Episode 307:
Was Jesus a Wizard? with Dr. Shaily Patel
Transcript!
PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.
Shownotes
(because citations are political)
Today’s episode is the second of a pair centered on early Christianity, because we are joined by the one and only Dr. Shaily Patel.
Dr. Shaily Patel is assistant professor of early christianity in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. Dr. Patel’s research explores the ways in which “magic” was used to advance a number of theological ends in early Christian texts. Her first book, Peter the Magician: Discourses of Magic in Early Petrine Traditions, is all about how magic was used--and not just how we think--by early Christian thinkers across texts.
If early Christianity, magic, and definitions are new to you, that’s ok! It’s new to us, too, really, which is why we did these two episodes. As a reminder, this miniarc looked like:
(E306) Early Christianity Is Actually Kind of Interesting
24 March 2021
No, seriously, it is. We’ll prove it to you. Because you’ll need it for our next episode.
(E307) Was Jesus a Wizard? with Dr. Shaily Patel
7 April 2021
Neither of us are professionally or confessionally equipped to answer this question, so we’re bringing in Prof. Shaily Patel, Assistant Professor of Early Christianity at Virginia Tech and baller scholar of magic & religion.
We talked widely in this episode about what Ilyse didn’t understand about New Testament (a lot, it turns out) and what Megan mis/remembered about New Testament (also a lot).
But a major focus of our conversation was around magic. In part because we wanted to learn whether or not Jesus was a wizard—Dr. Patel said maybe and voted for Jesus to be Team Hufflepuff if he was a Hogwarts type. But in part because the very definition of magic relies on understanding that magic is not religion.
Dr. Patel talked with us about the politics of that definitional frame as well as why it’s too limited: in the texts themselves, there are magicians (even if not actual wizards), people are doing magic to achieve particular ends, and there are ritual components. Dr. Patel suggested that ignoring all the magic people were doing was tantamount to ignoring all the religion people were doing—and it limits our ability to interpret the text, make sense of the ancient world, and put Jesus within his very specific historical context.
We talked about Christian exceptionalism (the Christianity is somehow special or elevated beyond other traditions that we would term religions) and Christian supremacy (the idea that Christians should be special, should be elevated beyond other religious traditions, and should, in fact, work to ensure that they are the dominant religious tradition).
We talked about the New Testament itself, about canon, how Jesus is different things within that set of texts, and to Ilyse’s confusion, how there aren’t really only four books of the New Testament but 27.
We talked a lot about how people think they know this text and know it well—but how the contradictions and nuances actually make it.
We talked about Christianity as a Roman religion—that it is contextual, and that ignoring that context has a real (imperialist!) history.
And, Megan called Paul a chatty bitch, so we weren’t anything but ourselves.
Primary Sources!
(the segment where we talk about how the episode’s themes affect us, as humans, because the “I” matters)
In today’s Primary Sources, Dr. Patel sang a duet with Megan, and then talked about what it has meant to be Hindu, study religion, and study early Christianity. We talked about how religion being what people do is primary for her—in her work, as she delves into what folks were doing when they did magic, and as a human whose own religious tradition was vilified by Christian colonizers, labeled lesser, and has a lot of rituals to be done.
Megan reminisced about realizing the plurality in Christianity, including the time she realized that Protestants sometimes see Catholics as not-Christians.
At some point in Primary Sources, Megan and Shaily realized they had both accidentally gone to Sunday school as non-Protestant Christians. So that was neat. Ilyse was horrified, as she put it, “right in her Catskills.”
Ilyse, having never been hoodwinked into Sunday school, shared a story about her husband Kevin’s experience in shopping churches based on the strength of their basketball teams.
Homework!
(that’s right, nerds, there’s always more to learn)
Dr. Patel assigned a bunch of things! Keep your eyes peeled for her book, which is in process.
Randall Styers' book Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the Modern World (2004)
Magic, A Very Short Introduction by Owen Davies is a great, simple primer
Richard Gordon, "Imagining Greek and Roman Magic" in Valerie I. J. Flint, ed., Witchcraft and Magic in Europe (London: Athlone, 1999).
Curious about Dr. Shaily Patel’s work? We got you.
“Magical Practices and Discourses of Magic in Early Christian Traditions: Jesus, Peter, and Paul,” Dissertation Spotlight in Ancient Jew Review. January 29, 2019.
“Team Teaching an Interdisciplinary First-Year Seminar on Magic, Religion, and the Origins of Science: A ‘Pieces-to-Picture’ Approach,” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,17.1 (2017): 24-36. Co-authored with Melati Nungsari and Maia Dedrick. Available online.
“Excursus: Forms of Ideological Criticism,” in The New Testament: a Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, ed. Bart Ehrman (2019 ed.)
Megan and Ilyse recommend early Christianity scholar Candida Moss, from whom we shamelessly stole the title of this episode: “Was Jesus a Wizard is Actually A Serious Scholarly Question”