There is a common line of argument among the more naïve believers in Jesus Mythicism that goes “the stories of Jesus are full of miracles and other non-historical elements. So if any of them are not historical, why not all of them?” This all-or-nothing thinking is based on the idea that if any part of these accounts can be concluded to be not historical, this means the rest of them are as well: “it’s all made up”. But even in its more developed form, this kind of argument ignores the fact that miracles and what we consider the supernatural were commonly believed in during the first century AD and we find such elements in many accounts of historical figures as well, so miracle stories are not a solid indicator of ahistoricity.

Miracles and Ancient History

There is a particular type of person who accepts Jesus Mythicism, often with great enthusiasm and evangelical zeal, after abandoning a highly literalist, fundamentalist form of Christian faith. It should be noted that these people are by no means representative of all Mythicists and it is hard to tell exactly what proportion of those who accept or promulgate the theory they make up. Nor do all of them transition directly from dogmatic Christian belief to entrenched Mythicism. But as my recent interview with Derek Lambert of Mythvision shows, Mythicism often forms an accessible and appealing alternative view of Jesus for someone who has found Christianity wanting and is looking for a new framework to explain the origins of their former faith. And they often bring many of the assumptions and much of the enthusiasm of strident Christianity to their newfound belief.

After years of interacting with Mythicists online, I have heard this story many times: one of a former committed or even fanatical Christian believer who discovers that a literal reading of the gospels cannot be credibly sustained, begins to doubt their faith and eventually decides that it is largely “fiction”. And then discovers Jesus Mythicism and comes to believe it is the magical key to a new wholistic understanding of the gospels and the beginning of Christianity – put simply, “none of it happened”. Mythicism has the appeal of an all-encompassing explanation for how Christianity started, minus the messy, complex and difficult business of assessing which parts of the Jesus story may be historical and which are likely not. For people who like neat solutions, binary alternatives (“truth”/”fiction”), hard distinctions and simple black and white reasoning, Mythicism is far more satisfying than the nuance, uncertainty, provisionalism and ambiguity that is required in mainstream historical analysis of Christian origins, and in the study of ancient history generally.

So it is not hard to find online Mythicist believers who take this kind of “all or nothing” approach. If, they argue, many elements in the accounts of Jesus’ life are unhistorical, what reason do we have to accept any of them? Surely the very fact that they contain episodes and details that are clearly supernatural and unlikely to be true historically means the whole fabric is dubious and can be rejected, or at least regarded with extreme scepticism. As several online Mythicists have put it to me, “if you take away the miracles from the story of Jesus, there is no story left”.

This is, in fact, not correct. It is actually an interesting exercise to take, say, the gospel of Mark and look at what is left if you ignore all the miracles and supernatural elements. Contrary to the claim above, there is actually quite a bit left, and it makes a reasonably coherent story. After all, much of the narrative in the gospels consists of Jesus going somewhere, answering questions, telling parables and preaching. Remove the miracles and the resurrection accounts from gMark and we are left with the story of a preacher who teaches about the coming apocalyptic return of God’s power and the renewal of the earth that will follow (see Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet for details on this). He then goes to Jerusalem, runs afoul of the authorities and is crucified by the Romans. As something that potentially could have happened historically; this story is coherent, consistent with what we know about the period and its context and so entirely plausible.

As post-Humean moderns, we tend to find miracle stories disconcerting, even if some of us belong to belief systems which allow the possibility of the genuinely miraculous. We live with a world view where there is a sharp distinction between the “natural” and the “supernatural” and a generally high base level scepticism about any supernatural claims. So it is understandable that the idea that any supernatural element in a story immediately makes that story suspect to the modern mind. This is why the presence of miracles in the Jesus story make many people feel justified in rejecting the idea of any of the story being historical.

But people in the ancient world did not see things this way. They lived in a world that was permeated by what we would call “the supernatural”. Visions, oracles, portents and wonders may not have been everyday phenomenon for ancient people, but they were as accepted as perhaps rare, though entirely normal. Even the humblest house had a shrine to the household gods, offerings and prayers were a regular daily habit and the examination of entrails or the observation of auspices was a serious business, undertaken by sombre government officials. Unsurprisingly, we find elements that we would consider “miraculous” or “supernatural” throughout ancient literature; often reported as matter-of-factly as the weather.

This makes the wholesale rejection of all of the Jesus narratives on the grounds they also contain miracles rather historiographically naïve. After all, we find similar elements in stories about about ancient figures we are sure are historical, so we cannot reasonably dismiss the stories of someone like Jesus wholesale just because they contain supernatural elements. For example, we are quite certain Augustus existed. Yet when we turn to Suetonius’ often useful biography of him we find a story of his miraculous conception:

When Atia had come in the middle of the night to the solemn service of Apollo, she had her litter set down in the temple and fell asleep, while the rest of the matrons also slept. On a sudden a serpent glided up to her and shortly went away. When she awoke, she purified herself, as if after the embraces of her husband, and at once there appeared on her body a mark in colours like a serpent, and she could never get rid of it; so that presently she ceased ever to go to the public baths. In the tenth month after that Augustus was born and was therefore regarded as the son of Apollo. Atia too, before she gave him birth, dreamed that her vitals were borne up to the stars and spread over the whole extent of land and sea, while [her husband] Octavius dreamed that the sun rose from Atia’s womb.

