The Problem of Jesus by Mark Clark

Author:Mark Clark [Clark, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

John Dominic Crossan, the most famous scholar within the Jesus Seminar (a group made famous through the 1990s, sometimes deemed demonic by conservative Christians) notes as a powerful indication of the probability of Jesus’ miracles that they were actually not all that helpful in moving the Jesus tradition along. So why include them if they were problematic? “I hold,” he says, “that Jesus, as a magician and miracle worker, was a very problematic and controversial phenomenon not only for his enemies but even for his friends.”6 It is noteworthy that the gospel writers repeatedly admit that the response to Jesus and his miracles was not awe and wonder but the opposite. His exorcisms often led to the charge that he was in league with Satan and led some observers to plot his death (Matthew 12:14; Mark 3:6). If the early church was creating a narrative and trying to present a whitewashed apologetic for Jesus, which is what many skeptics claim, they could easily have avoided controversy by downplaying or ignoring his miraculous works.

It is also telling that the gospel stories are remarkably free from the sort of embellishment that appeals to a bought-in audience, which would have been tempting for them to include. The stories of miracles are somewhat short and to the point, without a lot of unnecessary information or extrapolation. In this they are quite different from other legends and myths of the time. C. S. Lewis, a scholar of medieval literature at Oxford, noted that this was one of the things that stood out to him as he read the Gospels: “I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends, and myths all my life,” he said. “I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this.”7

It could even be argued that the Gospels downplay the miracles. Often Jesus warned witnesses not to tell anyone about them (Matthew 8:1–4; Mark 1:40–44), and they were rarely presented as the reason why one should believe in Jesus’ claims. Jesus often only performed miracles in front of his closest disciples, and he turned down requests for a demonstration to amaze the crowds and impress people with his power. In a sense, Jesus’ ministry was actually quite subdued if he was in fact able to perform miracles: The Gospels portray him as having performed just over thirty miracles in thirty years of life, three of which were public ministry. That averages to only ten miracles a year! John, one of Jesus’ disciples, tells us that Jesus did more miracles than we have recorded (John 20:30), and the other gospel writers allude to the fact that he healed many more people than they recorded (Matthew 12:15; 15:30; Mark 3:10; Luke 4:40). And yet the gospel writers recorded the details of only these thirty miracles. Why only these? They were showing rather amazing restraint in their presentation of Jesus, which speaks to their trustworthiness. They could have easily exaggerated or embellished, but instead they stuck to plainly stating the details of these thirty.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.