This is a view that is common in most Universities. Scholar’s these days are afraid to believe in miracles. During the enlightenment, in the wake of controversies such as that of Galileo, philosophers and others began to try and understand the world basing defining truth as what can be readily proven through the senses. In the late 18th and 19th centuries Theologians began to adopt “rational religion” ideas in Germany. They interpreted the Bible in the context of the Enlightenment’s “rationalism”. Thus they denied everything which “supernatural”.
Some did - some did not. To dismiss all post-Enlightenment theology because of some ideas in it, is as fair-minded as dismissing all priests as paedophiles, just because some are
We also get textual criticism of the Bible from this period, and Theistic Evolution.
And textual criticism is objectionable because…?
WIth that said, the critics of Biblical miracles have some good points. For example a miracle performed for the sake of establishing one’s authority would only be necessary if their authority would not readily be obeyed by individuals. In other words, miralces force us to beleive something that we would not otherwise beleive. For example, in Revelation 13 the false prophet does miracles to establish its authority. Truth should be objective, but miracles cause men to make descisions which are not self-evidently true. I hope this makes sense. … …
Bringing in the category of the miraculous doesn’t solve anything - so Biblical scholars don’t use it.
God could have inspired Abraham to write the entire Bible - why not ? God can work miracles, & that would have been nothing to Him. So if one tries to settle issues of authorship of books by invoking the miraculous, that possibility cannot be ruled out. Those people commonly regarded as the writers of Scripture may have done nothing more than bring the original copies of Matthew or Genesis up to date, by adding a few details to the text of Mark or Proverbs as known to (say) Jacob & Joseph. It must have comforted Joseph in his prison that he had the Fourth Gospel to read.
That is where reliance on the miraculous as a means of settling scholarly issues gets you. A Christian who really believes in miracles will find no pleasure in the unbelief of those who insist on an early date for a Gospel - a God of miracles is well able to inspire a gospel to be written long after the events mentioned in it are forgotten; so it is unbelief, not faith, that insists Matthew must have been written in (say) 40, & not in 80.
It’s as reasonable to accuse juries of “denying the miraculous” as it is to accuse Biblical scholars - real Christians realise that if someone looks guilty of murder, it’s because he is. Trivia such as his water-tight alibi only show that the devil miraculously transported him to the scene of the crime so that he was in the right place to commit it. Only atheists will be impressed by alibis or evidence.
IOW - the miraculous is useless to scholars, real as it may be, because it allows for anything to happen: scholarship is possible only if the world is intelligible, regular, & more or less predictable. If water can turn into wine or a saint can cross a river on his cloak or multiply food, & if these possibilities are treated as other than very rare (& in that sense “abnormal”), the world ceases to be a world which is intelligible. Biblical scholarship is a historically-minded discipline - historical data (manuscripts, attributions of authorship, traditions, attributions of miracles, etc.,) are impossible to study if the world is not intelligible; if anything can happen.
If Catholic students believe in miracles - why do they bother revising ? God can give them infused knowledge; if they had faith, they would trust in Him to do so. In fact, even the most ultra-supernaturalist Catholics are unlikely to act like that.