(Suetonius, Augustus, XCIV.4)

Here we have prophetic dreams foretelling the child’s greatness, a divine visitation to the child’s mother and widespread acknowledgement that the child is a deity’s son. These are all miraculous elements found in the stories of Jesus’ conception as well, yet here they are in a story about the entirely historical figure of Augustus. We find another familiar element in accounts of the aftermath of the assassination of Julius Caesar:

When, however, a certain star during all those days appeared in the north toward evening, which some called a comet, claiming that it foretold the usual occurrences, while the majority, instead of believing it, ascribed it to Caesar, interpreting it to mean that he had become immortal and had been received into the number of the stars, Octavius then took courage and set up in the temple of Venus a bronze statue of him with a star above his head.

(Cassius Dio, Roman History, XLV.7)

So just as a portent in the skies after Jesus’ death is presented as a sign of his supernatural status, so one after Caesar’s death is presented as a sign he had gained divine status. And we have another example regarding Vespasian, in an account by the relatively sceptical historian Tacitus. In Histories IV.81, Tacitus tells of how Vespasian healed a blind man and a lame man in Alexandria, though he implies that these cures had a possible naturalistic explanation, even if they still indicated divine favour. Then he notes:

These events gave Vespasian a deeper desire to visit the sanctuary of the god [Serapis] to consult him with regard to his imperial fortune: he ordered all to be excluded from the temple. Then after he had entered the temple and was absorbed in contemplation of the god, he saw behind him one of the leading men of Egypt, named Basilides, who he knew was detained by sickness in a place many days’ journey distant from Alexandria. He asked the priests whether Basilides had entered the temple on that day; he questioned the passers-by whether he had been seen in the city; finally, he sent some cavalry and found that at that moment he had been eighty miles away: then he concluded that this was a supernatural vision and drew a prophecy from the name Basilides.

So even a writer who is less inclined than most toward relating miracle stories is happy to acknowledge the reality of a supernatural vision which foretold Vespasian’s elevation to the emperorship (the name Basilides comes from the Greek βασιλεύς or “King”).

Of course, plenty of other examples could be presented, but the point is clear: ancient people believed in miracles, signs and visions and unproblematically associated them with great men. So the presence of them in accounts of entirely historical ancient figures is completely normal and actually expected. This means miracle stories in the Jesus narratives does not mean he is therefore as “fictional” as Harry Potter or Gandalf. It is absolutely reasonable that he may be as historical as Augustus, Caesar or Vespasian.

Enter the Philosopher

The more simplistic version of the argument against the historicity of Jesus by reference to the miraculous elements in the gospel narratives does not carry much weight. After all, as Bart Ehrman has noted, just because the story of the young George Washington cutting down the cherry tree is not historical, does not mean no George Washington existed. Non-historical stories are often told about historical figures: in fact, they tend to attract them. This goes doubly for miracle stories being told about great men in the ancient world – they are a way of indicating and emphasising the great man’s greatness.

But in 2011 the British philosopher Stephen Law decided to venture out of his field and into history and presented what he clearly felt was a much more comprehensive and persuasive version of the argument. Law is an atheist and Director of the Certificate in Higher and Education and Director of Philosophy at the Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford. He writes a variety of popular books on philosophy and philosophers, as well as sceptical titles such as Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole (Prometheus: 2011).

Law also likes to debate Christian apologists and so seems to have become interested in the historicity of Jesus via those interactions. Of course, as we have seen with A.C. Grayling, when philosophers dabble in history, the results can be embarrassingly bad. But Law appears to have thought this whole historical analysis thing was something he could have a stab at, and so we got his paper “Evidence, Miracles and the Existence of Jesus”, Faith and Philosophy, Vol. 28, Issue 2, April 2011, pp. 129-151. The Abstract to Law’s article reads:

The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of independent evidence for an historical Jesus, remain sceptical about his existence.

(Law, p. 129)

Law begins by assuring his readers that “the focus of this paper is solely on what history, as a discipline, is able to reveal.” Unfortunately his grasp of this discipline and of the sources he tries to use is not particularly good. He notes that New Testament material – namely the gospels and the Pauline epistles – constitute “the main source” for any case for a historical Jesus. But he is quick to brush Paul’s letters aside, arguing:

Paul claims to have received the Gospel not from any human source or teaching but by revelation from the miraculously risen Christ (Galatians 1:11–12, 15–16).

(Law, p. 130)

This is a standard Mythicist talking point that Law appears to have accepted without sufficient critical scrutiny. He is naively misreading the texts he cites as Paul saying he got his information about who and what Jesus was purely by revelation. Like the Mythicists he is deriving this line of reasoning from, he sees the word “gospel” in his translation and assumes it has the primary modern English meaning of that word: “an account of the life and deeds of Jesus”. So he thinks this is what Paul is saying: all he knows about Jesus comes purely from his visions of the “risen Lord”, not from anything others “who were already apostles before me” (Gal. 1:17), including those who could have known Jesus directly, may have told him.

For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

(Gal. 1:11-12)

But Law does not understand this passage. Paul did not write in English and was writing decades before any of the texts we now call “gospels” even existed and centuries before the word “gospel” attained its modern connotations. The word he uses here is εὐαγγέλιον – “good news” – and what he is referring to is clear from the context. Paul is writing to the Jesus Sect community in Galatia to put his side of a dispute to them. He expresses his dismay that they are “so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ” (i.e. Paul) and are “turning to a different gospel” (again, εὐαγγέλιον – “good news” Gal. 1:6). So clearly Paul is not referring to accounts of Jesus’ life here: he is talking about the Galatians abandoning something Paul has taught them and adopting some other idea instead. Here is where he declares that he received the εὐαγγέλιον he taught them from Jesus himself and he contrasts it with the one that they have turned to.

So what is he talking about? The context makes it clear that the dispute is over whether Gentiles should become Jews in order to be saved by the sacrifice of Jesus’ death – specifically whether they should be “compelled to be circumcised” (Gal. 2:3) – is the point at issue. Paul argues that this is not necessary and that Gentiles and Jews are both saved if they acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah. And this is the “good news” he has proclaimed to them: what he calls “the good news [again, εὐαγγέλιον] that I proclaim among the Gentiles” (Gal. 2:2).

So both Law and the Mythicists badly misread Gal. 1: 11-12. Paul is not saying he got all his information about Jesus via revelation. He is saying he got this specific teaching from Jesus that way.

Elsewhere he talks about how he “received” certain information about Jesus in a way that indicates he got it from others, not via direct revelation. in 1Cor. 15:3 he says he “handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures”. Here the key verb is παρέλαβον (received). This is a rabbinical term used to refer to passing on a tradition and he says he is passing it to the Corinthians in the same way. This is even more clear from the grammar of 1Cor. 11:23 where he passes on the Last Supper tradition:

For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread …

(Ἐγὼ γὰρ παρέλαβον ἀπὸ τοῦ Κυρίου ὃ καὶ παρέδωκα ὑμῖν, ὅτι ὁ Κύριος Ἰησοῦς ἐν τῇ νυκτὶ ᾗ παρεδίδετο ἔλαβεν ἄρτον …)

In English this appears to read as him saying explicitly that he received this from Jesus himself; a reading that lends itself to the Mythicist claim that Paul says he got all his information via revelation. But grammatically, the preposition ἀπὸ in the phrase παρέλαβον ἀπὸ τοῦ Κυρίο (“received from the Lord”) indicates a remote but ultimate source, whereas the idea of an immediate and direct source is usually indicated by the use of παρά instead of ἀπὸ (see Herbert Weir Smith, A Greek Grammar for Colleges, 4.43 for the relevant grammar and examples). Of course, English doesn’t have a grammatical distinction of this kind and, given that Paul is emphasising Jesus as the ultimate source of the information, most translations render this as simply ” … I received from the Lord …”. But the Greek makes it clear that this is not direct, but indirect and ultimate – he is referring to something he’s been told by others (though which originated with Jesus).

So the Mythicist line of reasoning Law is depending on here is wrong. Nowhere does Paul say he only got his information about Jesus via revelation. In fact, his stress that he got “the good news that I proclaim among the Gentiles” via direct revelation indicates that this was very much the important exception, not the rule. This means Law cannot brush Paul aside in one line as he does in his article. Paul has several things to say about Jesus which clearly indicate a historical person, particularly his reference in Galatians to meeting Jesus’ brother James and having an argument with him (Gal. 1:18-19; 2:7-14). As even the most prominent proponents have to admit, Paul meeting Jesus’ brother remains an awkward fly in the Mythicist ointment (see Jesus Mythicism 2: “James the Brother of the Lord” for details).

There is a similar problem with Law’s eagerness to dismiss any extra-Biblical references to Jesus as evidence he existed. In a fairly brisk paragraph, he argues:

In addition to the textual evidence provided by the New Testament, we possess some non-canonical gospels, and also a handful of later, non-Christian references to Jesus: most notably Tacitus, who writes about the Christians persecuted by Nero, who were named after their leader Christus who suffered the “extreme penalty” under Tiberius , and Josephus, who makes a brief reference to the crucifixion of Jesus . However, it is controversial whether these later references are genuinely independent of Christian sources (Tacitus may only be reporting the existence of Christians and what they believed, and Josephus may be relying on Christian reports of what occurred ). There is also debate over the extent to which the Josephus text has been tampered with by later Christians.

(Law, p.130)

The claim that Tacitus “may only be reporting the existence of Christians and what they believed” reflects another bad Mythicist argument: one undermined by Law’s own reference to Tacitus reporting “their leader Christus … suffered the ‘extreme penalty’ under Tiberius”. Tacitus actually gives us a succinct who, what, where and when about Jesus, saying he was called “Christus” (the Latin form of “Messiah”) and was executed by Pontius Pilate in Judea during the reign of Tiberius. He states these things as facts, not merely as something Christians believed or as details he gleaned from what Christians claimed. Law is correct that we cannot be certain this reference is “genuinely independent of Christian sources”, but we cannot go further than that. Thankfully he does not veer off into the dogmatic Mythicist claims that Tacitus’ information must be ultimately from a Christian source, or that this is the most likely source of it. Neither of those claims can be sustained. At best we can simply note this reliable and usually judicious historian notes these simple things about Jesus matter-of-factly, but that we cannot determine where he got this information or whether it is truly independent attestation (which is fairly normal with most ancient historians’ references of this kind – see Jesus Mythicism 1: The Tacitus Reference to Jesus for more detailed discussion).

