Christianity
Hellenistic Magic and Jesus—Jesus as Magician
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, December 20, 2001
Jesus Magician
Early Christians denounced the activities of Simon Magus, Apollonius and Alexander of Abonotichus, all well-known magicians, yet apocryphal works like to explain some of the puzzles of the gospels by making Jesus a powerful magician himself. The idea that Jesus was a magician is dismissed out of hand by modern scholars and churchmen, but it is so old it goes back to his own lifetime—it is found in the gospels! Rudolf Bultmann found about twenty instances of magic in the synoptic gospels, mainly in Mark, but he invites us to believe it was merely from the folk culture of the day rather than any ouvert magical content of the earliest form of Christianity. Either way, it is there, and readers must have noticed. Martin Dibelius pointed out that the miracles in Mark were presented in a magical style, and the disciples attend rather as the magician’s apprentice in Lucians’s Philopseudes.
Examples are found in Mark 3:22-27 and parallels; Matthew 10:25; John 7:20; 8:48, 52; 10:20. Sometimes the claim is subtle, as in Mark 6:14 and parallels, where Herod claims that John the Baptist has risen from the dead and that Jesus has his powers. This sort of thing could be done by necromancy and would be dangerous, since according to the magical papyri the demon of a man killed violently is powerful and easy to control. Morton Smith says the end of Mark 6:14 could be translated, “the inferior powers work by his orders”, implying that Jesus now possessed John.
Of the synoptic gospels, only one specifies any charge brought against Jesus before Pilate. Matthew and Mark appear to suppress the accusations, though Luke gives several:
And they began to accuse him, saying, We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King.
What is “perverting the nation”? Perhaps a clue comes from John 18:30, where Pilate’s question as to a charge is answered, “They answered and said unto him, If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him up unto thee”. “Malefactor”, “kakon poiwn”, is taken by Pilate as a specific accusation. It is translated into Latin by Theodotion and Tertullian as “malethicus”, a technical term for magician! It is also used in 1 Peter 4:15 as one in a list of specific crimes which carry a capital penalty:
But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men’s matters.
“Evildoer”, or “mischief-maker” as it is sometimes translated, is not a capital crime, but “magician” is. If being a magician was equal to perverting or corrupting the nation, then it explains why Matthew and Mark chose to suppress it. Another term used about Jesus, “planos” (deceiver) in Matthew 27:63 is also a technical term for a magician.
Jesus was accused during his lifetime of being a magician. The charge comes in the peculiar section of Matthew, in Mark, and in John—three separate sources. It is not derived from the resurrection experience or from the early church.
These early ideas of Jesus as a magician show that it seems to have been a relatively common charge in the first century AD, and not merely the accusations of his enemies. Jesus’s enemies and some of his friends thought he was a magos. It was plausible from the gospel evidence, even though overt expressions of it have been suppressed.
The magi visiting the infant Jesus him shows that magicians should do him homage. The story of the descent of the spirit as a dove and of the voice from heaven at Jesus’s baptism are common to many accounts of magicians. The Berlin papyrus has an example covering several pages. Other rites to obtain the spirit’s assistance can be found in other magical papyri, where the spirit becomes the assistant of or identical with the magician. In the gospels, the voice of God is heard instead: “My beloved son”.
“Son of God” is not a Jewish messianic title. It occurs in the gospels usually in connection with miracles. No explanation of them is given, They are rarely attributed to Jesus’s spirit or the Holy Spirit. This is because “son of God” implies a supernatural being in human form who performs miracles by his own divine power.
The Mithras Liturgy depicts the adept being deified by the spirit, becoming the sun, and accomplishing the miracle of ascending into heaven. This parallels the career of Jesus. In the Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden, appears “I am the son of the living god”. PGM 4.142-221 concludes with union with the deity in form, a gift of power in the deity’s name, and the believer achieving a nature like the god.
The gospels and the papyri have many close parallels involving miracle stories and teaching material, including details of wording and liturgical procedures. Most of Jesus’s miracles have parallels in the magical papyri. Much of his teaching has parallels also, except for ideas about the kingdom. The magical papyri were directed entirely toward the individual, and so did not promise to bring in a kingdom.
Many stories of magicians in the magical papyri fit the gospel accounts:
- baptizing to purge from sin
- being made a magician by the descent of the spirit
- being declared a god
- experiencing mystical phenomena in the wilderness
- exorcism and cures of certain types
- teaching with authority
- calling disciples, who joined him as if enchanted
- traveling as master and holy man, with disciples
- successful and famous as an exorcist and healer, so that other magicians use his name
- developing opposition from neglect of laws, especially concerning fasting, sabbath keeping
- associating with low life, so that stories were spread about his evil magic
- initiation of the disciples into his own magical experience (hints only)
- twelve given the power to exorcise
- being seen in a vision, with supernatural beings, by several people.
