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Jesus of Nazareth turned the water into wine at Canaan, and fed 5,000 people with no more loaves and fishes than you can count on two hands – maybe fewer. Before that, he was born of a virgin. The prophet Mohammed refused to perform miracles in order to ‘prove’ the truth of his message, although some regard his renowned Night Journey as a teleportation from Mecca to Jerusalem. Others insist this was a spiritual journey – and not to Jerusalem, but to a mystical ‘highest horizon’; in any case, the miracle, if such it was, was performed upon the Prophet, not some supernormal act of his own that affected someone else, and thus was unlike Jesus’s raising of Lazarus from the dead. Despite Mohammed’s implicit critic­ism (and perhaps political caution), saints of the Sufi mystical tradition of Islam didn’t shrink from miraculous deeds, according to the hagiographies: they are credited with healing the sick, rainmaking, restoring sight to the blind, and the capacity to read minds. One, the Persian poet Rumi (1207–1273), was said to be capable of buruz, ‘exteriorisation’ – the ability to be in several places at once: one night he reportedly turned up at 17 parties at the same time, and composed a poem at each one. How times – and parties – change. As might be expected, the progenitor of these Abramic faiths, Judaism, is no stranger to miracles: both Elisha and Elijah, for instance, prefigured the story of Lazarus by raising the dead, while in modern messianic Hassidic sects tales of miraculous healings and the like are ubiquitous. The Talmudic attitude to miracles is a little more subtle, as we’ll see shortly when looking into the Oven of Akhnai and witnessing God having a right good giggle.


NOT EVERYONE IS IMPRESSED
There is a long tradition of scepticism toward miracles, of course: Aristotle had little time for them; Spinoza sounded like a contemporary sceptical ufologist in suggesting that if we had all the facts to hand, there would be a rational explanation for them. Enlightenment philosopher David Hume commented that “No testi­mony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavours to establish.” The late, great zetetic Marcello Truzzi reformulated this idea for today’s readers as: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Hume’s contemporary, Thomas Paine, was more forthright: “All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for impostors to preach and fools to believe.”

Fr James Keller (1900–1977), a distinctly evangelical Roman Catholic, surely risked heresy in remarking that if miracles occurred, they implied that God was not just or fair: “If God intervenes to save your life in a car crash, then what was he doing in Auschwitz?” Keller’s fatuous argument has been well stuffed by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, who has pointed out that the Holocaust was (rather obviously) a product of human free will, not of God’s ‘permission’; and those of us familiar with Viktor Frankl’s work have evidence enough that God was in Auschwitz, if not of it. Richard Dawkins (b.1941 and miraculously still alive), whose nose is everywhere but is nowhere wanted, considers mir­acles a violation of the principle of Occam’s Razor (Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: “Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily”). Fair enough; and we’d like to know more about how William of Occam reconciled his insight with his vocation as a God-fearing Christian friar.

Readers can scarcely not have noticed that, so far throughout this entry, there has been an implicit connection between mir­acles and religious belief, even among sceptics and scoffers. Our Oxford dictionary confirms the idea, defining a miracle as “a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency”. Certainly, both religious canonical texts and apocrypha like to include accounts of miracles: one (albeit shaky) tradition says the Buddha too was born of a virgin, for instance; he himself was averse to miracles. Even so, many are ascribed to him, and many of his most highly realised followers reportedly performed them. A modern legend has it that when the Dalai Lama went into exile in 1959, the word went out: “No miracles.” If true, this was presumably a political decision, designed to curb the scope of cynics; on the other – cynical – hand, it may have been designed to limit opportunities to expose sleights of hand and other tricks, which would bring the lamas into disrepute.

But reports of miraculous events are not limited to a religious context. If miracles do indeed occur as reported, they may happen in any number of contexts.


FORTEANA: SECULAR MIRACLES?
Cast an eye down the contents page of that excellent compend­ium, Phenomena: A Book of Wonders by the semi-legendary duo of John Michell and Bob Rickard (Thames & Hudson 1977) and you’ll see that about 40 per cent of the chapters cover bizarre events free of any religious link or tendency: frogs and toads found alive in lumps of coal, mysterious flows and oozings, spontaneous human combustions, levitations, stones that move and/or grow… and so on. These are all, in Thomas Aquinas’s phrase, “outside and beyond the order comm­only determined or observed in nature”.

Michell and Rickard reproduce (p71) a letter to The Times written on 17 September 1862 by one John Scott, of which this is an excerpt:

1. My wife is prepared to state that she herself, many years ago, saw one of her father’s workmen split open a piece of coal, and discover in the middle of it a moderate sized frog or toad (she is not sure which) alive, and able to move, and she remembers distinctly the oval shape and smooth surface of the hollow where the animal had laid.

