So I’ve had a few back and forths with a person who has degrees in early Christianity and is a very good scholar from what I can tell. She’s a believing Christian but who says that when it comes to supernatural claims, now it’s out of the field of history. She says that as a historian we have to use “methodological naturalism” so claims of the supernatural are N/A.
I’m just confused because don’t historians say, even with miracle claims and supernatural claims from history that some “probably didn’t happen”?
I understand that historians can’t appeal to miracles but let’s say there are two claims from history, but one has a supernatural element attached, all of the sudden we have to be agnostic on the one with a miracle attached, we can’t lean towards non-historicity because of this?
I hope my question makes sense.
Personally I don’t think the miracle claims of the New Testament are historical. But as a historian can you not say that because it’s a supernatural claim?
Short answer:
History, like physics, only accommodates the physically possible.
Discussion:
We can observe all sorts of supernatural claims made by historical figures -- Christian and others-- but as historians we don't engage the validity of the supernatural, it's not historical subject matter. We can speak to the historicity of _claims_ of the supernatural (eg who claimed what when), but not to supernatural events themselves. So we've got lots of work on the history of alchemy, including the many claims to transmute lead into gold -- none of that constitutes evidence that it happened, just evidence that it was claimed. People "claim" all sorts of things that aren't true, both today and two thousand years ago.
So when it's claimed that someone lived 969 years because scripture says so . . . all we can say is "that's a claim that was made". Its not compatible with medical science, and that its stated doesn't make it any more likely to be true.
Your question is most commonly encountered when believers claim that there's "historical evidence for" their supernatural event of choice. There isn't. There is no substantial historical evidence to substantiate claims of any supernatural event occurring, anywhere, ever.
So when there are historical events where an historically important miracle is claimed-- for example, Constantine at the Battle of Milvian Bridge-- historians will investigate what is claimed, but have no way to substantiate anything more than "this was claimed" and "this is how the story evolved over time".
Removing the discussion from the freighted context of religion, which can excite confessional passions, we can more soberly discuss it in the context of dragons. We've got lots of references to dragons in the historical record, from many different cultures . . . so it's fair to say that many people report them at different times-- and we also can say that there's actually no substantial evidence that they existed.
Sources:
Lippincott, Louise W. “The Unnatural History of Dragons.” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 77, no. 334, 1981, pp. 3–24.
Blust, Robert. “The Origin of Dragons.” Anthropos, vol. 95, no. 2, 2000, pp. 519–536.
Newman, William R., and Lawrence M. Principe. “Alchemy vs. Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake.” Early Science and Medicine, vol. 3, no. 1, 1998, pp. 32–65.
DiMaio, Michael, et al. “‘AMBIGUITAS CONSTANTINIANA’ : THE CAELESTE SIGNUM DEI’ OF CONSTANTINE THE GREAT.” Byzantion, vol. 58, no. 2, 1988, pp. 333–360.
I recall a back-and-forth in the Hispanic American Historical Review over Paul Vanderwood's (excellent) The Power of God Against the Guns of Government, a history of the Tomochic uprising in late 19th century Mexico. The book relies heavily on pro-spiritualist accounts of Teresa Urrea, also known as Santa Teresa. Alan Knight reviewed the book, and was generous on its virtues, but critical of the way it filled in unknowable historical details in almost literary style, and of how it was so credulous about using sources that took miracles at face value.
Paul Vanderwood replied that he believes in miracles. What more to say?
I personally side with Knight; I don't think even being overly reliant for factual information on sources that consider the events under discussion to be miraculous is a very wise idea. And I certainly don't think we should just report miraculous events as having happened simply because a source says so. But that scepticism is because my episteme doesn't involve miracles. I can't prove that miracles don't happen just using history. More broadly, I don't know think there is a rigorous way for historians to use entirely historical methods to determine what systems of knowledge to use to interpret the past. One is pretty much forced to make up one's mind about what one believes about the underlying nature of reality, and then interpret history accordingly. This gets trickier as we move away from the broadly implausible (violations of dominant theories in physics, chemistry, biology) to the much more plausible (violations of highly contested theories in economics, sociology, psychology). At that point, it's pretty much down to whether the reader finds the underlying theory compelling or not.
History might provide some help in sorting through theories, weeding out the implausible and supporting the more useful, but in the main, historians come in lots of different kinds, and their histories will be almost inescapably bound up in their own worldviews. But what else would we expect, since we interpret historical actors themselves that way?