The eucharist is easily seen as a familiar type of magical rite of union between Christ and his disciples in love and in body—the identification of the magician with the deity, in which food becomes the body and blood of the deity. Bultmann argues against a magical interpretation of the eucharist. It is magical, with its earliest forms in Egypt. Morton Smith says the cultic emphasis of the eucharistic story is secondary, showing that the story is older than even Paul and James, who connected it with the Passover and other Jewish ideas in a clearly midrashic manner. It does not fit the stories of Jesus, and is not even primitive, since it has different forms and circumstances in different gospels—the Passover in the synoptics and crucifixion in John. The gospel writers are straining to convert a magician into an acceptable Jew of Jerusalem in the time of the Christian church under James. They are effectively hiding the Essene origins of Christianity.
When a person does the things that a magician does, using magical techniques, and has magical experiences, he may certainly be thought of as a magician. Magic must be socially defined, since there is no essential difference between magic and religion. Magic is a large collection of ways of dealing with a special group of deities in special ways for special purposes, not all bad. A magician thinks he has established communication with such a deity, is identified with the deity, is made divine by virtue of the indwelling deity, and has consciously adopted techniques of magic. Jesus, or the gospel writer, for their purpose, adopted techniques known in society as magical, with many parallels to details of stories about magicians.
In the Acts of Pilate, the Jews attribute Pilate’s wife’s dream to Jesus as a sorcerer:
Did we not tell you he was a sorcerer? Behold! He has sent a dream to your wife.
The guards at the sepulchre in Matthew who fell asleep are excused in the Clementine Recognitions because Jesus had worked his magic on them. In the various works attributed to the apostles, they are shown as being magicians. The Indians in Acts of Thomas admire Thomas as a magician, and Paul is accused by the Greeks of being a sorcerer for persuading betrothed women to refuse to marry.
Simon Magus, in the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, denigrates Peter as a magician, the author adding that the accusation was false. Yet Peter claims he could do better and “turn the city upside down”. Admittedly, what he really meant was that he could cause an uprising, and only later Christians have interpreted it as sorcery, but it still shows that sorcery was acceptable to Christians. More acceptable than any hints of rebellion. A von Harnack, in the Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the first Three Centuries, writes:
All Christians with one consent attributed a magical force, exercised especially over demons, to the mere utterance of the name of Jesus and to the sign of the cross… Christianity had become a religion of magic, with its center of gravity in the sacramental mysteries.
The Quran 5:113 says that infidels attributed Jesus’s miraculous healings, the raising of the dead and his making birds from clay to sorcery. The Hayat of al-Damiri calls Jesus an “enchanter, son of an enchantress”, and Mandæan literature calls him a false prophet and a magician, emanating from the planet Mercury.
The miracles of the synoptic gospels were considered as if they were magical, and once that was done, there was no clear distinction between Jesus and other eastern magicians. Athanasius, in writing about Anthony and other ascetics, appears to approve a policy whereby magical practices are taken up by Christianity. Lucian presents Peregrinus as both a magician and as a Christian leader with a following. Christian apologists place Jesus at the good end of the good-evil axis and therefore have him working magic in the name of God not Satan. They placed other magicians like Simon Magus, Dositheus, Menander and Apollonius at Satan’s end. Philostratus, however, in the Life and Acts of Apollonius puts his hero at God’s end, and others were wizards using the devil’s power. It shows it is all arbitrary. Each school felt their own hero was the man of God. If we are to accept that only one was, as the Christians say, how are we to know it was their hero?
Though Christians think they can see a distinction between good and bad magic, no one else can. Christians have simply been conditioned to believe that their heroes do good magic and others do evil magic, and even the abominable history of Christianity cannot persuade them otherwise. They are certainly in the grip of a powerful magic, but the question is whether it is what they think.
Many of these works are ambiguous, often renouncing magic in others while acknowledging it in Jesus and those acceptable to Christianity, or accepting magic in both, but treating Christian magic as God’s work while others produce magic through demons. The fact that modern dramas easily distinguish “black” magic as evil is due to Christian conditioning in society rather than any sensible considerations of the devil’s intelligence. God’s powerful adversary, even His equal to judge by the difficulty God has in suppressing him, ought to be quite capable of winning converts by presenting to them magic that seemed to be good but was not. If that is what the devil did, then the outcome would have been called Christianity.
Origen and Celsus
Revealing of the differences perceived in the later Roman world between magic and religion is the controversy between Celsus and Origen, reported by the latter in his Contra Celsum. Celsus in the second century saw all the novel cults growing at the time as being the work of conjurers and magicians, and put Christianity among them. Origen defended the Jews and Jesus against accusations of sorcery and that Jesus did not learn magic in Egypt. Origen, answering Celsus in Contra Celsum, denied that Jesus was a magician, but plainly believed in magic himself, defending “Yehouah” as the only proper name of God because only it had the power to work spells!
Magic is an issue in Contra Celsum when Origen responded to Celsus’s attempts to consign Christianity to inferior social, moral, and intellectual status. To accuse someone of practicing magic was to impugn their morals and education. The illiterate and immoral would most frequently be suspected of magical beliefs and practices.
