Latin mass was rather boring this morning. We had bald Tom Bosley priest, and he was talking about praying for the souls in purgatory. What stood out to me, though, was one of the passages in the Scripture reading. The passage was in one of the books of Corinthians, and Paul was discussing the power of God in Paul’s ministry to the Corinthian church. That reminded me that Paul refers to miracles in his letters to various churches. In I Corinthians 12:9, Paul says that there are people in the Corinthian church who have the gift of healing. In Galatians 3:5, Paul reminds the Galatians of the miracles that have been done in their midst.
Would Paul refer to these miracles, if they had not occurred? If Paul realized that the Corinthians or the Galatians could reply with “What miracles?” or “What healings?”, would Paul have brought them up? This was a point that I used to raise as an amateur apologist. My argument was that Paul wouldn’t have referred to miracles in the churches if they were not occurring, and so they must have been real. Therefore, Christianity has supernatural confirmation, and is thus true.
But I can think of three challenges to my argument, and I’d like to wrestle with them.
1. One guy—a Jewish-Christian who did not accept the religious authority of Paul—disputed that these were actual letters that Paul wrote to congregations. His view was that they were written by an official body as Scripture, and so, of course, they would refer to miracles to convince their audience that Christianity had miraculous confirmation! For this guy, Paul was not talking to people about miracles that they had experienced. Rather, these “letters” were crafted by a group specifically to serve as authoritative Scripture, and the “miracles” that they mention were made-up.
I don’t see this sort of argument in too many places, for many assume that I Corinthians and Galatians were written by Paul for specific congregations. But I do remember having a discussion with former fundamentalist Ken Pulliam, who referred to scholar Robert Price’s argument that I Corinthians 15:3-11 was a post-Pauline interpolation (see the discussion under Ken’s post, The Memory of Eyewitnesses). I Corinthians 15:3-11 is significant to Christian apologists for the resurrection of Jesus. In that passage, Paul (or, for Price, “Paul”) mentions five-hundred people who witnessed the risen Jesus, some of whom were alive in the time that Paul wrote to the Corinthians. For Christian apologists, Paul would not have referred to those witnesses if they did not exist, for Paul realized that the Corinthians could have easily checked up on Paul’s claim that there were witnesses to the risen Jesus. Why would Paul claim something that could be easily refuted? Christian apologists conclude, therefore, that there were indeed witnesses to the risen Jesus.
Price does not go the route of saying that I Corinthians was not an authentic letter to the Corinthian church, but he does make an argument that overlaps somewhat with the view of that Jewish-Christian guy who challenged me: Price realizes that, at some point, I Corinthians became authoritative Scripture, and so pious interpreters could have added stuff to it, years after Paul wrote the letter. For Price, therefore, Paul did not refer to witnesses to the risen Jesus who were contemporary with the first century Corinthian church, the recipients of Paul’s letter. Rather, the passage that claimed this was inserted into the letter after the time of Paul, when the text was becoming (or had become) sacred Scripture. A later hand was holding that there were eyewitnesses to the risen Christ when Paul was alive.
I’m not sure how to respond to the claim that Paul’s letters were pious fiction. To me, they appear to address genuine communities, with real-life first-century problems. My impression is that even pseudonymous letters (e.g., Colossians, Ephesians, I-II Timothy, Titus) were written for real-life communities: someone was writing to a church what he thought Paul would say about its situation.
I don’t know if I Corinthians 15:3-11 was a post-Pauline insertion, but I don’t think that such was the case for Galatians 3:5 and I Corinthians 12:9, since Paul’s claims that there were miracles in these passages are integral to his argument: the Galatians didn’t have to keep the Jewish law because they experienced God’s miracles before they started observing Jewish customs; the Corinthian Christians are experiencing genuine miracles from God, but they must learn to exercise their spiritual gifts responsibly. I think Paul was referring to miracles that his audience had experienced.
