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Sorry bud. Forgot to put the quote marks and source in. I've edited it now to meet with your approval.rjmrjmrjm said:
ghostdog19 said:
I know how you feel.
Was Jesus An Illusionist / Magician?
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I know how you feel.
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Glad I'm not the only one. Thank goodness we don't have to have word verification when we post... being dyslexic those blasted things are a royal pain in the hoop.QuaziWashboard said:I know how you feel.
Do you mean frozen over waters, or on an iceberg?QuaziWashboard said:
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It's just the same levitation trick as any other levitation trick (they even do the whole hoop routine) except that the magician in this case is resting their feet on water. So, again, simply attributing magic tricks to a theme. The fish trick is basically your old 'is this your coin/card/watch?' trick, but with fish (like when David Blaine makes a card appear inside a locked car). There's no doubt millions of magic tricks that can be dressed up to look like the miracles. I still think the notion you have is an entertaining possibility, but the point I was making is that unless the magic circle wishes to reveal its secrets... don't hold your breath. And if you recall a documentary where engineers built Leonardo Da Vinci's inventions using tools relevant to the period... it would need to be something like that. There was a documentary on not so long ago on the history of magic which did include the Indian rope trick and how that was done (and its not something that requires modern techniques to accomplish).QuaziWashboard said:
EDIT to correct amusing error... I originally wrote "like when David Blaine makes a car appear inside a locked car".... now THAT'S magic!
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Sorry, I meant giving the appearance as though he were resting his feet upon the water when in actual fact his feet are simply touching the surface of the water. ¿Comprende?Xanatico said:
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As in sitting on the gun'l of the boat, feet outboard, but not quite paddling?ghostdog19 said:
[PS: in Biblical times, boats wouldn't have had gun'ls (gun whales), as guns hadn't been invented then. I wonder what they did call the top strake of a boat in those days? :? ]
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this guy does it way better than either of those scottish guys.... watch this (why he stalls at the end however....)rynner said:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnYKa2n47-4
Here's the trick we've been talking about... not very impressive in comparison... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpW5Mdp2pOw (watch his feet)
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The way I see it, one of (or maybe a mixture of) three things happened. Either the miracles were tricks, or stories made up by someone to spread the word of Jesus,.....or Jesus really did actual magic.ghostdog19 said:
Two of them are perfectly believable, the other, well let's just say that you'd really need to have faith to believe it. What I do know is that going even further back (possibly 4000 years ago) than the time of Christ, magicians who did tricks that to the uninitiated would seem like miracles did exist, especialy in Egypt. So If Jesus did indeed spend a lot of time in Egypt as a young man, the knowledge of trickery, sleight of hand and illusion was available to him. Put that together with stories re-told, over and over again until they are eventualy written down, up to (as rjmrjmrjm mentions) 200 years after his death and you can imagine how simple tricks can be turned into full blown miracles.
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An entertaining notion. Also, it doesn't take 200 years for something to turn from a simple trick to a full blown miracle. That can happen within a matter of minutes. Take a look at the tabloids for example where the truth of the matter is often lost to hyperbole on a daily basis.
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True.ghostdog19 said:
Thank goodness it was written down then, because just think how far gossip would have taken it after 2000 years if it wasn't.
Well some stage magicians have had the problem of people believing they have supernatural powers, even thought they have denied it themselves. Maybe Jesus just wanted to pull a few Blaine style stunts, and couldn´t get people to believe that it wasn´t really miracles.
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OK, I've been away a while - interesting discussion in the meantime!
I personally am a somewhat liberal Episcopalian. So I'm not committed to the actual factuality of many of the miracles attributed to Jesus. I'm not committed to thinking they didn't happen, either.
The point is not whether they happened, but what they tell us. Biblical literalism has the major drawback of reducing these miracles to supposed proofs of Jesus' divinity, which then invites precisely the kind of conversation we have here, the suggestion that they were "merely" magic tricks. Either perspective has at its base the assumption that whatever Jesus was up to, he was trying to draw attention to himself.
