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Loading...Very few biblical scholars are interested in studying the actual manuscripts of the New Testament. It’s an unusually rigorous and technical field, and most are interested instead in how to interpret the New Testament. That’s true of most fields. The vast majority of Shakespeare scholars are interested in figuring out what the plays *mean*, not in examining the quarto and folio editions to see in detail how they differ from each other. So too with scholars of Homer, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, and and and.
As a result most NT scholars — really! most of them — do not know a lot about the actual manuscripts. It’s a bit of a pity, because there are a lot of very interesting things about them, unrelated to interpretation of the text. Here’s one thing that almost no one knows about, even PhDs in the field (and, as it turns out, even many (most?) scholars who do specialize in studying the manuscripts): the use of manuscripts in later Christian circles for purposes of magic.
To explain what this is all about, I need to provide some background.
There’s been a lot written about magic over the years. When talking about antiquity, “magic” is not what we think of today: we think of illusion artists who do tricks in order to make think something has happened which in fact has not. In antiquity, magic was understood to be a real thing, not a clever illusion. It involved the manipulation of the physical world through suprahuman means. The big question was then (and still is for scholars studying the phenomenon) how to differentiate between magic and miracle. The (very) short answer is that miracles were performed by those who were thought (by the observer) to be on the side of the good (or God or the gods) and magic was performed by those who were (thought by the observer to be) on the side of evil (or the wicked divinities). But in fact, what miracle workers did and what magicians did was not all that different, either in what they performed or in how they went about doing it.
Older scholarship used to claim that magic involved *forcing* the gods to do something by secret spells and other forms of manipulation, and that miracle involved simply making a humble *request* of God or the gods for the desired result. That is no longer considered to be true. Mainly because there’s no evidence of it. And all the other older differentiations that you may have heard at some point – e.g., magic brought bad or harmful results, miracle only good results – also all break down. It appears that one person’s miracle was another person’s magic. It just depended on whether you thought the person doing the spectacular deed was a good guy or not.
In any event, there has been a lot written about magic and a lot about early Christian manuscripts, but very little scholarship combining the two. In what follows I point out ways that the two fields overlap.
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Not surprising since Jesus’ time was an age of superstition, as is our present time. I wonder how many Christians today use Scripture in this manner. Certainly there is no shortage of Christians who have their fortunes told every day by the neighborhood seer.
The entire edifice of Christian belief is based on magic thinking–the fantasies of the immortal human soul, the eternal afterlife, heavenly rewards, hellish punishments.
Not long ago, my born again neighbor gave me a little booklet. It was John’s Gospel. But I failed to notice the fill-in-the-blank form in the front or back (can’t remember which) that facilitated my confirming that I had recited a brief version of the Sinner’s Prayer. Ha! That’s sort of magic, isn’t it?
It would be if you filled it out!
The concept doesn’t seem that weird to me considering there are plenty of people today that think the bible can work for them the same way. I heard one individual telling another how one can pray and then just open the bible and put down a finger and find an answer to prayer.
A man was looking for advise for what to do with his business by asking his Christian friend. The friend claimed that he had learned how to invest at the right times by using the bible in the aforementioned way. The first time he did it, his finger found the word “gold” and his ensuing investment brought him profit. The second time, it was “oil” and his investment brought him more wealth. The man, decided to takes his friend’s advice. He opened the bible, put his finger down and found his answer: Chapter 11.
I completely agree!
This made me think about the I Ching and how people use the shuffling of coins or throwing of stalks to gain insight into a question or situation. I have done this multiple times and had been left with a feeling that the old sage was looking after me.
It seems like there are people now that use the bible in the same way as others read the I Ching or Tarot cards. (Bible tarot cards? Surely someone thought of making these up.) I have several memories of my grandmother advising me to open up my bible to any random page during times of trouble and read the first verse that caught my eye. As a young kid, I remember thinking how incredibly accurate the bible was with advising me.
Carol Jung believed the I Ching gave a voice to the unconscious by expressing the archetypal situation relevant to our question. Could it be the same as well when using the bible in the same manner?
I don’t know about I Ching, but yes, people definitley use the Bible this way!
Ah there are few sweeter words to the hopeless bibliophile than “with extensive bibliography”! The links are much appreciated. More of this kind of thing, please!
Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
I have a question that I’ve been pondering for a while.
The relationship between the gospels are usually described as the synoptics (Mark, Matthew and Luke) and then John on his own. While it’s clear from close reading that John is very different indeed with few (any?) clear links to the earlier gospels, the question remains: Was the writer(s?) of John aware of the synoptics, and if so, was John written in response? Did John conciously reject synoptic sources (Q) for some reasons? Maybe something in the theology of John would point in that direction, but I’m not the one to confirm such ideas.
I realize that this can come down to a “we have no idea and we’ll never know” but if you have any thoughts on the subject, I’d be very interested to hear them!
// Olof
It’s a very big and much controverted issue. My view is that John did not know the Synoptics at all; I’m pretty sure he didn’t use them as a “source” for his stories. Whether he had ever read or heard of them, I don’t know. I tend to think not, but other scholars think so. mark Goodacre, on the blog, is writing a book arguing that John both knew and used them.
Well i suppose John had some reason to start J ministry with the table-turning dust-up, instead of end his ministry with a destabilizing bang during Passover in Jerusalem. Point Ehrman’s position. Hurdles to overcome. Is this the biggest hurdle, or do you see another bigger, Professor, in Mark Goodacre’s position? Perhaps for literary effect, as Mark, Matthew and Luke had all done, Goodacre may argue that John knew them all well enough, but had this extolled divinity to tell us about? (You yourself point out the “progression” as the years rolled by in “How Jesus Became God” if memory serves).
The big opint in the discussion is not so much about the sequence of events as the way the stories are told — whether John’s telling reflects teh Synoptics’ in how the stories are told and worded. If there are not word-for-word agreements, then it’s much harder to claim that John was actually getting his stories from them, as opposed to some other source.
Proverbs 6:21 says “Bind them continually upon thine heart and tie them about thy neck” referring to the laws of god. I was told (by an evangelical fundamentalist) that Jews would do this with scripture (in exactly such a manner as you described as amulets) in order to obey this command. Is that likely? (given that the passage seems to me to be clearly metaphorical)
A few places in the Gospels Jesus is quoted saying an Aramaic word like “Ephphatha!” when healing a man as in Mark 7:34. I tend to think that the Gentile gospel writers may have thought of those Aramaic words as magical or at least special words with special power, which is why they used the original language rather than just translating into Greek. Plausible?
Yes indeed!
Perhaps, then, the tradition of placing the hand on a copy of The Bible when being sworn into public office, is vestigial form of apotropaic magic, to thwart agents of evil that might oppose the beneficent oaths made.
Yup! Or it’s a “strike me dead if I don’t do what I say” kind of thing….
Anyone who has watched TV documentaries about early Christianity has heard of early Christian art depicting Jesus as holding a wand, which to the modern mind is unambiguously connected with magic as opposed to miracle. How does that fit into the story?
Incidentally I recently read a work of fiction in which a prominent character has the surname Metzger, which caused me some serious cognitive dissonance when reading about Bruce on your blog! We can take it as read that this character and Bruce have practically nothing in common…
Of course staffs were used by miracle workers in antiquity (think Moses); so it may be that image more than a magic “wand” (which may have derived from that older image?). Ah, Metzger. The name means “Butcher” and so is relatively common.
Interesting, thank you. Miracle is theological, Magic is natural.
So the creation to Creation People is a Miracle, that is an agency (known as God or gods) OUTSIDE of creation caused the universe to exist.
These days many people subscribe to MAGIC to explain how the universe came to be. That is, the creation created itself – ie no cause and no reason for being – this violates our scientific understanding of how nature works. When push comes to shove, and Magic People cannot explain how a universe, which didn’t exist, created itself, they will fall back on the hoary old line that the universe has simply “been here forever.” That is a retreat to a different proposition – Magic Of The Gaps if you like. An infinite universe is no longer accepted by Cosmologists, and in any case dodges the question.
“NT manuscripts were sometimes used for apotropaic magic (that is; to “turn away” harmful forces that are out “to get you”!) — for example, worn around the neck or placed under a pillow to ward off evil spirits.”
