Note 268 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

We have a more complicated anecdote connected with the sea, wanting in Luke, but contained in John vi. 16 ff., as well as in Matt. xiv. 22 ff., and Mark vi. 45 ff., where a storm overtakes the disciples when sailing by night, and Jesus appears to their rescue, walking towards them on the sea. Here, again, the storm subsides in a marvellous manner on the entrance of Jesus into the ship; but the peculiar difficulty of the narrative lies in this, that the body of Jesus appears so entirely exempt from a law which governs all other human bodies without exception, namely, the law of gravitation, that he not only does not sink under the water, but does not even dip into it; on the contrary, he walks erect on the waves as on firm land. If we are to represent this to ourselves, we must in some way or other, conceive the body of Jesus as an ethereal phantom, according to the opinion of the Docetæ; a conception which the Fathers of the Church condemned as irreligious, and which we must reject as extravagant. Olshausen indeed says, that in a superior corporeality, impregnated with the powers of a higher world, such an appearance need not create surprise:268 but these are words to which we can attach no definite idea. If the spiritual activity of Jesus which refined and perfected his corporeal nature, instead of being conceived as that which more and more completely emancipated his body from the psychical laws of passion and sensuality, is understood as if by its means the body was exempted from the physical law of gravity:—this is a materialism of which, as in a former case, it is difficult to decide whether it be more fantastical or childish. If Jesus did not sink in the water, he must have been a spectre, and the disciples in our narrative would not have been wrong in taking him for one. We must also recollect that on his baptism in the river Jordan, Jesus did not exhibit this property, but was submerged like an ordinary man. Now had he at that time also the power of sustaining himself on the surface of the water, and only refrained from using it? and did he thus increase or reduce his specific gravity by an act of his will? or are we to suppose, as Olshausen would perhaps say, that at the time of his baptism he had not attained so far in the process of subtilizing his body, as to be freely borne up by the water, and that he only reached this point at a later period? These are questions which Olshausen justly calls absurd: nevertheless they serve to open a glimpse into the abyss of absurdities in which we are involved by the supranaturalistic interpretation, and particularly by that which this theologian gives of the narrative before us.