But if you throw out biblical literalism, or at least suspend it or look deeper than a superficial reading (i.e., about mere facts), then you can find more interesting and still relevant truths. The feeding of the multitudes, for example, are Eucharistic stories. The raising of Lazarus points to Jesus as the source of life - life that has less to do with whether one has a pulse, and more to do with the Reign of God. Of course, there's much more to each story - it's not a one-to-one ratio of story and meaning.
The way I see it, the story of Jesus must begin with the Crucifixion. I find it highly unlikely that a crucifixion could be a staged event with the cooperation of the Romans, simply because of what crucifixion was about. It wasn't just a way of executing criminals - it was reserved for a certain kind of criminal: political insurrectionists, and others such as slaves who dared to try to rise above their station. The "thieves" crucified with Jesus weren't thieves, they were "bandits," a term the Romans applied to rebels or insurrectionists. Crucifixion was actually a mock enthronement - a parodic exaltation. The mockery recorded in the Gospel accounts was actually commonplace.
So when Jesus' followers found him arrested and killed in this manner, as a failed insurrectionist, they probably should have renounced him and turned their attention to other pursuits. In fact, there are some hints in the Gospels that they did just that - returned to fishing, for example. They seemed to have given up hope. Jesus couldn't possibly have been the expected Messiah, because he died. At any rate, the disciples didn't simply pick a new leader or attach themselves to a new charismatic figure in a revolutionary movement, as one might expect.
So what is the Resurrection about? However it's interpreted, it became a new interpretive lens for Jesus' life, ministry, and death. The New Testament is all about reinterpreting Jesus, an executed political rebel, in the light of the Resurrection. The NT isn't all of one mind about it, either. If all of this were a planned trick of some sort, the NT would be a lot more homogenous in its interpretation and proclamation of Jesus. Ironically, if you insist on biblical inerrancy, which tends to lead to attempts to harmonize all the different writings into one single theology, you play into the hands of those who would dismiss the accounts as a sort of conspiracy. But an honest and critical examination of the text shows a remarkable diversity of understandings of what Jesus was all about, as well as development over time. People were really wrestling to make sense out of their experiences of Jesus. But everything in the New Testament should be read through the lenses of the tragic and puzzling execution of Jesus, who people thought would be the Messiah, and his subsequent resurrection, however that might be interpreted. The subsequent proclamation by the disciples had to deal squarely with the very public fact of Jesus' execution. The fact that the Gospels each devote so much ink to that single event only highlights its importance - that it was an unexpected event that had to be reckoned with. We're actually still wrestling with it, as we've been for 2000 years. There is no one single Christian understanding of what Jesus' death was about.
A side-note: I can't remember who suggested a few pages back that if Jesus died, or seemed to die, then came back to life, and died again some time later, then all parties could be happy. Actually, that's not true. The whole point of the Resurrection, for many Christians who take it literally and Christians who don't, is that it represents Jesus' triumph over, and in fact destruction of, death. St. Paul's description of Jesus as the "first-born from the dead" also implies that in Jesus, we see the destiny of all of us who die - so the Resurrection shows us what we will also become. It wasn't simply another trick to prove Jesus' divinity. It's probably more about his humanity, in fact. But, as with everything else, not all Christians will agree on this meaning and there may be some who would be happy with the idea that he merely came back to life only to die again later - but I've never met any. St. Paul also wrote (and the more catholic churches tend to use this in their liturgy through the Easter season, in the Pascha nostrum) that "Christ, being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him." So in order to believe that Jesus merely returned only to die again, you have to be willing to throw out at least the Pauline corpus, if not most of the New Testament, which tends to interpret the resurrection along similar lines.
I personally am a somewhat liberal Episcopalian. So I'm not committed to the actual factuality of many of the miracles attributed to Jesus. I'm not committed to thinking they didn't happen, either.
