There is so much we can—and do—know about Jesus, Mary, and miracles

Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J., observes in Christ, Science, and Reason that the refutation of those who have denied Jesus’ existence as a historical person may be summed up in a single word: Tacitus. This first-century Roman historian is one of the touchstones of classical studies, and for untold generations, Latin students have been expected to parse excerpts from his Annals–such as the one which confirms the brutal persecutions of early Christians by the mad Emperor Nero.

When terrible fires broke out in Rome, records Tacitus, they wrought havoc and death throughout the city. Inevitably, suspicion turned toward the insane emperor, who had expressed a desire to demolish and then rebuild a number of sectors of the capital. None dared make open accusations, but the emperor’s critics were even bold enough to pass around a purported eyewitness report that Nero had greeted the sight of the enormous blaze with merriment and song:

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular.

Here, Tacitus’ evident prejudice against Christianity only strengthens his testimony that, yes, some extraordinary person in Judaea had founded a new form of worship prior to being executed under the authority of Pontius Pilate. From the point of the view of the Christian apologist, Tacitus’ Annals can be juxtaposed with the fact that some of the prominent militant atheists of yesteryear heartily denied Jesus of Nazareth’s very existence as a historical figure.

Along with the Babylonian Talmud and Hellenized Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, Tacitus’ work reveals such denial to be a glaring goof on the part of the atheist movement, one which has been conveniently dropped down the memory-hole by those who like to sneer about Creationism. The godless have not always been so intellectually rigorous as some of them would like to believe.

As for Fr. Spitzer’s new book, it may be seen as a natural sequel to Science at the Doorstep to God. From Aquinas’s “Five Ways” to Pascal’s Wager, the basic arguments for belief in God are familiar to most catechized Catholics. Less known, perhaps, are the arguments and evidence pointing toward a specifically Christian understanding of God. “Yes,” the honest and searching modern pagan might reply, “there is some sort of Prime Mover, a spiritual force, a Supreme Being whereby we ourselves live and move and have our being. But why suppose this Eternal One takes a personal interest in us, much less that we should identify it–or Him–with a messianic preacher from a couple millennia ago?”

It is a good question. Fr. Spitzer’s answer begins with the testimony of human behavior. For one thing, the doctrine that Christ differs not just in degree but in kind from every other human being was not invented in the Middle Ages, but can be traced back to his earliest followers. Whatever else we might say, believing in the Second Person of the Trinity was clearly not the easy way out:

The early Church could have proclaimed Him to be a “martyr prophet,” which would have allowed converts to worship at His tomb and to pray through His intercession. This more modest claim would have made him acceptable to Jewish audiences who would then have ranked Him high among the “holy ones.” Why then did the leaders of the apostolic Church go so unapologetically and dangerously far to proclaim that “Jesus is Lord”? Why did they suffer social and financial loss, religious alienation, and even persecution and death, when it all could have been avoided by simply giving up the implication of His divinity? The most likely answer is that they really believed him to be divine.

This thread leads us to apostles such as Saint Paul, who went from despising Christianity as blasphemy to being willing to die for its sake. For him to have merely made up the story of his encounter on the road to Damascus seems implausible, given how severely a devout Jew like Saul would have viewed sacrilegiousness and impiety. The other possibility—hallucination—cannot be logically ruled out, but to simply assert it as a fact is convenient hand-waving. Assuming we do not simply rule out rule out firsthand experience of the otherworldly, we must at least admit the possibility that Paul had a real encounter.

As an aside, Fr. Spitzer’s remarks also offer us an interesting contrast between Christianity and modern liberalism. Where early Christians willingly underwent martyrdom for proclaiming unwelcome truths to Jew and Roman alike, liberalism has ascended in the West largely through a mix of dissimulation, manipulation, and revolutionary violence. Voltaire, for instance, would pretend to respect the Faith, or scoff at it, as the moment suited him. Certainly prior to the 1990s no liberal would have dared openly preach “gay marriage” or open borders, much less transgenderism, because few if any liberals have had the stomach to recognize the long-term implications of their own teaching–much less suffer the political equivalent of martyrdom for it. (How many prominent liberals today are candid enough to recognize that their doctrines ultimately imply a post-human system, one that could well turn out utterly repulsive to us all, liberals included?)

In any event, returning to Fr. Spitzer’s book, we find he devotes much of it to documented modern miracles such as Fatima. As few readers will need a detailed recap of the Miracle of the Sun, where tens of thousands of Iberian observers watched the Sun dance around the sky, it is enough to briefly summarize Fr. Spitzer’s commentary. This event was witnessed by a huge number of people, he observes, which makes outright rejection of the Fatima Event difficult—which has in turn forced deniers to embrace a narrative of mass hypnosis or delusion on the part of the religious and gullible.

Yet, as Father Spitzer responds, among the eyewitnesses were skeptics who had gone to the scene “specifically to disprove the ‘miracle,’ but [later] reported the same events as those who were looking forward to a miracle.” Moreover, there were certain objective phenomena which would be especially hard to explain by hallucination: The sudden and uncanny drying of the ground and of spectators’ clothing following torrential rains, for instance. In any event, blithely pronouncing “mass hallucination” once again seems a bit like hand-waving.

While the Faith does not rest upon any particular event considered in Chapters Three to Six–Lourdes, Eucharistic miracles, the Shroud of Turin–it is surely worth being open-minded toward Divine manifestations. Indeed, in light of the obvious media push to get the public worked up about UFOs, it is ironic to find the establishment so smug in its a priori assumption that there cannot possibly be anything to traditional accounts of higher power intervention in human history.

Is the truth out there, or isn’t it?

On a more positive note, it is intriguing to think of how we might learn and grow by contemplating the miraculous. In the course of some cases, skeptics have converted, which gives us more reason to hope for man. In other cases, believers have acquired a deeper appreciation for the doctrines of the Trinity, of Our Lady, and of Creation. As recent history testifies, the world is still more surprising than anything the planners, experts, and would-be controllers could have predicted.

Christ, Science, and Reason: What We Can Know about Jesus, Mary, and Miracles
By Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J
Ignatius Press, 2024
Paperback, 370 pages