Craig Keener’s new book Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts is now available for sale. Writer Tim Stafford interviewed Craig for the December edition of Christianity Today.
Following are some excerpts. We encourage you to read the entire interview on the Christianity Today website.
Miracles are an unusual subject for a New Testament scholar. What led you to it?
I was going to write a footnote in my commentary on Acts, and was dealing with questions of historical reliability. Many scholars dismiss miracle stories as not historically plausible, arguing that they arose as legendary accretions.
I was familiar with [contemporary] reports of miracles taking place. There must be thousands of such reports. It was inconceivable to me that people would say eyewitnesses can’t claim to have seen such things.
What do you want to accomplish with this book?
Primarily, to challenge scholars who dismiss miracles in the Gospels as legends and not historically plausible. Eyewitnesses say these kinds of things all the time. I also want to challenge the bias that says these things can’t be supernatural. I believe God does miracles, and I don’t see why we scholars are not allowed to talk about it.
You’re trying to break open the naturalistic tradition of writing history that scholars have followed for centuries.
I understand the historical paradigms within which we work, and I’m able to work within those by bracketing out certain questions. But I wonder who made up the rule that we have to bracket out those questions, and why we are obligated to follow such rules. The way the discipline of historiography has been defined, such questions get punted to philosophy or theology.
What does New Testament scholarship gain from taking miracle stories seriously as historical phenomena?
We have been embarrassed by the miracle stories, and have tended to allegorize them more than other narratives. Accounts from the Temple of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing—nobody allegorizes those.
I agree that the Gospel writers are teaching us broader principles with broader applications. But in much of the majority world, when people read these narratives of healing, they see a God who cares about their suffering, who meets them at their point of need. I think we in the West can learn from the way they hear.
Does your personal background play a role in your views on miracles?
Certainly. I was an atheist before I was a Christian, and for that reason, I have some sympathy for skeptical perspectives.
When I was working on my historical Jesus book and trying to stay within these historical paradigms, I wouldn’t admit things for which I could not offer evidence. Then my wife would say things to me, and I would reply, “Can you give me evidence for that?” I got into a lot of trouble. That approach doesn’t work in the rest of life. If you find someone generally trustworthy, you will trust him or her whether or not he or she can provide evidence for every detail. I was well into this book when, having encountered so much evidence, I stopped trying to be neutral and said, “This is my view.”
How has your wife’s family influenced you?
Médine comes from Congo-Brazzaville. She was introducing me to people in the Eglise Evangelique du Congo, her denomination. As she introduced me to people, I asked them for their stories.
It was remarkable. I got seven eyewitness accounts of people being raised from the dead. One was my sister-in-law, Therese. I asked my mother-in-law to tell me about it, with my wife translating from one of the local languages.
My mother-in-law described how Therese was bitten by a snake. By the time my mother-in-law got to her, she wasn’t breathing. No medical help was available. She strapped the child to her back and ran to a nearby village, where a friend who was an evangelist prayed for Therese. She started breathing again.
I asked my mother-in-law how long Therese had stopped breathing. She thought about how long it takes to get up this hill and down this hill from one village to another. She said about three hours.
What did you experience in terms of trying to verify miracles?
Most people don’t collect documentation, and don’t know how to get medical documentation.
Documenting that you have a certain problem is one thing. Documenting that you no longer have it is another. Even if you do that, how can you prove that the change was due to prayer?
I have a pastoral concern as well: How far do you press people? I felt very awkward when I was interviewing people and would press them with hard questions. Sometimes they felt that I was questioning their integrity or even their experience.
Some people have said that since we know that everything must have a natural explanation, we know there will be a natural explanation someday; there, we have solved the problem, it’s not a miracle.