The point is not whether they happened, but what they tell us. Biblical literalism has the major drawback of reducing these miracles to supposed proofs of Jesus' divinity, which then invites precisely the kind of conversation we have here, the suggestion that they were "merely" magic tricks. Either perspective has at its base the assumption that whatever Jesus was up to, he was trying to draw attention to himself.
But if you throw out biblical literalism, or at least suspend it or look deeper than a superficial reading (i.e., about mere facts), then you can find more interesting and still relevant truths. The feeding of the multitudes, for example, are Eucharistic stories. The raising of Lazarus points to Jesus as the source of life - life that has less to do with whether one has a pulse, and more to do with the Reign of God. Of course, there's much more to each story - it's not a one-to-one ratio of story and meaning.
The way I see it, the story of Jesus must begin with the Crucifixion. I find it highly unlikely that a crucifixion could be a staged event with the cooperation of the Romans, simply because of what crucifixion was about. It wasn't just a way of executing criminals - it was reserved for a certain kind of criminal: political insurrectionists, and others such as slaves who dared to try to rise above their station. The "thieves" crucified with Jesus weren't thieves, they were "bandits," a term the Romans applied to rebels or insurrectionists. Crucifixion was actually a mock enthronement - a parodic exaltation. The mockery recorded in the Gospel accounts was actually commonplace.
So when Jesus' followers found him arrested and killed in this manner, as a failed insurrectionist, they probably should have renounced him and turned their attention to other pursuits. In fact, there are some hints in the Gospels that they did just that - returned to fishing, for example. They seemed to have given up hope. Jesus couldn't possibly have been the expected Messiah, because he died. At any rate, the disciples didn't simply pick a new leader or attach themselves to a new charismatic figure in a revolutionary movement, as one might expect.
So what is the Resurrection about? However it's interpreted, it became a new interpretive lens for Jesus' life, ministry, and death. The New Testament is all about reinterpreting Jesus, an executed political rebel, in the light of the Resurrection. The NT isn't all of one mind about it, either. If all of this were a planned trick of some sort, the NT would be a lot more homogenous in its interpretation and proclamation of Jesus. Ironically, if you insist on biblical inerrancy, which tends to lead to attempts to harmonize all the different writings into one single theology, you play into the hands of those who would dismiss the accounts as a sort of conspiracy. But an honest and critical examination of the text shows a remarkable diversity of understandings of what Jesus was all about, as well as development over time. People were really wrestling to make sense out of their experiences of Jesus. But everything in the New Testament should be read through the lenses of the tragic and puzzling execution of Jesus, who people thought would be the Messiah, and his subsequent resurrection, however that might be interpreted. The subsequent proclamation by the disciples had to deal squarely with the very public fact of Jesus' execution. The fact that the Gospels each devote so much ink to that single event only highlights its importance - that it was an unexpected event that had to be reckoned with. We're actually still wrestling with it, as we've been for 2000 years. There is no one single Christian understanding of what Jesus' death was about.
A side-note: I can't remember who suggested a few pages back that if Jesus died, or seemed to die, then came back to life, and died again some time later, then all parties could be happy. Actually, that's not true. The whole point of the Resurrection, for many Christians who take it literally and Christians who don't, is that it represents Jesus' triumph over, and in fact destruction of, death. St. Paul's description of Jesus as the "first-born from the dead" also implies that in Jesus, we see the destiny of all of us who die - so the Resurrection shows us what we will also become. It wasn't simply another trick to prove Jesus' divinity. It's probably more about his humanity, in fact. But, as with everything else, not all Christians will agree on this meaning and there may be some who would be happy with the idea that he merely came back to life only to die again later - but I've never met any. St. Paul also wrote (and the more catholic churches tend to use this in their liturgy through the Easter season, in the Pascha nostrum) that "Christ, being raised from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him." So in order to believe that Jesus merely returned only to die again, you have to be willing to throw out at least the Pauline corpus, if not most of the New Testament, which tends to interpret the resurrection along similar lines.