Although magic often enters the discussion in Origen’s Contra Celsum, Celsus and Origen were not always divided about it. Indeed, they mainly agreed. Both prized the philosophical ideal. Both acknowledged the power of magic to be real, valid and attractive. Neither doubted the reality of demons or the possibility of a human being performing supernatural feats. Both attempted to design an explanation of their appropriation of magical beliefs which would preserve their social, moral, and intellectual status. Origen, at least, found this in his theology of names.
Celsus mainly used magic or sorcery to cast suspicion or ridicule on Christianity. Origen conceded to Celsus that Christianity, in part, was treasonous, barbarian in its origin, possibly foolhardy in its courting of danger, and not novel in its ethical teaching. But where Celsus made the charge of magic, Origen conceded nothing. He was adamant in denying that Jesus performed his miracles by magic. Origen insisted on the total separation of Christianity and magic, and even implied Celsus was beset by demons.
Celsus claimed that any supernatural power of Christians was done by magical means, while Origen responded that the name of Jesus was not used as an incantation, but was used with the words of divine scriptures. Origen’s attitude was at best ambivalent. To Origen, “so-called magic” was not utterly incoherent, but rather a consistent system whose principles are known only to a very few. It was a theory of the power of certain divine names, pronounced in their original languages and in a sequence which was natural to them. He took magic seriously, at least in some of its aspects.
Celsus contended that magic was only effective with uneducated people and with those of depraved character, while those who had studied philosophy were impervious to its power since they were careful to lead a healthy life. Celsus claimed that Christians were low class people who practiced magic. Origen replied that Christians were not high class people, but they were morally better than others.
Origen noted that magic had spread to other races than the Magi, to the destruction and ruin of those who used it. He differentiated the magi with their demonic formulae from the Christians with their use of divine power. When Celsus entertained the possibility that Jesus performed miracles as magic stunts and tricks, Origen countered that Jesus did his miracles, not to show his own powers, but “to call the spectators to moral reformation”. In short, Origen did not claim that Christians were not magicians, but that they were better magicians because of the power on which they called.
Celsus aimed to undermine the Christian religion by discrediting its founder, and he introduced a Jewish interlocutor to bring charges against Jesus. A feature of the Jew’s polemic is that Jesus and his followers practiced magic.
Since both Celsus and Origen agreed that men with superhuman or divine characteristics could exist, it was only a question of deciding who was divine and who was a sorcerer. Through a detailed examination of the life of Jesus, Celsus’s Jew demonstrated that Jesus was only a man and a sorcerer who duped the gullible multitudes and who suffered a well-deserved death. By defending Jesus against the charges that he was a sorcerer, Origen intends to reclaim for Christianity and its founder social, moral, and intellectual status. In reply, Origen from his own criteria for deciding the issue of who was divine and who was a sorcerer. Although he shares the same techniques of exegesis with his adversary, Origen proposes that beneficial works should be the primary criterion by which sorcerers are distinguished from divinities. This moral criterion is formulated in explicit response to the charge that Jesus practiced magic. Not surprisingly, Origen thereby confirmed Jesus’s divinity. Moral character distinguishes Jesus from sorcerers, and establishes him as divine.
Celsus’s motives for introducing the Jew are mysterious. It raises the question of the audience of the Contra Celsum. Origen’s mention of contemporary Jews who still accused Jesus of sorcery would seem to indicate that the issue was a live one. Yet the Jew reflected the views of the contenders that magic was undesirable. A Jew would know about Christianity than would a Pagan, and would know about what actually happened in Palestine in the years leading up to the Jewish War. He could accuse Christianity on the basis of its origins.
The purported manifestations of Jesus’s divinity or superhuman power in his birth and early life showed instead he was a sorcerer, and later Jesus gave no unequivocal sign that he was divine. What Jesus did showed him to be a sorcerer. Celsus accused Jesus of being condemned for sorcery. Neither the crucifixion nor the resurrection appearances strike the Jew as evidence for the divinity of Jesus, although they could be evidence for his use of sorcery.
Origen replied that Jesus’s wonder-working led to the conversion of many:
No one could suggest that it is the work of sorcerers to convert souls from the multitude of sins among mankind and from the flood of evil.
That distinguished him from a sorcerer, and tales of suffering and death were compatible with Jesus being a superhuman benefactor. For Celsus, they were not at all!
Origen’s ideas about the use of divine names seems to create a problem. He carefully avoids calling it magic, but he certainly is fascinated by the powers which can be triggered by the use of God’s name and other divine epithets.
Did this Celsus really exist, or was he a straw man invented for the sake of the book? Celsus’s arguments seem genuine, offering real problems for Christians to answer:
- How can Christians claim antiquity when they have departed from their roots?
- How does Christianity relate to the Jewish scriptures?
- How do they resolve the problem of not keeping the law, if they want to retain a connexion with the scriptures?
These problems must have been put by someone. Origen would not invent arguments like these against his own faith. His general defence of Christianity was its success. Other magicians were only famous in their lifetimes, and thereafter were soon forgotten, but not Christ.
