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Over the last two hundred years, there have been countless attempts to explain away Jesus’ miracles as misinterpretations, hallucinations or myths created later. Some attempts border on the ridiculous: as when Jesus’ walking on water is explained away as the disciples’ failure to notice that he was really strolling at the water’s edge. Others assume that Palestine was entirely populated by people ready to cry ‘miracle!’ at the slightest coincidence.
In reality, it is hard to create a ‘miracle-free’ Jesus. The ‘supernatural’ is present throughout the gospels, not just in the miracles but in the virginal conception, in appearances of angels and in prophecies. It is not even easy to imagine the development of the gospels from some miracle-free source: Mark – the earliest gospel – has more miracles per page than the others.
The miracles are also so tightly interwoven with Jesus’ teaching and the events of his life that it is hard to remove them. For instance, the gospels record a major crisis when, just after Jesus had miraculously fed five thousand men and their families, the crowd wanted to make him king. To propose there was no miracle makes nonsense of the account: it is hard to see how thousands of people sharing their packed lunches together would have generated the enthusiasm to declare Jesus king!
Equally, the rest of the New Testament assumes that Jesus did miracles. In Acts, for instance, Peter says this of Jesus: ‘People of Israel, listen! God publicly endorsed Jesus of Nazareth by doing wonderful miracles, wonders, and signs through him, as you well know.’
Finally, but importantly, the few traditions about Jesus outside the New Testament talk about him as an exorcist and a miracle worker. None of the hostile references to Jesus deny his miracles; they simply consider them as being due to him having occult power.
In summary, you cannot remove the miraculous from the life of Jesus; it runs through the accounts of his life like the lettering in a stick of rock and it is just as hard to remove. Either we accept that Jesus is an almost entirely invented figure or we somehow accept the miraculous in the gospels. There is no halfway house.
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