Many students enter the classroom with the instinctive sense that they know magic when they see it. This often makes excellent sense, as their primary exposure to the idea of magic is often in media that loudly announces that “magic” is happening (read: Harry Potter). They have developed reflexes based on modern genres, which have rich, deep, and readily identifiable reservoirs of symbolism and language by which to denote magic and magicians. It would be hard to mistake an act of magic for a miracle—for magicians wear pointy hats, wave wands, and speak pseudo-Latin spells, as everybody knows.
Scholars of ancient Judaism and Christianity know that this dichotomy cannot survive the transfer to the ancient world. Not just because the identifying symbols of magic-workers break down (no more tall pointy hats to help!), but because the phenomenological differences between magic and miracle events are rarely apparent in our ancient sources. Both of the activities described below are designed to help students realize this curious phenomenological overlap, through direct and active engagement with primary sources.
The activities take slightly different approaches: one activity, designed for use during a New Testament class, forces students to draw the line between miracle and magic for themselves, with the added bonus of playfully probing their classmates’ demarcation at the same time. The other, designed for use during a Hebrew Bible class, asks students to prep and perform a little faux-magic themselves, but in the person of a figure they’d likely have cast as a great miracle-worker: Moses.
A note: I teach at a preparatory school called Phillips Academy Andover. Similar to a typical college classroom, I work with a range of students capable of reading, writing, and engaging material at levels that range from upper-high-school, to upper-undergraduate. My class sizes are small (capped at 15), so I do almost entirely activity-based learning. Moreover–-and this should help contextualize the activities outlined below a bit–-I benefit from the reality that Phillips Academy is a boarding school, and my students live very intertwined lives. My students’ deep-seated friendships, flirtations, rivalries, and neighborly relationships mean that they take to playful activities like the ones listed below with verve, excitement, and an almost goofy competitiveness. But I think these activities can not only benefit classrooms drawing from existent communities, but also contribute to community-building over the course of the semester. After all, there is nothing that brings a community together like a little (friendly) inquisition.
1. “But how do you know she is a witch?”[1]
In Class; 30-60 Minutes (depending on size of class)
The following activity could complement a variety of classes in a course on the New Testament or Early Christianity, so long as the material explores supernatural phenomena. I run it during my unit on canonical gospels, but it would fit well alongside the teaching of Acts (canonical or apocryphal).
Its purpose is to ask students to figure out whether a narrated event (whose source has been obscured) should be classed as ‘miracle’ or ‘magic,’ and encourage them to work together to decide how to make that distinction. The upshot, of course, is that it is diabolically difficult to sort our ancient sources into those two boxes—an idea brought home both by the always-challenging process of decision-making, and also by their flabbergasted reactions once the source of the event is revealed (“that was Jesus?!”).
This activity builds primarily on scholarship on Greco-Roman religious and magical discourses as a wellspring for early Christianities,[2] on ‘magical’ episodes found in the New Testament and other ancient Jewish and/or Christian works,[3] and on literature exploring the difficulty of defining ancient Mediterranean magic.[4] Most of all, in its current iteration, the activity encourages students to step into a conversation that has been bubbling since the beginning of the common era, through to the (in)famous publication of Morton Smith’s monograph in 1978 and beyond: the controversial but generative labeling of Jesus as “magician.”[5]
Required Reading:
The Gospel of Mark (or another early Christian source of interest
Teacher Instructions
Before Class
I select a number of wonder-working stories from relevant ancient sources commensurate with the number of students in the class. (For my purposes, prepping for a gospels lesson, I found Wendy Cotter’s Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook for the Study of New Testament Miracle Stories, a particularly helpful starting-point.)[6] My most recent class had 12 students, so I selected 12 accounts. I try to prioritize accounts not yet covered in class, and less famous episodes.
I copy and paste each written account into a Word document, but change the names and pronouns of each account to correspond with a student in the class. So, instead of “As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered… (John 9.1-3),” to change this to refer to myself, I would write, “As she walked along, she saw a man blind from birth. Her disciples asked her, “Elena, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Elena answered…”
In Class
Students will be called up from their seats, one by one, to stand in front of the class. They will read the account using their name aloud, and I encourage the class to debate amongst themselves, and come to an agreement—is this person a miracle-worker or a magician?
Once their classmates have passed judgment, the student will wait in a corner of the room designated either for miracle-workers or magicians. I reveal the ancient figure to whom the event was credited, and the student in question can now participate in the remaining rounds of debate.
Notes from the Field:
This activity is especially fun in my home pedagogical setting because the students take such joy in teasing one another, and they have a great time trying to get their friends classed as magicians (which instinctively seems like the inferior categorization to them, for reasons that they start figuring out as the conversation continues). But the thing that makes it most effective is that the figures from the ancient world are essentially anonymized in the transposition of the account. The name of “Jesus” or “Simon Magus” or “Honi the Circle Drawer,” or anything else that might provide an establishing cue for the modern listener is effaced, and the action itself takes center stage.
That said, there are some ways that terminology begs the question, which students are quick to notice. Yet even these moments show the depth of the problem. For instance, Josephus’ account of Eleazar, an exorcist working during the reign of Vespasian, mentions “his incantations (τὰς ἐπῳδὰς) (Antiquities 8.47),” a term which led several of my students to “a-ha!” moments, and a quick pointing of fingers. But how, we then discussed (or argued, really), would we differentiate this reported “incantation” (which we did not hear, and did not witness) from a prayer? Could it not simply boil down to who told the story?
