Miracles keep many from accepting the historicity of the Bible. As I argue in Uninvented, that is a an unjustified bias. In fact, the rarity of miracles and how they are portrayed lends more credibility to the text and makes the Bible more believable. That’s why if you’re dealing with an open-minded skeptic instead of arguing for miracles philosophically, it’s often best just to get them to read it. Especially the gospels because there they will encounter the most amazing miracle of all, Jesus himself!
The depictions of miracles are so powerful and compelling exactly because they are so muted, so matter of fact, so simple. This combined with the psychology of the those encountering the miraculous lends them a persuasive verisimilitude.
I was initially going to call Uninvented psychological apologetics, but nobody would have known what the heck it was about. Simply put, the people in the text encounter the divine and the miraculous as real people would who encounter what doesn’t make sense to them. Since fiction as a concept was unknown in the ancient world, making miracles appear real (like good fiction would) both in portrayal and psychologically would have been a tough trick to pull off. Not to mention that the portrayals span 1500 years and numerous authors.
Which brings me to the stories we read about these two significant prophets in I and II Kings. In Exodus 4, Moses asks the Lord what he’s to do if the Israelites (let alone Pharaoh and the Egyptians) don’t listen to him. The Lord replies that he’ll do the miraculous “so they may believe that the Lord, the God of their fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has appeared to” to him. The Lord got a lot of mileage out of those miracles. Not only did the he defeat the Egyptian army, which Moses declared repeatedly to the people in their wilderness journeys, but for those 40 years and into the promised land, he supernaturally guided and sustained them.
Once in the land, the overt displays of miracles ended. There is debate about dates (one timeline), but let’s say Joshua leads the Israelites into Canaan around 1400 BC. It isn’t until the late 800s where overt miracles are again seen in Israel with the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Why then and them?
Since the Old Testament is about Jesus, one reason is to introduce the prophetic ministry by God’s miracles through the prophets, as the Lord had done through Moses, so his people may believe. They point forward to the most prodigious miracle worker in history, Jesus of Nazareth, and confirm his prophetic ministry. It would be another 800 years before miracles again become common in Israel.
There had been judges and kings to whom the Lord spoke prior to these two prophets, but we’re not told how, and it’s not something the average Israelite would have experienced or been aware of. When Solomon died, the monarchy started a quick slide downhill to idolatry and rebellion. Someone with the authority of Yahweh needed to call the rebellious kings to account, and the Lord used prophets to do that. The miracles were evidence prophets were from Yahweh, so Elijah and Elisha introduced the prophetic ministry to God’s people. We could say three millennia before “the Sixties” these two prophets were the very first to “speak truth to power.”
Anyway you look at it, being a prophet in ancient Israel was a tough and thankless job. Suffering and death always seemed to be right around the corner because the people in power to whom they were declaring truth didn’t want to hear it. Some things never change.
We’re introduce to “Elijah the Tishbite” in I Kings 17:1, and he makes his big miracle debut in the next chapter when he single handedly takes on 450 prophets of Baal. Evil King Ahab and Queen Jezebel were not happy. I encourage anyone who isn’t familiar with these passages to read them and consider how the miracles are portrayed, and the psychology of those involved.
Elisha is introduced in chapter 19, becomes Elijah’s protégé and successor as a prophet of Israel, and works more miracles than his mentor. I only want to focus on one to make my point, and strangely enough that happened after Elisha died. We read about this bizarre event in 2 Kings 13:
20 Elisha died and was buried.
Now Moabite raiders used to enter the country every spring. 21 Once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man’s body into Elisha’s tomb. When the body touched Elisha’s bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet.
I laugh incredulously to myself when I read this. Really? Why in the heck is this in the Bible? Why did God find it necessary to put such a story in his revelation to his people?
First, Elisha is alive and well doing his prophetic work, then abruptly we’re told he dies, but his miracle working apparently isn’t done. This is the last overt miracle of the Old Testament, and it’d say it’s an 11 on a strangeness scale out of 10. Is that what you would pick for the last miracle for 800 years? Seriously, it has to be real. Why put it in the historical record otherwise. To me it’s perfectly uninvented.
I know the skeptic is going to say, that’s dumb. Maybe they thought the guy they was dead, threw him into the tomb, and he comes back out alive (as if ancient people didn’t know the difference between alive and dead). Then over the years the story, like the ever-growing fish, turns into miraculous bones. Maybe, but why put a story in a book of history that is so on the face of it ridiculous? Even to ancient people. Especially if you want readers to believe it’s history.
If we believe Genesis 1 is true, then this story is credible, and to me the bizarreness makes it even more believable. Especially because the writer sees no need to explain it. It just happened, let’s move on, a portrayal that lends authenticity to the narrative. This certainly fits under; you just can’t make this stuff up!
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