One of the most common reasons skeptics doubt the Gospels is that they present Jesus as a miracle-worker. After all, the logic goes, if a story contains supernatural elements, then it must be legendary.
This assumption drives much of the skepticism surrounding the Gospel accounts.
For example, the late German Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann wrote concerning Jesus’ resurrection, “But what of the Resurrection? Is it not a mythical event pure and simple? Obviously it is not an event of past history.” John Dominic Crossan carried forward Bultmann’s skepticism, declaring in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, “[Jesus] did not and could not cure that disease or any other one.” He later adds, “I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life.”
The Jesus Seminar went even further in The Five Gospels, ruling out entirely the authenticity of Jesus’ resurrection sayings on the grounds that words ascribed to him after his death cannot be historically verified. For such scholars, the miraculous content of the Gospels is itself proof that they cannot be historically reliable.
But is this actually a good reason to reject the Gospels? A closer look suggests otherwise.
First, miracle reports would count against the Gospels’ reliability only if miracles were metaphysically impossible. This of itself isn’t all that bad of a methodology. For example, if I already know it’s impossible for something to both be and not be at the same time and in the same way, and then I read the Gospels repeatedly saying that something both exists and doesn’t exist in that exact sense, then I’d have a pretty solid reason to doubt those reports.
But miracles are not like contradictions. Rather, miracles are considered impossible only on the prior assumption that God does not exist. If there is no God, then of course there can be no divine actions in history. But if God exists, then miracles are at least possible. That means the presence of miracle reports in the Gospels cannot, by itself, discredit them as historical sources. The real issue is not the Gospels’ trustworthiness, but the prior question of whether God exists.
This raises another point: skeptics often pride themselves on being critical thinkers, but in this case, they rarely question their own assumptions. They simply take it for granted that miracles are impossible. Yet as Gregory Boyd and Paul Eddy point out in Lord or Legen?, this assumption has never been widely shared across history—and even today, most people around the world continue to believe in at least the possibility of the supernatural. Given that the skeptic’s position is the minority view, it would be wise for him to critically examine whether his presupposition is a worthy starting point for historical investigation.
Finally, there is the issue of consistency. Ancient historians routinely deal with texts that contain miraculous elements, yet they don’t automatically dismiss the entire account. Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon (cf. 49 B.C.) is a prime example. Roman historian Suetonius reports in his On the Life of the Caesars that Caesar was inspired to cross the river after seeing “an apparition of superhuman size and beauty,” who was “sitting on the riverbank, playing a reed pipe.” Yet historians do not treat this as grounds for doubting the historical event itself. Why, then, should miracle references in the Gospels cause wholesale rejection of their accounts? As Craig Blomberg observes in Jesus Under Fire, such a move reveals a clear double standard.
The British historian A.N. Sherwin-White saw this problem decades ago. He wrote in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, “It is astonishing that while Greco-Roman historians have been growing in confidence, the twentieth-century study of the Gospel narratives, starting from no less promising material, has taken so gloomy a turn.” If other ancient sources can be read generously—even with supernatural elements included—then surely the Gospels deserve at least the same courtesy.
In the end, dismissing the Gospels simply because they contain miracles is not a sound historical move. It shifts the conversation away from the actual reliability of the texts and onto a prior assumption about the impossibility of God’s action in the world. If God exists, then miracles are possible—and if miracles are possible, then the Gospels cannot be dismissed out of hand. At the very least, they deserve the same fair treatment as any other historical documents from antiquity.
The claim that the Gospels are unreliable because they contain miracle stories rests on shaky ground. It assumes, without argument, that God does not exist and that miracles are therefore impossible. It also applies a double standard, treating the Gospels more harshly than other ancient sources that contain supernatural details. When we peel back the assumptions, we find that the real question is not whether the Gospels can be trusted, but whether miracles are possible—and that depends on the bigger question of God’s existence. Until that question is answered, dismissing the Gospels on the basis of miracle reports is not an act of historical rigor, but an act of philosophical prejudice.