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Loading...In my post yesterday I mentioned something about the importance of our surviving manuscripts for understanding practices of magic in the early Christian tradition. Several people have asked me about it, so I thought I would follow it up.
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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I somehow have the idea that even now, there are people who – perhaps when they’re especially concerned about something – open a Bible at random, expecting the first passage they see to be a guide in solving their problem.
And of course, there’s also an element of superstition in wearing “religious” jewelry. All those ballplayers wearing crosses! (The Mets’ Matt Harvey was very openly wearing one for a while; then it disappeared. Because he’d decided it *wasn’t* bringing him luck?)
Bart, I’d really be interested in reading your take on the ‘Jesus as Magician’ hypothesis.
The most recent Time magazine contained a short article about how the Catholic Church goes about distinguishing magic from miracles in the present day.
I think the Amish appoint leaders by randomly turning to a page in the Bible and looking for a name.
Weren’t the urim and thummin mentioned in the OT considered to have some sort of magical properties?
They had probperties that we would probably call magical, but they are not called magical by the texts themselves.
Thank you, plenty of reading material suggested. 🙂
By the way, with regard to your interest in the apocalypse, I just read an article in Time magazine about a group of Mormons who are convinced that the end is coming on 9/27/15 with the upcoming lunar eclipse.
Bart,
I’ve been checking out some of the mythicist claims that a fictional Nazareth was interpolated into the Gospel of Mark, specifically Mark 1:9. I’m sure a new book about the Nazareth “hoax” from Rene Salm and Frank Zindler will also make that claim.
Zindler writes in his previous book attacking you (“Bart Ehrman and the Quest for the Historical Jesus”) that “It is striking that only in Matthew and Mark do we find the extended expression “Jesus apo [from] Nazareth of the Galilee.” He is referring to Matthew 21:11 and Mark 1:9. Zindler thinks that Matthew 21:11 was used as a source to interpolate the phrase “Jesus apo Nazareth of the Galilee” into Mark. In this scenario, the author of Matthew invented a fictional Nazareth and then someone who had access to the Gospel of Matthew then inserted Matthews’s fictional Nazareth, and the phrase containing it, into Mark.
Doesn’t Mark 1:9 say Nazaret and Matthew 21:11 say Nazareth in our ancient Greek texts? And isn’t apo (from) used differently in the two verses? And don’t the verses also contain some other significant word differences? I would think that if Matthew had been used to interpolate a verse or part of a verse into Mark that there would be more similarities between the two verses in Mark and Matthew. [The verse in Matthew also contains the definite article (the, ho) that Zindler makes a big deal about being missing in Mark 1:9.]
Yeah, good points. I think they’re grasping after straws. There is no archaeological room for doubt about the existence of Nazareth.
Thanks for this post. Would the predictive/assertive aspects of apocalypticist texts have been seen to be similarly different from the “fortune telling” frowned upon in the OT?
Yes, fortune telling is almost always about individuals and what will happen to them in the future. Apocalyptic proclamations are about the world and the whole cosmos, with individuals only as part of taht.
In Acts, Paul rebuked a slave girl for fortune telling. Do you think that account was real or fictional? If it was fictional, what was the point in creating that story?
Fictional. It was to show his power over demons who inspire other religious activities that are not Christian.
Bart,
I find that “apo” is used in Mark in about 48 verses. So the association of Jesus and Galilee with apo (from) should not be so “striking” as Mr. Zindler indicates. After all, there are only a few ways that a writer can convey the idea that Jesus is from, or came or walked from, Galilee. As an example with apo, look at Mark 15:43: “Having come Joseph apo Arimathaea … ” (Strong’s Concordance). This sentence structure is almost identical to that in Mark 1:9, which Zindler claims is a forgery because it contains “Jesus apo Nazareth of Galilee.” One of the strategies of Jesus mythicists is to ignore evidence that contradicts or disconfirms their arguments.
I’m not sure how well Mr. Zindler knows ancient Greek. He never had any formal training in ancient Greek from what I understand and has never published his Greek translations in scholarly publications. He has just published in lay literature and has never been peer reviewed by experts trained in Greek as far as I can tell.