Law’s dismissal of Josephus is more problematic. The “brief reference to the crucifixion of Jesus” he notes refers to AJ XVIII.62-3 – the infamous Testimonium Flavianum – so Law is right to say there is “debate over the extent to which the Josephus text has been tampered with by later Christians”. This is something of an understatement, given the range of views on the passage and its authenticity, with both the majority view (partial authenticity) and the main minority alternative (wholesale interpolation) having valid arguments, rendering the question moot (see Jesus Mythicism 7: Josephus, Jesus and the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’). But Law refers to Josephan references to Jesus in the singular, indicating he is not aware of (or has chosen to ignore) the second reference to Jesus in Josephus’ Antiquities (AJ XX.200). Given that almost no Josephus scholars doubt the authenticity of this passage (though yes, there are a handful of outliers, as ever), this one is far harder to dismiss. And given it refers, like Gal. 1:18-19, to Jesus’ brother James and is written by a younger contemporary of James reporting James’ execution in Josephus’ own city in circumstances Josephus would have followed closely, it is difficult to dismiss as good evidence that Jesus was known as a historical person. Law simply avoids it completely. Again, the Jesus-James reference is discussed in detail in the second half of this article.

This means that Law’s attempt to reduce the relevant source material to just the gospels may suit his argument, but it does not fit well with a knowledgeable approach to the evidence. Unfortunately Law is not familiar enough with the source material or the scholarship to see the problems with his rather blithe dismissal of other relevant evidence.

Miracles in the Ancient World

As already noted, one of the problems with Law’s arguments is that miracles and supernatural events are often found in accounts of ancient figures, including many whose historical existence is completely uncontroversial. So how does Law deal with this objection? Firstly, he argues that the sheer number of the Jesus miracles mean we need to be more sceptical about the existence of Jesus rather than simply sceptical about the miracles attributed to him:

[W]hen we look at the textual evidence for an historical Jesus provided by the New Testament, we find an abundance of miracle claims. Somewhere in the region of thirty-five miracles are attributed to Jesus in the New Testament. These miracles constitute a significant part of the narrative. It is estimated that the episodes reported by the Gospels (other than the nativity) occur in only the last three years of Jesus’ life, and that together they comprise just a few weeks or months. The supposed occurrence of thirty-five or so miracles within such a relatively short period of time is striking. Nor are these miracles merely incidental to the main narrative. The pivotal episode – Jesus’ resurrection – is a miracle.

(Law, p. 132)

Secondly, he works from a single example of a miracle attributed to a historical figure – Plutarch’s account of Alexander the Great being miraculously guided to the oracle of Ammon by some helpful ravens (Alexander, 27) – to argue the Jesus stories differ substantially from relevant examples in other ancient sources. After noting again that “the miraculous claims made by Plutarch about Alexander constitute only a small part of his narrative”, he continues:

Moreover, regarding the miracle of the ravens, it’s not even clear that we are dealing with a supernatural miracle, rather than some honestly misinterpreted natural phenomenon.

(Law, p. 139),

This is true, given that nothing Plutarch describes is necessarily miraculous even if he interprets it that way:

Again, when the marks for the guides became confused, and the travellers were separated and wandered about in ignorance of the route, ravens appeared and assumed direction of their march,​ flying swiftly on in front of them when they followed, and waiting for them when they marched slowly and lagged behind. Moreover, what was most astonishing of all, Callisthenes tells us that the birds by their cries called back those who straggled away in the night, and cawed until they had set them in the track of the march.

But Law does not mention another version of the story referred to by Arrian, which is rather more difficult to claim was naturalistic:

Ptolemy son of Lagus relates that two speaking snakes preceded the army and Alexander ordered the guides to follow them and trust in the divinity; the snakes then led the way to the oracle and back again.

(Arrian, Anabasis, 3.3.5)

Some fortuitously appearing and misinterpreted ravens may be natural, but helpful talking snakes certainly are not. Arrian then also notes the ravens version of the story, which he attributes to Aristobulus, and observes “most writers agree with him”. This refers to Aristobulus of Cassandreia, who had accompanied Alexander on his campaigns and whose (mostly lost) account was used by both Arrian and Plutarch. But the problem for Law here is that the talking snakes version of the tale is also recorded by one of Alexanders companions. Ptolemy son of Lagus was one of Alexander’s generals and was also there with him in Egypt – he went on to become Ptolemy I Soter, the founder of the Ptolemaic Dynasty of Egyptian kings. So was it ravens or was it snakes? Was it a possible miracle or an unmistakeable one? We have two accounts, both by alleged witnesses and both saying different things. And Law chooses to highlight the one that can possibly be explained naturalistically and ignores the alternative which clearly cannot. Again, we have to wonder if he does this out of ignorance of Ptolemy’s account or because it does not really suit his line of argument.

Law then tries to distance the Alexander miracle story he chooses to focus on from the Jesus stories still further by saying:

Further, and still more importantly, there’s good, independent evidence that Alexander existed and did many of the things Plutarch reports (including archeological evidence of the dynasties left in his military wake).

