The Magician Label Nobody Wanted
When Alex O'Connor sits down with Andrew Mark Henry of Religion for Breakfast to ask whether Jesus was a magician, the conversation quickly reveals that the question itself is the wrong one to ask. The real question, Henry argues, is not what Jesus was doing but how onlookers chose to categorize it. That distinction -- between the act and its moral framing -- turns out to be the engine driving the entire history of "magic" in the ancient world.
Henry's central thesis is disarmingly simple: miracle and magic are not different kinds of events but different moral judgments applied to the same kind of event. An exorcism performed by someone you trust is a miracle. The same exorcism performed by someone you distrust is sorcery. The ritual is identical; only the audience's allegiance has changed.
Miracle and magic as categories of ritual are subjective. They are in the eyes of the beholder. If you like what the guy's doing and if you think he's getting the power through God or angels or something good, we're going to call it miracles. But if he's doing the power through the power of demons, we're going to call it magic.
This framework is elegantly demonstrated through the clash between the early Christian theologian Origen and his opponent Celsus, a Greek philosopher writing in the late second century. Both men read the same gospel accounts of Jesus performing supernatural feats. Celsus concluded that Jesus had learned Egyptian sorcery during the flight to Egypt described in Matthew's gospel, attributing his powers to demons and charlatanism. Origen insisted those same powers flowed from God and the Holy Spirit. Neither disputed the events themselves -- only the moral bucket into which they should be sorted.
Morton Smith and the Problem of Definitions
The conversation traces the modern scholarly debate back to Morton Smith's 1978 book Jesus the Magician, which Henry credits with usefully blurring the line between miracle and magic but faults for failing to grapple with what "magician" actually meant in antiquity. The Greek word magos (plural magoi) derives from Persian priestly functionaries, and early Greek writers like Herodotus used it in a straightforward ethnographic sense to describe foreign priests who performed sacrifices and interpreted dreams. But almost simultaneously, other writers began wielding it as a slur -- a way to mark certain ritual practitioners as illegitimate, spooky, or dangerously foreign.
Nobody's going to call himself a magus. Simon Magus is called Simon the Magus. He's not called Simon the Megas because he wants to be a megas. It's because people on the outside are like, "Oh, he's doing bad stuff. We're going to call him Simon Magus."
This point deserves emphasis. In the ancient world, "magician" was an accusation, never a professional title. No one hung out a shingle advertising magical services. The people who actually made amulets, inscribed curse tablets, and prepared protective formulas were scribes, metalworkers, gem artisans, monks, and rabbis. Their work was, as Henry puts it, "part and parcel of a marketplace of ritual power in the Roman Empire," and nothing about the material evidence suggests it was secret, occult, or evil.
The Mundane Reality of Ancient "Magic"
Perhaps the most compelling stretch of the conversation is Henry's determined effort to de-mystify ancient magical practice. The curse tablets found at the temple of Sulis Minerva in Bath, England, offer a case study in the ordinary. Approximately 160 lead tablets were deposited in a sacred spring, many of them addressing petty grievances -- stolen cloaks, missing money. Henry describes the spring as functioning like a "lost and found" for the town, with temple priestesses likely helping depositors place their tablets as part of routine temple services.
My whole job as a historian of ancient magic is to try to de-mythologize it. It's actually quite mundane. If you really wanted the green team to lose, you would go to the local lead guy, buy some lead from him, and then maybe take it to the local scribe and say, "Hey, what do you got for anti-chariot curses?"
Similarly, the incantation bowls found in Mesopotamia -- clay bowls inscribed with spiral texts against demons, buried upside down in houses like spiritual roach motels -- show clear evidence of rabbinic authorship. The "magical" practitioners were the literate establishment, not shadowy outcasts. In late Roman Egypt, the people crafting protective amulets inscribed with Psalm 91 or the Trisagion ("Holy, holy, holy") were monks and bishops repurposing liturgical knowledge for protective ritual.
