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Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Page 13

by Reza Aslan


  That said, there was a distinct difference between magic and miracle in the ancient mind, not in their methods or outcome—both were considered ways of disrupting the natural order of the universe—but in the way in which each was perceived. In the Graeco-Roman world, magicians were ubiquitous, but magic was considered a form of charlatanry. There were a handful of Roman laws against “magic-working,” and magicians themselves could be expelled or even executed if they were found to practice what was sometimes referred to as “dark magic.” In Judaism, too, magicians were fairly prevalent, despite the prohibition against magic in the Law of Moses, where it is punishable by death. “No one shall be found among you,” the Bible warns, “who engages in divination, or is a witch, an enchanter, or a sorcerer, or one who casts spells, or who consults spirits, one who is a wizard or a necromancer” (Deuteronomy 18:10–11).

  The discrepancy between law and practice when it came to the magical arts can best be explained by the variable ways in which “magic” was defined. The word itself had extreme negative connotations, but only when applied to the practices of other peoples and religions. “Although the nations you are about to dispossess give heed to soothsayers and diviners,” God tells the Israelites, “as for you, the Lord your God does not permit you to do so” (Deuteronomy 18:14). And yet God regularly has his servants engage in magical acts in order to prove his might. So, for example, God commands Moses and Aaron to “perform a wonder” in front of Pharaoh by transforming a staff into a snake. But when Pharaoh’s “wise men” do the same trick, they are dismissed as “magicians” (Exodus 7:1–13, 9:8–12). In other words, a representative of God—such as Moses, Elijah, or Elisha—performs miracles, whereas a “false prophet”—such as Pharaoh’s wise men or the priests of Baal—performs magic.

  This explains why the early Christians went to such lengths to argue that Jesus was not a magician. Throughout the second and third centuries, the church’s Jewish and Roman detractors wrote numerous tracts accusing Jesus of having used magic to captivate people and trick them into following him. “But though they saw such works, they asserted it was magical art,” the second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr wrote of his critics. “For they dared to call [Jesus] a magician, and a deceiver of the people.”

  Note that these enemies of the church did not deny that Jesus performed wondrous deeds. They merely labeled those deeds “magic.” Regardless, church leaders, such as the famed third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria, responded furiously to such accusations, decrying the “slanderous and childish charge [that] Jesus was a magician,” or that he performed his miracles by means of magical devices. As the early church father Irenaeus, bishop of Lugdunum, argued, it was precisely the lack of such magical devices that distinguished Jesus’s miraculous actions from those of the common magician. Jesus, in the words of Irenaeus, performed his deeds “without any power of incantations, without the juice of herbs and of grasses, without any anxious watching of sacrifices, of libations, or of seasons.”

  Despite Irenaeus’s protestations, however, Jesus’s miraculous actions in the gospels, especially in the earliest gospel, Mark, do bear a striking resemblance to the actions of similar magicians and wonder workers of the time, which is why more than a few contemporary biblical scholars have openly labeled Jesus a magician. No doubt Jesus uses a magician’s techniques—incantations, rehearsed formulae, spitting, repeated supplications—in some of his miracles. Once, in the region of the Decapolis, a group of villagers brought a deaf-mute man to Jesus and begged him for help. Jesus took the man aside, away from the crowd. Then, in a bizarre set of ritualized actions that could have come directly from an ancient magician’s manual, Jesus placed his fingers in the deaf man’s ears, spat, touched his tongue, and, looking up to the heavens, chanted the word ephphatha, which means “be opened” in Aramaic. Immediately the man’s ears were opened and his tongue released (Mark 7:31–35).

  In Bethsaida, Jesus performed a similar action on a blind man. He led the man away from the crowds, spat directly into his eyes, placed his hands on him, and asked, “Do you see anything?”

  “I can see people,” the man said. “But they look like walking trees.”

  Jesus repeated the ritual formula once more. This time the miracle took; the man regained his sight (Mark 8:22–26).

  The gospel of Mark narrates an even more curious story about a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had seen numerous doctors and spent all the money she possessed, but had found no relief from her condition. Having heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in a crowd, reached out, and touched his cloak. At once, her hemorrhaging ceased and she felt in her body that she had been healed.

  What is remarkable about this story is that, according to Mark, Jesus “felt power drained from him.” He stopped in his tracks and shouted, “Who touched my cloak?” The woman fell down before him and confessed the truth. “Daughter,” Jesus replied. “Your faith has healed you” (Mark 5:24–34).

  Mark’s narrative seems to suggest that Jesus was a passive conduit through which healing power coursed like an electrical current. That is in keeping with the way in which magical processes are described in the texts of the time. It is certainly noteworthy that Matthew’s retelling of the hemorrhaging-woman story twenty years later omits the magical quality of Mark’s version. In Matthew, Jesus turns around when the woman touches him, acknowledges and addresses her, and only then does he actively heal her illness (Matthew 9:20–22).

