 I actually find Epuleus in his defensive himself as a magician in a work called the Apology very helpful because he defines magic as simple communication with your gods and divine beings. It's acts of communication. A lot of the times that I've heard apologetic defenses of Jesus not doing magic is an argument along the lines of well he's not doing magic because he's not using paraphernalia like talisman he's not using complex complicated strings of words like you see in the Greek magical papyri which it's a string of vowels or in unintelligible words that we call vocase magikai. All right, so Dr. Henry, Dr. Litlow welcome to our show. Thanks for having us. Yes, thanks appreciate it awesome. So when I invited you both on I found it very interesting that you both had subject matter specialties that coincided specifically ancient Christian history specifically the topic we're talking about today is going to be ancient Christian magic. Could Dr. Henry could you start us off by just kind of telling us a little bit about ancient Christian magic what it entails how is it related to the earlier forms of demonic magic that we found we find in the scrolls. Magic is one of those words that is so difficult to define. I often say it's it's not a separate thing from religion like when we when you have a ritual that calls upon a higher power to accomplish something that you desire like what is the real difference between a prayer and writing something down on an amulet or a curse tablet. Like if you say dear God please protect me that that's a prayer. If you put it on an object and you wear that around your neck suddenly it's called a talisman or an amulet. So a lot of the bifurcation between religion and magic is a is a subjective distinction. The same goes with miracle versus magic you know Jesus himself was accused of doing magic by some of his opponents like Kelsus as described by the early Christian author origin. So when I define magic when I use the term magic I'm usually referring to small scale rituals that people do on an individual level. I try to avoid the term actually and use more specific terms like rituals that are meant to protect or curse or heal because so many of these things that we call magic fall into one of those categories of healing and healing spell or formula you know please take away this headache from from the protection keep this demon away from me and lumped into that as exorcism and then cursing we have all these objects that are led curse tablets led curse tablets called defixiones where you would write down like curse so and so for stealing my my cloak may the the power of the gods subject judgment upon him. So we have rituals about cursing protecting healing exercising and if we want to call that magic let's use the term very loosely because it's not necessarily when we were when we use the word magic it suddenly brings up ideas of secrecy or subversive or evil but as far as we can tell from the archaeology of magic the stuff was not it wasn't being done in secret you were likely able to go to your local shop and be like hey I really need an amulet for my sick baby what can you do for me. Yeah absolutely it really our distinction between things like magic and religion as Marvin Meyer points out in his text the text of ancient Christian magic he says that we really tend to nowadays scholars create this false dichotomy between religion and magic is something we do versus what they do I find it very interesting that there's a lot of continuity between what's going on I mean even though the theology may change for lack of a better term they're still doing the same technological practices so I found that very interesting Dr. Litwood did you want to take this up. Yeah well I mean that's a super introduction that's already been given you have to start out with theoretical observations here and yeah the fact is there's been an apologetical stream that has continually tried to distinguish either religion and magic or miracle and magic you know and a good example of this is you know the phylacteries that you know Jews are called upon to wear and yeah so if you're Jewish it's a phylactory if you're Greek and Roman it's a talisman and you know you can have negative nuances that are wrapped up in this unnecessarily for the the Greeks and Romans who are you know still you know called by that Christian name of depreciation the pagans so we need to be very careful about that you know there's many imprecatory prayers in the in the Psalms and these are essentially curses but we use that kind of fancy you know name imprecatory prayers so that you know we can kind of clean up the the violence of the rhetorical language I actually find Epuleus in his defensive himself as a magician in a work called the Apology very helpful because he defines magic as a simple communication with your gods and in divine beings it's its acts of communication and it is yeah oftentimes the there's a certain domesticity to the to the rites so the the rites will be performed home in the home there of a smaller scale then they can be performed anywhere so if you wanted to distinguish you know state cults the big state cults from magical practices you might be able to do that on the idea that you know the the state cults you know when they want to sacrifice everybody's involved it's a it's a public holiday it's a huge festival with a feast and they bring in this huge bull and it's sacrificed by a large altar everyone can see it it's public and yeah the the smaller scale rights as Dr. Henry said they're not they're not secretive but they are more private in many cases so you'll you'll do it at night add a junction of three roads or you'll do it in your living room I mean I'm tempted to almost queer the discourse here because you you could just define all miracle as magic and and we could just define you know every everything as magic you know including Jesus's miracles um and I'll see where that takes us yeah I mean ironically so my dissertation advisor in my doctoral program David Frankfurter writes about this in his book Christianizing Egypt and he uses the term magic not as a high fidelity definition trying to identify certain rituals but as a very loose heuristic he almost uses it almost as just as an adjective like this thing is magical this thing is magical in so far as it is efficacious it has agency so he'll use terms like there's there's a magic to the spoken word and that magic of the spoken word could be in a quote-unquote sanctioned religious situation like I I baptize you in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit boom suddenly you are baptized like that there's a magic to that word like that