Otherness
Brian Inglis
Jesus the Magician Morton Smith (Gollancz £6.95) Miracles Geoffrey Ashe (Routledge £4.75) The idea that Jesus was a magician, in the sceptical sense of that term, was put forward by German freethinkers early in the last century. He and his disciples, the theory was, were a band of tricksters who moved from village to village faking miracles; and when the authorities finally caught up with him, the disciples had to fake the resurrection, too, so that they could stay in business.
Professor Morton Smith here presents what might be described as a refined version of this anti-gospel. 'Trying to find the actual Jesus', he admits, 'is like trying, in atomic physics, to locate a submicroscopic particle and determine its charge'; all the more so because as soon as the Christians were in a position to do so they destroyed all the hostile evidence they could find from pagan or heretical writers, so that what we are left with 'has about as much historical value as a portrait of Charles de Gaulle or Mao Tse Tung drawn exclusively from Gaullist or Maoist sources'. The early fathers, however, were not able to make a complete job of it. The gospel writers themselves provide some evidence of Jesus's magicianship— the turning of the water into wine at the Cana wedding feast. And later writers, when they were rebutting pagan arguments, sometimes unwittingly revealed what those arguments were. Painstakingly, Smith uses them all to construct a portrait of Jesus as a .run-of-the-m ill shaman-figure, whose divinity was thrust upon him by his followers.
The general thesis is admirably, if a little laboriously, documented. Largely owing to the work of Mircea Eliade it is now possible to fit the prophets — Abraham, Moses, Elijah and the rest—into the sham anic context; and it fits Jesus, too — the point Margaret Field made in her provocative Angels and Ministers of Grace, a work which Smith seems to have missed.
Smith, though, is not willing to accept that shamans may actually have enjoyed any powers of the kind which would qualify them as magicians in the original sense of the word. He is prepared to credit Jesus with healings, because they can be attributed to auto-suggestion on the part of the patients — as, he feels, can a few of the other miracles: if the disciples saw Jesus glow in the dark, it was because 'they all 'saw' (by hallucination) what they hoped to see'. Walking on water, though, or changing it into wine, he rejects on the traditional rationalist grounds. But this makes it hard to account for his admiration for St Paul, who, if he did not have the powers he claimed for himself, must have been a monumental liar. As Eliade, from his researches, has been con vinced of the reality of shamanic powers, Smith could at least have taken seriously the possibility that Jesus enjoyed them; in which case it becomes much easier to understand why he wielded such influence. There is now no way of telling which, if any, of the episodes described in the gospels actually happened, let alone whether they happened as described; but at least if Jesus could work what were regarded as miracles, this, combined with his unusual teachings, would help to account for the way in which he came to be regarded as divine.
Geoffrey Ashe approaches the subject from the other, Christian, angle. He accepts the reality of paranormal phenomena, and uses them to account for much of what used to be regarded as miraculous. Extra-sensory perception, he assumes, is natural, in the sense that it will eventually be accounted for. A miracle, though, is a different matter; .`a divinely ordained exception', something which cannot be accounted for except as the work of God.
Ashe is careful to point out that by 'God', he does not mean a bearded gentleman fooling around with thunderbolts. The term divine, for him, refers simply to what in desperation he calls 'something OTHER, transcendent'; the gods may simply be our symbols for that otherness. But the otherness is meaningful; 'a miracle is not merely an exception, but an exception with a point . . . it is an ordained exception, ordained for a reason'.
Miracles consists of a historical survey of the whole subject, and a most agreeable conducted tour it turns out to be. It suffers only from the opposite limitation to Jesus the magician; as a Christian, Ashe can be prejudiced against those who in the past have been a threat to belief in the divinity of Jesus. For example, he derides Philostratus's life of Jesus's shaman contemporary, Apollonius; 'it is quite remarkable how feeble, disconnected and pointless the marvels in that story are'. Disconnected, yes; pointless, no — as Smith emphasises. The similarities between the life-stories of Jesus and Apollonius are astonishing, so much so that Christians ever since have had to cling to the myth (as Ashe does) that the life of Apollonius was fabricated as a rival gospel, designed to provide a counterweight to the Christians' quartet.
Ashe's tenderness towards Christianity, though, helps him to put a case which is well worth making: that for too long we have accepted David Hume's identification of the miraculous with the unexplained. The distinction needs to be made between, on the one hand, phenomena which, even if we cannot account for them in terms of any known forces, are sufficiently well established by experience and experiment to be recognised as part of the natural order; and on the other, those phenomena which point to the existence of 'a beyond, which transcends that order'.
It is, of course, possible that the 'beyond' Will also eventually be naturalised, in the sense that its purpose will be revealed. It is also possible that there is no 'beyond': that what we are witnessing when we encounter phenomena of the kind which Ashe regards as miraculous. — inspired promptings, say, from what appears to be a Guardian Angel — it may simply turn out to be an ingenious evolutionary device of a purposive nature which, hag-ridden as we are by neoDarwinism, we have refused to recognise. But either way, the need remains to make a tentative distinction between everyday manifestations like telepathy — reported in all eras, from all parts of the world — and miracles in the purposive sense Ashe is describing: enabling us to accept the first, in spite of the plaintive objections of the dwindling rump of sceptics, and leave it up to individuals to decide whether to accept or reject the second-or simply to fall back on agnostic doubt.
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