Rageh Omar and the miracles of Jesus

BBC2 has just finished broacasting a semi-dramatised series of three programmes about the miracles of Jesus, presented by Rageh Omar. He is a BBC reporter, probably best known for his coverage from Baghdad of the second Iraq war, whose participation will probably have lent the series a degree of authority in the minds of some viewers which I don't think it deserved.

In the series we saw sketchy reconstructions of various miracles (healing, the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus walking on water and stilling the storm, for example). The culmination of the series was the resurrection, followed by the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples, with a tailpiece about Paul and his interpretation of Christianity. The subsequent success of Christianity was represented as the greatest miracle of all.

Throughout, Omar paid lip service to doubt by saying "We can't know for certain what really happened, but ...". He said repeatedly that he wasn't mainly interested in trying to establish the reality of the miracles but rather in deciding what they meant to Jesus's followers and even, quite ambitiously, to Jesus himself. It soon became clear that what he was moving towards was the claim that Jesus was divine, and that this is what his disciples came to believe.

Of course, if the miracles didn't really occur their evidential value for the divinity of Jesus is nil, but Omar didn't discuss this, nor did he consider the possibility that the miracles were invented by Christians precisely in order to justify the claims they were making for Jesus.

The series begged so many questions that it's hard to know where to begin. What we didn't get was any acknowledgement of the uncertainties that have arisen as the result of modern textual criticism of the New Testament. To take just one example: the account of the resurrection was presented as if all the gospel writers agreed about what happened. This is manifestly not so. Nor was there any hint that the earliest version of Mark's gospel does not mention the resurrection at all; the verses that do mention it briefly are thought to be a later addition (see Misquoting Jesus, by Bart D.Ehrman). Indeed, the programme even seemed to assume, naively, that Mark's gospel was really written by the disciple Mark, something hardly any scholars believe today.

As for the claim that the early Christians all agreed about the divinity of Jesus, this is a long way from the truth. There was a huge variety of views about Jesus in the early years; on this, see Lost Christianities, by Bart D. Ehrman.

I found this a deeply unsatisfactory series. It was evidently Christian propaganda masquerading as objective inquiry. I looked for the credits at the end and found that it had been made in collaboration with Jerusalem Productions. So I went to their website where I found that their stated aim is "to support radio and television programmes which will be broadcast outside designated religious slots and which will appeal to those who do not have an active religious commitment." This explains the tone of the series, of course.

The web page for Jerusalem Productions also tells us that they were responsible for "The Monastery", an earlier series that followed a group of men who spent 40 days and nights in retreat at Worth Abbey in Sussex. That had a propaganda element too, but it was more honestly acknowledged than it was in the present case.