Are miracles a big sticking point for Christian historians who write for a broad audience?
Miracle stories raise some hard questions. You want to acknowledge that miracles can happen, but then, in particular cases, what if you think they didn’t happen? What if you’re writing about Jim and Tammy Bakker? You ought to make some distinction between how you treat miracle stories that you find credible and those about which you find some evidence of deception. So I think it is appropriate to be critical of certain religious claims to miracles. I can’t articulate exactly what the rule should be, because it depends on whether you’re writing about your own tradition or about somebody else’s tradition. You might be respectful of another person’s tradition because it would be indiscreet not to be. The general rule in the academy is not to criticize anyone’s story. You talk about their experience and leave it at that. Many of the historians discussed in this issue also were uncritical of miracle stories, though for completely different reasons. What does a modern historian make of figur