2. Samuel Goodwin, a stonemason, whom I myself have known these five-and-twenty years, and who is very trustworthy, states as follows:– “When I worked in the quarry at Kettlebrook, with Charlie Alldridge, we sawed a stone through about four feet [1.2m] thick, quite solid, and in the middle was a toad about the size of my fist, and a hole about twice the size. We took it out, and it lived about half an hour, and then it died. We worked the stone, and it was used as a plinth-stone in the Birmingham Town-hall.”

Leaving aside the obvious problems with this letter as ‘evidence’ and taking it at face value, what it describes is miraculous, in the sense that what has occurred here is officially ‘impossible’, but nonetheless is so. There is no plausible scient­ific explanation for live toads surviving in tiny chambers inside lumps of rock; while frogs – earliest known example, approx. 200 million years ago – did not move upon the face of the Earth when the carboniferous forests flourished, between 359 and 299 million years ago. At the ‘woo’ end of the explanatory scale, frogs have to be time-travellers as well as have the ability to hold their breath for rather a long time. At the zealous debunk­er’s end of the scale, hypotheses multiply with equal fervour.

We might regard the levitations of Scottish-American medium Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–86) in a similar light. Granted, Home was no stranger to séances, whose ostensible purpose was to demonstrate that there was life after death, which suggests a religious impulse. The otherwise trivial or tasteless demonstrat­ions of strange powers in séance rooms – floating trumpets, accordions that played themselves, weird noises from tables, ectoplasm oozing from unmentionable orifices – make a kind of sense only if their ultimate source is divine plenipotence – otherwise, they remain merely trivial or tasteless. Victorian spiritualists, perhaps nervous of being accused of religiosity when ‘truth’ was increasingly identified as ‘scientific objectivity’ – and always keen to attract scientists who would approve their evening spectaculars – tended to identify the medium with the message and the ‘power’. So, in the view they promulgated, if DD Home really levitated, he was responsible for manifesting the phenomenon, however much higher the cause. And if DD Home levitated, he set both Newtonian and Einsteinian gravity by the ears, and performed a miracle.

In the present age, secular miracles abound in ufological discourse. First, the aliens get here at all. Second, they float people through walls, and levitate them (and themselves) to astonishingly un-aerodynamic craft. Said craft reportedly perform ‘imposs­ible’ manœuvres in the sky – such as flying, in the first place – and can interfere with vehicular electrical systems, and so on (and on). There is a mass of commentary that says ufological belief is at heart religious, but the terms in which ‘serious’ ufologists present themselves are remorselessly secular, laying endless claim to a scientific approach. But within the boundaries of our current science, what UFOs and ufonauts do is miraculous.


AN OVEN SHAPED LIKE A SNAKE
If one cares to look for them, one can find splendid deconstruct­ions of how Home appeared to levitate (and created other ‘miracles’). Similarly, one can find plausible explanations for most ufological phenomena and a few for the appearance of live frogs in lumps of coal. The real question, though, is not whether or not the reports of these or any other wonders are true or false, but what use people make of them. To flip the point around, these accounts wouldn’t exist if they had no use, however abstruse or metaphysical, in the real lives of real people. This is the time to peer into the Oven of Akhnai, and at the truly remarkable, yea legendary, life of its great defender, Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus – and his cucumbers. Brace y’self, Sheila, this is gunna be a good one.

Here is the tale[1] as originally told in the Babylonian Talmud, Baba Mezi’a 59b. [Halachah = legal matters and decisions, based on Torah = the law of God as revealed to Moses and recorded in the first five books of the Hebrew scriptures (the Pentateuch).]

We learnt elsewhere: If he cut it into separate tiles, placing sand between each tile: R. Eliezer declared it clean, and the Sages declared it unclean; and this was the oven of ‘Akhnai. Why [the oven of] ‘Akhnai? – Said Rab Judah in Samuel’s name: [It means] that they encompassed it with arguments as a snake, and proved it unclean.

It has been taught: On that day R. Eliezer brought forward every imagin­able argument, but they did not accept them.

Said he to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let this carob-tree prove it!’ Thereupon the carob-tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place – others affirm, four hundred cubits.

‘No proof can be brought from a carob-tree,’ they retorted.

Again he said to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let the stream of water prove it!’ Whereupon the stream of water flowed backwards.

‘No proof can be brought from a stream of water,’ they rejoined.

