Is Jesus God? (Part 3: Was Jesus a Fraud?)

(Despite the length of time it’s taking me to post these installments, this is part of a series. Check out part 1 on the credibility of the Gospels and part 2 on Jesus’ claim of divinity before you jump in.)

Part of what makes me a good apologist, I think, is that I’m a skeptic by nature. So when you tell me about the miracle of how you had a cold and now you don’t, I’ll smile and nod and tell you how lovely that is but I tend not to buy it. I tend to assume that there were natural causes for whatever people are calling a miracle or a vision or whatever. I don’t contradict people because if it encourages them in their pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful it doesn’t much matter if it was a supernatural phenomenon or a natural one that God used to his purposes.

What this means is that any miracle I’m convinced by is probably pretty convincing. The miracles at Lourdes,¹ for instance, or Padre Pio’s² or Bonnie’s little boy who was dead for an hour. These miracles are impossible things well-attested by reasonable, educated people. And when you look at the Gospels, you see all kinds of prophecies fulfilled and miracles worked; enough to convince this skeptic that there’s something going on.

Prophecies

At first glance, the alleged fulfillment of prophecies isn’t terribly impressive. Many of them just seem too easy to fake. So that whole “born in Bethlehem”³ thing strikes me (when I’m wearing my hypothetical skeptic hat) as something Jesus could have made up. After all, he was from Nazareth. But if the prophecies said he would be from Bethlehem, he could say he was from Bethlehem. “This one time, there was a census….” Bada-bing, bada-boom, Messiah from Bethlehem!

And being of the tribe of Judah would have been no problem—almost all the Jews were. That’s where they got their name from. House of David⁴ would have been a little harder, but if you cross your fingers when you jot down your genealogy, maybe nobody will check into it.

There’s a problem with this theory of deliberate fulfillment of prophecy, though; beyond those two, Jews at the time of Jesus had little idea what was prophesied about the Messiah. They knew the Messiah was supposed to save his people and they were sure as heck in need of saving. After decades under Roman rule (following centuries ruled by everybody else in the Near East), they were ready for a knight in shining armor to come riding in and save the day.

They say that every woman at the time of Christ hoped that she’d be the one to bear the Messiah. Not a one of them was hoping for Jesus. None of this meek and humble of heart business—the Jews wanted action, violence, intrigue. They were looking for a temporal ruler, a military genius who’d unite the Jewish people to overthrow their oppressors. When people started calling Jesus the Messiah they were all ears. Even with all his talk of love and forgiveness and repentance they were willing to listen. Heck, they were willing to acclaim him as king and throw palm branches before him.

And then, like a lamb led to the slaughter or a sheep before the shearers, he was silent and opened not his mouth.⁵ He didn’t call down legions of angels or even speak in his own defense. This was not the Messiah they’d been raised looking for. Jesus was a failure.

Because he wasn’t looking to fulfill their expectations. He was fulfilling prophecy instead. If he’d come charging in just as they’d expected it would be reasonable to think he was a fraud. But he didn’t conform himself to their image of him. He didn’t go out of his way to do what they thought the Messiah should do. It wasn’t until he opened the Scriptures to the disciples on the road to Emmaus that they began to see how everything—everything—pointed to him.

Everybody’s favorite, of course, is Isaiah 7:14: A virgin shall be with child and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel. We’re so used to hearing this in Christmas pageants that we assume the Jews would have understood it just as we do: a virgin will have a baby. But “virgin” can also mean young woman and that’s how the Jews would have read it. It wasn’t until a virgin actually did have a baby—a baby who is Emmanuel, God with us—that we began to see the fullness of the meaning of Isaiah’s words. And then we started wondering if maybe naming him “God-hero” and “Father forever”⁶ might hint at his divine nature. Certainly, his virgin birth and divinity could have been invented,⁷ but why would the evangelists make up the fulfillment of a prophecy that nobody was looking for?

The bulk of the prophecies that Christians point to are about the Passion. We’re told that they’ll pierces his hands and his feet⁸ for our offenses.⁹ We see his unbroken bones foretold in the Paschal Lamb,¹⁰ who was slaughtered at twilight and whose blood marked the chosen ones for their salvation. We watch him die for the sins of his people¹¹ in order to justify them.¹² And we know that he will rise because he himself told us he was the new Jonah.¹³

Jews at the time of Jesus were looking for a liberator, one who would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah 61. But liberation from sin and suffering wasn’t what they were trained to look for. They didn’t see those miracles coming. And while they may have expected the Messiah to be a miracle-worker à la Isaiah 35, it seems to me that if a guy is healing the blind and the deaf and the lame and the mute, he is who he says he is.

Miracles

Jesus was kind of a baller. When he worked a miracle, he left no doubt. These miracles of his are radical, unmistakable miracles. And because he is all in all, these miracles aren’t just evidence of his divinity;¹⁴ they’re also, for the most part, moments of reconciliation and liberation for those healed or exorcised or fed or raised. Jesus never uses people to exalt his own reputation—more often than not, he asks them to tell no one. He knew that if he was merely a miracle-worker, people would come to him to get what they wanted, not to get him. But he couldn’t leave them in their suffering and isolation, so he became a miracle-worker. These miracles are powerful evidence in the case for his divinity, but he himself says that they won’t be enough.