(Law, p. 139)

This is absolutely true and precisely what we would expect. After all, it is hardly surprising we have far more substantial evidence for the king who conquered most of the known world than for a Jewish peasant preacher from an obscure backwater. But this argument rather misses the point. The fact that we have this and other miracle stories about Alexander and a variety of other figures who we are relatively certain existed is a problem for Law. Again, if this is what we find for many such figures, the existence of miracles in the stories of Jesus is not the indicator of likely non-existence he is trying to claim. Miracles are not a necessary indicator of ahistoricity.

Which leads us back to Law’s only remaining argument regarding a difference between the other miracle stories and those in the Jesus narratives: the sheer number of them in the gospels:

The problem with the textual evidence for Jesus’ existence is that most of the details we have about him come solely from documents in which the miraculous constitutes a significant part of what is said about Jesus, where many of these miracles (walking on water, etc.) are unlikely to be merely misinterpreted natural phenomena, and where it is at least questionable whether we possess any good, independent non-miracle-involving evidence of his existence.

(Law, pp. 139-40)

This argument runs up against a problem with trying to compare different types of sources. Law, in this argument and elsewhere, appears to take the gospels as intending to be straightforward historical accounts of Jesus’ life and deeds, so feels they can be directly compared to, say, Plutarch’s biography of Alexander. In that comparison, yes, the miracles and supernatural elements form a far more significant part of the narratives. But is this a comparison of like with like? It is far from clear that it is.

The genre of “gospel” had some precedents in content and structure with other literary works of the time, particularly Greco-Roman bioi, which are generally accepted to have influenced the structure and aims of the gospels writers. But bioi differed substantially from each other in content depending on whose life was being presented, to whom and why. So an ancient biography of a king, emperor or general is almost certainly going to have a very different intended audience and polemical purpose to that of a philosopher or teacher and is obviously going to focus on substantially different types of anecdotes and events. This means the biographies by Plutarch or Suetonius do, as we have seen, contain miracles, but are unlikely to have them in the same density or with the same centrality as the gospel accounts of Jesus, just as the Jesus stories are understandably unlikely to have many references to battles. Law is not bothering to compare apples to apples.

If we do look for examples of ancient Greco-Roman biographical works that are far closer in focus, intent and content to the gospels, we will (unsurprisingly) find in them a far higher density of miracles and supernatural events. The most obvious analogous work here is Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana.

Apollonius of Tyana (c. 3 BC – c. 97 AD) was a Neopythagorean philosopher from Cappadocia. Most of what we know about him comes from Philostratus’ Life, written sometime in the 220s or 230s AD, though drawing on at least some earlier works including, reportedly, a memoir by Apollonius’ disciple Damis and, possibly, letters by the philosopher himself. Unlike Augustus or Alexander, Apollonius is a far closer analogue for Jesus; he was a travelling teacher who was widely regarded to have miraculous powers by merit of his special wisdom and status and who was even thought to have ascended into the heavens after his death. So, as with Jesus, the narrative of his life is taken up with his journeys, his dialogues and disputes with others and his miracles. Several of these seem to parallel some of the Jesus stories quite closely. For example, while travelling in India, Apollonius is approached by a succession of people asking for miraculous cures. He exorcises “a boy of sixteen years of age, [who] had been for two years possessed by a devil” (Philostratus, 3.38) and then a variety of other people:

There also arrived a man who was lame. He already thirty years old and was a keen hunter of lions; but a lion had sprung upon him and dislocated his hip so that he limped with one leg. However when they massaged with their hands his hip, the youth immediately recovered his upright gait.

And another man had had his eyes put out, and he went away having recovered the sight of both of them. Yet another man had his hand paralysed; but left their presence in full possession of the limb. And a certain woman had suffered in labour already seven times, but was healed in the following way through the intercession of her husband. He bade the man, whenever his wife should be about to bring forth her next child, to enter her chamber carrying in his bosom a live hare; then he was to walk once round her and at the same moment to release the hare; for that the womb would be extruded together with the foetus, unless the hare was at once driven out.

(Philostratus, 3.39)

And these are just a few of the wonders and miracles Philostratus relates about his hero. Apollonius’ birth is suitably presaged by visions and accompanied by strange portents. He can predict the future, understand foreign languages and can even teleport himself over huge distances. Like the gospel writers, Philostratus has a polemical purpose in telling these stories. They serve to illustrate his unique wisdom as well as refuting the charge that Apollonius was a mere magician or simply a charlatan, by insisting his powers were purely a result of his superior knowledge of the world.

Of course, beyond this rather fanciful account by Philostratus we have little information about Apollonius, though he is generally regarded as having been a historical person. Law pays him no attention, despite his biography being far more of a parallel to the gospels than those of Alexander or similar figures. Law could dismiss the likely historicity of Apollonius on the same grounds he does for Jesus: the number of miracles in Philostratus “contaminates” the non-miraculous details and so is sufficient grounds to conclude or at least suspect Apollonius never existed at all.

