Miracles – Jesus learned magical arts in Egypt [Answered]

Jesus did work some miracles, but they were not by God’s power. We have traditions that tell us he learned magical arts in Egypt.

Aside from the fact that it is highly unlikely—to say the least!—that someone could raise the dead and open the eyes of people born blind by demonic or magical power (these were the kinds of miracles that Jesus performed, and they demonstrated the power of God, not the power of demons), the idea that Jesus learned magical arts in Egypt has as much factual or historical support as the claim that Santa Claus delivers gifts through the chimney on Christmas Eve.

In fact, the Talmudic account that claims that a certain “Jesus” practiced magic actually places that “Jesus” in the wrong century! Also, the miracles of Jesus resulted in multitudes of Jews praising and worshiping the God of Israel, to whom Jesus pointed all people. To this day, around the world, genuine miracles take place as followers of Jesus simply pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the name of Yeshua the Messiah. This is hardly magic!

For the most part, it is only a small number of extremely fundamentalist Jews who take an objection like this seriously, but since it has been raised, we will take a moment to refute it.

We made reference (above, 5.7) to various Talmudic traditions that referred to a certain “Yeshu” (Jesus) who lived during several different centuries, concluding that either the Talmud was talking about two (or more) different people or that it was totally confused in its chronology.²²⁰ The text in question here, b. Sanh 107b, dates this Yeshu to the reign of King Jannaeus, 104–78 b.c.e. So, if this was actually supposed to talk about the Yeshua of the Gospels, it is off by a hundred years.

This would be similar to placing Ronald Reagan in the Civil War. How seriously would you take a history book that alleged that, while Reagan was president during the Civil War in the 1860s, he held secret meetings with Martian leaders who gave him counsel? Well, that’s how seriously this Talmudic account should be taken, and only the most staunch and unscholarly Jews would even try to defend its contents as truthful and accurate.

For the record, here is the full account as rendered in the Soncino edition of the Talmud in footnote 17 to b. Sanh 107b. (It is found in the footnotes because it had been removed from the text by censors.)

What of R. Joshua b. Perahjah?—When King Jannai slew our Rabbis, R. Joshua b. Perahjah (and Jesus) fled to Alexandria of Egypt. On the resumption of peace, Simeon b. Shetach sent to him: ‘From me, (Jerusalem) the holy city, to thee, Alexandria of Egypt (my sister). My husband dwelleth within thee and I am desolate.’ He arose, went, and found himself in a certain inn, where great honour was shewn him.

‘How beautiful is this Acsania!’ (The word denotes both inn and innkeeper. R. Joshua used it in the first sense; the answer assumes the second to be meant.) Thereupon (Jesus) observed, ‘Rabbi, her eyes are narrow.’ ‘Wretch,’ he rebuked him, ‘dost thou thus engage thyself.’ He sounded four hundred trumpets and excommunicated him. He (Jesus) came before him many times pleading, ‘Receive me!’ But he would pay no heed to him.

One day he (R. Joshua) was reciting the Shema’, when Jesus came before him. He intended to receive him and made a sign to him. He (Jesus) thinking that it was to repel him, went, put up a brick, and worshipped it. ‘Repent,’ said he (R. Joshua) to him. He replied, ‘I have thus learned from thee: He who sins and causes others to sin is not afforded the means of repentance.’ And a Master has said, ‘Jesus the Nazarene practised magic and led Israel astray.’²²¹

You might say, “But doesn’t the end of this text explicitly say that is talking about Jesus the Nazarene?”

The answer, of course, is yes it does, which points to how confused the whole account is—not to mention completely absurd—and why no reputable scholar defends it today.

You might still ask, “But shouldn’t we have an answer for these charges? After all, they have been raised.”

Yes, they have been raised, but there is no more need to defend Yeshua against such slanderous charges than it is necessary to provide scholarly documentation showing that, contrary to accounts in periodicals like the National Enquirer, Elvis Presley and Adolph Hitler are not alive today. Perhaps also the Jewish leadership should be required to provide scholarly documentation refuting every libelous charge that has come against them.

