Painting Fakes

This Lent I've been thinking about one of the stories of Jesus' life, found in Mark 5:1-20, and Luke 8:26-39, with a different, abridged version in Matthew 8:28-34. The story concerns a man whose name we never learn.  He lives in 'the region of the Gerasenes' (with variations on the place name in the other gospels), part of the Decapolis on the east side of the Sea of Galilee.  This region is a set of multi-ethnic towns, with many residents being veterans of the Roman Army as well as local ethnic peoples including some Jews.  We don't know if this man is a Jew although it seems likely - none of the gospels tell us one way or the other. What we do know is that he had an 'impure spirit' - that is, he was inhabited by a demon.   "This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue h...

The important thing about Jesus' miracles is not their factuality but their meaning .  Jesus' miracles illustrate and reinforce his teaching about the Kingdom of God .  The same goes for the resurrection.  Having summarised what I think the resurrection stories are describing , I'd like to talk a little about how the apostles used the story and what they made of it. Whole books have been written about this.  I'm just going to give you the highlights under three headings - vindication of Jesus' life and message, a new life for his followers here and now, and a future hope. Vindication In Acts 2, Luke reports a sermon by Peter which centres on the following words. “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know— this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law...

A while ago I wrote a series of posts about Jesus' miracles.  Without wanting to go over old ground, the general drift was that the miracles are teaching incidents.  They are not intended as displays of divine power, but as illustrations of the nature of the Kingdom of God coming among us.  Did they happen?  Not sure, I don't dismiss them but I hold their factuality relatively lightly. Anyway, I kind of hinted then that I would do a separate post on the Resurrection, but it's taken me a while to get around to it.  It's a difficult subject and not one to be taken on lightly.  However some of my recent reading, including William Lane Craig , Paul Barnett and Geza Vermes , has helped to crystallise my thinking about the question in a way I think is worth telling you about.  I'll do it in two parts, otherwise it would be too long - this one looks at the evidence for the resurrection as an historical phenomenon, the next will look at what it meant fo...

Last year I wrote a short series of posts on Jesus' miracles .  For some reason the first of the series has been read by quite a lot of people, although since not that many have read the subsequent posts it seems likely they didn't find what they were looking for. What I was trying to say is that the miracle stories in the Gospels were not intended to demonstrate Jesus' divine power.  Jesus said explicitly that they were not, and if they were their message on this subject is at best ambiguous.  Rather, the miracle stories, like the other deeds of Jesus (I suspect the gospel writers didn't necessarily distinguish between miraculous and non-miraculous deeds), are dramas intended to illustrate aspects of Jesus' message and mission.  They dramatise the forgiveness, inclusion, abundance and peacefulness of the Kingdom of God. Lately I've been thinking about the relationship between the miracle stories and the idea of the Incarnation - the idea that Jesus was G...

I have suggested that Jesus' miracles are not so much displays of power  as teaching events coded to the worldview of first century Palestine .  If this is the case, what is Jesus teaching through them? In one sense it is not really possible to answer this question, at least not in a blog post although perhaps in a hefty tome.  Each incident has its own meaning, its own message.  Jesus spoke on many subjects and responded to many different people.  Yet much of his message is organised around the central theme of the Kingdom of God or as Matthew calls it the Kingdom of Heaven. Right from the the beginning Matthew has him saying "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near".  Jesus is not a systematic theologian, and he never defines or describes in an orderly way what he means by this term.  Instead he illustrates it in multiple parables, and enacts it in various deeds miraculous and otherwise. So here are some key things I think Jes...

In my first post on Jesus' miracles I summarised my reasons for not seeing the miracles as demonstrations of power, and in the second I commented on the way the miracle stories are bound by the culture and world view of their original authors and hearers.  The starting point for this one is the theory of some New Testament scholars that among the original sources for the gospels were a "sayings gospel" and a "signs gospel".  If they existed (and their existence is merely an hypothesis, no copies exist), then the first was a collection of the sayings or teachings of Jesus, and the second of deeds attributed to him.  Within this framework, Jesus' acts are not defined by whether or not they require supernatural power, but simply by the fact that he did them. No doubt Jesus did many things - getting dressed, washing his hair, going to the toilet, ordinary everyday things of which we have no record because they were not worth recording.  The deeds we have i...

Speaking of reading ancient texts through modern eyes, that's the subject of my second post on miracles . For the past two centuries, people in Western countries have primarily seen the world through a "scientific" mindset strongly influenced by the Enlightenment.  We see the things that take place around us as products of impersonal natural forces, and when something takes place our first reaction is to seek a natural cause.  This makes it very difficult for us to believe in miracles, because we believe that they are not a "normal" part of the cosmos.  The natural is everyday, the supernatural is extraordinary. This mindset was behind the blossoming of the "rationalist" lives of Jesus which began to be written in the 18th and 19th centures, and which are still influential today.  These sought to explain Jesus' miracles in rational, scientific terms.  The feeding of the 5,000 was explained as an event in which Jesus shamed the rich into sharing...