It is a false argument, still often used by apologists, that fails to distinguish cause and effect. The cause of Christianity was unlikely to have been the cause of its success. An egg can produce a chicken but it cannot produce another egg. In other words the belief in Christianity is different from the phenomenon, whatever it was, that created the belief. To accept that the popularity of a belief was a sure confirmation of its foundation myth would compel Christians to believe that Hercules was a god because millions once believed him, or that Mormonism is a true religion because millions believe it now.
Magic Spells
“In the name of Jesus” is a magical formula based on the magical power of names. Its use in Christian baptism is not merely symbolic of the power of God but is meant to confer magical power to the baptized person. It pervades the person with the power of the name that would drive out all rival powers, an example of the very name beliefs found in all parts of the ancient world when Christianity was being formed.
The seven vowels were considered magical and magical texts often have names consisting of strings of combinations of vowels. Yehouah is a string of vowels.
Aramaic words spoken out during some of the New Testament miracles, gibberish to Greeks and Latins must have taken on the aspect of a magic spell. In Coptic magical papyri, the magical incantations were done in Greek. In Greek ones, in Hebrew. In the gospel of Mark, Aramaic sufficed for the Latins. The prominent Christian scholar of some decades ago, Vincent taylor, in his commentary on Mark, comes out with typical Christian weaselese:
Jesus shares the ideas of his time, but so far transcends them that by a commanding word alone, without the use of any magical practices, he casts out the unclean spirit.
Taylor is a scholar and must know that to use words as spells is in fact a magical practice in its own right. So, Jesus is using a magical practice, but, in case you notice this, he tells you that Jesus nevertheless transcends the practice of the time. This though you are expected to accept on faith alone, like Taylor himself. Christians are expected to be uncritical and are taught to be so, that being what faith is! Taylor attempts to deflect attention from the truth of the matter in these instances that Jesus is behaving like a magician. Taylor proves the point and exemplifies his own prejudice elsewhere when he is discussing the healing of a deaf mute:
The details of the story, the insertion of the fingers into the man’s ears, the use of saliva… the sighing… suggest that it is taken from life.
Then Taylor admits that “such actions are common to the technique of Greek and Jewish healers”. He concludes:
Although sighing and groaning belong to the technique of mystical magic… only a love for the bizarre rather than sober exegesis will find in the groaning of Jesus anything other than a sign of his deep feeling and compassion for the sufferer.
Sadly, this is Christian scholarship from one of the last century’s greatest scholars—nothing less than buddy Jesus self-delusion—and it is utterly typical! Taylor refuses to let the facts interfere with his preconceptions. “Sober exegesis” is Taylor’s euphemism for exegesis that he will countenance. The truth is even more bizarre than the bizarre exegesis that Taylor will not countenance. The supposed healing is the opposite of a healing. The man was not dumb or deaf but refused to talk—he would not give the rebel group Jesus led any information, and so he was tortured until he did. This story got back to the gentile world and had to be given a new spin by the bishops, who conveniently altered the torturing of the man into a magical healing.
J M Hull comments on Taylor’s efforts that “instances are difficult to find in a commentary which in spite of its immense learning and thoroughness is marked by an almost silent rejection of the sort of researches we have been describing, a rejection which is unacceptable…” Now Hull was a lecturer in education at Birmingham University and a former lecturer in divinity. The sort of scholarship and exegesis evinced by Vincent is typically Christian. They are clever men, and not prone to error, so they are quite simply dishonest. If they were more objective—more scholarly—they would soon be compelled to lose their beliefs, and their jobs too. Christians have rarely been committed to that degree of honesty.
Miracles
A miracle is magic and, if magic worked, it would be a miracle! The miracle of the creation in Genesis 1 is presented as magic—the word of God has the power of creation. When gods, angels and demons are considered to be part of the fabric of nature, people can accept miracle as natural, and to induce gods to act by magic is no less natural. Eventually, it is so natural that not to perform a necessary ritual is to invite disaster, to fail to stimulate the gods to act as they should. Ancient religious ceremony was magic, so powerful that the gods and nature itself would not function without it.
Human beings had been created to be slaves to the gods, and among their duties was reminding the gods to make the seasons come on time, and so on. The ancient seasonal festivals were not just excuses to have a holiday, but were seen as necessary to keep the year on its course, and ancient new year festivals renovated the year or gave birth to a new one. The Persian and Babylonian new year festivals were held at Easter.
Magical in apparoach and method are Moses’s brazen serpent, th raising of the dead by Elijah and Elisha, the capture of the Ark in Judges.The defeat of the Egyptian priests by Moses is unashamedly magical. Miracles in Judaism are by prayer and might be magical, or by invocation of the divine name when they surely are. In Jubilees and 1 Enoch, beloved of the Essenes, healing is by binding or confining evil spirits, and so is magical. The angels in Jubilees tell Noah about herbal medicines to stop evil spirits, and, in 1 Enoch, the archangels bind the lesser fallen angels that cause plague, as they do in the Testament of Solomon, suggesting a source of the latter.
In the Greek tradition of Homer, miracles are similarly the will of god, or are brought about by magical use of apparatus or gestures.
