Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

there was a distinct difference between magic and miracle in the ancient
     mind, not in their methods or outcome—both were considered ways of disrupting the
     natural order of the universe—but in the way in which each was perceived. In the Graeco-Roman
     world, magicians were ubiquitous, but magic was considered a form of charlatanry.
     There were a handful of Roman laws against “magic-working,” and magicians themselves
     could be expelled or even executed if they were found to practice what was sometimes
     referred to as “dark magic.” In Judaism, too, magicians were fairly prevalent, despite
     the prohibition against magic in the Law of Moses, where it is punishable by death.
     “No one shall be found among you,” the Bible warns, “who engages in divination, or
     is a witch, an enchanter, or a sorcerer, or one who casts spells, or who consults
     spirits, one who is a wizard or a necromancer” (Deuteronomy 18:10–11).
    The discrepancy between law and practice when it came to the magical arts can best
     be explained by the variable ways in which “magic” was defined. The word itself had
     extreme negative connotations, but only when applied to the practices of other peoples
     and religions. “Although the nations you are about to dispossess give heed to soothsayers
     and diviners,” God tells the Israelites, “as for you, the Lord your God does not permit
     you to do so” (Deuteronomy18:14). And yet God regularly has his servants engage in magical acts in order to
     prove his might. So, for example, God commands Moses and Aaron to “perform a wonder”
     in front of Pharaoh by transforming a staff into a snake. But when Pharaoh’s “wise
     men” do the same trick, they are dismissed as “magicians” (Exodus 7:1–13, 9:8–12).
     In other words, a representative of God—such as Moses, Elijah, or Elisha—performs
     miracles, whereas a “false prophet”—such as Pharaoh’s wise men or the priests of Baal—performs
     magic.
    This explains why the early Christians went to such lengths to argue that Jesus was
not
a magician. Throughout the second and third centuries, the church’s Jewish and Roman
     detractors wrote numerous tracts accusing Jesus of having used magic to captivate
     people and trick them into following him. “But though they saw such works, they asserted
     it was magical art,” the second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr wrote of
     his critics. “For they dared to call [Jesus] a magician, and a deceiver of the people.”
    Note that these enemies of the church did not deny that Jesus performed wondrous deeds.
     They merely labeled those deeds “magic.” Regardless, church leaders, such as the famed
     third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria, responded furiously to such accusations,
     decrying the “slanderous and childish charge [that] Jesus was a magician,” or that
     he performed his miracles by means of magical devices. As the early church father
     Irenaeus, bishop of Lugdunum, argued, it was precisely the lack of such magical devices
     that distinguished Jesus’s miraculous actions from those of the common magician. Jesus,
     in the words of Irenaeus, performed his deeds “without any power of incantations,
     without the juice of herbs and of grasses, without any anxious watching of sacrifices,
     of libations, or of seasons.”
    Despite Irenaeus’s protestations, however, Jesus’s miraculous actions in the gospels,
     especially in the earliest gospel, Mark, do bear a striking resemblance to the actions
     of similar magicians and wonder workers of the time, which is why more than a few
     contemporarybiblical scholars have openly labeled Jesus a magician. No doubt Jesus uses a magician’s
     techniques—incantations, rehearsed formulae, spitting, repeated supplications—in some
     of his miracles. Once, in the region of the Decapolis, a group of villagers brought
     a deaf-mute man to Jesus and begged him for help. Jesus took the man aside, away from
     the crowd. Then, in a bizarre set of ritualized actions that could have come directly
     from an ancient magician’s manual, Jesus placed his fingers in the deaf man’s ears,
     spat, touched his tongue, and, looking up to the heavens, chanted the word
ephphatha
, which means “be opened” in Aramaic. Immediately the man’s ears were opened and his
     tongue released (Mark 7:31–35).
    In Bethsaida, Jesus performed a similar action on a blind man. He led the man away
     from the crowds, spat