The Wand That Was Not a Wand
O'Connor raises the intriguing case of early Christian catacomb art depicting Jesus raising Lazarus while pointing a stick-like object at him -- an image that looks, to modern eyes, unmistakably like a wizard brandishing a wand. Henry pushes back firmly. These are devotional images created by Christians for Christian spaces. The artists were not labeling Jesus a sorcerer. The scholar Lee Jefferson has argued that the rod references the staff of Moses, and some catacomb frescoes place Jesus with his staff on one side and Moses striking the rock on the other, creating deliberate visual parallelism.
A counterpoint worth noting: Henry himself acknowledges the ambiguity. Even if the Christian artist intended a Mosaic allusion, someone like Celsus viewing the same image might seize on it as evidence of sorcery. The visual grammar of the ancient world was not fixed, and the same image could be read through competing moral lenses -- much like the rituals themselves.
Freelance Ritual Experts and the Growth of Christianity
The conversation takes a sociological turn when Henry introduces the concept of the "freelance ritual expert," drawing on the work of Heidi Wendt. These were charismatic individuals -- in Max Weber's sociological sense of charisma, meaning perceived otherworldly power -- who operated outside institutional structures. John the Baptist, with his self-invented water ritual performed in the wilderness, fits this model precisely. So does Jesus, if the gospel accounts of his exorcistic activity reflect any historical kernel.
Henry suggests, following historian Ramsay MacMullen, that Christianity's rapid growth owed less to the hopeful content of its message than to the demonstrated power of its holy men over demonic forces. People were not necessarily won over by theology; they were impressed by practitioners who could credibly claim to control evil spirits.
People weren't necessarily convinced by the hopeful message of the gospel. They were like, "Oh, that holy man, that St. Anthony, that guy out in the desert, I hear he can get rid of the evil demons that are plaguing my kid or haunting that cave over there. So, we should listen to this guy."
This is a provocative claim that some historians of early Christianity would push back on. The social and economic networks of early Christian communities, the appeal of monotheism in a pluralistic empire, and the structural advantages of an organized church all played roles that cannot be reduced to charismatic demon-wrangling. Henry's framing, while illuminating, risks overstating the exorcistic dimension at the expense of other factors that made Christianity viable as a mass movement.
The Magic of the Written Word
The final major thread concerns the power attributed to writing itself. In a world where perhaps five percent of the population was literate, the written word carried an aura that modern readers struggle to appreciate. Henry describes how the apocryphal letter of Jesus to King Abgar of Edessa -- a brief, unremarkable note saying he was too busy to visit -- became a powerful magical object precisely because it was believed to bear the trace of Jesus's hand. Christians inscribed it on city gates for protection, copied it onto amulets, and treated its graphic symbols as inherently efficacious regardless of content.
O'Connor draws a sharp analogy to cargo cults, where Pacific Islanders built replica airports from sticks and leaves in hopes of summoning the return of supply planes. The comparison is apt: in both cases, the outward form of a powerful technology is reproduced without understanding its mechanism, in the belief that the form itself carries the power. Ancient pseudo-scripts -- fake Hebrew letters, imitation hieroglyphs, meaningless character sequences inscribed on amulets -- follow the same logic. The appearance of writing was itself a spell.
Bottom Line
This conversation succeeds not by answering whether Jesus was a magician but by systematically dismantling the question. Henry demonstrates that "magic" in the ancient world was neither a practice nor a profession but a label -- one applied by opponents to delegitimize rituals that looked identical to the miracles claimed by allies. The real historical Jesus, if recoverable at all from the gospel texts, most plausibly fits the role of a freelance ritual specialist: an exorcist-healer operating through personal charisma outside institutional structures. That role was thoroughly ordinary in first-century Judea. What was extraordinary was how effectively his followers leveraged claims of demonic mastery into a global religion -- and how their opponents used the same evidence to brand the whole enterprise as sorcery.