Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

directly into his eyes, placed his hands on him, and asked,
     “Do you see anything?”
    “I can see people,” the man said. “But they look like walking trees.”
    Jesus repeated the ritual formula once more. This time the miracle took; the man regained
     his sight (Mark 8:22–26).
    The gospel of Mark narrates an even more curious story about a woman who had been
     suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had seen numerous doctors and spent
     all the money she possessed, but had found no relief from her condition. Having heard
     about Jesus, she came up behind him in a crowd, reached out, and touched his cloak.
     At once, her hemorrhaging ceased and she felt in her body that she had been healed.
    What is remarkable about this story is that, according to Mark, Jesus “felt power
     drained from him.” He stopped in his tracks and shouted, “Who touched my cloak?” The
     woman fell down before him and confessed the truth. “Daughter,” Jesus replied. “Your
     faith has healed you” (Mark 5:24–34).
    Mark’s narrative seems to suggest that Jesus was a passive conduit through which healing
     power coursed like an electrical current. That is in keeping with the way in which
     magical processesare described in the texts of the time. It is certainly noteworthy that Matthew’s
     retelling of the hemorrhaging-woman story twenty years later omits the magical quality
     of Mark’s version. In Matthew, Jesus turns around when the woman touches him, acknowledges
     and addresses her, and only then does he actively heal her illness (Matthew 9:20–22).
    Despite the magical elements that can be traced in some of his miracles, the fact
     is that nowhere in the gospels does anyone actually charge Jesus with performing magic.
     It would have been an easy accusation for his enemies to make, one that would have
     carried an immediate death sentence. Yet when Jesus stood before the Roman and Jewish
     authorities to answer the charges against him, he was accused of many misdeeds—sedition,
     blasphemy, rejecting the Law of Moses, refusing to pay the tribute, threatening the
     Temple—but being a magician was not one of them.
    It is also worth noting that Jesus never exacted a fee for his services. Magicians,
     healers, miracle workers, exorcists—these were skilled and fairly well-paid professions
     in first-century Palestine. Eleazar the Exorcist was once asked to perform his feats
     for no less a personage than Emperor Vespasian. In the book of Acts, a professional
     magician popularly known as Simon Magus offers the apostles money to be trained in
     the art of manipulating the Holy Spirit to heal the sick. “Give me this power also,”
     Simon asks Peter and John, “so that anyone I lay my hands upon may receive the Holy
     Spirit.”
    “May your money perish with you,” Peter replies, “for you thought you could purchase
     with money what God gives as a free gift” (Acts 8:9–24).
    Peter’s answer may seem extreme. But he is merely following the command of his messiah,
     who told his disciples to “heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, and
     cast out the demons. You received [these gifts] without payment.
Give them out without payment
” (Matthew 10:8 | Luke 9:1–2)
    In the end, it may be futile to argue about whether Jesus was amagician or a miracle worker. Magic and miracle are perhaps best thought of as two
     sides of the same coin in ancient Palestine. The church fathers were right about one
     thing, however. There is clearly something unique and distinctive about Jesus’s miraculous
     actions in the gospels. It is not simply that Jesus’s work is free of charge, or that
     his healings do not always employ a magician’s methods. It is that Jesus’s miracles
     are not intended as an end in themselves. Rather, his actions serve a pedagogical
     purpose. They are a means of conveying a very specific message to the Jews.
    A clue to what that message might be surfaces in an intriguing passage in
Q
. As recounted in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, John the Baptist is languishing
     in a prison cell atop the fortress of Machaerus, awaiting his execution, when he hears
     of the wondrous deeds being performed in Galilee by one of his former disciples. Curious
     about the reports, John sends a messenger to ask Jesus whether he is “the one who
     is to come.”
    “Go tell John what you hear and see,” Jesus tells the messenger. “The blind see, the
     lame walk, the lepers are cleansed,