Jesus the Magician: Charlatan or Son of God?

Rating:
Summary: Questing for the Historical Jesus
Review: Almost twenty years ago, during a personal quest to find the historical Jesus, I read this book. It portrayed a much different Jesus from the one I learned about in Sunday School. After having read this and a number of other literary quests for the historical Jesus (Including Albert Schweitzer's original "Quest for the Historical Jesus"), I have come to the conclusion that whosoever questeth after the historical Jesus findeth the Jesus he is looking for. Smith set out to find a magician, and lo and behold, that's what he found. In "The Passover Plot", Hugh Schonfield set out to find a pious fraud, and, wonder of wonders, that's exactly what he found. There are a myriad of scholarly quests for the historical Jesus, and each one finds the Jesus that the scholar goes looking for. Each one, however, can add texture to the student's own personal understanding of Jesus. "Jesus the Magician" is well written, well researched, and well argued. It doesn't carry the day in persuading the reader that Jesus was nothing more than a magician, but it does help the reader to understand how and why Jesus did some of the things he did.

Rating:
Summary: With enemies like this...who needs allies!
Review: As Schweizer observed around 90 years ago, reconstructions of the historical Jesus by liberal theologians tend to be self-portraits. Not so Morton Smith! True, he had an axe to grind. True, he let his speculations outrun his evidence. True, he was one-sided. But his portrait is not merely a face at the bottom of the well.

He sought to reconstruct the image of Jesus according to early pagan and jewish opponents and the image they give is consistently that of a magician. *None* disputed the accounts of miracles. (Let all contemporary advocates of "Jesus the Great Humanistic Teacher of Ethics" take note.)

Morton Smith was an *advocatus diabolis" in the best sense of the word. It is petty for some to criticize his approach, when he almost alone sought to take seriously the miraculous aspects of the Gospels without merely taking them at face value. True he moves from merely presenting the pagan/jewish case for "Jesus as magician" to asserting it as the *true* picture. And he undercuts his own argument against the distinction between magic and religion as false by then basically arguing that "Jesus was *really* a magician" (and by implication not really a religious figure).

Aside from his suggestions of homosexuality (*one* accusation, never leveled by pagan and jewish critics) there is much ammunition for conservatives to use against the "Jesus Seminar" types. From suggestions that Paul *might* have known the historical Jesus to the seriousness Smith gives to the narrative Gospels (including John!) Smith is no mere "demythologizer."

Rating:
Summary: Was Jesus a Magician? What was a magician?
Review: Did you ever wonder what people believed about Jesus when he was alive? This book is not for the timid. It presents Jesus the man, a case for his being a magician (and what that means), and what it meant to be called "a son of God". A great read for students seeking to better understand the man who is called the Christ. The book is completely non-denominational and requires a dictionary at hand. It reads like a well documented college paper with the author stating theories then proving or disproving them with the historical documentation available. Do you want to know more about the "real" Jesus, Jesus the man? Feeling brave? Then go for it!

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and provocative
Review: For centuries The Secret Gospel of Mark has been a pink elephant in studies of reconstructing the gospel. Without the plethora of strong denials of this document's existence, there would be no reason to suppose it exists, but with these denials one could be led to a "the lady doth protest too much" conclusion. In the 1960's Morton Smith discovered a letter from Saint Clement of Alexandria to one of his followers, regarding the Secret Gospel of Mark. In this letter he corrects certain comments the follower had heard but instructs him not to reveal the existence of this document. What's interesting about these few passages we have from the longer version of Mark is that all of them revolve around quasi-magical practices. In other words was Mark part of a longer work, and the magical material censored out? Since Morton Smith was unlikely to trip over gold again and find more of this lost book, he begins investigating the nature of magical practice in 1st century Palestine using texts like the magical papyri. What did people mean by magic? From this study we are able to understand much more clearly what verses like, Matt 9:34, "It is by the prince of demons that he drives out demons ", meant to the speaker which as it turns out is quite different than what they mean to a modern audience. A very good book, I wouldn't recommend it as a first "true life of Jesus" but it makes an excellent contrast to the Crossen, E.P. Sanders school which tries to place Jesus in a fully Jewish context by ignoring everything that doesn't fit.

Rating:
Summary: Exposing the Myth
Review: Jesus the Magician is a thoroughly documented and fascinating account of the multiple parallels of ancient Pagan Magic practices and how these practices are woven into the "Gospels", or "gods spells" and the "magical spells of Jesus the Magician". Morton Smith's care to show "what makes a magician", to then showing how Jesus was a magician is well done and logically presented. Only the lack of information available to the author from a larger historical base prevents this story from really jumping out at the reader.

Such is hardly the fault of the author.

For those who seek to understand the personality cult that has become known as "Christianity", Morton Smith's exhaustive research is a great primer as Mr. Smith fully exposes the source documents of the "mythos" behind this ancient Jewish fabricated personality cult whose roots lie in Pagan philosophies.

Jesus the Magician provides a great deal of cross reference material for the serious scholar as well as the weekend historian who wishes to have a greater understanding of the enigma which came to be known as Jesus.

Rating:
Summary: Exposing the Myth
Review: Jesus the Magician is a thoroughly documented and fascinating account of the multiple parallels of ancient Pagan Magic practices and how these practices are woven into the "Gospels", or "gods spells" and the "magical spells of Jesus the Magician". Morton Smith's care to show "what makes a magician", to then showing how Jesus was a magician is well done and logically presented. Only the lack of information available to the author from a larger historical base prevents this story from really jumping out at the reader.

Such is hardly the fault of the author.

