Mather acknowledges an additional contradiction in Jesus’s working miracles. Matthew relates that Jesus “did not many mighty works” in Nazareth “because of their unbelief” (Matt. 13:58). Mather recognizes that this seems inconsistent with Jesus’s behavior since “Our Saviour
had given undeniable proof, of His Irresistible and Unconfined power to work miracles, in many
Instances, before ever He required Faith, as a condition” (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58). Citing Robert
Jenkin,102 Mather notes that this is the first time Jesus demands faith. Unfortunately, Mather and Jenkin offer a weak explanation: Jesus began to demand faith because that was the appropriate response. Mather lists some of the miracles Jesus had performed, such as the casting out of devils, then defends Jesus: “It was highly Reasonable, that after this, our Saviour should require a Faith of what He had already done, & was able to do, before He should Extend His Healing Power” (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58, c.f. Jenkin 2:472). He implies that the stories of previous miracles should have been sufficient enough to give hearers faith in Jesus’s powers.
Rationalism, which supported humanity’s ability to reason, and empiricism, which supported making logical deductions based on sensory experiences, had both gained ground in
102 Robert Jenkin (1656-1727) was a Church of England minister who refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary (Brunton). He graduated Cambridge with his M.A. in 1681 and received his D.D. in 1709, becoming Master of St. John’s College beginning in 1711 (Brunton). He served as a chaplain and a fellow of Cambridge and completed his most popular work, The Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion, which Mather uses, in 1696 (Brunton). It went through two more editions by 1708 (Brunton).
scholarly circles at this time and made their way into the church. Individuals who wholeheartedly embraced empiricism may have struggled with Mather’s explanation. If Jesus required faith before performing miracles, he would be expecting his followers to depend naively on secondhand stories instead of trusting their own faculties to determine the truth. This line of defense was common among orthodox exegetes in the seventeenth century, Robert Burns
explains: “The proof from miracles… is relevant only to an enquirer already so impressed by the distinction of Jesus’s teaching that he has no doubt that it possesses those qualities which the reasonable man must expect to be manifest in a genuine divine revelation” (97). Burns notes that apologists’ focus on a priori faith caused critics to dismiss their arguments as circular (97).
Mather’s emphasis on a priori faith without empirical evidence would not fly with seventeenth-
century philosophers, just as it did not sway ancient Pharisees. He states it mildly in his gloss on
Mark 6:6: “He did not use to work them for any but saith as Desired them, and Requested them,
& had some Hope of receiving such Favours from Him. – Such Dispositions were wanting in this
Wicked people” (“BA” 7: Mark 6:6). What Mather limits to “disposition” in the gloss on Mark
he is much more clear about in his gloss on Matthew 13:58. In that gloss, he spells out that a
priori faith was Jesus’s expectation: “It was requisite for these [applicants] to Beleeve, what they had heard so well attested, if they would receive the Benefit, they besought Him to do for them” (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58). He adds that since Nazareth was Jesus’s homeland, these people must have seen his miracles before. If such is the case, though, then they were not being asked to believe without seeing, and therefore they were less likely to doubt the miracles, even if they questioned the merit of Jesus’s means.
Although Mather does not address that complication directly, his manner of explaining the incredulity of the Nazarenes indicates his Calvinist view of their depravity. With all his
explication on Jesus’s demanding faith before performing additional miracles, Mather admits that Jesus “saw how unsuccessful all His works would be” (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58). The miracles, if performed, would not assure the Nazarenes’ faith, anyway, because their hearts had already hardened against him. That is why Jesus chose to perform miracles only for those who had “Faith required as a Disposition, or Praeparation” (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58). In other words, miracles, the Puritan implies, and any other empirical evidence, do not cause grace, and such evidence cannot convert a person who does not already have faith. Mather quotes Jerome to the effect that unbelievers would be condemned further for seeing miracles and not converting, so Jesus was doing them a mercy by refusing to perform miracles for those without faith (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58). He implies, then, that so far as empirical evidence was concerned, miracles had no
value: “The End of His Miracles required, That those who were cured by Him, should Beleeve in
Him” (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58). The miracle would only be performed for someone who would believe in Jesus even without the miracle.