  Despite the magical elements that can be traced in some of his miracles, the fact is that nowhere in the gospels does anyone actually charge Jesus with performing magic. It would have been an easy accusation for his enemies to make, one that would have carried an immediate death sentence. Yet when Jesus stood before the Roman and Jewish authorities to answer the charges against him, he was accused of many misdeeds—sedition, blasphemy, rejecting the Law of Moses, refusing to pay the tribute, threatening the Temple—but being a magician was not one of them.

  It is also worth noting that Jesus never exacted a fee for his services. Magicians, healers, miracle workers, exorcists—these were skilled and fairly well-paid professions in first-century Palestine. Eleazar the Exorcist was once asked to perform his feats for no less a personage than Emperor Vespasian. In the book of Acts, a professional magician popularly known as Simon Magus offers the apostles money to be trained in the art of manipulating the Holy Spirit to heal the sick. “Give me this power also,” Simon asks Peter and John, “so that anyone I lay my hands upon may receive the Holy Spirit.”

  “May your money perish with you,” Peter replies, “for you thought you could purchase with money what God gives as a free gift” (Acts 8:9–24).

  Peter’s answer may seem extreme. But he is merely following the command of his messiah, who told his disciples to “heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, and cast out the demons. You received [these gifts] without payment. Give them out without payment” (Matthew 10:8 | Luke 9:1–2)

  In the end, it may be futile to argue about whether Jesus was a magician or a miracle worker. Magic and miracle are perhaps best thought of as two sides of the same coin in ancient Palestine. The church fathers were right about one thing, however. There is clearly something unique and distinctive about Jesus’s miraculous actions in the gospels. It is not simply that Jesus’s work is free of charge, or that his healings do not always employ a magician’s methods. It is that Jesus’s miracles are not intended as an end in themselves. Rather, his actions serve a pedagogical purpose. They are a means of conveying a very specific message to the Jews.

  A clue to what that message might be surfaces in an intriguing passage in Q. As recounted in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, John the Baptist is languishing in a prison cell atop the fortress of Machaerus, awaiting his execution, when he hears of the wondrous deeds being performed in Galilee by one of his former disciples. Curious about the reports, John sends a messenger to ask Jesus whether he is “the one wh
o is to come.”

  “Go tell John what you hear and see,” Jesus tells the messenger. “The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor are brought good news” (Matthew 11:1–6 | Luke 7:18–23).

  Jesus’s words are a deliberate reference to the prophet Isaiah, who long ago foretold a day when Israel would be redeemed and Jerusalem renewed, a day when God’s kingdom would be established on earth. “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped, the lame shall leap like deer, and the tongue of the mute shall sing for joy,” Isaiah promised. “The dead shall live, and the corpses shall rise” (Isaiah 35:5–6, 26:19).

  By connecting his miracles with Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesus is stating in no uncertain terms that the year of the Lord’s favor, the day of God’s vengeance, which the prophets predicted, has finally arrived. God’s reign has begun. “If by the finger of God I cast out demons, then surely the Kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12:28 | Luke 11:20). Jesus’s miracles are thus the manifestation of God’s kingdom on earth. It is the finger of God that heals the blind, the deaf, the mute—the finger of God that exorcises the demons. Jesus’s task is simply to wield that finger as God’s agent on earth.

  Except that God already had agents on earth. They were the ones clothed in fine white robes milling about the Temple, hovering over the mountains of incense and the ceaseless sacrifices. The chief function of the priestly nobility was not only to preside over the Temple rituals, but to control access to the Jewish cult. The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and to what degree. The sick, the lame, the leper, the “demon-possessed,” menstruating women, those with bodily discharges, those who had recently given birth—none of these were permitted to enter the Temple and take part in the Jewish cult unless first purified according to the priestly code. With every leper cleansed, every paralytic healed, every demon cast out, Jesus was not only challenging that priestly code, he was invalidating the very purpose of the priesthood.

  Thus, in the gospel of Matthew, when a leper comes to him begging to be healed, Jesus reaches out and touches him, healing his affliction. But he does not stop there. “Go show yourself to the priest,” he tells the man. “Offer him as a testimony the things that the Law of Moses commanded for your cleansing.”

  Jesus is joking. His command to the leper is a jest—a calculated swipe at the priestly code. The leper is not just ill, after all. He is impure. He is ceremonially unclean and unworthy of entering the Temple of God. His illness contaminates the entire community. According to the Law of Moses to which Jesus refers, the only way for a leper to be cleansed is to complete the most laborious and costly ritual, one that could be conducted solely by a priest. First the leper must bring the priest two clean birds, along with some cedarwood, crimson yarn, and hyssop. One of the birds must be sacrificed immediately and the living bird, the cedarwood, the yarn, and the hyssop dipped in its blood. The blood must then be sprinkled upon the leper and the living bird released. Seven days later, the leper must shave off all his hair and bathe himself in water. On the eighth day, the leper must take two male lambs, free of blemish, and one ewe lamb, also without blemish, as well as a grain offering of choice flour mixed with oil, back to the priest, who will make of them a burnt offering to the Lord. The priest must smear the blood from the offering on the leper’s right earlobe, on his right thumb, and on the big toe of his right foot. He must then sprinkle the leper with the oil seven times. Only after all of this is complete shall the leper be considered free of the sin and guilt that led to his leprosy in the first place; only then shall he be allowed to rejoin the community of God (Leviticus 14).

