- descending from the patriarch Abraham through his son Issac, born of Sarah, and the Arabs through his son Ishmael, born of Sarah’s Egyptian servant, Hagar; see Genesis 15-16, 18, 21. Thus, even though we tend to view the Arab world as separate from the West, together these three faiths comprise the “Western” religions.
- 2 John 14:20.
- 3 John 14:11-12. I am not of the mind that Jesus performed “miracles” in the term’s contemporary sense. Indeed, many in Jesus’ time presented themselves as “healers” and performers of “miracles.” As well, numerous scholars have attempted to decipher the accounts of Jesus’ miracles in order to reveal their nonmiraculous “sense”; see for example, Barbara Thiering, Jesus and the Riddle of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Unlocking the Secrets of His Life Story (Toronto: Doubleday, 1992).
Whatever Jesus meant by “miracles,” I contend that his pantheistic perspective was such that he would have agreed with later pantheists that “the belief in miracles does no credit to God, for what need has God to intervene in events that [it] originates. The laws of the Universe must be universally binding if we are to understand them, and the intelligibility of the Universe is the premise from which all science and all religion begin” (R. Scruton, Spinoza [New York: Routledge, 1999], 52-3).
Jesus’ capacity for “miracles” may have stemmed from his greater grasp of the “intelligibility of the universe,” but the point is that he understood this capacity as residing within each of us.
- 4 John 14:16-26.
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