2. Another response to my argument is that the “miracles” Paul mentioned may not have been all that miraculous. I once had a conversation with Ken Pulliam under his post, Psychological Factors Influencing Eyewitness Testimony–Part Two. Ken was arguing that, even if the Gospels were “eyewitness testimony,” that didn’t mean that that they are historically-reliable, for people mis-remember things. But I asked him what gave rise to the eyewitnesses’ memory of Jesus’ miracles. Those were unusual events! Would eyewitnesses to Jesus’ healing of a man’s withered hand mis-remember that event? In my mind, that would be too extraordinary to mis-remember!
Ken responded as follows:
“You raise some good questions. First, I think that for some of these ‘miracle’ events there was some kernal of historical truth. IOW, something unusual happened. Second, as the stories got passed along things got exagerrated. Third, I doubt seriously that anything that as dramatic as a withered hand or withered legs (as in Acts 3) was healed immediately and spontaneously. I think its more along the line of what we hear about today in many Charismatic circles. As these stories get passed along the anecdotes keep growing and expanding until you have something truly remarkable.
“Oncologists report the occasional spontaneous remission of cancer and they have some theories for it but that is not the same as a person covered with leprosy suddenly being healed and given brand new baby soft skin all over their body as some miracle reports have it. Nor is it like a person who had never walked in his life suddenly being healed and his previously atrophied legs now made like those of an Olympic pole vault champion (as in Acts 3). Or a person dead for 4 days like Lazarus coming out of the tomb. If I were to see something on that scale today, then I might be a believer.”
“BTW, a book I read years ago by William Nolan, A Doctor in Search of a Miracle, was very interesting. This medical doctor took a year off from his practice to investigate the people who were supposedly healed in charismatic healing services. He concluded that there was not ONE case of a truly organic disease being healed.”
Was Paul referring to genuine miracles, or to events that got exaggerated? Maybe, by “healing,” Paul and the Corinthians had in mind the sorts of things that occur at a Benny Hinn crusade. I don’t mean fake “healings,” but rather people who (for example) feel that they don’t need their glasses anymore because their eyesight has cleared up as a result of an evangelist’s “healing,” but later they realize that they do need them. (Of course, glasses did not exist back then, but I hope you get a picture of the sort of thing I’m talking about.)
I don’t know. I’ve heard evangelicals talk about friends who have been healed of AIDS or cancer. Are these exaggerations or urban legends, or are they real-life experiences? There are exaggerations and urban legends that arise, as a story is passed on from one person to the next, gaining different layers in the process of transmission. Christians can exaggerate events as they look at them through the lens of their faith. In Charismatic Chaos, John MacArthur refers to a man who claimed to have been healed of his paralysis, and yet the man still had leg-braces.
But I’m reluctant to dismiss every miraculous story that I have heard. There are people who appear to me to be reasonable, who mention experiences they have had that are out-of-the-ordinary. I don’t think they’re lying or making stuff up. Their story hasn’t gone through the “telephone” game, so I doubt that it’s an exaggeration. Personally, I don’t rule out that they have experienced a miracle.
My view is that Paul was referring to genuine miracles that his audience had experienced. Unlike many skeptics, I don’t think that the Galatians and the Corinthians were particularly gullible, even if they lived in a time when people attributed a lot to the supernatural. Rather, I believe that there were cases in which they labelled something a “healing” because a person’s disease went away, in a manner that was extraordinary enough to get their attention.
3. A third response to my argument is that there are miracles in non-Christian cultures and religions. Ken Pulliam, in his post, The Christian Delusion: Chapter Eleven–Why the Resurrection is Unbelievable, discusses scholar Richard Carrier’s point that Herodotus refers to eyewitnesses to miraculous events. Herodotus claims to have talked with these eyewitnesses. Ken and Carrier wonder why Christians make a big deal about the eyewitness testimony to the risen Jesus (i.e., Paul in I Corinthians 15:3-11 refers to eyewitnesses whom he knows), even as they dismiss the eyewitness testimony to pagan miracles that Herodotus cites. (Either they dismiss that testimony, or they attribute the miracles to demons.)
Personally, I think that there are miracles in non-Christian religions and cultures. Therefore, even if Paul referred to authentic miracles in his letters to certain churches, those miracles don’t prove that Christianity is the only legitimate way of seeing the world. But they do open up the possibility that there are things out there that have not been explained. Maybe they even show that there’s a benevolent God who reaches out to people in different religions and cultures.