When short passages of Christian texts in amulets are found, what criteria do scholars use to determine whether the copyist was basing that text on an NT book? Couldn’t the copyist have based it on an unknown Christian work that just happened to have an identical passage as the NT book? After all, even within the NT, some passages in the Synoptic gospels share identical wording. Or do these amulets sometime mention the book they’re quoting from?
Likewise, when one single manuscript fragment is found that contains words identical to a passage in the NT, could it be from an unknown work, maybe used as a source by the NT author? (On the other hand, if that fragment is found in close proximity with other fragments, all containing passages we are familiar with, then perhaps it could be inferred that these are probably fragments of a known book.)
Yes, that’s possible tht it’s from an unknown work. But if it is worded exactly as in the NT, then the unknown work probably got it from there, so it’s the same thing. It’s unlikely that a scribe creating an amulet in later centuries had access to an unknwon work *earlier* than the Gospels. If the wording is identical between Gospels, right — there’s no way to know which it was drawn frm. The amulets never give us book references.
When we saw the Book of Kell in Dublin, they told us that the book had been lost and was found in possession of a farmer. He had dumped it in water and used the water to anoint his cattle so they would be fertile. This is an example of the magic principle of contagion. Luckily the book was made from vellum so it wasn’t too badly damaged – if it had been made from paper it would have been mush.
I was in a relationship once with a woman who’d been involved in Wicca for a long time. I found a Bible on her bookshelf, among a number of magical texts, and asked her what that was doing there. Her response was: it’s full of spells!
Dr. Erhman I suggest to the blog members a series of lectures posted by Yale School of Religion on youtube on the old testament historical method. They point out the books in the Old Testament should be understand in light of the historical context at the the time of the writing.
For example, the Kings retained 100’s of phophets who acted like cheerleaders for predicting victory in the coming battles or issued praises glorifying the King. The New Testament writers use these scriptures in a completely different manner and look for every reference to the positive nature of God and applied them to Jesus.
They point out in one lecture that The rewriting of the Genesis creation story (chapter one) by the Priestly writer at a later time carefully shows God’s creation of man in the image of God was very good. The story in Genesis chapter two shows God’s creation of man quite different.
Go to youtube, put John J. Collins, Yale lectures in the search box and all the lectures are available at this time.
There is a scene in the British TV series Cadfael (about a monk in XII century England who solves mysteries) where the monastery has possession of a saint’s relics (and derives considerable income from them), and that possession is disputed. They agree to solve the dispute by having each party blindfolded; he then opens a Bible to a random page and points his finger at a random verse. A monk then reads the verse out loud.
Given the other authentic aspects of the series (it takes place during the civil war between Stephen and Maud), I would think that this scene was also based on historical research.
Then there’s the whole recent “Bible Code” thing in which some people claim to see messages predicting current events in snippets of biblical text read diagonally, vertically, backwards, etc. Nostradamus had nothing on these folks!
Hi Dr Ehrman, I was hoping you can help with some research i’d like to undertake.
Can you recommend, either any of your publications or other references, where I can understand how the availability/access to and number of NT manuscripts were in circulation along a timeline, from 1st century onwards i.e before printing press
Example – how many NT manuscripts were in circulation during the 3, 4, 5 centuries? What degree of availability did the priests and average lay people have access to read and even own a copy of a NT manuscripts before printing press?
Hope my request makes sense 🙂
Thank you kindly
The request makes sense indeed, and its a great issue. Unfortunately, I don’t know of such a thing and can’t imagine how someone could come up with an answer. We just don’t know The closest thing I can think of is a very brief discussion in my book Triumph of Christianity, based on the research of Roman historian Keith Hopkins, on the number of Christian writings that may have been floating around at times in this period. But that wouldn’t tell us how many manuscxripts of the NT there were. Possibly one could make some educated guesses though. (It has to do with population figures and the numbers of churches at various times. It’s in Triumph pp. 173-75.
John 9:6 After saying this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes.
Mark 7:33,34 And taking him aside from the crowd privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and after spitting touched his tongue. And looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, “Ephphatha,” that is, “Be opened.”
Has anyone compared Jesus’ healing rituals described above to magical practices of the day?
Oh yes indeed. You should check out Morton SMith’s book, Jesus the Magician.