After excerpting Jenkin, Mather adds, “I take leave to subjoin my own Thoughts” (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58). He remarks that Jesus’s miracles serve primarily to “trial Bodies and souls,
together” (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58). Jesus observed that “that people had no Faith by ye Hand of
Heaven wrought in them” (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58). This “First Essay of mercy . . . was hitherto
withheld from them” and so “He could do nothing for these unbeleevers” (“BA” 7: Matt. 13:58).
If such is the case, then, seventeenth-century radicals who demanded empirical proof of Jesus’s miracles and rationalization of Jesus’s behavior were, by indicating their need for evidence instead of trusting their faith, demonstrating the hopelessness of their situation. Whether or not Mather consciously considered it in such a light, he was effectively dismissing the validity of radicals’ empiricism-based arguments as inherently at odds with Christianity. Whatever Mather’s
intent, his implication suggests that he did not truly seek to refute empiricists and rationalists but instead sought to compete with them in hopes of winning over disciples who were considering deflecting from the church.
3.6 Conclusion
Responding to the criticisms of Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan and Charles Blount in his
notes on The Life of Apollonius, Mather argues unconvincingly that the Gospels’ depictions of
miracles are both logical and historically accurate. In doing so, and largely borrowing his ideas from Samuel Clarke, Mather problematically limits God’s power by implying that God
deliberately puts natural laws in place and continually enforces them. Furthermore, in trying to explain the significance of miracles in the Gospels, Mather ultimately concludes that miracles will only convince people who already believe, seemingly contradicting his argument that Jesus’s miracles were intended to confirm Christianity’s authenticity and fulfillment of the Messianic promise. He implies, then, that only those predestined to have faith would appreciate miracles as empirical evidence of Christianity.
4 CHAPTER FOUR: JESUS
4.1 Introduction
The foremost issue at stake in Mather’s commentary on the Synoptic Gospels is the divinity of Jesus. In Mather’s day, most Christians not only believed in the Trinity but held that Trinitarian doctrine is revealed in the Old Testament. Nevertheless, early Enlightenment radicals began to note what is commonly accepted by modern high critics: that the Synoptic Gospels do not depict Jesus as God.103 They asserted that the Trinity was a later invention of the Church.104
103 Most modern critics agree that ancient Jews did not anticipate a divine Messiah. As much of Matthew illustrates, the Messiah was expected to be a human who would literally restore the entire kingdom of
For example, in c. 1697, Samuel Crell, under the pseudonym Lucas Mellier, authored Fides
primorum christianorum ex Barnaba, Herma, et Clemente Romano demonstrata, which asserts
that Trinitarian doctrine was uncommon in early Christianity (Mulsow 62). Some Socinians charged that the Gospel of John had been written by a Gnostic disciple of Simon Magus
(Mulsow 176).105 Gnosticism, while never a defined or organized religion, was decried as heresy
by Church Fathers,106 including Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, and
Tertullian.107 Irenaeus and Justin Martyr were the major ancient critics to associate Gnosis with Simon Magus (Markschies 73). One of Mather’s favorite scholars, William Whiston, argued in Athanasius Convicted of Forgery (1712) that Athanasius had fraudulently interpolated
Trinitarian passages into the Bible in order to crush Arianism (BA 1: 277n). With such attacks
Israel by implementing a new law. Matthew and the other Synoptic Gospel writers argue that Jesus, as the Messiah, led a spiritual restoration of the Israelite kingdom through his preaching and self-sacrifice. Only John further adds that Jesus was actually divine. The Hebrew Bible does not expressly prophesy that a Messiah would cause a spiritual restoration, nor does it directly indicate that God is three beings in one. Historian Christoph Markschies cautions modern scholars to be careful about defining early orthodox Christianity, “because it is becoming increasingly clear that Christianity took shape only in the second and third centuries and defined its limits by both linking up with its environment and opposing it” (21). 104 As will be explored in this chapter, Mather rallied against this reading of the Synoptic Gospels. However, in an appendix following his commentary on Revelation, Mather implies his agreement with the radicals. Describing the acceptance of the New Testament canon by contemporary Christian sects, Mather remarks that “Every Sect has Endeavoured to Reconcile ye Books to their Principles” and he notes as an example that “The Socinians own the Epistle to the Hebrews; tho’ ye Deity, and the Sacrifice, of Christ, be so plainly asserted in it; and they dare not Renounce ye Gospel, and Epistle of John; tho’ they are from thence distressed wonderfully” (“BA” 10: “Some Remarks”). If all four canonical Gospels are bursting with evidence of Jesus’s divinity, as Mather tries to illustrate in his commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, then it is interesting that in his appendix Mather just mentions the Gospel of John. He – and Robert Jenkins, whom he paraphrases in his essay – seem to have recognized that the doctrine of the Trinity is only apparent in the Fourth Gospel.
