Craig Keener and the Credibility of Miracles¶

Craig Keener is a New Testament scholar, long associated with Asbury Theological Seminary, who did something the modern debate had not done: he went and collected the reports. Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Baker Academic, 2011, two volumes) is not a defence of any particular healing. It is a catalogue with an argument, and the argument is about method — about what a historian is allowed to assume before he looks. Keener is not the continuationist case; he is the man who removed one of the sceptic's favourite premises.

The claim¶

The claim is narrow. The premise that "no one reports this kind of thing" — that miraculous healing belongs to the ancient world and the credulous margins of the modern one — is false. Reports are widespread, cross-cultural, and persistent, and they come from people a historian has no principled reason to dismiss in advance. The sceptical argument can therefore no longer begin with "we know these things do not happen."

The method¶

Keener's method has three parts.

Collection. He gathers reports from published sources and his own interviews, across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the West, and presents them as a body of data. Some are first-hand, many second-hand, some thin; he says so. The point is not that every report is true but that the category is too well attested to be waved away by people who have not read it.

Historical-critical caution. Keener is a historian of the New Testament, not a campaigner. He applies to modern reports the ordinary canons of testimony — sources, corroboration, motive, distance — and is candid that most cannot meet the standard of a medical file. Then he turns the canons on the sceptic: "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is applied to miracle reports in a way it is not applied to other ancient testimony, and the asymmetry is a choice rather than a finding.

The philosophical argument. His target is anti-supernaturalism as a prior commitment. Hume's argument against miracles, on Keener's reading, is not a conclusion from evidence but a rule that decides in advance what counts as evidence; a historian who begins with "miracles cannot occur" will always find that none did. Keener's alternative is not "miracles occur" but "the question is open, and the reports deserve to be read." There is a further edge, and it is the one that stings: a discipline that treats the testimonies of the global South as superstition while treating its own scepticism as neutral is not being neutral. It is being provincial.

The scale of the reports¶

The second volume is largely a catalogue, and the catalogue is the argument. Keener ranges across continents and centuries, from mission hospitals to village churches, and the cumulative effect is not "here is a proof" but "here is a phenomenon." Healing reports are not a curiosity of the apostolic age; they are a normal feature of the church's life in most of the world.

Two qualifications belong here. The reports vary enormously in quality: some are documented, many reported, some disputed, a few plainly self-serving. And quantity is not quality — a thousand weak reports do not add up to one strong one, and the book is vulnerable wherever it lets volume do the work of verification.

The criticisms¶

The fair criticisms are three.

It is mostly hearsay. Much of the material is second-hand, and in cross-cultural collection the collector cannot check the diagnosis, the before-and-after, or the competing explanation. A report of a healing is not a medical record, and a catalogue of reports is not a case series.

Quantity is not quality. The book's scale can create an impression its evidence does not support. Readers may come away thinking the sheer number of accounts settles something, when what it settles is only that the accounts exist.

It is a catalogue, not a proof. Keener does not demonstrate that any particular New Testament miracle occurred. He demonstrates that the modern world contains many reports of the kind the New Testament contains — and a sceptic can accept every page and still deny the resurrection.

These are not cheap shots, and Keener's sympathetic reviewers have made them. The question is what they leave standing.

A fair response¶

What they leave standing is the methodological point, which was the point.

Keener does not argue that modern reports prove the New Testament. He argues that they defeat a premise the sceptic needs — that no one reports such things, or that reports are confined to a pre-scientific age. If the premise is false, the sceptic must argue from the texts and the evidence rather than from the assumption that the case is closed. That is a real gain, and it does not require a single report to be verified.

There is a second response, about the standard of proof. A historian who demanded medical documentation for every ancient miracle would have to demand it for every ancient event, and he does not. The complaint is not that the sceptic demands evidence; it is that he demands a kind of evidence he demands nowhere else, then treats the resulting silence as a verdict. The modest conclusion is the right one: the reports are a reason to keep the question open, not to close it in the continuationist's favour.

What the reader should take from it¶

Three things.

First, the "we do not see them today" argument is weaker than it looks: it is a statement about a province, not about the church (the argument in full).

Second, evidence is graded. Keener's catalogue is not a substitute for the source library, which grades claims by how hard they are to dismiss; the honest reader will grade Keener the same way.

Third, the book is a resource, not a doctrine. It does not prove continuationism. What it does is make the sceptical case work for its conclusion instead of inheriting it — which is what the sceptic's case should be made to do.

What this does and does not prove¶

It proves: that the premise "no one reports these things" is false; that the subject can be studied by a serious New Testament scholar without abandoning historical method; and that anti-supernaturalism is a philosophical commitment rather than a finding.

It does not prove: that any particular report is true, that the New Testament miracles occurred, or that the gifts continue. Keener catalogues reports and defends the right to take them seriously. The doctrinal case is made from Scripture, and the greater works is where that argument begins.