Motives of Credibility: The Miracles of Christ

Christians, even those who convert (or revert) after a long sojourn in the wilderness, often fail to appreciate how hard it can be for someone to abandon his previous beliefs and place his faith in Christ. For every bit of evidence deemed demonstrable proof for the existence of God, the deity of Christ, or the legitimacy of the Catholic Church, there stand myriad rhetorical obstacles. Anyone who has tried to persuade a family member, friend, coworker, or neighbor of the historicity of the New Testament or the divine approbation of the Church knows what I’m talking about.

We may, for example, point to the many miracles Christ performed. But there are other ancient texts purporting that other charismatic religious leaders amazed the crowds with seemingly supernatural deeds. New Testament scholar (and former evangelical) Bart D. Ehrman makes precisely this point, citing as just one counterexample the first-century Pythagorean teacher and itinerant preacher Apollonius of Tyana, whose birth was accompanied by supernatural signs (The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings 2nd ed., 2000). Apollonius reportedly healed the sick, cast out demons, and raised the dead. After his death, his followers claimed he had appeared and spoken to them before bodily ascending into Heaven. What makes Jesus so special?

Moreover, we live in a post-Enlightenment era that has trained us to be suspicious of fantastical stories. Though few of us have read the 18th-century empirical philosopher David Hume, most moderns are his intellectual disciples, uncritically accepting as dogma his famous refutation of miracles in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Our experience of nature’s regularity, argues Hume, should overrule any evidence of a miracle proposed for our consideration. There must be, he writes, “a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle.”

Stated simply, Hume’s position is that there must always be some natural, scientific explanation for supposedly supernatural events. Thus do we hear from skeptics at the water cooler (and even from pastors at the pulpit) that Jesus didn’t turn a few loaves of bread and fish into enough food to satisfy the hunger of thousands. Rather — if there is any merit to such an historical event — He persuaded those carrying their picnic baskets to share with the needy. Neither did He walk on water; rather, He only appeared to do so when He traversed a pier that extended far out onto the Sea of Galilee. Nor did He heal the sick; rather, He simply offered basic medical care, such as the equivalent of chiropractic services to the paralyzed.

For the (presumably vast) majority of us who have never witnessed a miracle, this all seems quite reasonable. In a time without television, radio, the Internet, or smartphones, our ancestors relied largely on hearsay or subjective, often fallible eyewitness testimony for their information. For most of human history there was no such thing as the scientific method or the empirical testing of hypotheses, and thus the credulous could be persuaded that the unusual or remarkable things they saw or heard about were of divine origin. We need not necessarily be condescending in viewing our faith-holding forebears this way — they simply didn’t know any better — but thanks to Hume, Francis Bacon, and Charles Darwin (among many others), we have moved beyond such naïve credulity.

How would you respond to such argumentation? Even if you have answers informed by the best Catholic apologists, you are fighting an uphill battle. That might not be the case logically, but it is so rhetorically in that the vast majority of our contemporaries find the above quite persuasive, if for no other reason than it is in the very air they have breathed since childhood. I must admit that even the intellectual exercise of writing the above came far more naturally to me than articulating the more complex and nuanced defenses of the supernatural. Yet perhaps that points to part of the problem, for as anyone knows who has carefully studied any field — be it medicine, history, or carpentry — simple and instinctive analysis may be terribly, even disastrously wrong. A likely (but wrong) diagnosis can get a man killed. Measuring once may mean cutting twice…or more!

There are, of course, good answers even to the best philosophical, scientific, and historical objections to the claims of the Church. Indeed, the arguments in favor of Catholic positions are strong, much stronger than those offered by her most prominent critics, whether Protestants, skeptics, or otherwise. My point is that whenever we are presented with the opportunity to explain or defend Catholic beliefs, we should do our best to understand our interlocutor’s position. Intelligent and, in many cases, brilliant people reject the Church and her claims about God, nature, and morality. Their reasons for doing so might be wrong, but they are often enfolded within a much broader worldview — as well as a lifetime of personal experience — that requires a careful and charitable approach to disentangle, expose, and, hopefully, correct.

A concept little known among practicing Catholics — even though it has been with us since the apostolic age — lies behind the reasons we should believe that the Church is precisely who she claims to be. The technical term is motives of credibility. The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:

What moves us to believe is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: we believe “because of the authority of God himself who reveals them, who can neither deceive nor be deceived.” So “that the submission of our faith might nevertheless be in accordance with reason, God willed that external proofs of his Revelation should be joined to the internal helps of the Holy Spirit.” Thus the miracles of Christ and the saints, prophecies, the Church’s growth and holiness, and her fruitfulness and stability “are the most certain signs of divine Revelation, adapted to the intelligence of all”; they are “motives of credibility” (motiva credibilitatis), which show that the assent of faith is “by no means a blind impulse of the mind.” (no. 156)

The concept of motives of credibility, external proofs that are accessible to every human intellect, can be traced to Christ’s own ministry. Consider, for example, Jesus’ words when approached by the disciples of John the Baptist, who by that time had been imprisoned by Herod Antipas. John, though a blood relative of Jesus and having leapt in the womb when approached by Mary, still wants to know if Jesus is “he who is to come” or if the Jews should await another. Jesus responds, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense at me” (Mt. 11:4-6). In effect, Jesus tells John, whom he subsequently titles a prophet, that the proof of His messiahship is that miracles are being performed and reported across Judea.