Lucian, in Philopseudes, refuses to accept that the use of a sacred name will cure a fever or an inflammation, even though others consider the belief as equal to venerating the gods. Rational, as ever, Lucian has his character saying:
First, convince me by logical proof that it takes place in this way naturally, because the fever or inlammation is afraid of a holy name or a foreign phrase, and so takes flight from the swelling or your stories still remain old wives tales.
Lucian is happy to concede that the gods have given humanity medicines, but he cannot bring himself to accept they make the magical use of names effective. A magical cure cited by Lucian is that of a vine dresser bitten by a poisonous snake who has the poison driven out by a spell then has the would bound up with a piece broken from the tombstone of a dead virgin. The vine dresser stands up and walks home with his litter, as in the New Testament miracle of the paralytic. It was a common extravagance to embellish the story of a dramatic cure. The magician in Lucian’s story, then summons toads and snakes by uttering magic names, and destroys them with his breath. He flies in the air, walks on water and walks on fire, conjures up demons and restores mouldy corpses to life.
Elsewhere, in Philopseudes, a haunted house is exorcised by adjuring the ghost in the Egyptioan language. Modern exorcists will use Latin, though, when people spoke Latin, it did not work and the demons only responded to Egyptian. The point is that it should not be understood and therefore sound mysterious to onlookers. It is “abracadabra”!
Clement of Alexandria, in Stromateis, tries to convince Pagans of the gospel miracles by citing Pagan ones! An oracle from Delphi broke a drought by advising Aeacus to pray to Zeus with pure hands—a rain storm broke out. Empedocles stopped the wind and was called the “Checker of Winds”. Clement describes the Magi averting disaster by incantations and sacrifice, or when no animal was available by cutting a finger as a substitute for sacrificing. He shows that magic and miracle were intertwined, claiming simply that others like the Magi could work miracles but God “transcended” them.
Iamblichus, in Life of Pythagoras, describes many miracles undertaken by the great man and his followers. They prophesied earthquakes with infallible accuracy, cured disease, stilled the wind, stopped hailstorms and calmed vilent waters so that people could cross them safely, 500 years before Jesus stilled a storm. Abanus rode on a dart given to him by the Hyperborean Apollo, allowing him to appear in inaccessible places, as if he could travel through the air on his arrow. Pythagoreans effected healing by ointments and herbs, by willpower, by magic and by music, but made no distinction between them. All worked by understanding the sympathies of Nature.
One miracle is close to the fishing miracle of John. Pythagoras met some fishermen pulling ashore a large catch of fish in their nets. He declared to them he could tell them exactly how many fish they had caught if they would do as he asked, if he were correct. They agreed and set about counting the fish. It was just the number that Pythagoras had written. He finally asked them to return the fish to the sea and he would pay for the catch. They did as they had promised, but the real miracle that they told the world after Pythagoras had gone on his way was that not a fish died despite being out of the water for a considerable time.
Signs
Many Pagan Miracles are given in Pliny Apuleius, Philostratus and the magical papyri, but no Christian shows enough interest to even read about them, let alone convert to Paganism because of them, they are so bigotted. In the Recognitions of Clementine, Simon Magus, hated by Christians, flies through the air, makes statues walk and turns stones into bread. Niceta wants to know of Peter why Simon’s miracles are not to be believed as divine signs:
In what respect did the Egyptians sin in not believing Moses, since the magicians wrought like signs, even though they were done rather in appearance than in truth? For, if I had been there then, should I not have thought, from the fact that the magicians did like things to those that Moses did, either that Moses was a magician, or that the magicians wrought their signs by divine commision? For I should not have thought it likely that the same things could be effected by magicians, even in appearance, which he who was sent by God performed. And now, in what respect do they sin who believe Simon, since they see him do so great marvels? …but if he sins who believes those who do signs, how shall it appear that he also does not sin who has believed our Lord for his signs and works of power?
The New Testament repeatedly warns Christians (Mt 7:22-23; 2 Thess 2:9; 1 Jn 4:1; Rev 13:13) not to believe such signs. The serious problem of divine miracles, that Christians do not understand, is that they cannot prove their divine origin. In other words, the miracles of Jesus are valueless as evidence that he is a god or the Son of God. It all shows the atmosphere of the time, most notably among the underclasses of society. They expected and got miracles.
Characteristics of Magical Miracles
A miracle is magical when one or more of the following is true:
- the miracle has no apparent cause except the will of the miracle worker
- the miracle appears to be caused by some sympathetic relationship
- the miracle is brought about by a ritual.
Christians are fond of saying, and it is frequent in commentaries and apolgetic works, that Jesus works his miracles by his own word, an that has nothing to do with magic. It is typical of Christian lying. Manifestly it is untrue, but Christians think it becomes true because they say it, and indeed it does for other Christians.
The second method implies the sympathetic theory of nature which needs to be understood and made to work by the magician. Thus when the magician uses the power of his word, say, to work a miracle by this criterion of magic, an onlooker, noting the word, will find it has no power at all! The magician claims an underlying knowledge that makes the word work for him. Lucian is doubtless being sarcastic when he relates the story of the onlooker who heard a spell that made a pestle oick up a jar of water and tip it out. The onlooker tried the spell and got flooded out of his home because he did not know the spell to stop the first spell.
