Johnny Skeptic

At http://www.christian-thinktank.com/mqfx.html, the quite erudite Christian apologist Glenn Miller discusses miracles, but inadvertently in the process gives skeptics an excellent argument against miracles. Consider the following from Miller:

Fales referred in the preceding paragraph to Richard Carrier's piece on Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire

(http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...er/kooks.html).

Carrier will say there:

"If the people of that time were so gullible or credulous or superstitious, then we have to be very cautious when assessing the reliability of witnesses of Jesus. As Thomas Jefferson believed when we composed his own version of the gospels, Jesus may have been an entirely different person than the gospels tell us, since the supernatural and other facts about him, even some of his parables or moral sayings, could easily have been added or exaggerated by unreliable witnesses. Thus, this essay is not about whether Jesus was real or how much of what we are told about him is true. It is not even about Jesus. Rather, this essay is a warning and a standard, by which we can assess how likely or easily what we are told about Jesus may be false or exaggerated, and how little we can trust anyone who claims to be a witness of what he said and did. For if all of these stories below could be told and believed, even by Christians themselves, it follows that the gospels, being of entirely the same kind, can all too easily be inaccurate, tainted by the gullibility, credulity, or fondness for the spectacular which characterized virtually everyone of the time."

Now, much of modern scholarship would already disagree with this position, as can be seen from a couple of authors:

"In antiquity miracles were not accepted without question. Graeco-Roman writers were often reluctant to ascribe miraculous events to the gods, and offered alternative explanations. Some writers were openly skeptical about miracles (e.g. Epicurus; Lucretius; Lucian). So it is a mistake to write off the miracles of Jesus as the result of the naivety and gullibility of people in the ancient world." [GAJ, rev 2, p.235, Stanton]

"This period [Hellenistic] may well have been the least superstitious period of antiquity, even if we have to allow for the continued existence in concealment of an undercurrent of the usual superstitions and belief in miracles. However that may be a change sets in with the beginning of late antiquity. Popular belief in miracles and superstition revived." [MSECT:269, Theissen]

"On the other hand it must be admitted that in the relatively peaceful and stable period of the first two centuries the irrationalism which first appeared at the beginning of the first century was unable to strike roots. There continued to be rationalist movements alongside it. In his dialogues Lucian mocked his contemporaries' belief in the miraculous. Oenomaus of Gadara mocked the oracles, and Sextus Empiricus once more brought together all the arguments of scepticism. Even where increased irrationalism was notable--for example in Plutarch's development--it remained within bounds, without eccentricity or fanaticism. There was no decisive change before the great social and political crisis of the 3rd century. AD. [MSECT:275, Theissen]

"Primitive Christian belief in the miraculous thus has a crucial role in the religious development of late antiquity. It stands at the beginning of the 'new' irrationalism of that age. Our brief outline of this development may have done something to correct the widespread picture of an ancient belief in the miraculous which has no history. What we have found here is not a rampant jungle of ancient credulity with regard to miracles, but a process of historical transformation in which forms and patterns of belief in the miraculous succeed one another. If we accept this picture, we must firmly reject assertions that primitive Christian belief in the miraculous represented nothing unusual in the context of its period." [MSECT:276, Theissen]

"particularly in the Augustan age, when intellectual life was inspired by the example of Alexandrian scholarship, there was a general desire for increasingly exact knowledge, and historians, like poets, were always on the alert to correct their predecessors." [X02:RCH4S:93, Woodman]

"It is in this light that we must judge the accounts we possess of other miracle-workers in Jesus' period and culture. We have already observed that the list of such occurrences is very much shorter than is often supposed. If we take the period of four hundred years stretching from two hundred years before to two hundred years after the birth of Christ, the number of miracles recorded which are remotely comparable with those of Jesus is astonishingly small. On the pagan side, there is little to report apart from the records of cures at healing shrines, which were certainly quite frequent, but are a rather different phenomenon from cures performed by an individual healer. Indeed it is significant that later Christian fathers, when seeking miracle workers with whom to compare or contrast Jesus, had to have recourse to remote and by now almost legendary figures of the past such as Pythagoras or Empedocles." [X:JATCH:103]

Johnny: Well my word, readers, I could not possibly have ever put together a rebuttal of miracles as good as Miller did. In review, Miller’s sources said:

“In antiquity miracles were not accepted without question.”

“This period [Hellenistic] may well have been the least superstitious period of antiquity…”

“…we must firmly reject assertions that primitive Christian belief in the miraculous represented nothing unusual in the context of its period.”

“It is in this light that we must judge the accounts we possess of other miracle-workers in Jesus' period and culture. We have already observed that the list of such occurrences is very much shorter than is often supposed. If we take the period of four hundred years stretching from two hundred years before to two hundred years after the birth of Christ, the number of miracles recorded which are remotely comparable with those of Jesus is astonishingly small. On the pagan side, there is little to report apart from the records of cures at healing shrines, which were certainly quite frequent, but are a rather different phenomenon from cures performed by an individual healer. Indeed it is significant that later Christian fathers, when seeking miracle workers with whom to compare or contrast Jesus, had to have recourse to remote and by now almost legendary figures of the past such as Pythagoras or Empedocles.”

Johnny: Miller must tell us why these spectacular occurrences, with no prior precedent or subsequent duplication in all of human history, failed to quickly create a storm of interest across the entire Roman Empire and beyond. History provides no such interest in the first century, at least not proportionate to what the response would have been if New Testament claims of miracles were true. Logically, the more unusual miracles were, the more that people would have been interested in them, whether or not they wanted to accept Jesus’ teachings, so the better that Miller makes his case that New Testament miracles were quite unusual for that time period, the worse he makes his arguments look.