But this is based on his argument that a large number of miracle stories about a figure somehow means that the person is less likely to exist. That argument rests almost entirely on the idea that the stories of Jesus are exceptional in this regard and so nothing like the biography of, say, Alexander. But Philostratus’ Life and similar accounts of Pythagorean and Neoplatonic philosophers show this is not the case. Works which have a similar kinds of polemical purpose and focus as the gospels display a much higher number of miracles and supernatural events than those about figures very different to Jesus. The Life of Apollonius is the most obvious parallel, but Marinus’ Life of Proclus and Porphyry’s On the Life of Plontius are two other (perhaps less close) examples and ones where we are reasonably certain the men in question existed. Law is wrong to think that the Jesus stories are without significant parallels when it comes to the number and nature of their miracles.

The Curious Case of Ted and Sarah

Given he is a philosopher, Law seems only slightly interested in looking at ancient sources and understanding how the stories of Jesus may fit into them. He is much more interested in presenting what he feels is a good analogy to illustrate what he calls “the contamination principle” and this is actually the centrepiece of his argument. He summarises this principle like this:

Where testimony/documents weave together a narrative that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims, and there is good reason to be sceptical about those extraordinary claims, then there is good reason to be sceptical about the mundane claims, at least until we possess good independent evidence of their truth.

(Law, p. 136)

To illustrate what he feels this means, he tells a story about two people called Ted and Sarah:

Suppose I have two close friends, Ted and Sarah, whom I know to be generally sane and trustworthy individuals. Suppose that Ted and Sarah now tell me that someone called Bert paid them an unexpected visit in their home last night, and stayed a couple of hours drinking tea with them. They recount various details, such as topics of conversation, what Bert was wearing, and so on. Other things being equal, it is fairly reasonable for me to believe, solely on the basis of their testimony, that such a visit occurred.

(Law, p. 132)

So far so good. He continues:

But now suppose Ted and Sarah also tell me that shortly before leaving, Bert flew around their sitting room by flapping his arms, died, came back to life again, and finished by temporarily transforming their sofa into a donkey. Ted and Sarah appear to say these things in all sincerity. In fact, they seem genuinely disturbed by what they believe they witnessed. They continue to make these claims about Bert even after several weeks of cross-examination by me.
Am I justified in believing that Ted and Sarah witnessed miracles? Surely not.

(Law, p. 132)

And this too is pretty reasonable, given the nature of the claims made. Law invokes the idea that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, which is one most people would happily accept. But this is only a good reason to think the extraordinary claims about Bert are not true. Law has quite a bit more work to do if he wants to get from this analogy to a substantiation of his “contamination principle”.

He tackles this task, unsurprisingly, the way a philosopher would. He presents his analogy of Ted, Sarah and the alleged “Bert” and then examines his proposition that the unlikely miracle stories told by Ted and Sarah not only cast doubt on the miracles, but on the whole tale of “Bert”. He then presents a series of objections to this proposition and works to counter them, arriving at the conclusion that his proposition is sound. Some of his counters to these objections are solid and several are rather weak, and to analyse each in turn would take a long time. But the main problem with Law’s argument lies not in how he defends his proposition, but rather in the analogy on which all this is based. Because Law’s analogy is not actually analogous.

Law bases his argument on his story of Ted and Sarah. In it, two “generally sane and trustworthy individuals” tell him of a visit by this person Bert the previous evening. Some elements of the story are mundane (the visit, the visitor’s ordinary name, conversation, drinking tea), but others are wildly unlikely (Bert flying, rising from the dead, turning their sofa into a donkey). Ted and Sarah stick to their story even after weeks of cross-examination. And all this is supposed to be analogous to … the gospels, apparently.

Anyone with even a mild exposure to any kind of critical analysis of the New Testament texts should begin to see a serious problem here. Law is treating the gospel stories as the equivalent of supposedly direct, eye-witness testimony of things that happened just hours ago. In his Ted and Sarah story the idea that they are simply insane is largely ruled out (“generally sane and trustworthy individuals”), but the fairly obviously possibility that an actual reasonably mundane event (a visit by Bert) could have grown in the telling over time is completely ignored. So is any examination of a psychological, social or cultural context that would explain how Ted and Sarah could come to tell miracle stories about this Bert, despite Bert not actually doing anything miraculous.

Most importantly (despite what apologists and certain conservative Christians try to claim) the gospels are not eyewitness accounts and are definitely not tales of things that happened less than 24 hours ago. They were written 40 to 100 years after the events they describe and most critical scholars agree their authors were, at the very least, one degree removed from anyone who could have been witnesses to those events, and probably much more. They were also written in a social and religious context which, as we have seen above, invested significant figures with miraculous powers. Further, they sometimes told miraculous stories of these figures not as documentary fact, but as a symbolic way of indicating and emphasising the figure’s greatness.

Law’s Ted and Sarah story is nothing like any of this. Law creates an analogy that has no room for what is the most likely scenario regarding the Jesus narratives: that a generally mundane series of events involving a Jewish preacher were interpreted in a particularly charged religious and cultural context by people who saw him as God’s anointed one and so, over a period of decades, these events became invested with stories that reflected and emphasised this high religious status. And these stories then built on each other as they were told and retold and so grew in the telling.