And, in so doing, students inductively arrive at a key tenet of our understanding of ancient magic: that “magic, and its synonyms, were born out of a desire to condemn the practices of other people.”[7]
2. Moses the Magician
In Class; 20-30 Minutes
I run this activity during my Hebrew Bible class, and it is tagged to the Exodus account. This exercise is meant to help students appreciate a peculiar feature of the text—both Moses and his Egyptian magical antagonists, according to the text, are capable of superhuman feats. Here, at least, Exodus does not deny the existence of efficacious magic. Instead, the magicians are outclassed. The purpose of the activity is to help students explore, for themselves, the thin and porous boundary between categories they might call ‘magic’ and ‘miracle’, while also stepping into the heat and urgency of the plague narrative in Exodus. Most of all, it introduces students to trajectories of interpretation that may be unexpected, but are thought-provoking.
This activity builds on a long history of literature surrounding the trouble defining ‘magic’ within the Hebrew Bible,[8] scholarship on Exodus highlighting the texts’ seeming acquaintance with Egyptian ‘magic’ and ‘magical’ practices,[9] and a rich Jewish and Christian legacy of interpreting Moses as the magician par excellence.[10] Finally, this activity uses material from the much later (but helpful for our purposes) body of texts known as the Greek Magical Papyri, to intentionally include some of the signals students recognize as ‘magical.’[11]
Required Reading (HW or In-Class)
Exodus 7 (or Exodus 1-12)
Teacher Instructions:
Students receive handouts, to be read in-class or assigned for homework, with spells from the Greek Magical Papyri. Some options:
PGM XIII 1.343ff claims to be the “Eighth Book of Moses.” This is a longer option, but has the benefit of connecting Moses and magic explicitly.
PGM XXIIb 1-26 is the so-called “prayer of Jacob,” and features invocations to the God of the Hebrews. This is a good, short option that connects easily to those thinking in a biblical frame.
PGM IV 475-829 provides a spell so that the user might ascend into heaven (read: fly!). This is an option students have found especially amusing in class.
PDM xiv 594-620 provides a short spell to heal a poison sting, and invokes gods which students might readily recognize as Egyptian. This is a short option that connects easily to those students thinking in an Egyptian frame.
Students find a place where Moses and Aaron perform a supernatural feat (Exodus 7 has a few good options). It is not stated in the text that Moses or Aaron spoke certain words by which they accomplished their feats, but that won’t stop us for the purposes of this activity. (The teacher will also have to be comfortable with a little anachronism, for a higher cause).
Students, inspired by the Greek Magical Papyri, write a spell for Moses and/or Aaron. What did they say to get the job done?
When done, students perform their spells for their classmates. Bonus if they throw down a staff (or stick), and see if it turns into a serpent. (Fingers crossed!)
Notes:
This ends up being a fairly comical activity, so long as a couple of students are game to do a little playacting. I (and my students) laughed hysterically at some of their spells, which were often accompanied by shouting and the melodramatic flinging of sticks, so it can provide great comic relief.
The magical papyri provide the students with some ideas for stock phrases with which to construct spells—some strange non-signifying sounds (or gibberish) here, some invocations of deities there, a little groveling, and so on. And the activity makes students sit down and think about how individuals refer to God, the things they want from their deity, and the appropriate tone to take when addressing their deity—but always in an active manner, rather than just passively absorbing written accounts.
But, in essence, the activity forces students to place magic and the characters and events of the Bible in the same sentence—a sentence they, themselves, must construct. Some students may think it is uncomfortable at first, though, in my experience, the silliness of the activity (complete with stick-throwing) should suffice to make it clear that we are doing something a little offbeat. And the example of the Greek Magical Papyri (let alone Exodus) should show them that they are not the first to try and marry Moses and magic, and that there is something interesting to pursue here.
The chatter during and after the spells almost always comes back to the question of perspective, as in the activity above. Who is telling the story? Why separate a hero from the title ‘magician’? And who might wish to bring such a title back in the game?
[1] Activity title courtesy of the classic film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
[2] David Aune, “Magic in Early Christianity,” ANRW II:23/2 (1980): 1507–57; Korshi Dosoo, “Magic in the Graeco-Roman World,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, June 28, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.696.
[3] Hans-Josef Klauck, Magic and Paganism in Early Christianity : The World of the Acts of the Apostles, Fortress Press (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); Jan N. Bremmer, “Magic in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles,” in The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 51–71; Graham H. Twelftree, “Jesus, Magician or Miracle Worker,” The Biblical Annals 10, no. 3 (June 15, 2020): 405–36.
[4] Sarah I. Johnston, “Describing the Undefinable: New Books on Magic and Old Problems of Definition (Review Article),” History of Religions 43, no. 1 (2003): 50–54.
[5] Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978).
[6] Wendy Cotter, Miracles in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook for the Study of New Testament Miracle Stories (London: Routledge, 1999).
[7] Johnston, “Describing the Undefinable,” 54.
[8] Martti Nissinen, “Magic in the Hebrew Bible,” in Magic in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean, ed. Kirsi Valkama and Nina Nikki, Mundus Orientis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021), 47–67.
[9] Gary A. Rendsburg, “Moses the Magician,” in Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience, ed. Thomas E. Levy, Thomas Schneider, and William H.C. Propp, Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015), 243–58.
[10] John G. Gager, Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism, Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series ; No. 16 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972); John G. Gager, “Moses the Magician-Hero of an Ancient Counter-Culture,” Helios (Lubbock) 21, no. 2 (1994): 179–88; Yuval Harari, “The Sword of Moses (Ḥarba de-Moshe): A New Translation and Introduction,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 7, no. 1 (2012): 58–98.
[11] Hans Dieter Betz, The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, 2nd ed., with an updated bibliography. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).