I was talking with one of my guy friends because I'm not sure what I believe right now and he asked me this question, "What if Jesus was just the first great magician?" He pointed out that magicians now could walk on water, and do other miraculous things that "ordinary" people couldn't normally do. So I pose the question to you: What do you think about Jesus being the first great magician?
Jesus .... the first great magician?
by collegegirl21 24 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Carmel
Hagiographics is not limited to Jesus. Many before Him were credited with "miracles". Christians just tend to disbelieve those stories, yet gullibly accept their veracity for Jesus.
carmel
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OnTheWayOut
He may not have done any miracles, nor tried to make it appear that he had. It is possible that
the stories were made up. Suppose Jesus was this expert on Hebrew scriptures that rode an
ass into Jerusalem, tried to become king, and got killed for his effort? If you wanted to make him
your Messiah, retell the story with some miracles mixed in. -
cognizant dissident
I think Jesus was a great and very charismatic teacher who drew many disciples. After his death, those who wrote the gospels could easily have embellished his life stories adding in miracles. Well, what about all the eye witnesses to those miracles the bible mentions? Again, how do we know there were all those eye witnesses. The same writers who invented the miracles could also have invented the eye-witnesses. Who is going to discredit them in that time period. Jesus barely gets a mention in the historical records of the time period. He was not a great figure of history in his lifetime that would merit a full scale investigation of events. Then, after the death of the bible writers and all the supposed eye-witnesses who is left to discredit the stories or recant. It's the stuff all the great legends and myths of the world are made of. It is really no more believable than any of the other great mythologies of the ages, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Norse, etc. Yet, at one time, millions believed in those stories.
One of the only reasons Christianity has gained the great foothold in the world that it has is because of war and politics. If Charlemagne had not been so successful in his military dominance, then Christianity may have faded into the realm of ancient history like so many other of those other mythologies. When those empires died out, the prominance of their religions died with them. The same could happen to Christianity if the world dominance of Christian countries ever declines. Education combined with freedom of thought could also conceivable accomplish the same thing over time.
Cog
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collegegirl21
Lol... funny! You all have good points. I'm looking at this in a whole different view.
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JH
I'll believe that he is the greatest magician when he resurrects everyone and makes a paradise earth, where we can drink beer and have sex forever.
p.s.: Pouta
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hmike
Magicians provide entertainment in a performance by controlling what we are allowed to see, then allowing our own minds to explain what we have seen in a way that leads to a false conclusion about what we have seen. They use illusion to get us to think they have done something which seems to violate natural laws, but they actually have no power to suspend or violate the laws of physics. A magician may appear to have made a person dematerialize from a stage before our eyes, but somehow, that person has simply been moved, or is still there, or never was there to begin with. If the subject was ever really there, eventually that person has to turn up somewhere--the effect doesn’t continue.
It looks like you’re suggesting that Jesus fooled everybody into believing he did miraculous things--fooled not only the public, but even his own disciples. If the gospel accounts have any credibility at all, this cannot be the case. The people he healed, for example, seem to have had their conditions for quite some time, even an entire lifetime in at least one case, and their conditions were known to others. All indications are that when Jesus healed them, they were able to do things they could not do before, and they stayed healed--these were not just brief illusions. All this would have been done without access to technology available to magicians now, nor were these things done in a controlled setting like a stage. The case of healing the centurion’s servant would have been a real trick, since the subject was at a remote location. We can also see that what Jesus did was not just for show anyway--it changed peoples’ bodies and their lives for the better.
Of course, for anyone who thinks Jesus is a myth and the gospels are a fabrication, the question is meaningless, since Jesus can be whatever someone wants him to be.
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Narkissos
If he was a magician he was certainly not the first... Magic is as old as mankind, as the Bible itself testifies (cf. the magicians at Pharaoh's court in Exodus or in Daniel's story for instance). And it was no mere "entertainment" as in our society.
There are a number of "magical" features in some of Jesus' miracles, especially healings in the Gospel of Mark -- specific gestures and acts, such as laying hands and spitting, using strange formulae (Aramaic words and expressions retained within the Greek text), which are often omitted in the later Gospels. Also, non-Christian sources sometimes describe Jesus as a magician or sorcerer (so the Talmud references to Yeshu', although they situate him earlier than the Gospel Jesus).
Of course this may only point to the existence of magical clichés along others in the material available to the Gospel writers, not necessarily memories of a historical person.
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TopHat
Is this another post thread of Anti-Christ propaganda?