that that phrase was said by a literate specialist and something happened he says there's a magic to the written word so if you if you write down something and especially in the mostly a literate society the the power and the efficacy and the agency that writing has so he he happily applies the term magic to almost anything uh as a qualifier not as a type of ritual but as a quality of a ritual if the ritual means to to bring some agency or power into the here and now we let's call that magical and that could be something as simple as as a wedding you know I pronounced you a married couple you know boom your ontological status has changed so in that in that case it yeah it's playing with the term magic well said yeah performativity performativity is is part of it where you you say something and then by the very act of saying it you do it yeah absolutely um I was reading uh brian copenhaver's book um the book of magic um I think it's a rerelease of an earlier text he did but um he makes this really interesting point about simon getting back to one of your uh specialties doctor like what a simon of samaria like we think of ax chapter eight verse four through 25 is uh nowadays because we're looking at it from a certain point of view uh with certain kinds of glasses on back back on the text that simon's doing something bad because he's asking peter for um you know give me this power but copenhaver makes a really interesting point um he says that it's a natural mistake um them doing this in ax because in simon's day magic was the commercial enterprise you have a religious specialist you know making receipt recipes charms curses tablets curse tablets amulets talismans love potions just like y'all are talking about so um that was very interesting and dr. lila brought up uh you know new testament um Jesus cursing i'm i'm really reminded of jesus and mark chapter what chapters is that chapter 11 mark 11 verse 12 where he's cursing the fig tree and then i'm thinking about um paul in first currentians five verse five where he's talking about uh he's basically like doing a greek magical papyri curse he's he's like saying hand this guy over in the flesh to satan he's saying a lethron test sarcos you know in the flesh um and he's he's like present in the spirit of the lord you know um you know to emo penumatos soon uh te duname to kurio you know he's he's present in the power of the lord when they're going to hand this guy over to satan to be destroyed i found that very interesting like we're looking at it with this artificial divide whereas like somebody at that time there's no huge distinction there um i just wondered if y'all had any further thoughts on that yeah interesting point so in in john three we hear that you know the spirit blows where it wills but if you look carefully at x chapter eight and this is distinctive to x chapter eight um there's a the people are baptized including simon who you know becomes a christian just like everybody else and um they there's a delay in in the giving of the spirit so that the apostles have to drop down to samaria and then the spirit only comes upon people exactly when the apostles lay their hands on people and so it's very different than than what you find in john the it's it's not the spirit just comes upon anybody if the spirit comes whenever the apostles apply their hands and it's that performative aspect that um i won't say mechanical but predictable aspect the predictability of spirit transmitted through hands that's what simon observes and that's what he wants to get and of course peter goes ballistic and you know that simon instead of you know tron you know chomping away uh wanting to you know claim battle against the apostles like urinaya says he he cries and he says pray for me so that you know i i can uh come to a better understanding but that's really how the how the text actually portrays the giving of the spirit it it's a magical operation i would say because of that performative aspect excellent what about you dr andrey yeah i mean a lot of the times that i've heard apologetic defenses of jesus not doing magic is an argument along the lines of well he's not doing magic because he's not using paraphernalia like talisman he's not using complex complicated strings of words like you see in the greek magical papyri which it's it's a string of vowels or in unintelligible words that we call vocase magikai and you know jesus just uses short usually short sentences like you know peace be still or just laying on of hands setting aside the the two miracles where he uses spit it's almost always just speech and gesture but the the effects are similar you know it's it is causing things to happen in the here and now supernaturally so the difference is not so much uh quality it's just a difference in complexity and there's still a there's still a performative aspect of putting a hand on somebody or saying something authoritatively and so much of what we would call magical practice probably entailed that short short formulas laying on of hands but that's the sort of stuff that doesn't survive in the archaeological record you know what survives in the archaeological record are you know papyrus formulas from egypt sometimes bronze amulets from asia minor or syria but like so much of what we call magic is lost to us that was probably happening every single day amazing um yeah i'm i'm just reminded of mark you know jesus is telling everybody constantly e gyro you know e gyro rise you know right so he's like commanding them like with some kind of power um well gentlemen this has been an amazing conversation thank you so much for coming on dr henry where can people find you i guess the main place you can find me online is my youtube channel religion for breakfast so youtube.com slash religion for breakfast it's a one-stop shop world religions youtube channel a lot of the stuff is early christianity just because that's my field but i'll cover everything from buddhism to islam to Haitian bodu you know you name it that's it's going to be published on religion for breakfast dr henry has an amazing patreon as well so be sure to join that um dr what where can people find you yeah just punch my name into youtube i've got a small channel as well as a patreon and yeah obviously i'm able to answer most questions over the patreon so hop on there and um make yourself known would love to meet you and hear what you're thinking about right and if you want to learn coptic to read these spells yourself dr letla and i are doing that right now so you know hop on he teaches those languages too so it really comes in handy so until next time thank you gentlemen very much have a pleasant night