Perhaps the rabbis should be required to prove that they do not make Passover matzah every year using the blood of Christian children whom they kidnap and crucify. Perhaps the Israeli leadership should be required to demonstrate that Jews are actually humans and not the “sons of monkeys and pigs.” (For more on this, see my chapters, “Lies! Lies! Lies!” and “Bigotry and Biased Reporting,” in Our Hands Are Stained with Blood.)

The fact is that, during his lifetime, Jesus was vilified and slandered, so there’s no surprise that this continues to happen today. God himself is vilified and slandered to this day, so there’s no surprise that such ridiculous charges are made against his Son.

However, for those wanting a proper assessment of mythical accounts such as the one just quoted—I say mythical if they are alleged to describe the Jesus of the Scriptures—the verdict pronounced by professor Solomon Schecther in 1898, with reference to the medieval collection of anti-Jesus myths called Toledot Yeshu, stands true.

He stated, “All the so-called Anti-Christiana collected by medieval [Jewish] fanatics, and freshed up again by modern ignoramuses, belong to the later centuries, when history and biography had already given way to myth and speculation.”²²²

In stark contrast with all this are the miracles of the Messiah, who would not put on a show just to demonstrate his power, repeatedly refusing to give a miraculous sign to those who tested him (see, e.g., Matt. 12:38–42; 16:1–4). He even rebuked those who asked for such a sign, saying, “A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a miraculous sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah” (Matt. 16:4).

But he was moved with compassion to heal the sick and raise the dead, and his miracles brought glory and attention to his Father, God (for more on this, see vol. 2, 3.4). In fact, following the pattern of Moses and other great prophets in Israel’s history, the miracles were part of the divine validation for their mission (see, e.g., Exod. 4:1–9, 29–31; 1 Kings 18).

As I wrote in Israel’s Divine Healer:

In the OT, Yahweh’s healings were perceived as acts of mercy and grace, reflective of his goodness, and worthy of praise (see, e.g., Pss 6:2[3] and Ps 103, which have as their background healing from serious illness;… cf. also Php 2:27). So also, it is noted several times that Jesus healed out of compassion, stated most broadly in Matthew 14:14: “When Jesus landed and saw a large crowd, he had compassion on them and healed their sick.”

The following individual cases of healing or resurrection out of compassion (always splanchnizomai) are also recorded: the leper (Mk 1:40–42); the two blind men (Mt 20:29–34, in response to their cries for mercy; cf. Mk 9:22, and the request for compassion [“take pity on us”] from the father of the demon-possessed boy); the bereaved widow (Lk 7:11–15).

In similar fashion, Jesus fed the five thousand and the four thousand because he was moved by compassion for them (Mk 6:34, 8:2), and it was because of his compassion for the crowds—like sheep without a shepherd—that he urged his disciples to petition the Lord of the harvest to send forth laborers into his harvest field (Mt 9:36–37). Thus these supernatural healings were not merely authenticating signs of his divinity or Messiahship… ; rather, they reflected the very heart of God towards sick and suffering humanity.

Based on this observation, one gains insight into the character of the Father: Jesus healed and delivered because God was with him (Ac 10:38). In curing the paralytic on the Sabbath, he was only doing what he saw his Father doing (Jn 5:16–20); in fact, it was the miracles themselves that gave proof to the fact that the Father was in him and he in the Father (Jn 10:38).

Thus Jesus could say to his detractors, “Do not believe in me unless I do what my Father does” (Jn 10:37); and to Philip he could pointedly ask, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.… The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father living in me, who is doing his work. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves” (Jn 14:9–11).

As expressed elsewhere in the epistles, Jesus was “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb 1:3a), “the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15a)—both in power and in love. Through his words and deeds, his life and death, he made God known to humanity (Jn 1:18).²²³

So then, far from practicing magic and leading Israel astray, he ministered in the power of the Spirit and brought many Jews and Gentiles into an intimate relationship with the God of Israel. For a typical picture of the Son of God in action in New Testament times, see Matthew 15:30–31, and notice carefully the results of the miracles (my emphasis):

Great crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed them. The people were amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled made well, the lame walking and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel.

