Was Jesus A Magician?

Preface

This website presents extracts from Helen Ingram, Dragging Down Heaven: Jesus as Magician and Manipulator of Spirits in the Gospels. If the text/layout is not compatible with your device, the thesis can be downloaded for free from the British Library at: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.446336

A combination of bad weather, a lacklustre congregation and the unrelenting desire of an overenthusiastic clergy to recreate the events of Holy Week in all their magnificent detail, resplendent with rusty iron nails and large wooden cross, had landed me with a speaking part in the trial narrative at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Good Friday, Holy Week, 1998. I usually avoided participation in readings and drama pieces since I didn't possess any religious faith of my own and merely worked for St. Barts as a wedding and funeral organist to earn a little cash-in-hand, besides my usual position at the organ was at a considerable distance to the main altar and the inevitable pause in the proceedings while I descended from the loft to the main body of the church was impracticable and time-consuming. Nevertheless, there were concerns that due to the poor turn-out for the Good Friday service that year, there could potentially be more participants in the reading of the trial narrative than seated in the congregation and so I was enlisted in the minor role of the fictional character Jolbad, a cleaner in the temple. When practicing my part before the service started, a few lines immediately leapt out of the script at me. When testifying to Jesus’ miracle-working powers before Caiaphas, my character Jolbad says:

            ‘He…Jesus, that is…

             He does tricks,

             He does magic tricks;

             He does tricks with fish and bread;

             He does tricks with trees;

             He threatens to move mountains and ruin our landscape.’

Was Jolbad claiming that Jesus was like Harry Potter? Or David Blaine? Or even a witch? 

The events of that Good Friday would remain dormant until an undergraduate lecture given by Prof. Mark Goodacre (who would later become my PhD thesis supervisor) during my final undergraduate years at Birmingham University in 2001. The two-year New Testament studies course consisted of a series of lectures intended to highlight the many roles applied to Jesus in Biblical Studies, each being inserted or removed like a set of optician’s slides to see whether the Gospel content became any clearer; Jesus the teacher, Jesus the prophet, Jesus the healer, Jesus the exorcist and so forth. One of these lectures introduced me to the character of ‘Jesus the magician’ and the work of Prof. Morton Smith, who claimed that Jesus’ conduct within the Gospel material constituted a ‘coherent, consistent and credible picture of a magician’s career.’^[1] The theory that the historical Jesus was actively practicing magic and that this behaviour is reflected in the Gospel materials was a very intriguing proposal and immediately stimulated a personal interest in this field of research.

This curiosity culminated in the submission and acceptance of my PhD thesis Dragging Down Heaven: Jesus as Magician and Manipulator of Spirits in the Gospels at The University of Birmingham in April 2007, extracts of which can be found on this website. The thesis was highly praised by my contemporaries in the field of Biblical Studies but I have resisted publishing it for two main reasons. First, I want it to be widely read outside academia and committing to an academic publisher would prevent this. Second, my research (and I) often fall foul of much vitriol from religious communities who believe that the subject matter is blasphemous, which was never my intent, and my working relationship with these communities may suffer as a result. So I have taken the decision to upload extracts from the thesis in the hope that the reader may find it informative or at the very least entertaining. I have removed a great deal of referencing to make it ‘internet friendly’ and there is so much more to tell...but here are the basics for now....

‘A sound magician is a mighty god’

~ Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I. Scene I. ~

NEXT: INTRODUCTION

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^[1] Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (Berkeley: Ulysses Press, [1978] 1998) p. 180.