Features of Jesus' Miracles Mnemonic

I like to create short mnemonics around the topics I'm teaching. I tend to find that they really help students retain information, and avoid missing out chunks of important material when writing essays. A quick test on a mnemonic is also a ready-made starter task! 

In our Year 12 class, we're currently studying miracles as part of our New Testament module, and this is a little mnemonic I've come up with to help remember seven key features of Jesus' miracles.

The features, and the explanations below, are adapted from Gwynn ap Gwilym's WJEC textbook:

Command - Jesus performs some miracles with only a verbal command. This is the case with nature miracles, but also elsewhere, e.g. the possessed man in Capernaum synagogue. 
Only where there is faith - Faith is a common feature of the miracle stories, while both Mark (6:5) and Matthew (13:58) tell us Jesus performed few miracles in his home town because people did not believe in him.
At a distance - Jesus does not need to be present to perform a miracle, for example, the healing of the centurion's servant.
Touch - Jesus is able to perform miracles by touch, such as healing the ear of the high priest's servant.
Pity for suffering - The miracles demonstrate Jesus' compassion for suffering humanity. Healing miracles are good examples of this, as is the feeding of the 4,000, where Jesus says he has compassion for the hungry crowd.
Evidence not always accepted - Those who did not believe in Jesus attribute the miracles to Satan, e.g. the teachers of the Law in Mark 3:20-30.
Glorify God - The purpose of Jesus' miracles is to bring glory not to Jesus, but to God. For example, when the widow of Nain's son is resurrected, the people glorify God.

I've also created a PowerPoint slide that can be dropped into revision lessons (if you're a teacher).

I'd say that if you could remember these seven features, and support each with examples, you would be well on your way to getting a good grade in 30 mark AS question. That said, I'd be interested to know whether you think the list is a good one, or whether any features should be added or removed?

Tweeting Jesus?

Was Jesus the world's first tweeter? Well, yes according to Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Vatican's Council for Culture.

Ravasi says that Jesus "used tweets before everyone else, with elementary phrases made up of fewer than 45 characters like 'Love one another' "

Firstly, the cardinal is just plain wrong here. Even leaving aside the considerable difficulties in figuring out exactly what he did and didn't say, Jesus was hardly the first person to express himself using pithy sayings - there are plenty attributed to the Buddha ("The mind is everything. What you think, you become") and Socrates ("The only thing I know is that I know nothing"), both of whom lived centuries before Jesus.

Secondly, am I the only person who finds all comparisons between ancient and and modern things somewhat grating? A couple of years ago, I watched a documentary in which a TV historian described medieval castles as being "the aircraft carriers of their day." Really? Did medieval castles float? Or cruise at 30 knots? Could you even use them to launch a squadron of F/A 18 Super Hornets?

Dover Castle: Cruising Speed 0 knots. (Photo: Wikipedia)

So in the case of our tweeting Jesus, I'm not sure how you can compare oral messages, heard and passed on by perhaps a handful of people at a time, to a mass medium like Twitter. In the few seconds it takes his publicist to type a tweet, Justin Bieber can tell 45 million people how exciting his breakfast was - a figure roughly equivalent to the entire population of the Roman world in Jesus' time.

There's also a hint of desperation about these comparisons, as if the person making it is hoping that the perceived coolness of the modern will somehow rub off on the ancient. In Ravasi's case, the logic seems go something like this: "Twitter is cool and trendy. Jesus is a bit like Twitter. So Jesus must be cool and trendy too. Please come back to church."

Anyway, don't all the cool kids use Snapchat these days?

Tom Holland on the Evidence for Jesus and Muhammad

Photo: Wikipedia

One problem with mythicism is that while mythicists  love to claim that the evidence for Jesus' existence is weak, if you actually take the time to compare the sources we have on Jesus to those we have for comparable historical figures such Muhammad or the Buddha, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the evidence for Jesus as is at least as good, if not better.

One person who is well equipped to make such a comparison is journalist and historian Tom Holland, who has written extensively about the ancient world and the origins of Islam.

In this interview on Australian radio, Holland (who says he is sure that Muhammad existed) points out that:

The gospels you have in the New Testament are actually much closer in time to the life of Jesus than the earliest biography of Muhammad is to the life of the prophet.

Holland goes on to say:

Jesus is elusive, but in a way you'd expect him to be, because he's a criminal in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, so in a sense it's amazing that we have anything about him at all. We have Paul's letters, which start to be written within twenty years probably of the crucifixion, and Paul clearly thinks that Jesus existed. So in a sense, the evidence for Jesus is kind of stronger than for Muhammad.

 Many thanks to Neil Godfrey for drawing my attention to this.