  Obviously, Jesus is not telling the leper he has just healed to buy two birds, two lambs, a ewe, a strip of cedarwood, a spool of crimson yarn, a sprig of hyssop, a bushel of flour, and a jar of oil and to give them all to the priest as an offering to God. He is telling him to present himself to the priest, having already been cleansed. This is a direct challenge not only to the priest’s authority, but to the Temple itself. Jesus did not only heal the leper, he purified him, making him eligible to appear at the Temple as a true Israelite. And he did so for free, as a gift from God—without tithe, without sacrifice—thus seizing for himself the powers granted solely to the priesthood to deem a man worthy of entering the presence of God.

  Such a blatant attack on the legitimacy of the Temple could be scorned and discounted so long as Jesus remains ensconced in the backwoods of Galilee. But once he and his disciples leave their base in Capernaum and begin slowly making their way to Jerusalem, healing the sick and casting out demons along the way, Jesus’s collision with the priestly authorities, and the Roman Empire that supports them, becomes inevitable. Soon, the authorities in Jerusalem will no longer be able to ignore this itinerant exorcist and miracle worker. The closer he draws to the Holy City, the more urgent the need to silence him will become. For it is not just Jesus’s miraculous actions that they fear; it is the simple yet incredibly dangerous message conveyed through them: the Kingdom of God is at hand.

  Chapter Ten

  May Your Kingdom Come

  “To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God?” Jesus asked. It is like a mighty king who, having prepared a grand wedding banquet for his son, sends forth his servants to the four corners of the kingdom to invite his honored guests to the joyous occasion.

  “Tell my guests I have readied the banquet,” the king instructs his servants. “The oxen and cattle have been fattened and butchered. Everything is prepared. Come to the wedding festivities.”

  The servants go out to spread the king’s tidings. Yet one by one the honored guests decline the invitation. “I have recently purchased a piece of land,” one says. “I must tend to it. Please accept my regrets.”

  “I have bought five yoke of oxen and I must test them out,” says another. “Please accept my regrets.”

  “I myself just got married,” says a third. “I cannot come.”

  When the servants return, they inform the king that none of his guests have accepted the invitation, that some of those invited not only refused to attend the celebration, they seized the king’s servants, mistreated them, even killed them.

  In a rage the king orders the servants to search the streets and back alleys of the kingdom, to gather everyone they can find—young and old, poor and weak, the lame, the crippled, the blind, the outcast—and to bring them all to the banquet.

  The servants do so, and the feast commences. But in the midst of the celebrations the king notices a guest who was not invited; he is not wearing the wedding clothes.

  “How did you get in here?” the king asks the stranger.

  The man has no answer.

  “Tie him hand and foot!” the king commands. “Throw him out into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many will be invited, but few are chosen.”

  As for those guests who refused to come to the wedding, the ones who seized and killed his servants—the king unleashes his army to drive them out of their homes, to slaughter them like sheep, and burn their cities to the ground.

  “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Matthew 22:1–4 | Luke 14:16–24).

  Of this there can be no doubt: the central theme and unifying message of Jesus’s brief three-year ministry was the promise of the Kingdom of God. Practically everything Jesus said or did in the gospels served the function of publicly proclaiming the Kingdom’s coming. It was the very first thing he preached about after separating from John the Baptist: “Repent, the Kingdom of God is near” (Mark 1:15). It was the core of the Lord’s prayer, which John taught to Jesus and Jesus in turn taught to his disciples: “Our Father, who is in heaven, holy is your name. May your Kingdom come …” (Matthew 6:9–13 | Luke 11:1–2). It was what Jesus’s followers were told to strive
for above all else—“Seek first the Kingdom of God, and God’s justice, then all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33 | Luke 12:31)—for only by forsaking everything and everyone for the Kingdom of God would they have any hope of entering it (Matthew 10:37–39 | Luke 14:25–27).

  Jesus spoke so often, and so abstractly, about the Kingdom of God that it is difficult to know whether he himself had a unified conception of it. The phrase, along with its Matthaean equivalent “Kingdom of Heaven,” hardly appears in the New Testament outside of the gospels. Although numerous passages in the Hebrew Scriptures describe God as king and sole sovereign, the exact phrase “Kingdom of God” appears only in the apocryphal text The Wisdom of Solomon (10:10), in which God’s kingdom is envisioned as physically situated in heaven, the place where God’s throne sits, where the angelic court sees to his every demand, and where his will is done always and without fail.

  Yet the Kingdom of God in Jesus’s teachings is not a celestial kingdom existing on a cosmic plane. Those who claim otherwise often point to a single unreliable passage in the gospel of John in which Jesus allegedly tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Not only is this the sole passage in the gospels where Jesus makes such a claim, it is an imprecise translation of the original Greek. The phrase ouk estin ek tou kosmou is perhaps better translated as “not part of this order/system [of government].” Even if one accepts the historicity of the passage (and very few scholars do), Jesus was not claiming that the Kingdom of God is unearthly; he was saying it is unlike any kingdom or government on earth.

 

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