The modern English word for miracle appears to come directly from the Latin miraculum, a neuter noun. My Latin dictionary defines it as "a marvelous thing, wonder, marvel, miracle." In short, a miracle is something unusual, strange, extraordinary—not something that we are accustomed to seeing or experiencing. The Greek word, thauma, is much the same. It is translated into English as "an object of wonder, or a wonder," and in a special sense, "a portent, miracle."1 In other words, thauma and miraculum are out-of-the-ordinary events, which extraordinarily impresses one or disturbs one (thaumazō), who encounters them.
It seems a little misleading to use the modern English word "miracle" in the definition of the ancient words. In English "miracle" seems to be the go-to word for the marvelous and extraordinary. To tag it onto definitions of Greek and Latin terms is simply odd since the word brings with it certain modern "baggage," which does not seem to be part of the ancient Greek and Latin words.
In today's popular imagination a miracle is routinely thought to be an act of a divine being. At least, that is how Samuel Johnson defined the word in his dictionary of 1755. Miracle is "a wonder; something above human power," and second "[in theology] an effect above human power, performed in attestation of some truth."2 The modern definition of miracle is different. In a recently published dictionary, miracle is "an event or action that apparently contradicts known scientific laws, and is hence thought to be due to supernatural causes, esp. to an act of God."3 The modern definition could only have come about after the Enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries.4 As a species, we seem to be coming around to the idea that there may be natural explanations for events that we previously described as demonstrations of divine power.
Here is a better way to see the problem that I am addressing in this essay. The classical Greek-English Lexicon by Liddell and Scott (9th ed.)5 does not use the word miracle to translate thauma. They translate it as wonder, marvel, astonishment. On the other hand, The Patristic Greek Lexicon by Lampe6 translates it in four ways; wonder with reference to God and his works, trick, admiration, and miracle (miracle has the largest number of citations). These two lexicons cover two different historical periods Liddell/Scott cover the classical Greek period and Lampe covers the Christian and Byzantine periods. In the preface to the 9th edition of Liddell and Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, who revised and augmented the lexicon in 1925 stated in the Preface (p. x): "After due consideration it has been decided to exclude both Patristic and Byzantine literature from the purview of the present edition." That decision paved the way for a Lexicon that covered the Greek of the Patristic and Byzantine periods as a separate lexicon, as was noted in the preface to the Patristic Greek Lexicon (p. iii).
The word thauma is used only twice in the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible): Job 17:8, 18:20.7 None of them relate to wonders or miracles, but rather they describe expressed wonder, or astonishment. In A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect8 a thauma is simply a wonder or marvel that elicits a response of wonder or amazement from one who beholds it. In the New Testament thauma only appears twice, 2 Cor 11:14 where it is an expression of wonder or marvel and in Rev 17:6, where it refers to the woman mounted on a scarlet beast.
To judge from the lexicons and dictionaries cited above, it appears that the ancient Greco-Roman experience of "wonders," or "marvels," which are defined as the unusual and extraordinary, become "miracles" performed by deities in the Patristic period—a bequest of Christian thought. And after the Enlightenment and the rise of scientific thinking, these extraordinary experiences become events that contradict known natural laws—a gift of critical thought.
What a person means by calling something a miracle is a matter of opinion, and how people today personally define the term "miracle" will determine the century in which they think they are living, the 16th or the 21st. Can one define a miracle both as an act of God and a suspension of natural law? Perhaps. It seems to me, however, that the issue is who or what drives the universe, a Divine Being or Mother Nature?
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University
1Bauer/Danker, Greek-English Dictionary, 444.
2Webster's New World College Dictionary (4th ed.) under miracle.
3https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/views/search.php?term=miracle
4The enlightenment is "an eighteenth century philosophical and scientific movement in Europe and America that gave birth to the critical method, the rejection of the hegemony of Christian belief, and the rise of reliance on human reason." Hedrick, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest. American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Cascade, 2009), 89.
5Liddell/Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, 1940), 785.
6Lampe, A Patristic-Greek Lexicon (Oxford, 1961), 613.
7Hatch/Redpath, Concordance to the Septuagint (3 vols.; Baker, reprint 1983), 626.
8R. J. Cunliffe, Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (Norman, OK: 1963), 186.
