“Let us take the first class first. Mark calls them ‘powers,’ i.e. works of power. That is a good name for them. But Mark seems to think that, if a man has ‘power’ to cast out demons and perform cures without medical means, such a one must be a great prophet or even a Son of God. To that I demur. I remember, when I was in Dacia, one of my men was down with fever, and bad fever, too. But when the bugles sounded out one night, and the enemy came on, beating in our outposts and pouring into our camp on the backs of some of our cowardly rascals, this brave fellow was up and doing, without helmet or armour, in the front with the best of them. Next morning, he was none the worse. Nor was there any relapse. He was quite cured. I think I have told you how Josephus described to me the casting out of a demon in the presence of Vespasian. And I might remind you of Tacitus’s story about the cure of a blind man by the same emperor. I suspect, however, that the former was a mere conjuring trick and that the latter was got up by the priests of—Serapis, I think it was. So I lay no stress on either. But I have spoken to many sensible physicians, who tell me that paralysis and some kinds of fever can be cured by what they call an emotional shock. Often the cure does not last. Some of these physicians go a little further and ascribe to certain persons a peculiar power of quieting restless patients and pacifying or even healing the insane. But I entirely refuse to believe that, if a man has such a power, he can consequently claim to be a Son of God.”
About the objection thus raised by Scaurus I have said enough already. It seemed to me that the power of permanently healing the paralysed, and permanently pacifying and healing the insane, was quite different from that of startling a paralysed man into a temporary activity. The former appeared to me allied with moral power and with steadfastness of mind, and likely to be an attribute of the Son of God. Still I was sorry that Mark devoted so much space to it. Here I agreed, in part, with Scaurus.
He then passed to the second class of miracles, “those that were honestly supposed to have occurred, but did not occur.” “If,” said he, “I assert that Mark turned metaphorical traditions into literal prose, you must not suppose that I accuse him of dishonesty. All the ancient Jews did it. Look at the story of Joshua, describing how he stopped the sun. Perhaps also you have read how God caused a stream to spring up from the Ass’s Jawbone (originally a hill of that name, like the headland or peninsula called Ass’s Jawbone in Laconia, which you and I passed together some five or six years ago). The second (the jawbone miracle) is somewhat different in origin from the first (the sun miracle). There are many shades of verbal misunderstanding capable of converting non-fact into alleged fact. There was all the more excuse for this error in Christian Jews (such as Mark and others) because of two reasons. In the first place, the prophets had predicted that all manner of disease (blindness, deafness, lameness) would be cured in the days of the Messiah (using even such expressions as ‘thy dead men shall awake’). In the second place, Christ did actually—as I have admitted—cure some diseases, such as insanity, fever, and paralysis. How, then, could it be other than a difficult task, in such circumstances, to distinguish the literal from the metaphorical traditions about the cures effected by Christ?”
I could all the less deny the force of these remarks because I had been studying the words, “Whatsoever things ye ask, praying, believe that ye have received them and they shall be unto you.” These words, if applied literally—to bread, for example, or money—were manifestly not true. Indeed they were absurd. How could a man honestly believe that he had received a thousand sesterces in the act of praying for them? But if applied spiritually, as in Paul’s prayer concerning the thorn in the flesh, they might (I felt) be true for one endowed with great faith. Paul prayed that the “thorn” might “depart” from him. In one sense it did not depart. But in another sense, it did depart because God so increased his strength that the “thorn” became as nothing.
Now in this same passage of Mark I found the following: “Whosoever shall say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted and thrown into the sea,’ and shall not doubt in his heart but believes in that very moment that what he says is happening, it shall be unto him.” Luke also elsewhere had, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye would say to this sycamine-tree, ‘Be uprooted and be planted in the sea,’ and it would have obeyed you.” I took for granted that “mountain,” “mustard-seed,” and “sycamine-tree,” must all have been metaphorically used.
