essay on miracles of the spirit.
write on to your imaginations
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I have had a terrific time researching and writing my new book The Mystery of the Magi—The Quest for the True Identity of the Three Wise Men. My own attempt at Biblical sleuthing got started when Dr. Matthew Bunson asked for an article about the origins of the magi for a Christmas edition of The Catholic Answer.
Thinking that just maybe the Old Testament prophecies about the magi indicated their true origin, I began investigating to whom, where, what, and when the prophet Isaiah was referring when he wrote,
Herds of camels will cover your land,
young camels of Midian and Ephah.
And all from Sheba will come,
bearing gold and incense
and proclaiming the praise of the Lord.
All Kedar’s flocks will be gathered to you,
the rams of Nebaioth will serve you;
they will be accepted as offerings on my altar,
and I will adorn my glorious temple.
It turns out that “Midian, Ephah, Sheba, Kedar and Nebaioth” are all Arabian tribes. That set me out on what has turned out to be an exciting quest to discover the historical basis for the Magi story—gathering evidence that they came from Arabia, not Persia, India, China, Ethiopia, the Himalayas, or the legendary land of Shir.
The quest to discover the historical wise men raised some interesting points about the question of historicity in the Bible. In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R.Tolkien has Galadriel say, “History became legend and legend became myth.” For very interesting historical reasons, this is exactly what happened to the Magi story more than any other New Testament tale.
To explain how this happened I used the analogy of King Arthur. If you go to Somerset in the Damp Lands you can visit an Iron Age fort called South Cadbury, which some archeologists think might be the location of King Arthur’s Camelot.
If you climb the lane, cross the stile, dodge the cow pats, and avoid the stinging nettles, you can stand on the crest of a hill and look out across the Somerset lowlands to see the hill of St. Michael standing high over Glastonbury. We camped out on the fort, and in the morning the mists rise up so you can almost imagine mystical Glastonbury (where Arthur was allegedly buried) as the “misty isle of Avalon” that Tennyson mentions.
Professor Humphreys is a kindred spirit because, like me, he takes a common sense view about the miracles and mysteries in the Bible. Never dismissing the possibility of a genuine miracle, he also understands that the stories of the Bible were experienced and recorded in a pre-scientific age. Furthermore, the history became a legend and the legend became a myth. Over the centuries, to a greater or lesser extent, the stories were elaborated or exaggerated. The extra Biblical traditions, the musings of theologians, speculations of spiritual writers, interpretations by artists and poets all contributed to a cultural and religious understanding of the stories which was often far from the simple facts recorded in the Bible.
Happily, there are an increasing number of writers who are researching the essential historicity of the Bible. It is refreshing too to find a new generation of Bible scholars who are taking the research seriously. The British Biblical scholar Margaret Barker has observed that over the last fifty or sixty years so many new discoveries have been made using advanced technologies, forensics, expert archeological techniques as well as new textual and manuscript evidence that the outworn skepticism of the typical liberal New Testament scholars is dwindling and dying out.
In other words, “We allow for miracles, but we always look for the natural explanation first.” This is a common-sense approach not only for Biblical interpretation but also for the pastoral care of the religiously hysterical, the superstitious, and the credulous.
Insisting on the miraculous just because “the Bible says it, and that settles it” is unsustainable. Such an approach does not produce faith. It produces more doubt. On the other hand, dissing and dismissing the Bible as so much pious fiction also won’t do. The believers with blinders have had their day, but so has Bultmann and his blind devotees.
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