A distinction should be made between miracles brought about by God and His providence. If the Israelites arrive at the Red Sea just as the waves are parting, it is providence not miracle. One assumes the waves would have parted anyway, whether there were Israelites there or not. So, some rationalizers explain the parting as caused by a tsunami, and providentially the Israelites got across but the Egyptians were in time for the big wave coming in. If God deliberately poarted the water to allow the Israelites to pass, then it is a miracle. In the case of prayer, Christians adjudge the oucome, if favourable, to be a reult of God’s grace in responding, but a prayer that obliges a response is magic.
The Church Fathers classified magic as:
- illusion by lack of reality
- the power of evil demons
- illusion by assistance.
Either the miracle was an illusion, perhaps by trickery, or it was the work of demons. God works miracles. Demons work magic. To the onlooker, they seem the same.
Exorcism
Jesus was an expert at driving out demons. As early as the fifteenth century BC, a mother addressed the sickness in her child, rebuking it and commanding it to go. In the time of Rameses II, a magical ritual invoking the god, Khonsu, was used to drive out an evil spirit from the Mesopotamian sister of one of pharaoh’s wives. Marduk and Ea were invoked elsewhere to drive out a “headache demon”. In Homer's Odyssey, an evil spirit causes a wasting sickness, and in Eumenides by Æschylus, vampires called EWrynges suck blood. Exorcism was a fully developed technique by the time of the Ptolemies in Egypt, so must have matured under the Persians—Zoroastrian dualism giving it its theology.
The word, exorcism, is first used by the ever skeptical Lucian, though he will not have coined it. In the Jewish scriptures, Tobit, uses magic to protect himself from the demon, Asmodeus. Tobit is among the most obviously Persian biblical books. Josephus, at the end of the first centuiry, describes cures by driving out demons, although set anachronistically, showing the popularity of the concept in the first century. Exorcism is completely linked with magic. Jesus exorcised them, but so did Solomon in legend, and Apollonius, a contemporary, and the rabbis not long after. The Gnostics and Christians latched on to these exorcism miracles because they interpreted them as the power of God over the possessing demons. The apocryphal lierature and the lives of the saints are full of them. Often, though, in the lives of the saints the story is altered to show the power of some desirable quality possessed by the saint, often humility. People believe! As they always did.
In Mark 1:24, the demon declares it knows who Jesus is and stating the holy name. The same happens in the Greek magical papyri, when a demon recognizes Hermes, and even knew where he came from. Demons cry out names throughout Mark (Mk 1:24; 3:11; 5:7), suggesting that the demonic story is being used to cover up those who were unwisely revealing who Jesus was to the authorities!
The expression “Most High God” occurs in Grek magic to mean the supreme God of the celestial spheres, non other than the “God of Heaven” of the Jews, and before that the god who wore the heavens as his cloak, Ahuramazda. Ahuramazda sems to have been the first of these supramundane gods—what Christians call a transcendental god. It was certainly not simply the sun, though it had solar aspects. Sometimes this transcendental god is named, and one such name in an invocation of Eros, the god of love, is Iao Adenoi! Jesus commands the spirits in Mark (1:25; 5:8; 9:25) with: “Come out of him!” It is the most commonly used command in the magical papyri.
In the Great Paris magical Papyrus, a demon is adjured “in the name of the God of the Hebrews, Jesus, Iaba, Iac, Abraoth”, seeming to suggest that some magicians thought that Jesus was a god of the Hebrews. The Hebrews were not, of course, only the Jews, but all of the nations of the Persian satrapy of Abarnahara. Ies was said to be a god of the Phœnicians, who also were Hebrews, but came to be called Syrians by the Romans who wanted to distinguish them from the Punic people of north Africa. If it is a reference to the Christian god, Jesus, then it is hard to think that any magician could have been so ignorant after about 100 AD, implying that the spell was earlier. If it is earlier, it seems that one of the Hebrew names of Yehouah was Jesus! Since this exorcism also mentions the fire burning in the Jerusalem temple, it implies that the temple was still functioning, placing the spell pre-70 AD. The maintenance of a continuous flame in a temple is typically Zoroastrian. It will refer to the menorah, the seven headed lamp or candlestick, plainly standing for the seven Amspends or archangels of Zoroastrianism. F W Fiebif says the name Jesus was used about 120 AD as a charm for snakebites.
Damascius, in Vita Isidore, explains that Theosebius exorcized a demon from his wife but otherwise he was “quite ignorant of magic and did not meddle with theurgy” proving that the ancients considered exorcism a branch of magic.
Healers such as Apollonius, and stories of the healings of Æsculapius often end with prescriptions for after care such as bathing, exercise or diet, but Jesus never did this, suggesting that they were not physical healings at all.
