PhilosopherJay

Hi Horatio,

Yes, we are probably getting a mix of source materials from several different sources. This source is just a magician versus the Jewish leadership story.

As a working hypothesis we could imagine a hero named Simon, a Samaritan magician who battles and outwits the hard-hearted Jewish leaders of Jerusalem. There are enough direct and oblique references to Simon and magic in the NT and apocrypha to suggest that this is where the material is originating.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

PhilosopherJay

Hi sotto voce,

Ancient Jews had a complex relationship to magic.

Here's a review of Gideon Bohak work "Ancient Jewish Magic"

Note this:

It is perhaps wrong to think that ancient judaism was split between those who believed in magic and those who didn't. Rather, there was a split between those who wanted magic restricted and supervised by the right authorities and those who wanted the masses to practice magic on their own. Jesus is a hero of the Jews of the second type and the villains are Jews of the first type. Ultimately the conflict boils down to a jurisdiction (or juris diction) problem. Should just anyone be allowed to practice magic without a license? That is what the gospels are all about, deregulation of the magic industry and overthrow of the magic monopoly.

Superman has his Lex Luthor. Batman has his Joker. Spiderman has his Dr. Octopus and Green Goblin. Jesus has his scribes, pharisees and Jewish leaders.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

sotto voce

Ancient Jews?

Israelites had a relationship to magic, ok. Definitely contra.

But we have here misuse of the word 'magic' (no doubt encouraged by utterly worthless modern media monsters), when the word 'supernatural' should have been used.

'The conflict is between a magician and Jews who don't like magicians' is therefore gibberish. The Jews looked back to the supernatural events that had brought them out of Egypt, and sustained their presence in the Promised Land, including the raising of the dead! Jesus healing a paralysed man was not magic. It was sign of divine action.

So another, credible hypothesis needs to be found.

outhouse

what a load of horse pucky.

outhouse

you may want to give this hobby up, if your this far lost.


jesus never had a single scribe, [facepalm]



there were 4 large groups of jews

Zealots
Essenes
Pharisees
ASaducees


they all had different thoughts and beliefs in judaism


jesus belonged more to the zealots then any one group, and was disinfranchised with the roman corruption within judaism.

woe's of the pharisees show how he did like their greed and corruption
the saducees were the worst, and hated by most everyone, not just jesus
while the essenes were close he still did not follow their methods.


he grew up in a area heavily influenced by zealots, and it reads that way in the roman version of scripture were left with.


he took to JtB for his teachings, cleansing of the spirit was their magic, that and having a master heal people of evil sprits for food scraps.

jesus never had jewish leaders of any kind, he was a poverty stricken traveling healer/teacher, traveling in remote small villages preaching the end was near

PhilosopherJay

Hi sotto voce,

The distinction between natural and supernatural is a modern distinction. Jews felt that magical/supernatural acts could be caused instantaneously either by divine or human action.

Note how none of the forty or fifty miracles that Jesus is said to have performed undergoes any questioning or testing. There are no tests performed by the Pharisees, the priest, the scribes or the Romans. They all just accept every miracle without seeking any natural cause. Even with the rising from the tomb, in Matthew's gospel, Jews are just accused of hiring people to lie about it. There are no attempts to question witnesses or find out what really happened. This is the mark of a primitive society totally in the grip of superstitious and magical thinking.

My hypothesis is that the main dispute in the gospels is over practicing magic without a license. It is quite sustainable.

We already looked at Jesus' first two magician tricks in the gospel of Mark, the curing of the paralytic and the man with the withered hand. The next one is the calming of rough waters.
The Sea of Galilee is actually a small Lake. It is 21 km (13 mi) long, and 13 km (8.1 mi) wide a maximum depth of approximately 43 m (141 feet)
Let us say that the gale of wind was 100km (62 mi) per hour and the ship was in the middle of the lake about 10km (6.2 mi) from shore. With such a wind, It would have taken the ship about 6 minutes to reach the furthest shore. If the 100km/62m per hour wind had been blowing for 5 minutes, the sailors would have realized that they were approaching shore and would not have felt themselves in danger and would not have awakened Jesus. Conversely if the wind had only been blowing for a minute or two, they would have expected it to stop on its own and not awakened Jesus. This means that some time between 2 minutes (120 seconds) after the wind started and 5 minutes (300 seconds), the sailors woke Jesus and he made his pronouncement. The sailors must have experienced gail winds rising to 100km (60 mi) per hour for 2 to 5 minutes many times in the past. If the sailors were rational, they would have attributed Jesus' pronouncement of "Hush, be quiet" to a man annoyed at being awakened from a sound sleep and not understanding his situation. The calming of the sea was a natural phenomena unrelated to Jesus' pronouncement. This would be the logical conclusion for the sailors who must have seen short burst of wind lasting 2 to 5 minutes hundreds of times in their lives.. The conclusion that Jesus could control the wind and sea based on this tiny bit of evidence is an absurd conclusion. If the men did not believe in magic before the event, they would have recognized instantly that Jesus' pronouncement was unrelated to the wind and sea. They would have asked for more evidence as part of an experiment to see if he could actually control the wind and sea through magic. It was only because they were predisposed towards a belief in magic that they believed it so readily. Their fear of Jesus ("They became very much afraid") was just their fear of magicians generally.

The fact that this is a fictional story does not matter. The author wanted it to be believed, so for him a group of sailors accepting magic on the basis of a coincidental pronunciation was normal for the 95% illiterate and uneducated people of that time.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

sotto voce

Really. Wow.

outhouse

come on back to reality jay



this being a literary creation, never happened.


biblical jesus was never historical jesus and you seem to fail at drawing a line between the two.



so all the unknown roman scribes who wrote mythology about someone they never knew, or met, or heard, nor lived in the same geographic location, decades after his death!

somehow can describe accurate details of a person from another culture, FACEPALM



like now there were those that believed the BS and those that didnt, your work is incomplete descibing a general assumption of a whole culture, that had subcultures all different.

Horatio Parker

You would consider sacrificing in the temple an act of magic?

PhilosopherJay

Hi Outhouse,

Even in fictional writing we get good and interesting information about people and their outlooks in a time and culture. For example, Jane Austin tells us that people felt an obligation to arrange good marriages for their daughters and one of the purposes for "Balls" in the English culture of the early 1800's was to introduce young women of marriageable age to young men who might make suitable husbands. Although nobody named Elizabeth Bennet may have actually met anybody named Fitswilliam Darcy at any of these balls, the attitudes of the characters in "Pride and Prejudice" do reflect the attitudes of the people of that time.

In the same way, we understand from watching Alfred Hitchcock's "Secret Agent" (1936) that in the 1930's, being a secret agent was considered a dirty, nasty and immoral job. It was only with the James Bond movies in the 1960's that it became a sexy and cool occupation. Neither "Secret Agent" or James Bond movies are histories of real people, but they do reveal attitudes of their time period.

The nearly universal acceptance of magic in Jewish culture in ancient time gets reflected in the attitudes of the characters in the Jesus tales of the time. There are no skeptics towards magic because there were few, if any skeptics towards magic in the Jewish culture/s of that time.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin