Hard Questions: Did the Miracles Really Happen

Water into wine. Walking on water. Five thousand people fed with five loaves and two fish. A man dead four days walking out of a tomb. If these things happened the way the Gospels describe them, they are among the most significant events in the history of the world. If they didn't, something else is going on in these texts — and we need to figure out what.

Most churches treat this as a loyalty test. Believe the miracles or you're not really a Christian. But that framing shuts down a conversation that serious Christians, including serious biblical scholars, have been having for centuries. This article is an attempt to open it back up — not to give you a conclusion, but to give you the actual range of honest options.

Start with the philosophical question, because it comes first.

The objection to miracles isn't primarily historical — it's philosophical. David Hume, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, argued in his essay On Miracles (1748) that our uniform experience of the laws of nature always outweighs any testimony to their violation. Dead people stay dead. Water stays water. The odds against any particular miracle report being true are, by this logic, always overwhelming.

C.S. Lewis, in Miracles (1947), took Hume's argument seriously and then took it apart. Lewis pointed out that Hume's argument assumes the very thing it's trying to prove — that the laws of nature are closed to intervention. But that's a philosophical position, not a scientific one. Science describes regularities; it doesn't have the tools to rule out the possibility of a being who stands outside the natural order acting within it. More pointedly, Lewis noted that the people who first told miracle stories were not, as Hume implied, naive primitives who didn't know how the world worked. Joseph knew that women do not conceive without a man. The disciples knew that dead people do not rise. Their astonishment is in the text because the events were astonishing to them too.

Lewis's argument doesn't prove any particular miracle happened. What it does is clear the ground — establishing that miracles are not philosophically impossible before we turn to the historical evidence.

The twentieth century introduced a different kind of challenge to the miracles, one from inside the church rather than outside it. Rudolf Bultmann, the German New Testament scholar, argued in the 1940s and 50s that the miracle stories in the Gospels needed to be "demythologized" — stripped of their supernatural elements to recover the existential truth underneath. For Bultmann, the modern world could no longer accept a "three-story universe" of heaven, earth, and underworld, or the idea that divine beings intervened in natural processes. The miracles were mythological expressions of theological conviction, not historical reports.

Bultmann's project was enormously influential and remains so in some quarters. But it has also been seriously criticized, including from within the liberal theological tradition. The problem is that demythologizing doesn't leave you with a cleaner Christianity — it leaves you with a fundamentally different one, in which the central claims of the faith (resurrection, incarnation, new creation) are reduced to metaphors for human experience. At some point, a Christianity without the resurrection is not Christianity making a strategic communication adjustment; it's a different religion.

On the other side of the spectrum, N.T. Wright, the former Bishop of Durham and one of the most important New Testament scholars of the last fifty years, has made the most sustained historical case for the bodily resurrection of Jesus in recent scholarship. In The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press, 2003), Wright surveys beliefs about life after death across the ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish worlds and shows that what the early Christians believed about Jesus was genuinely unprecedented — a mutation within Jewish resurrection hope that cannot be explained as either wish-fulfillment or borrowed mythology. He argues that two facts — the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances — each demand explanation, and that the best historical explanation for both, when assessed by normal historical criteria, is that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead.

Wright is not asking anyone to take this on faith. He's making a historical argument, subject to historical scrutiny. Not everyone finds it convincing — historians disagree, as they do about everything. But his work has made it impossible to dismiss the resurrection as intellectually untenable.

Between Bultmann's demythologizing and Wright's historical defense, there are a range of positions serious Christians have held.

Some distinguish between different categories of miracle. The resurrection — the bodily raising of Jesus from the dead — is treated as the hinge event on which everything else turns, while other miracles (the feeding of the five thousand, say, or the changing of water to wine) are read with more interpretive flexibility. Paul himself, in 1 Corinthians 15, stakes the entire faith on the resurrection while leaving room for disagreement about much else: if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.

Others draw on the tradition of reading miracles as signs — events whose significance is theological rather than primarily historical. In John's Gospel in particular, the miracles are explicitly called semeia, signs, pointing beyond themselves to who Jesus is. This doesn't mean they didn't happen; it means that their primary purpose in the text is revelation rather than demonstration.

Where does the Episcopal tradition stand?

The creeds — the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, both part of the Book of Common Prayer — affirm the virgin birth, the resurrection of the body, and the ascension. These are not optional for Episcopalians. They are part of the faith as the tradition has received and affirmed it.

But the tradition has never required that every miracle narrative be read with the same hermeneutical flatness. The 39 Articles affirm that Scripture contains all things necessary for salvation — not that every passage requires a single, identical mode of reading. The Anglican tradition has always made room for scholarship, reason, and the kind of careful reading that asks what a text means before asking whether it is historically reportable.

What the tradition does not permit — and what Bultmann's project ultimately requires — is reducing the resurrection to metaphor. The resurrection is not a symbol for the triumph of good over evil, or a way of saying that Jesus's influence lived on. It is the claim that something happened to a dead body — something unprecedented, disruptive, and world-changing. The Episcopal tradition affirms that claim. How each person holds it, with what degree of certainty, amid what questions, is the work of a lifetime of faith.

So: did the miracles really happen?

Some of them, almost certainly in some form. The healing miracles have better historical attestation than most people realize — even hostile ancient sources do not deny that Jesus healed people, only dispute the source of the power. The resurrection is affirmed by the creeds and defended by serious historical scholarship. The nature miracles — water into wine, walking on water — are held with varying degrees of literalism across the tradition, and the church has not required uniformity.

What the church does require is that we take the texts seriously — that we not explain them away before we've read them carefully, and that we not use them as loyalty tests before we've asked what they're actually trying to say.

Where are you with this today? Maybe you've been holding the miracles at arm's length for years — not rejecting them exactly, but not quite sure what to do with them either. Maybe that uncertainty has made you feel like you're on the outside of something everyone else seems to hold without difficulty. You're not. The tradition has always had room for the person who approaches the resurrection with trembling hands. What the faith asks is not that you perform a certainty you don't have. It asks that you keep showing up — honestly, and open to being surprised by what you find.

Sources and further reading: John 2:1-11; Matthew 14:13-21; John 11:1-44; 1 Corinthians 15:14-17 (NRSV). C.S. Lewis, Miracles (Geoffrey Bles, 1947; revised Harper, 1960). David Hume, "Of Miracles," in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology" (1941), in Kerygma and Myth (Harper & Row, 1961). N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress Press, 2003). The Apostles' Creed; The Nicene Creed, Book of Common Prayer (1979), pp. 96, 358. The 39 Articles of Religion, Article VIII.