We must not make too much of the details I have just mentioned. There is no real difference of principle. The healing of the centurion’s servant is telepathic like that of the courtier’s son. The woman with the issue of blood had been ill for twelve years, and had spent all her living on physicians. From the way in which blind Bartimaeus describes his sensations we should infer that he too had never had his sight. Death is death; and Jairus’s daughter and the widow’s son at Nain were as dead as Lazarus. Really, on this point, there is little to choose between the Gospels, as there is little to choose between the documents out of which the Synoptics are composed.
A common form of objection is that which lays stress on the isolation of the narrative of the raising of Lazarus. So notable a miracle, it is urged, would have been sure to leave traces of itself in the other Gospels. And I quite allow that the argument from silence has more force here than in many of the other cases in which it is used. And yet even here it is easily, and I feel sure it is often, much exaggerated. The only document of which the author seems to have had the intention of making any sort of collection of miracles was the ground-document of the Synoptics—we may say, our present St. Mark. Neither the Logia nor the special source or sources of St. Luke do more than mention incidentally a very few. But when we think of the way in which St. Mark is said to have composed his Gospel, it is evident that his collection of miracles could not be in the least exhaustive. He was dependent in the main upon the preaching of St. Peter, the object of which was not historical or biographical, but the edification of its hearers. If it is true (and it is as yet hardly proved) that St. Mark had access also to the Logia, that was a collection of sayings rather than of acts. So that there is no one source that we should expect to have anything like a complete enumeration of miracles.
On the other hand, if we turn to what I have called the special source or sources of St. Luke, how vividly do they bring home to us the incompleteness of the whole previous record! St. Mark apparently tried to collect parables as well as miracles; so also did the Logia. And yet neither of these documents has any trace of the Prodigal Son, or the Good Samaritan, or the Pharisee and the Publican, or the Rich Man and Lazarus, or the Rich Man cut off before he could enjoy his wealth, or the Importunate Widow, or the Unrighteous Steward. We should have thought it incredible beforehand that any one who professed to make collections with a view to a Life of Christ at all could have omitted, I will not say all, but any two or three of gems like these. And yet we have two considerable works, both including a collection of parables, and yet in neither of them is there a vestige of any one of the group I have mentioned. Even the conspicuous example of the Raising of Lazarus does not shake me in my distrust of the argument from silence.
ii. Method of approaching the Question of Miracle.
And yet I can well understand the reluctance to accept narratives of miracle. I can well understand a nineteenth or twentieth-century reader taking up the Fourth Gospel and saying at once and off-hand, ‘The writer of this cannot have been an eye-witness of the events he describes.’ I have little doubt that it is the same sort of off-hand impression which is really at work in the minds of many of the critics. They acquire the impression in the course of a rapid perusal; or rather it attaches itself to the recollection that they bring with them of what they learnt in their childhood. They do not try to shake it off; it is always there at the back of their minds; and it colours, and I must needs think discolours, all the elaborate and learned study that they make of the Gospels in maturer years.
This question of miracles has been occupying my mind for some time; and I think that at once the most candid and the best procedure that I can follow in regard to it will be just to lay before you the provisional conclusions that I have reached as provisional, as a stage in the investigation of a subject that does not at all profess to be final, but that I hope contains something of truth and something that may be helpful to others as it has been to myself.
The one main principle in the treatment of miracle that I should like to urge would be the importance of keeping as distinct as we can two things, the attitude of mind in regard to miracles of the contemporaries—those before whom they are said to have happened and on whose testimony they have come down to us—and our own attitude now in the twentieth century. It seems to me that our difficulties are much increased, and that we are prevented from realizing the full strength of the case for miracles, by confusing these two things.
If we take first the attitude of the contemporaries, it seems to me that several fixed points come out in regard to them on which we may really take our stand with great confidence.
(i) The first point is that what these men fully believed to be miracles undoubtedly happened. We have evidence on this head that is strictly first-hand, the evidence of those who believed that they had wrought miracles themselves, as well as that they had witnessed the working of miracles by others.
(ii) The second point is that this evidence is absolutely bona fide. Our best example is, I suppose, St. Paul. It is a good exercise to collect the allusions to miracles in the Epistles of St. Paul, to ‘signs and wonders,’ to δυνάμεις or ‘acts of power,’ to special gifts of the Spirit. There can be no doubt that St. Paul was possessed with the conviction that he was living in the midst of miracle. This conviction lies behind and permeates all his thought in the same natural, spontaneous, inevitable way in which he performed, or saw others perform, the most ordinary functions of nature, eating or drinking or sleeping or breathing.