Miracles 2

I thought I was done with miracles, having dispensed with the subject in two pages in my last blog essay. A sharp-eyed reader, however, nailed me to the wall with this question: "Is John's designation of miracles that Jesus does as 'signs' relevant to your discussion?" The short answer is, yes, of course it is! In his question, however, my reader designated things, at which we marvel, to be miracles— things, John insists, are signs (sēmeion, singular; plural, sēmeia) not miracles. And true enough when you plow through the some nineteen uses of the word "sign" in John, certain actions of Jesus are thought to be signs that God was working through Jesus (so Nicodemus thought, 3:2): turning water into wine (2:11), healing the Royal official's son (4:48, 53-54), things done for the sick (6:2), feeding the 5000 (6:14), the triumphal entry into Jerusalem (12:18).

Jesus' violent disturbance in the Temple precincts (2:14-16), however, was apparently not viewed as a sign, since the Judeans subsequently asked him for a sign to justify his actions (2:18). To which Jesus replied, if "this temple" were destroyed, he would raise it up in three days (2:19), which astonished the Judeans, who took his answer to refer to the temple structure (2:20). The evangelist intrudes, at this point, to explain to the reader that the "temple" to which Jesus referred was his body, which would be "rebuilt" by his resurrection (2:21-22). It was an understanding to which the disciples came sometime later.

For the word "sign," the lexicons compiling ancient words and their meanings are all agreed: signs (sēmeia), in addition to their secular meanings, are also signs from the Gods, evidence of intervention by transcendent powers, miracles, portents, prodigies, or miraculous works.¹ The earliest (1755) English dictionary (Samuel Johnson) defines the word "sign" as wonder, miracle. In the English dictionary of Noah Webster (1828), there are numerous entries for sign. Among the definitions he lists are portent—something that foreshadows a coming event, prophetic understanding or significance, and a marvel or prodigy. Webster's New World College Dictionary (4^th ed., 2002) after secular uses for the noun lists an 8^th meaning: "an act or happening regarded as a manifestation of divine will or power, or an omen, portent."

To summarize the high points of these two, all too brief, essays on miracle: In Liddell/Scott/Stuart thauma is a wonder or marvel, or the feeling of astonishment produced by a wonder.² The compilers do not associate thauma with miracle or divine action. In the Christian period thauma comes to include the idea of something done by God. The Bauer/Danker lexicon includes as a definition for thauma the modern English word miracle. Such a suggested meaning does not seem appropriate for thauma to judge by the German fifth edition (1958) of Bauer's lexicon.³ The word sēmeion, on the other hand, is applied both today and in antiquity to events, which were thought to be due to divine agency.

            Even the English word miracle is a problem, since today its use can refer to something out of the ordinary, or to an action by divine power, to or something that deviates from natural laws. To know what is being claimed by the word miracle, one must query the user of the word.

This essay in the end begs the question: is there after all a divine spiritual force in the universe that invades both the physical world and human life to do the unusual and things thought impossible? Or is it a deviation from "natural law" and merely an indication that we have not yet learned all there is to know about the physical universe? Or is the seemingly impossible occurrence we term miracle merely due to unknown causes we call luck or chance.⁴ The answer, as with all questions in religion, depends on whom you ask.

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹The Homeric Lexicon (R. J. Cunliffe, compiler) does not have an entry for sēmeion but does have an entry for sēma for which a meaning is assigned (in addition to secular meanings): a sign from heaven, portent, or omen.

²This is confirmed by An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (founded upon the 7^th ed of Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon), which is made from the last edition (1883) of the large lexicon. The word "miracle" is still not used to translate thauma. I suspect that the word "miracle" used in the Bauer/Arndt/Gingrich/Danker Greek-English Lexicons as a translation for thauma is due to the compilers/translators, since the German word Wunder can be understood in German, in part, as miracle, something performed by divine agency. The question is, was that the intent of Bauer?

³Walter Bauer, Grechisch-deutches Wörterbuch zu dem Neuen Testament (5^th ed. Tōpelmann, 1958), under thauma. The problem is complicated because the modern German word for both miracle and wonder is Wunder. Other German words, however, could have been used by Bauer to make the point clear, had he chosen to do so, that the event was due to divine agency, for example, Mirakel or Wundertat, which are also translated by the English word miracle.

⁴ See the two brief essays in Hedrick, Unmasking Biblical Faiths, "Chance, Luck, Randomness, and the Being of God," 28–30; "Does Anything happen by Chance," 30–33.

Miracles

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 17^th and 18^th 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 (9^th 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 9^th 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 16^th or the 21^st. 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?

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Bauer/Danker, Greek-English Dictionary, 444.

²Webster's New World College Dictionary (4^th 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.