Jesus the Magician

By Morton Smith

Book Overview

"A twentieth-century classic, uncannily smart, incredibly learned."--from the foreword by Bart Ehrman

This book challenges traditional Christian teaching about Jesus. While his followers may have seen him as a man from heaven, preaching the good news and working miracles, Smith asserts that the truth about Jesus is more interesting and rather unsettling.

The real Jesus, only barely glimpsed because of a campaign of disinformation, obfuscation, and censorship by religious authorities, was not Jesus the Son of God. In actuality he was Jesus the Magician. Smith marshals all the available evidence including, but not limited to, the Gospels. He succeeds in describing just what was said of Jesus by "outsiders," those who did not believe him.

He deals in fascinating detail with the inevitable questions. What was the nature of magic? What did people at that time mean by the term "magician"? Who were the other magicians, and how did their magic compare with Jesus' works? What facts led to the general assumption that Jesus practiced magic? And, most important, was that assumption correct?

The ramifications of Jesus the Magician give new meaning to the word controversial. This book recovers a vision of Jesus that two thousand years of suppression and polemic could not erase. And--what may be the central point of the debate--Jesus the Magician strips away the myths and legends that have obscured Jesus, the man who lived.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 157174715X
• ISBN13: 9781571747150
• Release Date: August 2014
• Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing Company
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Provocative, Insightful, and Scholarly

There are almost as many views of the historical Jesus as there are authors of books about the topic. After awhile many of them they tend to blend into one homogeneous view; one that acknowledges that indeed he was a Jew, and a reformer, and a healer, etc. The debate is still out on his Zealot propensities, but apart from that, the field seems so bland. But read this 1978 book by Morton Smith and you will discover a Jesus not dreamt of by Smith's contemporaries, nor by anyone since. Smith goes through the gospels and the ancient texts to demonstrate that underneath everything else, Jesus was primarily a magician. No, not the David Copperfield type, but a true magician whose powers came from his divine spark. Smith's analysis of the ancient evidence is masterful, and his case is very convincing. No matter what your position is on the historical Jesus, you need to read Smith's perspective.

informative book

Whether you agree with him or not, Morton Smith has something to say. In this book you might learn not only about what Jesus contemporaries probably thought of him, but also about the concept of magic and how ancient people understood it. For example, why do magicians sometimes seem to cast a spell by a long and time-consuming procedure while at other times they do it with a single word? Smith answers this question. (Hint: why do computer programmers sometimes write code for hours while at other times they launch a program with one key stroke? Basically the same answer to both quetstions.) My only major criticism of this book is that Smith never answers the question "what, if any, difference is there between religion and magic?" Even though he must have an answer to this, he never makes it clear.

maverick scholarship with flawless methodology

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.