DID JESUS PERFORM MIRACLES? (Investigator 26, 1992 September)
Prior to the
1930s it
was assumed that
people have an inate ability to distinguish simple shapes. In other
words
scientists believed that the recognising of what we see is not learned
but
is an ability we are born with.
This is explained in the following extract from The Human Species (1961) Anthony Barnett: An important discussion of this problem, published in Germany, in 1932, was based on studies of what happened when persons, blind from birth, had their sight restored by operation. Later, research was done on laboratory animals. Woman's Day
magazine (1988 July 5) had an article about a woman who
was blind from the age of 11 for 42 years and
who was then cured:
I couldn't work out what I was looking at because my brain had forgotten how to interpret what I was seeing. I couldn't even piece the features of faces together at first – the eyes looked as if they were on the top of people's heads. (p. 24) The above
information from Barnett and Woman's Day has
relevance to evaluating the alleged healing by Jesus of a blind man at
a village called Bethsaida. The report is in Mark 8:22-26.
Jesus reportedly: "...spit on his eyes and laid his hands upon him."Then he asked: "Do you see anything?"The man, according to the report, did see – and so we can regard the story thus far as an alleged miracle. However, the former blind man couldn't distinguish what he was seeing. He said: "I see men; but they look like trees, walking." (8:24) Apparently he saw
confusing
shapes which he initially
interpreted as trees but which he concluded – from the fact that they
moved
about – were men.
Jesus – according to the account – then: "…laid his hands upon him; and he looked intently and was restored, and saw everything clearly." (6:25) This, if it
really
happened, would have been a
second miracle, one which accelerated the process of learning to
recognise what is seen!
What at first seemed to be a report of one miracle is therefore really a report of two miracles. Prior to 1932
the Bible
report
of the former blind man being unable to recognise what he was seeing –
even
obvious things such as "men" – would have been regarded as medically
false.
Now, however, this unexpected inclusion of a modern discovery into
Mark's
reports of Jesus' miracles adds credibility to those reports.
(A)
Over twenty other
miracles
reported in the Bible are
discussed and supported on this website:
https://ed5015.tripod.com/ https://investigatormagazine.net |