Law does not bother to actually analyse the miracle stories of Jesus, critically examine and compare the texts they appear in, analyse their structure, precedents and interrelations, scrutinise their social and cultural context, compare them to analogous stories from the same cultural and temporal context or determine the polemical intention or intended audience of the texts in which they are found. In other words, Law does not bother to actually do what historians do. Yet he somehow thinks, despite not actually doing any historical analysis, his bad analogy and his philosophical toying with hypothetical objections to it should tell us something about … history. To be blunt, Law does not know what the hell he is doing.

The Gospels and their Miracles

If we do some of what Law did not do, we can see how his Ted and Sarah analogy is not remotely useful in determining the historicity of anything in the narratives about Jesus, including his possible existence. To begin with, apart from his rather inadequate reference to the more naturalistic version of the story of Alexander and the oracle of Ammon, Law seems uninterested in looking at the gospels’ miracles in the context of other miracle stories of the time. There are detailed scholarly studies which do this, such as Wermner Kahl, New Testament Miracle Stories in their Religious Historical Setting Α Religionsgeschichtliche Comparison from a Structural Perspective (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1994). Or Eric Eve, The Jewish Context of Jesus’ Miracles (Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 231, Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). Or perhaps Wendy Cotter, Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook for the Study of New Testament Miracles (Routledge, 1999).

Strangely, none of these studies or anything like them can be found in Law’s rather sparse footnotes. The very first thing a historian would do is look at parallels to the gospel miracle stories and similar stories from related ancient social and cultural contexts, or at least consider the scholarship of others who had already done this detailed work. And doing so shows there are many parallels between both the nature and the rhetorical purpose of the many analogous Jewish and Greco-Roman miracle stories and those in the gospels, which in turn give us useful insights into how and why these stories most likely arose about Jesus. But Law does not bother with any of this and just takes the gospel stories at face value, claiming they are analogous to his Ted and Sarah telling him what this Bert person did in their living room the previous evening.

Law is similarly uninterested in the decades of time and the literary distance between the gospel texts and the events they purport to describe. He notes briefly that they “[were] written within a few (perhaps one or two) decades of Jesus’ death … probably not by first-hand witnesses” (p. 130) but never bothers to return to this rather important point, let alone deal with the obvious fact that this makes them completely dissimilar to his Ted and Sarah “analogy” on which his whole argument is founded. Yet the 40 to 100 years between the events described and the writing of the gospel texts is plenty of time for the embellishment of a mundane story of a preacher and faith healer, so why does Law not bother to examine that fairly obvious explanation of how these miracles stories arose and the meaning of their place in the narrative? Bart Ehrman has given an accessible account of how the stories of Jesus in general and the miraculous ones in particular show signs of having grown and developed over time before they took the forms we find in the gospels – see Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (HarperOne, 2017). He writes:

Let me begin by making two points that I think everyone can agree on: (a) with the passing of time, Jesus’ miracle-working abilities become increasingly pronounced in the tradition, to an exorbitant extent; and (b) the stories of his miracles were always told to make a theological point (or more than one point) about him.

(Ehrman, p. 221)

Both these points are highly pertinent here. If (a) is correct then we have a strong indication that the miracle elements are outgrowths from the story of Jesus, embellishments on an original story that was far more mundane that developed over time. And (b) gives the key reason these stories were added. This means that, unlike in Law’s analogy, we have not only a clear reason that these elements in the narrative could have been added to the non-miraculous deeds of Jesus, but evidence that this is actually what happened over the many decades in which these stories evolved and grew.

Ehrman supports his first point by noting how the later the stories about Jesus are, the more spectacular the miracles attributed to him become. We see this most markedly in the non-canonical gospels dating to the second century onwards, where we see:

… as an infant [Jesus] ordered palm trees to bend down to provide his mother with some fruit; as a five-year-old he could make mud sparrows come to life, wither playmates who got on his nerves, and kill with a word teachers he found irritating.

(Ehrman, p. 221)

Analysis of the canonical gospels shows this pattern as well. Law is happy to note that the version of the story of Alexander and the oracle of Ammon which has him being led by ravens has a potentially naturalistic explanation. But he fails to notice that this can also be said for quite a few of Jesus’ miracles. After all, the majority of the gospels’ miracle stories are healings and exorcisms and faith healers are capable of convincing believers that they have been “healed” of various ailments even today, just as modern exorcists can convince those sure they are possessed by “demons” that the evil spirits have been driven out. No actual miracles need to be involved here, just an accepted and agreed set of mutual beliefs and behaviours and transactions. Early first century Jewish Palestine, like the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world, believed that disease and afflictions could be healed and that demons could be driven out by certain holy or wise men. The collections of ancient miracle stories in the works by Kahl, Eve and Kotter noted above give us dozens of examples illustrating these beliefs.

So it is not hard to catalogue the miracle stories in the gospels and then divide them into those with potentially naturalistic explanations (healings, exorcisms) and those that probably do not (nature miracles, angelic visitations, divine voices). The results are interesting. There are at least 52 distinct stories of miracles or supernatural events in the four canonical gospels; 37 of which are attested in two or more gospels and 15 of which are only attested in one gospel (9 only in gLuke and 6 only in gJohn). Overall, 27 of the total can be said to have possible naturalistic explanations (51%), whereas 25 cannot (49%).