Questions on Mythicism and Denial Movements

A big thank you to those of you who participated in my Virtually University sessions on Mythicism and the question of Jesus’ existence. From talking to other teachers, I wonder if my class was more a chat about some stuff I find interesting than a proper university style lecture, but hey - it was more fun than teaching the ontological argument.

I was really impressed by the quality of some of the thinking and the questions you raised, and pleasantly surprised that many of you could anticipate some key Mythicist arguments and the counter-arguments to these. I was also pleased that a couple of you had even heard of exciting things like Q and the apocryphal gospels... though on reflection, perhaps you’ve just been watching The Da Vinci Code?

I did say that I would post some follow up work for you, so here it is. Below are a few questions that I think were raised in the course of our sessions:

• How strong is the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus?
• How convincing is the mythicist case against the existence of Jesus?
• Why makes some people reject the consensus view of experts in particular field?
• What is the role of ideology in shaping way denial movements use evidence and the conclusions they draw?
• Is mythicism a denial movement?
•  Is rejection of human-caused global warming a form of denial?
• Is denying scientific consensus (such as evolution or HIV as a cause of AIDS) different to denying historical consensus (such as the existence of Jesus)?

Please could you pick one of these questions, research the issues raised, and write me a response.  I won’t ask for it to be done by Monday – I’d rather you took your time doing some reading and thinking and came back to me later, even if it’s in the holidays. I’m also planning to post my own thoughts on a few of these questions over the next week or two, so you may wish to read those posts too.

You can either email me your work to my school account or post them as a comment below, though please remember the house rules.

Mythicism for Dummies

I’ll take a leaf out of many an RS essay here – in talking about mythicism, I’m going to start with Wikipedia.

If you look at the Wikipedia entry for Jesus, and compare it to the entries for other figures such as Julius Caesar, Socrates, or Pythagoras, you might, if you read carefully, notice something interesting: there is a section devoted to the question of Jesus’ existence, and to the “mythical view”, that Jesus did not exist. In fact, there is a separate, and fairly extensive, wiki page devoted to the topic. But there is nothing similar for Caesar, Socrates, or Pythagoras: their existence does not appear to be in doubt. So is the existence of Jesus less certain than that of these historical figures?

There is a group of people who say that it is. These people are most commonly known as mythicists, and the Virtually University course I am hoping to run (if enough people sign up for it – subtle hint) is going to be about the mythicism and the question of Jesus’ existence.

One important thing to understand is that when we discuss Jesus’ existence, we mean the historical existence of a person called Jesus of Nazareth. Saying that Jesus existed historically is not necessarily the same as saying that every story found in the New Testament or every Christian belief about Jesus is true, just as saying that Muhammad lived is not necessarily the same as saying that every Muslim belief about him is correct. Since the 18^th century, Biblical scholars have attempted to use historical methods to detach the “real”, historical Jesus from the Christian portrayal of him, with varying degrees of success – or perhaps more accurately, with varying degrees of failure.

Mythicists, however, claim that there is no historical person to detach: they deny that Jesus of Nazareth ever lived. For mythicists, the person of Jesus is nothing more than a religious or literary invention of the Christian church. As evidence for their views, mythicists point to the unreliability of the Christian New Testament as a historical source, the relative lack of ancient references to Jesus from non-Christian sources, and to similarities between the figure of Jesus and characters of Pagan and Jewish mythology.

It needs to be stressed here that mythicism is rejected by the overwhelming majority of Biblical scholars: by this I mean people who have advanced qualifications in and/or teach Biblical Studies at University level. In turn, Mythicists are usually critical of these scholars, arguing that the academic discipline of “Biblical Studies” is compromised, because the methods used by Biblical scholars are flawed, and because Bible scholarship reflects an implicit pro-Christian bias. In fact, one prominent mythicist, Richard Carrier, has rather charming described the whole discipline of New Testament studies as “f****d”. Please note: his words, not mine.

I’ll be open here and say that I’m not a fan of mythicism as a theory or the way that mythicists go about their work. I even have a few problems with the name “mythicism”, and think that other terms should be used instead.

Nonetheless, mythicism raises an interesting set of questions: about the Bible, about how we study Jesus from a Historical perspective, and about how and why certain groups of people deny the consensus position of the academic community. For me, this last question is perhaps the most interesting one, and for A level students, I think it touches on the important problem of how to tell the difference between legitimate academic views and fringe or conspiracy theories.

So... that’s it for my shameless plus for my Virtually University offering. I’ll post some more about my views on mythicism before or during Virtually University. If you’d like to find out a bit more about the mythicist case, you can check out the website of Earl Doherty, a well-known mythicist writer. If you want to understand how New Testament scholars feel about mythicism, you might wish to look here or here.