Is it magic when you resurrect a dude from the dead? Asking for a friend. OH! I guess that ‘friend’ is Jesus, and we’re trying to gather whether he was, in fact, a magician… [Music] Hello everyone. I’m Dr. Angela Puca, and welcome to my Symposium. I am a PhD and a university lecturer, and this is your online resource for the study of magick, paganism, esotericism, shamanism, and related currents. As you may know, in the New Testament, there are several accounts of Jesus performing extraordinary endeavors, such as healing incurable diseases, performing exorcisms, and even raising people from the dead. In this video, we will investigate whether Jesus was, therefore, a magician. If you are familiar with my channel’s content and the academic approach I offer on this platform, you may have detected one key – core – element that underlies all of our discussions,

and that is complexity. That, along with presenting information drawn from academic scholarship and not based on personal opinions. That said, complexity means that there are hardly ever straight answers because the conceptualization of terms such as magic has many historical/geographical connotations and religious/cultural as well as social interpretations. To help us understand the matter in relation to the depiction of Jesus in the New Testament, let’s get some methodological help from the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault maintained that every historical period holds a set of pre-assumptions – a specific worldview, which he calls episteme – that determines how we understand the concepts we use in our discourses and how we construct meaning. The very relation between words and things – which is not consistent and changes over time – reveals to be essential in understanding what we mean when we talk about something. Because words work to create an inter-subjective ground where subjective

experiences can be conveyed and comprehended by someone who is other than the experiencer. Words, Foucault highlights, do not simply tell things. Words create things because words are how we articulate our experiences. This semiotic construction of meaning is dependent on time and place, of course, but also to a specific community. We have slang, jargon, and vernacular uses of a language that show how malleable words can be and how certain meanings can be only constructed with that connotation by one of such uses of the language. The same occurs when it comes to religious communities, such as Christianity and all of its varied denominations. And in the encounter between Christian ideas and the mainstream culture of a given time. That premised, the understanding of the deeds of Jesus, at the time when the Gospels were written, will be different from the perception of later interpretations because a different time comes with a different worldview.

diverse pre-assumptions and its own use of words to make sense of things. So, when it comes to Jesus, over the ages and across the different communities, the interpretations of his figure, as shown in the New Testament, vary significantly. As Helen Bond highlights, different methodological outlooks can lead to different portraits of Jesus. Some emphasize his healing activity and characterize him as a magician, or as a charismatic healer and exorcist similar to other Jewish figures at the time. Others see Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, stressing more his eschatological message. In other cases, teaching is deemed central and so Jesus becomes a sage or a rabbi, a Pharisee, a wisdom teacher preaching a radical egalitarianism, a subversive sage or a social revolutionary. Lastly yet not exhaustively, some see a high degree of Hellenism within Galilee

and hence detect similarities between Jesus and Cynic philosophers. Interpretations by scholars of the New Testament who connected the stories of the exorcisms performed by Jesus and his healings to “magic” were based on a few terms and phrases that occur in a few late “magical” texts. In the early twentieth century, for instance, the philologist Deissmann called attention to the “binding” in “magic” texts in connection with the healing of the deaf-mute in Mark, and to the importance in “magic” of knowing a daimon’s name which was connected to the question asked by Jesus to the exorcized demon in. In the 1920s, critics like Rudolf Bultmann pointed to certain terms in healing and exorcism stories paralleled in ancient “magical” texts as traces of magic. More recently, commands used by Jesus in his exorcisms and in

addressing demons have been correlated to similar formulas present in the Greek Magical Papyri. In the 1970s and 1980s, Morton Smith presented his interpretation of Jesus as a magician with extensive references to ancient sources, especially the “magical papyri.” Smith built constructed the concept of 'magic' and 'magician' earlier in the century, and then expanded their connotations to include not only healing and exorcisms but even prophecy, divination, and revelation. He then argued that much of what Jesus is presented as doing was familiar from the expanded sources for ancient “magic.” So, as you can see, it could be argued that Jesus was performing magic in the stories of the New Testament, depending on the definition we assign to the term ‘magic’. As I discussed in a previous video, the term magic started to be ‘reified’ and becoming a participatory concept in Christian discourse around the second century CE,

in opposition to the concept of miracle and in relation to a developing Christian theology. At the time of the Gospels, the Israelites don’t have the solid perception of magic as the one set of practices we recognise today. The single acts may have been performed but the collective understanding of a number of practices as belonging to one unitarian conceptual category called magic came much later. And along that, the concept of being a magician. Thus, if we want to answer the question of whether Jesus was a magician with the Foucauldian methodology we set as a premise, we can then conclude that Jesus cannot be seen as a magician because that would mean superimposing a later concept onto a community of people holding a worldview that didn’t encompass the perception or acknowledgement of certain acts as subsets belonging to the wider cluster, which would be now called magic and performed by someone who masters those acts, the magician.

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Was Jesus a Magician? Did he practise Magic?

Was Jesus a Magician? Did he practise Magic?