6. Magic and Miracle
Was Jesus a magician?^1 Were the apostles magicians? How one answers these
questions depends to large extent on how one defines magic. In New Testa-
ment Studies, there has been a traditional rejection of applying the category
of magic to the activities of Jesus and his followers (e.g., Grundmann,
1972, p. 302; Klauck, 2000; Luz, 2007, p. 112). Since Morton Smith’s (1978)
polemical characterization of Jesus as a magician, however, critical scholarship
of the New Testament has taken a variety of positions with respect to the
magical elements of Jesus’portrait in the gospels (e.g., Aune, 1980; Craffert,
2008; Kollmann, 2011, 2013). Instead of asking whether Jesus and the
apostles were“magicians”or performed“magic,”a cognitive perspective will
help us rethink the problem of the“magical”in the New Testament and
early Christian literature in a cross-cultural framework, moving beyond
the problems of social context, ideology, and labeling. Further, a cognitive
approach will lead to a new understanding of the relationship between
“magic”and“miracle,”using these two concepts to study interrelated yet
distinct phenomena.
6.1 MAGIC AS AN ACADEMIC CONCEPTFor over a century, the study of magic has been deeply influenced by the
heritage of the so-called intellectualist school of religious studies, especially
Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917) and James G. Frazer (1854–1941). Although
the views of Tylor (1920 [orig. 1871]) and Frazer (1911 [orig. 1890]) were
different in many respects, both of them associated“magic”with an earlier,
primitive stage of human thought, whereas religion with a later, more
(^1) This chapter is a substantially revised version of I. Czachesz,“A Cognitive Perspective on
Magic in the New Testament,”In I. Czachesz and R. Uro (Eds.),Mind, Morality and Magic:
Cognitive Science Approaches in Biblical Studies(pp. 164–79). Durham: Acumen, 2013. I thank
Routledge for granting me permission to use the paper.