Jesus uses spit three times, once in John (9:6) and twice in Mark (7:33; 8:23). The Greek word for spit is used only in these passages in the whole New Testament, though a cognate word is used elsewhere six times implying spitting in contempt, such as the onlookers at the crucifixion. In the healing miracles contempt seems inappropriate, unless it was meant to be for the demon, and it is hidden ot ignored by the translators, if there is any implication of it in the original. It might be an important clue that these people were not being healed, but they were voewd as demons and they were being tortured to punish them for speaking out of turn, or to make them yield up information.
Christian commentators boldly say that spittle was used medicinally, and that is what Jesus was doing. It si true that Egyptians considered there was power in spittle. Thoth healed Horus’s blind eye with spit in the Egyptian myth, and Jesus is shown as copying this miracle.
Mark wrote just as Vespasian became emperor, and Vespasian himself effected a miracle by using spit, and is quoted in many commentaries. The blind supplicant to Vespasian did not want any spit. He wanted Vespasian’s! Obviously spit was not considered as having any medical value, at least for curing blindness, but that the emperor’s spit had magical value! Vespasian was astonished that the blind man wanted his spit. He had also never heard that spit was medically useful—even an emperor’s. Needless to say, the emperor was persuaded to yield up his spit, and the man was miraculously or magically cured. The story is one of magic, not medicine. The spit of a great man had his magic power but any spit had none, even if it could be argued to have some medical power. Vespasian seemed not to have heard of the power of spit, so it sounds like a superstition of the lower classes. Christian commentators do not remark on the fact that the author of Mark used the miracle that must have been widely known when Vespasian became emperor to magnify the powers of the Christian hero, earn him favours in the eyes of Romans, and negate the rumours that Jesus was spitting in contempt.
Angels and Demons
Few writers can get it into their heads that angels are not Jewish! The Persian colonists of the fifth century BC introduced all of the ideas of Judaism to be the basis of the law and theology of their temple state of Yehud. Angels are Persian. The Persians call them yazatas, and they stand for the cosmic forces of the universe. Seven of the Persian yazatas were more highly regarded than others and were called Amesha Spentas, and they were associated with the seven known planets.
These seven yazatas preceded and are the origin of the seven archangels of Judaism. These spirits were then associated with the days of the week, minerals and plants. Angelology, astrology and magic are therefore closely related and all have their origin in the Persian religion, and Persian religion gives magic its framework of theology—the opposition of Good and Evil. Angelic names had magic power and the belief survived in Islamic Persia to have a marked influence on the ideas of the Sufis. The name of Jesus was used in cures in a similar way, and Arnobius had to deny that Jesus had stolen the names of the angels of might from the shrines of the Egyptians.
In Hellenistic magic, the demons—so named by the Christians from the repectable word used of the lesser gods of the Pagans—were identified with Persian fravashis, thought to occupy the space between the “massy heavens” and the earth. In Zoroastrianism, each person had a fravashi, a heavenly double, apparently derived from the idea of the spirits of the dead, and though not intrinsically evil, they had a hint of menace about them, as if they were temperamental unless treated with respect. Eusebius says that they were originally dead heroes, some of whom were good.
The gods themselves were in the heavens beyond the moon, but the fravashis were only in the air, and trembled at the call of a god. The gods had power over demons and could drive them off or summon them at will. Magicians used this divine power to forvibly control a demon.
Demons sought a home or a refuge because of their fears and some would take refuge in the human body causing disease or madness. Light hating demons—light was Good Creation—occupied a body to escape from the light, perhaps a basis of the vampire idea. Others sought warmth or moisture. Naturally, then, having found a pleasant and safe home, the demon did not like being driven from it by a magician calling upon a god to summon him, or drive him out. Demons thus coerced were always angry, and it was this anger that the demon sought to use. First, though, he had to divert it from himself, but having done so, he could get the demon to take it out on someone else.
The prominence of angels in Matthew, Luke and Acts testifies to a belief in magic and its Zoroastrian origins. H B Kuhn had noted as long ago as 1948 that the Jewish belief in angels was particularly focused on Jewish apocalyptic, which derived from Zoroastrian eschaology. Nearly all of the associations of Jesus with angels in Matthew are eschatological. Matthew is not interested in the heavenly hiwerarchy per se but just in their connexion with eschatology.
Ophthe is used to describe the appearance of angels in Luke. It is most often used to describe a supernatural entity appearing as a vision.
Luke 1:11-19 is modelled on Daniel 9:21-23in which the angels are on one side of a cosmic battle for the first time in the scriptures. Luke’s angels fight in the war! In Luke 2:10f, the heavenly host—the angelic army—praise the peace the birth of the saviour would bring. Oddly then, only one angel appears in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus is expecting the host of heaven to appear, and Matthew makes him say so!
The angels are opposed by another host called a legion, identifying them as Roman, in Luke 8:30, and will end up in the Abyss, as in Persian religion. Luke’s demons have a leader (Lk 11:15) and Satan has a kingdom (Lk 11:13). God’s kingdom is light while Satan’s is darkness (Acts 28:18). Luke’s gospel is thus markedly Persian in its eschatology, more so than Matthew when this struggle between the two powers is subsumed by the notion of Yehouah as being the supreme power. Luke’s angels are an active and real force in history, as they are in Tobit. Luke make’s his eschatology more clearly into a final battle set in the End Time, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In Luke 22:3, Satan possesses Judas and the final scenes are expressed in terms of cosmic conflict (Lk 22:31;43ff),53).
