Jesus Christ

“Many scholars have noted (to their dismay or glee, depending on which side they were taking) that Jesus’ miracles were in fact entirely typical of the tradition of performance magic that flourished around the Mediterranean at that time. Lucian, a Roman born in Syria, writing in the second century A.D., catalogued the range of phenomena that the ‘charlatans’ and ‘tricksters’ could lay on. They included walking on water, materialisation and dematerialisation, clairvoyance, expulsion of demons, and prophecy. And he went on to explain how many of these feats were achieved by normal means. Hippolytus, too, exposed several pseudo miracle workers who had powers uncannily similar to those of Jesus, including a certain Marcus who had mastered the art of turning the water in a cup red by mixing from another cup while the onlookers’ attention was distracted.

“So close were the similarities between Jesus’ works and those of common, lower-class magicians, that several Jewish and pagan commentators at the time simply took it for granted that there was little except style and zeal to distinguish Jesus from the others. In their view, while Jesus might have been an especially classy conjuror, he was certainly not in an altogether separate class.

“Celsus claimed that Jesus had picked up the art during his youth in Egypt, where the Samarian magicians were the acknowledged masters. Having listed the tricks of the Samarians, such as expelling diseases, calling up spirits of the dead, producing banquets out of thin air, and making inanimate objects come to life, Celsus (according to the Christian writer Origen) went on to say: ‘Then, since these fellows do these things, will you ask us to think them sons of God? Should it not rather be said that these are the doings of scoundrels?’

“Christian apologists were, early on, only too well aware of how their Messiah’s demonstrations must have looked to outsiders. They tried to play down the alarming parallels. There is even some reason to think that the Gospels themselves were subjected to editing and censure so as to exclude some of Jesus’ more obvious feats of conjuration and to delete references to the possible Egyptian connection...

“The somewhat lame solution, adopted by Origen and others, was to admit that the miracles would indeed have been fraudulent if done by anybody else, simply to make money, but not when done by Jesus to inspire religious awe.”

--Nicholas Humphrey, Leaps of Faith, 1996, as quoted in Doing Philosophy: An Introduction through Thought Experiments, Second Edition, 2003