Wednesday, January 22, 2014

NT quality miracles


Fred Butler  I guarantee none of them have witnessed a NT quality miracle. Amputees having limbs restored & quadriplegics restored. None if them. But restoring limbs was a regular work of Christ along w/ restoring sight & hearing. Why doesn't it happen now? The same with amputees. Jesus healed amputees in Mt 15. Any Iraqi veterans having limbs restored? Why not?

There are numerous problems with Fred's argument;

i) Why does he set the bar at "NT quality miracles" rather than Biblical quality miracles? Why doesn't he include OT miracles in his standard of comparison?

ii) Does Mt 15 say Jesus healed amputees? As various scholars have pointed out, the terminology in 15:30-31 is influenced by OT usage. The text alludes to Isa 35:5-6. And Nolland, in his standard commentary on the Greek text (639-40), makes a case for taking "maimed" as an allusion to Zech 11:16. In that event, the meaning is colored by OT usage. Moreover, the genre is poetic. Figurative usage, which plays on the shepherd/sheep metaphor. So Fred's interpretation is linguistically dubious.

iii) Moreover, appealing to Mt 15 doesn't falls short of showing that restoring limbs was a "regular" work of Christ. 

BTW, Jesus still exists. He rose from the dead and ascended to the Father. He's quite capable of healing at a distance. Yet by Fred's lights, he hasn't regularly healed amputees for the past 2000 years. So where does that leave Fred's comparison? 

iv) Furthermore, his argument either proves too much or too little. Notice that Fred confines his appeal to Christ rather than the Apostles. He doesn't quote any examples of apostles healing amputees. But if restoring amputees is a litmus test of a true healer, then by his own yardstick, the apostles were charlatans. At least, we have no record of their healing amputees. So we can't presume that they did so, in the absence of any textual evidence to that effect. In that event, how can we hold contemporary Christians to a higher standard than the Apostles? 

v) Finally, there's the problem of what constitutes a "NT quality miracle." Is the draught of fish a NT quality miracle? Is dispelling the fever of Peter's mother-in-law a NT quality miracle? Is the coin in the fish's mouth a NT miracle. Is exorcism a NT quality miracle? 

1 comment:

  1. For any readers who aren't aware of it, a couple of years ago I wrote a series of posts about Craig Keener's recent book on miracles. That series includes a post on the healing of amputees. Keener discusses some modern reports of such healings. You can also search the Triablogue archives for previous threads in which we've interacted with Fred Butler and others on this topic and related ones.

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