What else would you expect? The crowds continue to praise the God of Israel because of Jesus the Messiah until this very day.

²²⁰ While some Hebrew scholars claim that the Talmudic yešu reflects a natural philological development (from yešu‘a > yešu‘ > yešu) rather than a polemical one (yešu standing for yimaḥ šemô wezikrô, “may his name and memory be obliterated”), there is no question that, at some point in time, the polemical usage became prevalent in Rabbinic circles.

The widespread nature of this pronunciation through the years is seen most clearly in modern Hebrew usage, where Israelis are familiar with Jesus as Yeshu rather than Yeshua. Interestingly, the Koran uses a mistaken name for Jesus (Arabic ʿisa instead of yasu‘a), apparently based on the fact that Mohammed learned the pronunciation of Jesus’ name from Jewish sources, not realizing that these Jews referred to Jesus disparagingly as “Esau” (Arabic ‘isa).

Thus, throughout the Talmud and the Koran, the name of Jesus is incorrectly rendered in Hebrew/Aramaic and Arabic. Does this reflect a spiritual battle over “the name” (cf., e.g., Acts 4:7; Phil. 2:9–11)? With regard to Jews, this is not simply a matter of pronunciation, since a Hebrew speaker or religious Jew reading the Tanakh will not realize that the strange name “Yeshu,” which he has heard for years, is actually yešu‘a, found as a proper name 27x in the Tanakh (most notably, in the person of the postexilic High Priest, Joshua/ Yeshua, a Messianic prototype; see, e.g., Zech. 3:1–10; 6:9–15; Ezra 3:1–9).

Regarding the pronunciation and spelling of Yeshua’s name that would have been current in his day, there is evidence of the mutation of gutturals in Mishnaic Hebrew (cf. M. H. Segal, A Grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew [1927; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1978], 23), along with evidence of the confusion and even loss of gutturals in later Samaritan Hebrew (cf. Angel Sáenz-Badillos, A History of the Hebrew Language, trans.

John Elwolde [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 153ff., with reference especially to the work of Z. Ben-Hayyim). However, it is very difficult to prove that orthographic, final ‘ayyin completely dropped out (even in a proper name) as early as the first to second century.

Note also that in Syriac, the name is spelled yešu‘, preserving the final ‘ayyin without the nonsyllabic glide vowel (called pataḥ furtivum) which developed in Hebrew morphology when case endings disappeared.

²²¹ Reference is then made to R. Travis Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (London: Williams & Northgate, 1903), 51ff., where the passage is discussed at length.

²²² Solomon Schecther, quoted in Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament, 122; for discussion of the Toledot, which, thankfully, are totally ignored by almost all Jews today, cf. ibid., 122–28.

For a modern resurrection of this scurrilous work in a book containing a bizarre mix of scholarship and nonsense, see Frank R. Zindler, The Jesus the Jews Never Knew: Sepher Todoth Yeshu and the Quest of the Historical Jesus in Jewish Sources (Cranford, NJ: American Atheist Press, 2003). He prints the text, with comments, on pages 423–50. Note well that this book was published by the American Atheist Press!

²²³ Brown, Israel’s Divine Healer, 222–23; I have removed internal cross-references and the endnote references from the quote here. The interested reader will find a comprehensive study of the subject of God as Healer in this volume, along with discussion of the theology of miracles.

Relevant to our discussion here is the comment of Morton T. Kelsey, Healing and Christianity (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 89: “The healing ministry of Jesus is the logical result of the incarnation: God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son; Jesus so loved that he healed. His healings were the authentication of his mission and his person. They flowed naturally from him because he was what he was.”

Brown, M. L. (2007). Answering Jewish objections to Jesus, Volume 4: New Testament objections. (102). Grand Rapids, Mich.; Baker Books.

Miracles – Jesus learned magical arts in Egypt [Answered]