Again he urged: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let the walls of the schoolhouse prove it,’ whereupon the walls inclined to fall.

But R. Joshua rebuked them, saying: ‘When scholars are engaged in a halachic dispute, what have ye to interfere?’ Hence they did not fall, in honour of R. Joshua, nor did they resume the upright, in honour of R. Eliezer; and they are still standing thus inclined.

Again he said to them: ‘If the halachah agrees with me, let it be proved from Heaven!’

Whereupon a Heavenly Voice cried out: ‘Why do ye dispute with R. Eliezer, seeing that in all matters the halachah agrees with him!’

But R. Joshua arose and exclaimed: ‘It is not in heaven.’

What did he mean by this? —Said R. Jeremiah: That the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai.

After the majority must one incline.

R. Nathan met Elijah and asked him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do in that hour?
He laughed [with joy], he replied, saying, ‘My sons have defeated Me, My sons have defeated Me.’

What, the unversed may legitimately enquire, is going on here?

First, we need to know that Rabbi Eliezer was the foremost scholar and jurist of his generation. He never forgot anything he was taught, and generated legal interpretations the way some Hollywood denizens swap partners. He was said to have produced 3,000 new laws concerning cucumbers; once, even as he was teaching on the subject, freshly-sown cucumber seeds sprang up and produced ripe fruit. He was, thus, in the legendry, not unacquainted with miracles. His wife attributed their child­ren’s striking handsomeness to Eliezer’s ‘demonic’ dedication to conjugal delights. He was, then, also no world-shunning ascetic. His opponents were from a rival rabbinical school; the rabbi who approved his excommunication was his brother-in-law. The polit­ics were messy.

The ‘official’ problem with the Oven, which was reassembled from a previous broken one, was that under one legitimate interpretation of the law – and remember, these men were lawyers, not just priests – it was ritually impure; under another (Eliezer’s) it was not. Decisions regarding purity, traditionally administ­ered through the Temple in Jerusalem, were in flux after its recent destruction in AD 70. Bear in mind the family relationship involved, and it is clear that Oven had landed in an almost perfectly-formed liminal space in the theocratic arrangements of the time. The Oven of Akhnai could stand for the law itself, a cobbled-together thing of dubious wholesomeness.

God disagrees with all the rabbis but Eliezer, although the voice from heaven in Hebrew is a Bat Kol, a “daughter of a voice”, like an echo. The majority in turn reject His authority, which makes God laugh with joy, even though R. Joshuah’s riposte is a perversion of Exodus XXIII:2, which actually says: “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.” (We said these men were lawyers. As R. Epstein’s footnote drily remarks, “this is a remarkable assertion of the independence of human reasoning.” Indeed. And akhnai means ‘snake’, by the way.)


DID IT HAPPEN? IS THE WRONG QUESTION
There’s general agreement that the legend signifies the final withdrawal of God from the world, and His delight that his child­ren have matured enough to insist on making their own decis­ions through argument – R. Joshuah’s rebuke to the tumbling walls of the Beit Midrash is literally translated as “when scholars are besting one another” – and logic. Where does that leave R. Eliezer’s miracles? Cutting no ice with most Jewish jurists, evidently.

Bear in mind Eliezer resorted to miracles only after presenting every imaginable legal argument (“every argument in the world” in some versions). They are a manifestation of God’s approval, although the walls of the schoolhouse are strangely conscious of what’s going on and respect both points of view. Yet in the end even God accepts defeat in this dispute, and with pleasure and grace. Whether He accepts the invalidity of miracles per se is open to question, but the thrust of the tale is surely that He concedes that miracles do not an argument make, let alone a proof.

If one accepts the lesson of Akhnai, then, it’s irrelevant to ask if miracles ‘really’ occur or not. For whether they are secular, profane, or divine, they prove nothing in themselves. Certainly not the existence of God or the ability of frogs to travel through time. We believe Charles Fort would be entertained by this point of view.




Note
1 This is R. Dr Isaac Epstein’s translation; the punctuation has been slightly amended and the passage paragraphed. The vast Soncino Press edition of the Talmud is now, heaven be blessed, online. Start at come-and-hear.com. The story of the Oven of Akhnai is probably the most famous of Talmudic stories, but perhaps not famous enough in some quart­ers. There is a magnificent treatment, placing the tale in its ancient and modern legal contexts – the implications are not always comforting – and its theological one, by Prof. Daniel Greenwood, at people.hofstra.edu. There were several sequels to this story, outside our scope here, which deepen its meaning and ambiguity: see Prof. Greenwood’s article for illumination.