Even those who deny Jesus acknowledge that there was something unexplainable about him—the Babylonian Talmud says he practiced sorcery. Clearly something strange was going on. But in a world of Chris Angel and discredited faith healers, we tend to think we can explain away the miracles of Christ. They’re psychosomatic or faked healings, “magic” caused by sleight of hand or mirrors. The trouble with these theories is that Jesus went hard in the paint;¹⁵ his miracles were unmistakable.

First of all, there were too many of them to be coincidence. It’s not like that one time you said you wished it would quit raining and it did. Jesus wasn’t just in the right place at the right time when the man with the withered hand was healed. And even with miracles like the calming of the storm, which could have been luck, they just happened too often. Despite their reluctance, the crowds are convinced by the sheer number of miracles: “When the Messiah comes, will he perform more signs than this man has done?”¹⁶ Over and over and over again the Gospels recount stories of healings and exorcisms and resurrections. How many times do you have to walk on water before we get impressed?

Because these miracles were also too big to be faked. Maybe you could fake something small– the feeding of the 5, for example, or healing the guy with an astigmatism.  But 5000?  Blind from birth?  Ten lepers?  How do you fake that? Take a look at some of these stories; there are impossible odds, witnesses, and immediate results. Lazarus had been dead for four days when he came walking out of that tomb. The waves Jesus walked on were so high even seasoned fishermen were nervous. These aren’t parlor tricks and mild hypnosis. These are miracles, plain and simple.

And he didn’t work these alleged miracles in the secret of the Upper Room. For many of them, he had witnesses. Even discounting the ones he worked only in the sight of his disciples (the Transfiguration, for instance), there were too many witnesses to his miracles for them to be imagined or fabricated after the fact. You can’t hypnotize 5,000 people into thinking they had lunch. Peter points out the importance of this eyewitness testimony in his second letter: We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.¹⁷ Peter knew who Jesus was because he was an eyewitness. So, it seems, were many of those who threw down palm branches that Sunday in Jerusalem—and who decided miracles weren’t worth risking the wrath of the Pharisees when they called for his execution later that week.

With the volume, the size, and the witnesses of these miracles, it seems pretty clear that they weren’t just lies or exaggerations or tricks. There was something supernatural going on. But God isn’t the only one who can pull off the supernatural. Satan’s pretty good at that, too. Is it possible that Jesus is just a liar and that his miraculous “evidence” was fueled by demonic power?

A quick look at the nature of these miracles settles that issue. Satan is evil, the complete absence of good. He wouldn’t heal and calm storms and feed people, he would maim and kill and cause devastation. If he were clever enough to heal in order to seduce people, his true nature would show through somewhere. He’d behead people and then restore them, rip off their arms before reattaching them. He wouldn’t calm a storm and feed people, either; he’d show off with tornadoes and tidal waves, terrifying miracles to show his power and scare people into following him. And while he could cast out demons, it seems an unlikely strategy.¹⁸

But while it seems that he wouldn’t do any of these things, the fact remains that he could. And Satan is on his game, as anyone with a TV set can tell you. There’s one thing he can’t do, though: he can’t raise the dead. The prince of this world has no power over the next, no power over the human soul. Perhaps he could reanimate bodies, but a dead little girl who suddenly needs a snack¹⁹ would be beyond him. What this leaves us with is supernatural phenomena that couldn’t have been caused by the devil. By my count, that makes these miracles divine.²⁰

All this isn’t (in and of itself) to say that Jesus’ miracles prove his divinity. Just about everything Jesus did, Elisha had done first. What I’m saying is that these miracles were done by the power of God. And if Jesus claimed to be God and then worked miracles by God’s power, he must be God.

But still the doubts creep in. Maybe all the stuff about the miracles was made up? Once again, there was too much accountability. Maybe it was embellished? Oh, fine. Let’s knock this one out of the ballpark. Next time, we’ll look at the ultimate proof of the divinity of Christ: the Resurrection. Until then, spend some time praying over the miracles Christ worked and ask yourself what healing he’s trying to work in your heart. Mark 5’s a good place to start and evidence that your healing may hurt but the joy on the other side is worth the struggle to get there. God bless you, my friends.

1. The Church is pretty nuts about what she’ll declare an official miracles. Of over 7,000 alleged miracles at Rome, she’s only approved 67. That means they’re just as skeptical as I am! [↩]
2. How about a little girl with no pupils who can suddenly see–despite still having no pupils!! [↩]
3. Mic 5:1 [↩]
4. Is 11:1-2, 2 Sam 7:12-14 [↩]
5. Is 53:7 [↩]
6. Is 9:5 unless your translation numbers them differently. Then Is 9:5 is about boots tramping and cloaks rolled in blood. The one after that. [↩]
7. Well, not his divinity, but we’re building to that. Very, very slowly. [↩]
8. Ps 22:17 [↩]
9. Is 53:5 [↩]
10. Ex 12:46 [↩]
11. Is 53:8 [↩]
12. Is 53:11 [↩]
13. Mt 12:39-40 [↩]
14. Jn 5:36 [↩]
15. Something kids say these days. It means, I’m told, that he gave 100%. Not 110%. Not one thousand, million percent. That’s neither a number nor a possibility, Randy Jackson. Stop it. [↩]
16. Jn 7:31 [↩]
17. 1:16 [↩]
18. Mt 12:24-28 [↩]
19. Mk 5:43 [↩]
20. Assuming that there is a God and that there’s only one and that Satan is the only other supernatural force in the world yada yada yada. [↩]