Scaurus confirmed this view, saying that the Jews were in the habit of calling a learned interpreter of the Law an uprooter of mountains, i.e. of spiritual obstacles blocking the path of the students of the law. But then he added something that amazed me, “Matthew has, ‘If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do the deed of the fig-tree, but even if ye say to this mountain, Be lifted and thrown into the sea, it shall come to pass.’ Now, ‘mountain’ being metaphorical, you might naturally anticipate that Matthew intended ‘fig-tree’ to be metaphorical. But if you look back a little, you will find that Matthew actually imagines that there was a literal fig-tree in question. So does Mark. He and Matthew turn the metaphor into a literal miracle, as follows.
“In the first place, Jesus comes to a literal fig-tree, seeking literal fruit. He finds none. Consequently, say Mark and Matthew, a curse of barrenness was pronounced on it by Jesus. What followed? The tree was at once ‘dried up,’ or (according to Mark) ‘dried up from the roots.’ Now first note that the Hebrew word that means ‘barren’ means also ‘root up,’ ‘cut off,’ or ‘cut down.’ Then pass to Luke. He omits the whole of this miracle about a fig-tree. But he has a parable about a fig-tree. The Lord of a vineyard comes to a barren fig-tree, and gives orders that it shall be ‘cut down.’ The vinedresser intercedes for it that it may be spared for one year more in case it may bear fruit.”
I looked and found that the story in Mark and Matthew was as Scaurus had described it. But another detail astonished me. It was a phrase that followed the words, “While they were passing by early in the morning”—i.e. the morning after the curse had been pronounced—“they saw the fig-tree dried up from the roots.” Instead of writing that they were all amazed at the speed with which the curse had been fulfilled, Mark wrote, “And Peter, remembering it, says to him, ‘Rabbi, behold, the fig-tree that thou cursedst is withered up’.” Trying to put myself in the place of Peter, I asked, “What should I have done when I approached the spot? How could I fail to be on the alert to note the tree that my Master cursed yesterday? How could any of my companions fail? How was it possible that any of us could forget? How could I possibly talk about ‘remembering’ it? How, therefore, could a historian suppose it needful to insert that I, or any of us, ‘remembered’?”
Turning to Matthew, I found that he got rid of “remembering,” and of “Peter” too, by making the miracle occur instantaneously, thus, “He said unto it [i.e. to the tree], ‘Let there be no fruit from thee henceforward for ever.’ And immediately the fig-tree withered away. And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, ‘How did the fig-tree immediately wither away’?”
Scaurus explained the whole matter as follows: “Look at Ezekiel’s saying, ‘I the Lord have dried up the green tree,’ and its context. You will find that ‘the green tree’ is Tyre. Elsewhere Luke has a proverb about ‘the green tree and the dry,’ where ‘the dry’ refers to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. So here, the fig-tree, green but barren, is Jerusalem. Luke has given the parable correctly. The Lord of the vineyard, he says, comes to a fig-tree, i.e. Jerusalem, in the vineyard, that is, in Judah. He does not say that it is green, but we may imagine that. However, it has no fruit. ‘Let it be cut down,’ says the Lord. Well, I have shewn you that ‘Let it be cut down’ might mean, in Hebrew, ‘Let it be barren so that none may eat fruit from it,’ or ‘Let it be dried up.’ As a historical fact, the fig-tree was cut down, or dried up, when Jerusalem was destroyed by Titus. But that was not immediate. It was long after the resurrection. When Jerusalem was destroyed, the disciples remembered”—this explained my difficulty above mentioned—“that the Lord had pronounced this curse on Jerusalem. I could shew you, if space allowed, that the name ‘Peter’ (which would be in Hebrew ‘Simon’) might be confused (in Hebrew) with our Latin phrase ‘qui cum eo erant’ meaning ‘those that were with him,’ i.e. Christ’s disciples, and also that Mark’s phrase ‘passing by early’ may be an error for ‘passing along to inspect, visit, or seek fruit.’ Having regard to the fact that Peter died a year or two before the city was destroyed, I am inclined to think that it was ‘the disciples,’ not ‘Peter,’ that ‘remembered.’ But there is no space for details. It must suffice to have shewn you how a parable of Jesus, about cutting down a fig-tree, ‘remembered’ by his disciples long afterwards as referring to Jerusalem, has been converted by Mark and Matthew into a portentous miracle about withering a fig-tree instantaneously (according to Matthew) or by the following morning (according to Mark).”