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Sorry, just noticed this.ghostdog19 said:
Have a read of this. http://www.fsu.edu/news/2006/04/04/ice.walk/ It seems a little far fetched to me, but hey...it's still a theory.
The levitating man that you speak of was probably Simon Magus. He gets the sin of 'Simony' (paying money for a holy office - think 'cash for honours') named after him because he offered the disciples money to allow him to do miracles. The Simon story is in The Book of Acts, Chapter 8, lines 9-24. The flying story however is in the Apocryphical Acts of Peter which is generally held to be written in the later 2nd Century.
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No, we'd be celebrating Mithras. But, Hogwarts would likely have been a real place.QuaziWashboard said:
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Maybe this is the biblical equivalent of "The Prestige"?Gemaki said:
(would certainly explain the feeding of the 5000)
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I haven't had the pleasure yet, GhostDog.
Sometimes it makes you wish you had a time machine... then again, you'd probably be so disillusioned with what you'd see. Fascinating, though. I'd never heard of this guy... wouldn't it be awful if he wasn't a magician, or anything sinister, but really an honest teacher? Actually, that explains why they covered it up. I WANT THE TRUTH!
Sometimes it makes you wish you had a time machine... then again, you'd probably be so disillusioned with what you'd see. Fascinating, though. I'd never heard of this guy... wouldn't it be awful if he wasn't a magician, or anything sinister, but really an honest teacher? Actually, that explains why they covered it up. I WANT THE TRUTH!
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That ought to be a caveat for any budding time traveler.Gemaki said:
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QuaziWashboard said:
The story of Simon Magus (or, Simon "the Magician") is recorded in the Book of Acts - after Jesus' death, resurrection, and ascension.
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lupinwick said:
I've heard about that too, does anyone know anything about these other prophets, how many there was, if they lived at the same time as Christ?
Question to any Christian believers amongst us;
Do you think that Simon Magus could actualy levitate (or had other magical powers) or do you think that it was probably a trick of some sort?
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QuaziWashboard said:
Sure, why not.
Well, if anyone could levitate - I'm not sure what to make of any of those reports. I prefer to leave the question open. It's more likely, though, that in the case of this Simon, the levitation bit was folkloric embellishment.
It's like any of the many Fortean topics we discuss on these boards - I'm not going to assume things based on my faith commitment if the facts should (as in "ought to") convince me otherwise. If there are no real facts available, and no other compelling reason to come down on one side or the other, then I'd rather leave it open. Logically, in the case of Simon, if I don't know what to make of Teresa of Avila's levitation, or Joseph Cupertino's, for example, then I also have no clarity on a much more ancient report.
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Hmm, it seems every time an interesting point comes to the surface here, I see it on the Discovery channel. I watched some programs yesterday on whether Jesus was a magician, or really doing all those feats for real.
They had a magician try to walk on water, multiply food, and whatnot... he said he couldn't do it, and doubted that Jesus could fake those things. He also said there were many others who also claimed to be 'special'... but that they didn't have a following after they died.
He talked about the questions we've been discussing on here, and he said there was one big difference between believing then, and now. He said that if you had faith in Jesus back then, you most likely died because of it. A good argument for people saying that it was all a show.
He talked about how the Romans were seriously against Christians, and for people to die because they followed him was quite a sacrifice. I'd forgotten that.
They had a magician try to walk on water, multiply food, and whatnot... he said he couldn't do it, and doubted that Jesus could fake those things. He also said there were many others who also claimed to be 'special'... but that they didn't have a following after they died.
He talked about the questions we've been discussing on here, and he said there was one big difference between believing then, and now. He said that if you had faith in Jesus back then, you most likely died because of it. A good argument for people saying that it was all a show.
He talked about how the Romans were seriously against Christians, and for people to die because they followed him was quite a sacrifice. I'd forgotten that.