105 Markschies explains that by the early Enlightenment, “Gnostic,” like “Sadducee,” was sometimes used as a blanket criticism, particularly by Cambridge Platonist Henry More, who “was following an earlier English tradition in summing up under the name ‘gnosticks' not only the adherents of quite specific groups assigned to ‘knowledge’ in antiquity but all Christian heresies” (14).
106 See Markschies, Gnosis: An Introduction (2003).
107 Scholars disagree about whether this mystical “knowledge” movement existed prior to Christianity and joined with it or whether it developed alongside orthodox Christianity. Bart Ehrman describes Gnostics generally as “dualists who thought the material world was evil but the spiritual world good. … Christ, in these Gnostic religions, is a divine being who came to earth to reveal this saving knowledge to those with the divine spark” (New Testament, 193).
being leveled against the Trinity, the very heart of Christianity – the divinity of Christ himself – was at risk. The significance of this problem for Mather cannot be overstated.
Throughout his commentary on the Hebrew Bible, Mather highlights passages that he feels refer to the Trinity108 and prove that ancient Israelites believed in both it and in the spiritual restoration of Israel, so that only Jews in Jesus’s time falsely believed in a human-only Messiah. Such a reading depends upon a doctrinal interpretation of the Old Testament and is inescapably precritical. Of more concern for the present study is how Mather addresses these issues in his commentaries on the Gospels. It is unlikely that the authors of the Synoptic Gospels believed that Jesus was divine. Mather, however, and most Christian exegetes in the seventeenth century, accepted as fact that they did. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, though, radicals observed the flaws in Jesus’s behavior and the lack of references to Jesus’s divinity in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. For example, in a letter composed in 1678 and published in 1695, Charles Blount argues that first-century Jews expected a “great Prince” that would “reestablish the Jewish Monarchy” (164). Followers of Jesus expected the “temporal Reign of a Messiah” for the first century of Christianity (166). Blount claims that all early Christian documents support this
belief and those who try to oppose it “never quote any for themselves before Dionysius
Alexandrinus, who liv’d (at least) 250 years after Christ” (167, parenthesis his). If Blount is correct, and if Whiston is correct that references to the Trinity were also added later, then it would appear that the Trinity itself was an invention of the Roman Catholic Church. Mather attempts to head off these implications by defending the authority of the Gospels.
This chapter particularly explores how Mather clarifies the reasoning behind Jesus’s actions when Jesus’s behavior does not seem consistent with his supposed divinity. Mather
108See, for example, BA 1: Gen. 1:1, Gen. 1:26, Gen. 12:1. Mather also wrote a separate treatise on this topic. See Mather, The Faith of the Fathers, Boston, 1699.
resolutely defends Jesus’s omniscience, even in the passages that depict Jesus claiming not to know something and in the instance where Jesus appears to prophesy inaccurately. Mather further asserts that Jesus’s behavior accords with the behavior of a prophet and thus makes sense. Making significant concessions, Mather goes so far as to explain that some passages refer to Jesus as human only. He uses the devil’s temptation of Jesus as an example, concluding that the devil did not know of Jesus’s divinity, and notes Jesus’s baptism as another instance. Similarly, Mather observes, Jesus uses language that refers to himself as a human, particularly in reference to being God’s messenger, and allows his hearers to believe it as well instead of insisting that they recognize his divinity. By emphasizing Jesus’s actions as a prophet, Mather does not prove that the Synoptic Gospels claim that Jesus is divine. Instead, he unintentionally supports the Arians’ argument: that Trinitarian doctrine only appeared later in church history.