For those who seek to understand the personality cult that has become known as "Christianity", Morton Smith's exhaustive research is a great primer as Mr. Smith fully exposes the source documents of the "mythos" behind this ancient Jewish fabricated personality cult whose roots lie in Pagan philosophies.

Jesus the Magician provides a great deal of cross reference material for the serious scholar as well as the weekend historian who wishes to have a greater understanding of the enigma which came to be known as Jesus.

Rating:
Summary: maverick scholarship with flawless methodology
Review: Morton Smith, the author of this book, died while I was pursuing coursework in earliest Christianity at Brown University, so I saw firsthand the effect of his passing on (a set of) his peers, most of whom, it turns out, are believers. Although Smith's views are frightening and sometimes even repugnant to the faithful, his work commands a real (and not always grudging) respect among Christian scholars. Smith's method is heavily comparative, analyzing the four Gospel accounts of the life of Jesus in terms of choice of language and expositional technique, and comparing them to contemporaneous rabbinical and Hellenic writing. Granting a very few premises - such as, that Jesus and his followers did not conceive of themselves as representative of a wholly new historical paradigm, but rather as a part of their own cultural context, a premise quite consistent with the decisions they made in describing themselves and Jesus - the resulting historical account is virtually unassailable, and powerfully compelling. The most controversial aspect of Smith's results is the theory that Jesus thought of himself as a "magician", in the sense that that word was used 2000 years ago in the Levant, in addition to - but very much overlapping with - his roles as a religious teacher and political revolutionary. In conclusion, I can say with confidence that this is one of those books of history which come along only once in a very great while - Guns, Germs, and Steel; Plagues and Peoples; Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs - which leave the reader unshakeably certain that this is how it *must* have been.

Rating:
Summary: Well meant, but poorly done
Review: Professor Smith wisely realizes that if you want to have an accurate historical picture of a man such as Jesus you must consider all sides, not just what his faithfull followers wrote. Unfortunately Smith's "evidence" rarely holds up under scrutiny. For example, he tells the reader that John said that Jesus had been charged with practicing magic. The line citation given is, John 18:30, which reads, "'If he were not a criminal' they replied, 'we would not have handed him over to you.'" Apparently Professor Smith assumes that the crime was magic, but that no one was willing to say it out loud. Such an assumption is fine for a private theory, but to publish it as fact is not. I assure you that this is just one small example out of countless many. This book is very important in that it encourages us to keep an open mind about who or what the man named Jesus of Nazareth was. However to blindly accept its statements as fact would be very dangerous.

PS. I think it is important for anyone reading this to know that I am not on a religious crusade to stop this book. I myself am an atheist, and I read this book thinking how interesting it would be if it could be proved that Jesus was a Magician. This book utterly failed to convince me of any such thing.

Rating:
Summary: Objectivity and New Discoveries. Be Cautious
Review: Rudolf Bultmann, the greatest theologian of the 20th century, and critical Ancient Historians, recognized the problems, and told us long ago the Divine Hero, Jesus (See Lord Ragland's Hero Pattern) will be forever lost in personal conjecture. My friend, Morton Smith (I was the only magician who cared enough to correspond with him) may have stepped outside the goal of a critical historian, objectivity. New discoveries have a way of doing that to a person. Even you and I! We demand a solution to reduce the anxiety of dissonance. The ancient past is remote and ill-documented, not only have many things been lost, we are forced to be selective to only those documents that have survived. Ancient writers copy each other. (It still happens today). Rarely, if at all, do they investigate. It only takes a minute for a story to grow... and they do!
Christian art from the late 3rd and early 4th century portrays Jesus with a magic wand. The wand ONLY appears when Jesus is working wonders such as multiplying loaves, changing water to wine, or raising the dead. It does NOT appear when Jesus heals (he does this in the art by laying on of hands).In pictures at this time Jesus is a bare faced youth and bearded with a robe. There seems to be no Christian art before the late 3rd or 4th century. All this art has never been hidden or kept in secret.(Remember this art is hundreds of years after Jesus' time).This information is not clarified in "Jesus the Magician". In the "Catholic Encyclopedia" : Portaits of the Apostles, can be found more about magic wands. Again no secret; the entry is from 1911. There is a good article " The Two Faces of Jesus" by Robin M. Jensen in Bible Review Oct 2002 p.42. Also see her wonderful book "Understanding Early Christian Art" New York and London 2000.

Charlie Turek, Magician, Order of Merlin and proud member of the Association of Ancient Historians.(I am only an amateur).

Rating:
Summary: Interesting study of magic, but methodologically unsound.
Review: While the existence of magical practices in earliest Christianity is without doubt, and the relationships between such ancient historical figures as Apollonius of Tyana, Simon Magus, John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ could prove a subject for fruitful research, the methods used in this book are horrendously bad. It would be the equivalent of a man who had a maniacal hatred for Platonists setting out to discover the "historical Plato". One can only imagine it. First, he'd proclaim that anything the Platonists had to say about Plato cannot be of value because Plato was able to get his men into high places and therefore it's all Platonist propaganda. Then, he'd turn to Plato's enemies and detractors and see what they had to say. He'd comb the literature for anything - e.g. everything from criticisms of his beard, to calling him stupid, to calling him insane (and believe me, some of the criticisms of Jesus and his followers are just about this petty; they occur so often that there isn't much point in pointing them out in such a short review space). Then, he'd claim that this collection of faults constitutes the historical Plato and not the Plato of faith. And, he'd say that the only reason the Plato of faith exists at all is because the Platonists were able to exercise military control over everyone else (i.e. "take over the Roman empire"). In this way, he'd argue that Plato was a charlatan, and that nothing his own followers say about him could possibly be true or even important.

I have to give this book two stars though rather than one, because it does contain a lot of information about magical practices especially in the ancient Near East.