Reported miracles: an important clarification

After reading through the chapter on miracles in The Jesus Legend again it seems to me that Boyd and Eddy are conflating two distinct skeptical challenges to the miracle claims of the Gospels. The first uses the mere presence of miracle stories in the Jesus traditions as evidence that the evangelists or their sources concocted them out of thin air, either as a free creative composition or modeled on Old Testament or pagan miracle accounts. They write: "The Gospels claim that Jesus and his disciples performed miracles such as healing the sick and disabled, casting out demons, and even raising the dead. To the thinking of many historical-critical scholars, this is enough to demonstrate that they are substantially legendary." (pp.39-40) According to this line of thinking, the Gospel accounts cannot possibly have their source in the actual eye-witness experience of the disciples, even if they merely record their (confused?) reaction to an unusual event. This amounts to the claim that no one has ever experienced anything which they even believed to be a miracle, so the actual content of the miracle stories must have come, not from direct experience, but from prior literary sources or the evangelists' imagination.

This claim is easily rebutted on the basis of the anthropological evidence that Boyd and Eddy marshal on pp.67-78; clearly throughout history innumerable people have experienced events that they believed to be miraculous, which today we would call 'supernatural', such as possessions, epiphanies from angelic or demonic beings, rapid and remarkable healings, etc. There is absolutely no reason to think that in all or even the majority of cases of reported miracles the accounts originated with the conscious decision of the teller to fabricate an event without any external stimulus whatsoever. It seems undeniable to me that many accounts resulted (and continue to result) from an actual event which took the teller by surprise. A person was going along their merry way when a sudden bright light in the form of (what seemed to them to be) a person stopped them in their tracks, for example. Moreover, even if some miracle stories have a purely literary origin, modeled after previous accounts, we would still wonder where the previous accounts themselves come from. It is hard to imagine miracle stories springing into existence without even one antecedent experience of what seemed to a person or community to be a miracle.

However, acceptance of these facts does not automatically confer the status of eyewitness testimony on any specific miracle story. Many or perhaps even most reported miracle stories result from eyewitness experience, but we still do have miracle stories that are the product of the creative imagination and were either never meant to be taken seriously as a factual account or were deceptively promulgated as such. To complicate things even further, some miracle stories might be fictional but are ultimately based on the memory of a real event or series of events (in the case of Jesus, for example, we might have fictional miracles attributed to him precisely because he was remembered as a miracle worker; Jesus may not have performed the specific miracles attributed to him in, for example, the Proto-Evangelium of James, but that doesn't mean he didn't perform any miracles, and that the miracles he did perform didn't serve as the basis for the new fictional ones).

But distinguishing between fact and fiction, regardless of whether the event described was an actual miracle or only interpreted as such, and only on the level of authorial intent, should be possible regardless of prior world-view commitments. One doesn't have to believe in the possibility of miracles to analyse a miracle story and conclude that it most likely records eyewitness testimony. Alternatively, even if one believes in the possibility of miracles it should be possible to recognize a miracle story as fiction based entirely on historical and literary criticism of the text. For example, even though I believe in miracles I am 100% confident that Randal Flagg's levitation in Stephen King's The Stand never happened anywhere at any time because The Stand is a work of fiction through and through, and there are plenty of external and internal indicators of that fact.

Or for another more relevant example, if it should turn out that we've been misreading the Gospels all along and that originally they were meant to be read as fiction, as some critics like Randal Helms argue, that judgment should result from a careful analysis of the texts themselves, not from an a priori belief that miracles cannot happen. The judgment that the Gospel miracle stories are fictional should only be based on a careful argument to the effect that either: 1) the author never intended the stories to be read as factual, 2) the author did believe they were factual but lacked the resources and ability to verify his sources as going back as close as possible to the life of Jesus and the testimony of eye-witnesses or 3) the author did intend them to be read as factual but he didn't have any good sources and fabricated his accounts for polemical purposes. The point here is that the mere occurence of miracle stories in the Gospels should not prejudge or even cause us to suspect more than usual that we are dealing with any of the above three cases. This is a common skeptical bias: the conviction that fraud, deception and fiction tend to concentrate in a higher proportion around claims to paranormal experience than other claims. I highly doubt this is true in general, as there would seem to be just as many reasons for fabrication or embellishment of ordinary events, such as marital infidelity or incompetence, as for occurrences of the paranormal. Even if the skeptics are right, we should note that the same claim cuts both ways. In fact research shows that if there are many documented cases of fraud or embellishment in paranormal testimony arising from wishful thinking or polemical purposes, there are equally many cases of intellectual dishonesty, trickery and bias resulting from fervent skepticism and the desire to debunk, either as a result of intellectual pride, personal animosity, etc.

But Boyd and Eddy also discuss and critique another skeptical claim, going back to Hume's famous argument against miracles, roughly that eyewitness testimony to miracles could never be sufficiently strong enough to convince the critically thinking listener (or reader) that something actually transcending the natural order has taken place, much less that this something is most plausibly interpreted as the action of a specific religious being, such as God. If someone tells me that they saw another person levitate, I should weigh the likelihood that my friend witnessed an actual levitation against the nearly uniform testimony of my and others' experience that people cannot levitate.

The force of this argument, of course, depends on many questionable assumptions: whether human experience really is as uniformly void of supposed levitation events as Hume and other skeptics think, whether our understanding of the natural order is really stable and comprehensive enough to rule out or at least make highly unlikely the actual occurrence of paranormal events, whether all or even most of the reports of such events are the result of fraud or misperception, etc. The discussion of the merits of Hume's argument is too involved to enter into here. My point for now is that these two skeptical challenges should be kept distinct, and Boyd and Eddy are not so successful at this. At times they seem to be referring to the first challenge, and at other times the second. The question of whether historians are ever justified in inferring that a genuine supernatural event occurred on the basis of written testimony to that event, and whether the mere presence of supernatural events in a story should incline us to think that it is deliberately fictional (or factual but without good sources behind it) are two distinct questions. The answer to the former question depends on the interpretation we give of an unusual event, the latter on features of the textual evidence.