Moreover, Jesus’ message in His sermons preached to the poor is in some sense also evidence of His being the Messiah. As French philosopher Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., notes in his magisterial On Divine Revelation: The Teaching of the Catholic Faith (1950), the probity and profundity of Jesus’ teaching were not lost on anyone, given that throughout the Gospels, teachers of the law, scribes, pharisees, and common folk are all in awe of His wisdom (cf. Lk. 2:47; Mt. 7:28; Jn. 7:46).

Jesus’ response to John the Baptist is not the only place we find our Lord offering a correlation between His miracles and His very person. He does so when He declares before healing a paralytic, “that you may know that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins” (Mk. 2:10-12). Elsewhere, He says, “The testimony which I have is greater than that of John; for the works which the Father has granted me to accomplish, these very works which I am doing, bear me witness that the Father has sent me” (Jn. 5:36).

Miracles as a proof of divine approbation, the Gospel writers well knew, was an ancient motif. We read of Moses’s performing miracles: turning a staff into a serpent (cf. Exod. 4:1-5) and changing water into blood (cf. Exod. 7:3-5). When Elijah raises the son of a widow from the dead, the woman declares, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth” (1 Kings 17:23-24). The prophet Isaiah likewise accomplishes miracles to confirm the verity of his prophecies (cf. Isa. 8:7-12; 38:5-8).

The miracles of Christ — of which there are 37 described in the New Testament — were widely known both in His lifetime and afterwards. Pontius Pilate sent Jesus to Herod Antipas, who was excited to see Him, “because he had heard about him, and he was hoping to see some sign done by him” (Lk. 23:8). The Babylonian Talmud, a Jewish document written in the first or second century, accuses Jesus of having practiced sorcery, an obvious reference to His purported “wonder-working.” Josephus, a Jewish historian writing toward the end of the first century, describes Jesus as a “doer of startling deeds,” while Celsus, a second-century anti-Christian Greek philosopher, notes that Jesus acquired “miraculous powers” while in Egypt. As far as ancient history goes, this is a remarkable amount of evidence to support the claim that Jesus was capable of performing deeds that could not be explained as natural phenomena.

Indeed, the miracles of Christ were so widely known in ancient Palestine that St. Peter could declare to a crowd in Jerusalem that Jesus was a “man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know” (Acts 2:22). St. Paul similarly notes that the Gospel’s divine authority was proven by Jesus’ resurrection, given that He appeared not only to the Apostles but to more than 500 people (cf. 1 Cor. 15:4-8).

The early Church Fathers carried on this tradition, defending the Christian faith by referring to both the miracles of Christ and the Old Testament prophecies He fulfilled. “The activities of Christ after his baptism, and especially his miracles, gave indication and assurance to the world of the deity hidden in his flesh,” wrote St. Melito of Sardis in the late second century. In Against Heresies, St. Irenaeus argues that heretics were “so far…from being able to raise the dead, as the Lord raised them and the apostles did by means of prayer.” In his Dialogue with Trypho, second-century apologist St. Justin Martyr refers to both the miracles and prophecies of Christ as demonstrations of His authority and divinity, as does St. Clement of Alexandria in his Exhortation to the Greeks.

We see similar reasoning in the post-patristic period. St. Thomas Aquinas argues in the Summa Theologiae that the “Divine Wisdom” of God “visibly sets forth works that exceed the power of the whole of nature.” These works include:

The miraculous curing of illnesses, the raising of the dead, the miraculous alterations of celestial bodies, and what is more miraculous, the inspiration of human minds, so that unlettered and simple people, filled with the Holy Spirit, instantaneously acquired the heights of wisdom and eloquence. (II-II, q. 178, a. 1)

That last example of a miracle, though perhaps less striking than healing the sick, raising the dead, or calming a storm, is indeed incredible — many of the Apostles and the early converts to the faith were uneducated and impoverished, and yet they frustrated the learned of the ancient world.

Aquinas was, of course, not alone in the medieval era in arguing that the miracles of Christ are a motive of credibility. Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173) writes, “Lord, if there is error, we were deceived by you yourself. Indeed, these things were confirmed among us by so many signs and prodigies of such a nature that they could only have been performed by you.” Thus have Catholic apologists argued likewise, from the Counter-Reformation Catholic theologian and bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet to Pope Benedict XVI and Scott Hahn.

