‘The magician Merlin had a strange laugh,
and it
was heard when nobody else was laughing...
He
laughed because he knew what was coming next.’
~ Robertson Davies, World of Wonders ~
A
combination of bad weather, a lacklustre congregation and the unrelenting
desire of an overenthusiastic clergy to recreate the events of Holy Week in all
their magnificent detail, resplendent with rusty iron nails and large wooden
cross, had landed me with a speaking part in the trial narrative at St.
Bartholomew’s Church on Good Friday, Holy Week, 1998. I had avoided
participation in the Easter readings and drama pieces of previous years since
my usual position at the organ was at a considerable distance to the main altar
and the inevitable pause in the proceedings while I descended from the loft to
join the cast was considered to be impracticable and time-consuming.
Nevertheless, there were concerns that due to the poor turn-out for the Good
Friday service that year, there could potentially be more participants in the
reading of the trial narrative than seated in the congregation and so I was
enlisted in the minor role of the fictional character Jolbad, a cleaner in the
temple. When practicing my part before the service started, a few lines
immediately leapt out of the script at me. When testifying to Jesus’
miracle-working powers before Caiaphas, my character Jolbad says:
‘He…Jesus, that is…
He does
tricks,
He does
magic tricks;
He does
tricks with fish and bread;
He does
tricks with trees;
He
threatens to move mountains and ruin our landscape.’
Magic. I
expect that my comprehension of the word at the time was fairly typical; a
composite jumble of images consisting of Mickey Mouse with a pointy wizard’s
hat in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, a vague recollection of the witch trials
from history lessons at school, late night episodes of David Blaine performing
card tricks on the TV, the extensive popularity of the current Harry Potter
craze and recollections of a guy in a bar in Birmingham who made my ten-pound
note disappear only to recover it from inside his beer glass. So was Jolbad
claiming that Jesus was like Harry Potter? Or David Blaine? Or even a witch?
Such a proposal seemed ridiculous to me at the time and I subsequently assumed
that Jolbad was a fairly dim-witted and foolish character.
The
events of that Good Friday would remain dormant until an undergraduate lecture
given by Prof. Mark Goodacre (who would later become my PhD thesis
supervisor) during my final undergraduate years at Birmingham University in
2001. The two-year New Testament studies course consisted of a series of
lectures intended to highlight the many roles applied to Jesus in Biblical Studies,
each being inserted or removed like a set of optician’s slides to see whether
the Gospel content became any clearer; Jesus the teacher, Jesus the prophet,
Jesus the healer, Jesus the exorcist and so forth. One of these lectures
introduced me to the character of ‘Jesus the magician’ and the work of Prof.
Morton Smith, who claimed that Jesus’ conduct within the Gospel material
constituted a ‘coherent, consistent and credible picture of a magician’s
career.’[1]
The theory that the historical Jesus was actively practicing magic and that
this behaviour is reflected in the Gospel materials was a very intriguing
proposal and immediately stimulated a personal interest in this field of
research.
This
curiosity culminated in the submission and acceptance of my PhD thesis Dragging
Down Heaven: Jesus as Magician and Manipulator of Spirits in the Gospels at
The University of Birmingham in April 2007, extracts of which can be found on
this website. The thesis was highly praised by my contemporaries in the field
of Biblical Studies but I resisted publishing it for a number of reasons.
First, I wanted it to be widely read outside academia and worried that
committing to an academic publisher would prevent this. Second, my research
(and I) quite often fell foul of much vitriol from religious communities who
thought that the subject matter was blasphemous, which was never my intent, and
I worried that my working relationship with these communities would suffer as a
result. Third, although I consider myself to be rational and non-superstitious,
I had a number of odd, somewhat supernatural, experiences throughout the
process of writing the thesis that made me reluctant to pursue the subject any
further and I don’t think my nerves would take revisiting it too often! So I
have taken the decision to upload extracts from the thesis in the hope that the
reader may find it informative or at the very least entertaining. I have
removed a great deal of referencing to make it ‘internet friendly’ and there is
so much more to tell...but here are the basics for now....
‘A sound magician is a mighty
god’
~ Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I.
NEXT: INTRODUCTION
