appears to be connected with the preceding by a common feature. The narrative of the call of the fishers of men (Matt. iv. 18 ff. par.) opens the series; that of Peter’s draught of fishes (Luke v. 1 ff.) has in common with this the saying about the fishers of men, but the fact of the draught of fishes is peculiar to it; this fact reappears in John xxi., where the circumstances of Jesus standing on the shore in the morning twilight, and the swimming of Peter towards him, are added; these two circumstances are in Matt. xiv. 22 ff. parall. metamorphosed into the act of walking on the sea on the part of Jesus and of Peter, and at the same time a storm, and its cessation on the entrance of Jesus into the ship, are introduced; lastly, in Matt. viii. 23 ff. parall., we have an anecdote single in its kind, namely, that of the stilling of the storm by Jesus.

With this tale conclude the sea anecdotes.

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§ 102.

THE MIRACULOUS MULTIPLICATION OF THE LOAVES AND FISHES.

As, in the histories last considered, Jesus determined and mitigated the motions of irrational and even of inanimate existences; so, in the narratives which we are about to examine, he exhibits the power of multiplying not only natural objects, but also productions of nature which had been wrought upon by art.

That Jesus miraculously multiplied prepared articles of food, feeding a great multitude of men with a few loaves and fishes, is narrated to us with singular unanimity by all the Evangelists (Matt. xiv. 13 ff.; Mark vi. 30 ff.; Luke ix. 10 ff.; John vi. 1 ff.). And if we believe the two first, Jesus did not do this merely once; for in Matt. xv. 32 ff.; Mark viii. 1 ff. we read of a second multiplication of loaves and fishes, the circumstances of which are substantially the same as those of the former. It happens somewhat later; the place is rather differently described, and the length of time during which the multitude stayed with Jesus is differently stated; moreover, and this is a point of greater importance, the proportion between the stock of food and the number of men is different, for, on the first occasion, five thousand men are satisfied with five loaves and two fishes, and, on the second, four thousand with seven loaves and a few fishes; on the first twelve baskets are filled with the fragments, on the second only seven. Notwithstanding this, not only is the substance of the two histories exactly the same—the satisfying of a multitude of people with disproportionately small means of nourishment; but also the description of the scene in the one, entirely corresponds in its principal features to that in the other. In both instances, the locality is a solitary region in the vicinity of the Galilean sea; Jesus is led to perform the miracle because the people have lingered too long with him; he manifests a wish to feed the people from his own stores, which the disciples regard as impossible; the stock of food at his disposal consists of loaves and fishes; Jesus makes the people sit down, and, after giving thanks, distributes the provisions to them through the medium of the disciples; they are completely satisfied, and yet a disproportionately great quantity of fragments is afterwards collected in baskets; lastly, in the one case as in the other, Jesus after thus feeding the multitude, crosses the sea.

To evade the pre-eminently magical appearance which this miracle presents, Olshausen gives it a relation to the moral state of the participants, and supposes that the miraculous feeding of the multitude was effected through the intermediation of their spiritual hunger. But this is ambiguous language, which, on the first attempt to determine its meaning, vanishes into nothing. For in cures, for example, the intermediation here appealed to consists in the opening of the patient’s mind to the influence of Jesus by faith, so that when faith is wanting, the requisite fulcrum for the miraculous power of Jesus is also wanting: here therefore the intermediation is real. Now if the same kind of intermediation took place in the case before us, so that on those among the multitude who were unbelieving the satisfying power of Jesus had no influence, then must the satisfaction of hunger here (as, in the above cases, the cure) be regarded as something effected by Jesus directly in the body of the hungry persons, without any antecedent augmentation of the external means of nourishment. But such a conception of the matter, as Paul us justly remarks, and as even Olshausen intimates, is precluded by the statement of the Evangelists, that real food was distributed among the multitude; that each enjoyed as much as he wanted; and that at the end the residue was greater than the original store. It is thus plainly implied that there was an external and objective increase of the provisions, as a preliminary to the feeding of the multitude. Now, this cannot be conceived as effected by means of the faith of the people in a real manner, in the sense that that faith co-operated in producing the multiplication of the loaves. The intermediation which Olshausen here supposes, can therefore have been only a teleological one, that is, we are to understand by it, that Jesus undertook to multiply the loaves and fishes for the sake of producing a certain moral condition in the multitude. But an intermediation of this kind affords me not the slightest help in forming a conception of the event; for the question is not why, but how it happened. Thus all which Olshausen believes himself to have done towards rendering this miracle more intelligible, rests on the ambiguity of the expression, intermediation; and the inconceivableness of an immediate influence of the will of Jesus on irrational nature, remains chargeable upon this history as upon those last examined.

But there is another difficulty which is peculiar to the narrative before us. We have here not merely, as hitherto, a modification or a direction of natural objects, but a multiplication of them, and that to an enormous extent. Nothing, it is true, is more familiar to our observation than the growth and multiplication of natural objects, as presented to us in the parable of the sower, and the grain of mustard seed, for example. But, first, these phenomena do not take place without the co-operation of other natural agents, as earth, water, air, so that here, also, according to the well-known principle of physics, there is not properly speaking an augmentation of the substance, but only a change in the accidents; secondly, these processes of growth and multiplication are carried forward so as to pass through their various stages in corresponding intervals of time. Here, on the contrary, in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes by Jesus, neither the one rule nor the other is observed: the bread in the hand of Jesus is no longer, like the stalk on which the corn grew, in communication with the maternal earth, nor is the multiplication gradual, but sudden.

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§ 103.

JESUS TURNS WATER INTO WINE.

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§ 104.

JESUS CURSES A BARREN FIG-TREE.

The anecdote of the fig-tree which Jesus caused to wither by his word, because when he was hungry he found no fruit on it, is peculiar to the two first gospels (Matt. xxi. 18 ff.; Mark xi. 12 ff.), but is narrated by them with divergencies which must affect our view of the fact. One of these divergencies of Mark from Matthew, appears so favourable to the natural explanation, that, chiefly in consideration of it, a tendency towards the natural view of the miracles of Jesus has been of late ascribed to this Evangelist; and for the sake of this one favourable divergency, he has been defended in relation to the other rather inconvenient one, which is found in the narrative before us.

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