What, then, are we to make of the miracles reportedly performed by other thaumaturgists, or wonder-workers, such as Apollonius of Tyana? We compare them, of course! Certainly it is possible that Apollonius performed miracles. Then again, our knowledge of him comes almost entirely from the sophist Philostratus, who wrote his account of the philosopher almost a century and a half after his death. In contrast, our historical knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth comes from a panoply of (sympathetic and unsympathetic) sources proximate to His life and death. Even the most skeptical of biblical scholars admit that at least three of the four Gospels were written in the first century, and the Gospel of Mark may have been written a mere two decades after the crucifixion. Moreover, Philostratus wrote his biography on commission from an empress and follower of Apollonius and thus had reason to embellish his story. The followers of Apollonius did not perform miracles in his name, as did Jesus’ disciples and their successors in the early Church. Indeed, there is no “school of Apollonius,” while the institution Christ founded exists to this day and continues to offer miracles as attestation of His divinity and authority. (It’s worth noting, though Ehrman doesn’t acknowledge it, that the Apollonius-Jesus comparison as a means of undermining Christ’s authority is not particularly novel, given that it’s cited by the likes of Edward Gibbon, the Marquis de Sade, and Ezra Pound, among others.)

What of Hume’s argument that our experience of the natural order (and its absence of miracles) should override any information we receive regarding purported miracles? First, it is worth asking what is meant by “miracle.” Aquinas defines a miracle as something that is “full of wonder, namely as having a cause completely hidden from all,” when, in fact, its cause is God (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 105, a. 7). He elaborates elsewhere that miracles are “those things which are done in a divine manner outside of the commonly observed order of things” (Summa Contra Gentiles, III, ch. 101). Relying on this Thomistic definition, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange offers six properties of miracles: they (1) exceed the powers of nature, (2) are outside the exigencies of nature, (3) are not customary, (4) are not contrary to nature, (5) are signs that manifest something supernatural, and (6) are marvels on account of their excellence.

The problem with a categorical skepticism toward miracles is that it derives from an a priori conception of God that limits Him to establishing and sustaining the laws of nature. But, as Catholic theologian Lawrence Feingold asks, what is the evidence for this position? If God is omnipotent, He can do anything, apart from that which contradicts itself (such as creating a square circle). If God created the laws of nature, He can certainly occasion instances that deviate from them. And, as the great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton argued, believers in miracles typically have evidence for them, whereas disbelievers in miracles deny them “because they have a doctrine against them,” namely, that miracles categorically do not happen (a tenet of the philosophy of materialism). “It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence — it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence, being constrained to do so by your creed,” Chesterton writes in Orthodoxy (1908). In effect, those willing to consider a miracle as true are more “open-minded,” while skeptics are the “dogmatists.”

To offer a related and more recent critique of the supernatural, the English physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking argued that “a complete set of laws fully determines both the future and the past,” which excludes the possibility of miracles or an actively involved God (The Grand Design, 2010). Hawking’s position, he admitted, was “rooted in the concept of scientific determinism, which implies that…there are no miracles, or exceptions to the laws of nature.” Yet, like Hume’s position, Hawking’s is undermined by unsubstantiated premises. As Feingold notes, the concept of scientific determinism cannot itself be proved via empirical science. “The question of whether the general laws of nature completely determine every event in the universe is outside of the bounds of empirical science. This is a question more properly addressed by philosophy and theology.” Yes, a miracle by its very definition is an unusual, remarkable occurrence without natural explanation; its origin is, in fact, divine. To recognize it as such requires an act of faith, an act that transcends human reason but is not contrary to it. Those who de facto deny all miracles do so based on unproven presuppositions.

As stated above, there is significant evidence in favor of the historicity of Jesus’ miracles, both in the number of sympathetic and unsympathetic sources attesting to them and the fact that the historical image we possess of Jesus is not one of some dishonest huckster but an incomparably virtuous and wise sage. “His conduct was good, and [he] was known to be virtuous,” writes the Jew Josephus in Antiquities. And as even the Deist and miracle-skeptic Thomas Jefferson admitted in an 1820 letter, “I hold the precepts of Jesus, as delivered by himself, to be the most pure, benevolent, and sublime which have ever been preached to man.” The question, as C.S. Lewis poses in Mere Christianity, is whether a mere man could be both moral and brilliant while also forgiving men’s sins and claiming to be God. As the famous “trilemma” goes:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something else.

Though other motives of credibility are specific to the Catholic Church, that of the miracles of Christ is one we Catholics share with both Protestants and Orthodox, as evidenced by the above quote from the Anglican Lewis. Indeed, some of my own argumentation here derives from excellent evangelical works such as Craig L. Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (2nd ed., 2007) and F.F. Bruce’s The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (6th ed., 1981). That said, Lewis, Blomberg, and Bruce would probably be less friendly to the motive of credibility I hope to discuss in my next column: the miracles of the saints of the Church.

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