OK, so first of all being very up-front about this: I am NOT a scholar of Islamic history in the slightest. I’m basically familiar with the concept of Hadith, but that’s as far as I go there. However, my area of research is medieval Christianity, particularly sainthood and the documents it produced, so I may be able to cast some light on the broader topic which I think is at the heart of your question: how do historians process miracles? How do we tackle the idea of a text that should be reliable (in terms of provenance, corroboration, etc) but seemingly can’t be because it contains reports of events that we (meaning a secular or non-religious historian) consider to be impossible.

In my area, this is a question we have to deal with frequently. Saint’s lives are full of miracles, from the small-scale ones comparable to Muhammed’s blessing of food to larger ones involving constructing buildings, resurrection of the dead, or even divine vengeance and retribution at the saints’ command. Simultaneously, however, these lives (or Vita) are invaluable documents attesting to not only the activities of historical figures, but also offering insights into social history, the activities of a medieval household, the structure of medieval liturgy, childhood in medieval Europe, medieval medical knowledge, etc. The issue is that we’ve got a text that says something to the tune of

“Dorothy walked to the market to buys some fish, which she got for 3 pence. On the way back she blessed the body of a child which raised him from the dead, and also found 4 lost needles by crying at them after invoking the Holy Spirit.”

So we’re left with a problem. If the author of this text is willing to ‘invent’ these miraculous events, why should we trust anything he says? Maybe markets in southern Germany didn’t even stock fish in the late 14th century. Maybe fish was much more expensive. Maybe a women like Dorothy would have ridden a horse or a cart rather than walking. It creates an intellectual problem that we can’t ignore, but is difficult to fully account for. Historians have tried a number of tactics over the years to deal with this. Let’s examine a few of them, so we can get an idea of the sort of approaches that have been tried. This will necessarily be a bit whistle-stop and representative, but it should offer a sample of how difficult this problem is to resolve.

Aviad Kleinburg argues that in order to make use of a source as evidence for anything other than the author’s perceptions, the binary categories of “real/fabricated” and “authentic/inauthentic” are necessary. What Kleinburg means by this is that it is insufficient to dismiss miracle narratives as culturally accepted literary products (i.e. stories intended as fiction). If we are to usefully employ them to discuss social reality, he claims, we must have a methodology which offers an explanation for the miraculous events that corresponds to their status as facts, if not as miracles. We have to be able to say “did this happen?” and answer with confidence. Kleinburg’s proposed solution is…..a bit wild. He offers what he calls “the hallucinating witness and the deceived witness”. The hallucinating witness commits a category error by classifying their own faulty perceptions as objective fact, and deploying the explanation of ‘miracle’ to close the gap between perception and reality. The deceived witness is the victim or perpetrator of conscious falsehoods that have no basis in objective or subjective reality. So the “miracle” is either the product of misidentifying reality, or of being actively deceived.

This certainly resolves the problem of accounting for miracles, in that it fits them neatly into a formulation that does not disrupt our epistemology - people are either idiots (or mad), or liars. This is a rational proposition, if a very depressing one. However, we swiftly run into problems. In his subsequent attempt to ‘save’ Peter of Dacia’s Life of Christina of Stommeln, Kleinburg explains the miraculous incidences in the text as being the result of Christina’s “blurred sense of reality” being narrated to Peter, or her successfully deceiving him and manufacturing her miracles (depending on how cynical we want to be). When considering a miracle with actual physical manifestation (as opposed to a purely psychological or spiritual vision), Kleinburg is forced to settle on the conclusion that Peter was lying about the event, and that it didn’t happen. To avoid this slighting his text in this way, he posits a tentative solution that episodes like this can be explained by Peter not being present at the miraculous event, but depicting himself as so by drawing on the testimony of actual eyewitnesses, who are excised from the text. By this method, Kleinburg hopes to preserve the credibility of Peter as a source.

Only, of course, he doesn’t. We could quite justifiably ask “if Peter was willing to present other people’s experiences as his own, how do we know he wasn’t willing to invent things from scratch?” This question is every bit as reasonable as “if Peter was willing to write about impossible miraculous events, how do we know he didn’t invent mundane things as well?” Kleinburg’s strategy, while reminding us that we do in fact have to evaluate our texts as historical rather than literary products, and offering useful tools to unpick the concept of witnessing, fails to rescue miracle texts from the imposed correspondence of trustworthiness and value.

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