But when we look at the gospels in their most likely chronological order, a pattern emerges:

gMark (c. 70 AD)		26 events
Naturalistic	16	62%
Miraculous	10	38%
gLuke (c. 80 AD)		28 events
Naturalistic	17	61%
Miraculous	12	39%
gMatt (c. 80 AD)		35 events
Naturalistic	19	54%
Miraculous	16	46%
gJohn (c. 90 AD)		13 events
Naturalistic	5	38%
Miraculous	8	62%

Here we can see the proportion of events without a possible naturalistic explanation goes up over time. while in the earliest gospel potentially naturalistic events are in the majority, but by the time we get to the latest gospel its the miraculous events which are more numerous (even though the total events in the rather different narrative of gJohn is far lower than in the synoptics). Of course, the exact chronology here is impossible to determine precisely and the estimated dates given above are the earliest in the generally accepted possible ranges for each gospel . It very likely gJohn was composed much later than 90 AD and a strong case can be made for gLuke being as late as the early second century. But we still see a pattern whereby the further down the likely timeline a text is, the more spectacular and less potentially naturalistic the reported miracle events become. And then the stories in the even later non-canonical gospels became still more spectacular again. All this indicates tales that grow in the telling.

This pattern becomes more significant when we turn to the theological meanings the gospels give the miracles they report. Unlike Law’s Ted and Sarah story, the miraculous elements are not simply presented as remarkable feats with no meaning, like turning a sofa into a donkey. They are held up as proof that specific theological claims the story makes about Jesus and his mission are true. One passage in gLuke makes this particularly explicit. In Luke 7:18-20, John the Baptist sends two messengers to Jesus to ask him “Are you the one who is to come?”. The gospel gives Jesus’ response:

Jesus had just then cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had given sight to many who were blind. And he answered them, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

(Luke 7: 21-23)

This is a reference to two texts from Isaiah (Isaiah 35:5-6; 61:1) which were taken to be prophecies of the coming apocalyptic kingship of God. In synoptic gospels the miracles are not random works of wonder with no meaning, as in Law’s supposed analogy, they are specific signs of the coming apocalypse that is the key and central part of Jesus’ message (again, see Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet for a detailed discussion of the place of the miracles in the context of Jewish apocalyptic thinking). As Ehrman says, regardless of whether any of the attributed miracles are based on things that happened, such as actual faith healings and exorcisms, they are clearly presented for a polemical reason:

… to convince the world that Jesus really was the powerful miracle-working Son of God who not only conquered the forces of evil at his resurrection but that he had be conquering them all along, throughout his entire ministry, a ministry that proved the truth that the apocalypse was soon to appear and that the Kingdom of God was about to arrive.

(Ehrman, p. 225)

This apocalyptic significance also explains the higher density of miracle stories in the synoptic gospels, with their greater emphasis on Jesus as a harbinger of the coming Kingdom of God, as opposed to gJohn that shifts its theological emphasis onto Jesus as divine saviour.

All this means the examination of the parallels, nature, context, composition and polemical purpose of the gospel miracle stories indicates strongly that they were largely elements that were added to a story of a Jewish preacher. He may have been a faith healer and exorcist and this is likely why other miracle stories attached themselves to accounts of his life over time, or they could be purely theological constructs. But this analysis shows they are nothing like the meaningless miracles in Law’s non-analogy where Ted and Sarah tell him a tale of the evening before.

Law the Non-historian

As I mention above, Law begins his paper by stating “the focus of this paper is solely on what history, as a discipline, is able to reveal.” (Law p. 129). In its conclusion he assures the reader:

This paper, while relevant to Biblical history, is essentially philosophical in nature. My focus has not, primarily, been on the historical evidence concerning Jesus, but rather on the principles by which that evidence is, or should be, assessed.

(Law, p. 150)

He then states his findings on these principles, concluding that his “contamination principle” means we should not just doubt the miracles, but that we also have very sound reasons to take them as evidence the whole story of Jesus is unhistorical.

The contamination principle …. delivers the conclusion that, in the absence of good independent evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus, we are justified in remaining sceptical about the existence of such a person. 

(Law, p. 151)

The first problem with this conclusion is that Law deals with the issue of “good independent evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus” in a superficial manner and brushes aside evidence that actual historians find sufficient to indicate such a person most likely existed. More importantly, Law’s “contamination principle” is based on his bad analogy. Because he did not actually bother to put into practice the methodology of “history, as a discipline”, he constructed a highly artificial analogy that did not genuinely reflect the gospel narratives; their chronology, their intention, their context or even their miraculous content. This means his analysis of the meaning of this contrived and wrongheaded analogy is indeed “essentially philosophical in nature” and is also, as a result, a wild goose chase.

Law’s whole argument actually winds up telling us nothing about history and its main lesson is that philosophers should probably stick to their own field and leave history to those who know what they are doing.

Further Reading

Wendy Cotter, Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook for the Study of New Testament Miracles (Routledge, 1999)

Bart Ehrman, Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (HarperOne, 2017)

Eric Eve, The Jewish Context of Jesus’ Miracles (Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 231, Sheffield Academic Press, 2002)

Wermner Kahl, New Testament Miracle Stories in their Religious Historical Setting Α Religionsgeschichtliche Comparison from a Structural Perspective (Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1994)