Magic and Miracle in Acts
The only places in the New Testament where the relationship between magic and Christian charismatic powers is explicitly considered are in Acts 8 and 13. In both passages, the problem is one of a contest between an agent of the Holy Spirit and a magician, indicating that there were obvious similarities in the extraordinary phenomena which apostles and magicians were able to perform. Manifestations of power attributed in Acts to the apostles equate with the feats performed by several people in antiquity.
The author of Acts rates the achievements of the apostles in healing and exorcisms to be superior to those performed by the false prophet, Elymas, or by Simon Magus, but what is the ground for this evaluation? Is there a fundamental distinction to be made between magical and apostolic acts, which are so similar outwardly?
Some modern scholars try to distinguish religion from magic by saying that religion works through an appeal to a higher power while magic is only like cooking or chemistry—following the recipe and obtaining the desired result. Those who think this do not deserve to be called scholars. So, Judith Willer, in The Social Determination of Knowledge thinks that in magic, knowledge rests at the level of the immediately observable, being without theoretical component and purely practical, whereas religion has a theoretical component (theology). In magic, humans possess power. In religion, powers are reserved for superior beings.
Judith Willer’s error is to define magic to serve our own culture and society. Her definition of magic is not what an historian finds. By Willer’s kind of definition, the act is either religious or magical, depending on the explanation given. The truth is that the magician is also depending on higher powers, and the magician has a theology. All that differs is the approach to them, and identical or similar phenomena can occur in either magical or religious frameworks of knowledge.
In Acts, miraculous deeds which resemble magic include Peter’s thaumaturgic shadow (5:15-16), Paul’s healing handkerchiefs (19:12), and Paul’s immunity to snakebite (28:3-6). These seem to be pure magic, with no transcendent framework of meaning. There are, however, two narrative passages in which the issue of magic is raised explicitly and, except for Matthew 2, are the only places in the New Testament where the terms for “magic ”and “magicians” are used. In Acts 8, Simon appears as a magician with the embodiment of power. His offer to purchase the apostles’ power lets the author of Acts show he regards the Spirit as a gift of God, rather than an inherent power transmissible by secret formula for a fee. In Acts 19:11-20, the Jewish exorcists assume, as would any magician, that knowledge of the appropriate formula or technique guarantees success. They discover that the name of Jesus does not function in this automatic way, and that the evil spirits were not so accomodating. The exorcists are converted and presumably burn their secret books with their formulae.
Miracle and magic are a pervasive dimension of the narrative of Acts. Howard C Kee concludes that the powerlessness of the masses “is handled by a religious system that posits a deity who transcends the world, but whose power is at work through intermediate agents within it to achieve his purpose”. Quite how this differs from magic is beyond comprehension.
In their desperation to separate Christianity, these scholars become apologists. They assume that magic and religion are opposites, and incompatible. Yet magic is explained through religious belief. Magic requires God or gods and spirits, and works through them. The patriarchal religions have the same, because they are the basis of magical theology—the theory behind magic. In Luke’s terms, the phenomena of magic and religion are the same. The difference is the framework of understanding of validity in which it is viewed. Believe that your magic is worked only through the Good God and it is acceptable. If it is worked through unacceptable gods—the Pagan gods called daimones—then it is obviously not. Acts does not deny that magic works, but says that it is a wrong system of ideas. Acts seeks to show that the Christian world view is not only better but right. The distinction is arbitrary. It depends only on which god or gods are preferred.
Magic, Ignorance and Trickery
In A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, the hero impresses the audience by predicting an eclipse from his almanac, and it duly happens. For the ignorant onlookers, it is a miracle wrought by the power of the magicians’s will. What the observer does not understand and cannot explain is a miracle, and when it seems to happen through human intervention by one of the routes listed, it is magic.
Today people are rarely taken in by staged tricks, but some are despite our being more skeptical than of old. Most stage magicians make no pretence of having magical powers, and willingly concede it is clever trickery. Audiences today mainly clap in admiration at the subtlety of the trick, not because they think it is supernatural. But some stage magicians do still pretend to have supernatural powers, and some people still believe them—even after they have been exposed as tricksters! Some people are determined to believe whatever the evidence. Any real miracle ought not to be able to be explained by science and reason, or by trickery, and that was just Niceta’s complaint. There are no objective miracles. Miracles are subjective and magic is the same. If people are successfully duped by a magician, then it is magic.
J M Hull, in conclusion writes:
The gospel tradition was inevitably adapted to meet the needs of those who, as the epistle to the Hebrews puts it, were all their life-time in bondage through the fear of death to the devil. Just as the Christ figure of the Apocalypse is triumphantly adapted to meet the terrors of those suffering beneath the Roman persecution, just as the cosmic Christ of the Colossians letter satisfies the needs of those caught up in the worship of æons, so the saviour described by Mark’s gospel was a deliverer for those whose lives were lived for fear of evil spirits…
