Note 280 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

After pruning away these offshoots of the miraculous which are peculiar to the respective narratives, the main stem is still left, namely, the miracle of Jesus walking on the sea for a considerable distance, with all its attendant improbabilities as above exposed. But the solution of these accessory particulars, as it led us to discover the causes of their unhistorical origin, has facilitated the discovery of such causes for the main narrative, and has thereby rendered possible the solution of this also. We have seen, by an example already adduced, that it was usual with the Hebrews and early Christians, to represent the power of God over nature, a power which the human spirit when united to him was supposed to share, under the image of supremacy over the raging waves of the sea. In the narrative of the Exodus this supremacy is manifested by the sea being driven out of its place at a sign, so that a dry path is opened to the people of God in its bed; in the New Testament narrative previously considered, the sea is not removed out of its place, but only so far laid to rest that Jesus and his disciples can cross it in safety in their ship: in the anecdote before us, the sea still remains in its place as in the second, but there is this point of similarity to the first, that the passage is made on foot, not by ship, yet as a necessary consequence of the other particular, on the surface of the sea, not in its bed. Still more immediate inducements to develop in such a manner the conception of the power of the miracle-worker over the waves, may be found both in the Old Testament, and in the opinions prevalent in the time of Jesus. Among the miracles of Elisha, it is not only told that he divided the Jordan by a stroke of his mantle, so that he could go through it dry shod (2 Kings ii. 14), but also that he caused a piece of iron which had fallen into the water to swim (2 Kings vi. 6); an ascendancy over the law of gravitation which it would be imagined the miracle-worker might be able to evince in relation to his own body also, and thus to exhibit himself, as it is said of Jehovah, Job ix. 8, LXX., περιπατῶν ὡς ἐπ’ ἐδάφους ἐπὶ θαλάσσης, walking upon the sea as upon a pavement. In the time of Jesus much was told of miracle-workers who could walk on the water. Apart from conceptions exclusively Grecian,280 the Greco-oriental legend feigned that the hyperborean Abaris possessed an arrow, by means of which he could bear himself up in the air, and thus traverse rivers, seas, and abysses,281 and popular superstition attributed to many wonder-workers the power of walking on water.282 Hence the possibility that with all these elements and inducements existing, a similar legend should be formed concerning Jesus, appears incomparably stronger, than that a real event of this kind should have occurred:—and with this conclusion we may dismiss the subject.