Note 259 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

In both respects the natural explanation would find only the conceivable and the desirable attributed to Jesus in the evangelical narrative; namely, on the one hand, an intelligent observation of the state of the weather, and on the other, exalted courage in the presence of real peril. When we read that Jesus commanded the winds ἐπιτιμᾷν τοῖς ἀνέμοις, we are to understand simply that he made some remark on the storm, or some exclamations at its violence: and his calming of the sea we are to regard only as a prognostication, founded on the observation of certain signs, that the storm would soon subside. His address to the disciples is said to have proceeded, like the celebrated saying of Cæsar, from the confidence that a man who was to leave an impress on the world’s history, could not so lightly be cut short in his career by an accident. That those who were in the ship regarded the subsidence of the storm as the effect of the words of Jesus, proves nothing, for Jesus nowhere confirms their inference.259 But neither does he disapprove it, although he must have observed the impression which, in consequence of that inference, the result had made on the people;260 he must therefore, as Venturini actually supposes, have designedly refrained from shaking their high opinion of his miraculous power, in order to attach them to him the more firmly. But, setting this altogether aside, was it likely that the natural presages of the storm should have been better understood by Jesus, who had never been occupied on the sea, than by Peter, James, and John, who had been at home on it from their youth upwards?261