THE GREAT GOSPEL OF JOHN
VOLUME 5
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi. (cont.) Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16
- Chapter 45 -
Roklus explains the wizardries of an Indian magician.
Raphael says, "You are really a strange person! Your many experiences have made your head so crazy that you now do not know how to tell the difference between false and actual truth! If you had only asked the magician staying in Thebes to conjure up a sea landscape without a chamber and window, he would not have done that for you for a whole world full of gold, because such a thing would have been quite impossible for him; but in this familiar chamber he could have conjured up for you several other landscapes through this particular window!
2
This magician should only conjure up a solid house in the open nature equipped with everything and able to remain! But that, as we said, he would not do! Therefore that is a work of God, quite honestly "and the other is only the work of a man who is basically only an expert engineer of nature and not at all a so-called magician.
3
But if that is a work of God, then my wisdom is also the same! Everything that you find in me is from God! Therefore do not ask any more how, where and when I received all this!
4
People can certainly perform miracle-like deeds for the eyes of other people; but those are no miracles at all, but instead things that were brought forth quite naturally with very natural means, which only seem to the layman to be a miracle because he has no idea of either the means or of the ways to make use of them for a particular purpose. But if someone tells him the means and their use, however, with the corresponding success resulting from it, he will immediately be able to perform the same miracles as that same magician whom he previously considered to be a miracle-worker."
5
Roklus says, "Even the conjuring up of a landscape by the magician of Thebes?"
6
Raphael says, "In any case, but the means for this are somewhat difficult to receive; for that magician invented a means himself, and the method as well. He will certainly not reveal these, and so it is very difficult for you to achieve the same thing that he performs there and what gives him the reputation of a major magician.
7
But if you understood how to melt pure sand and to make out of it pure glass and finally to burnish and polish it as one burnishes and polishes jewels "a skill very well known to the Indians "you would soon see the miracle very clearly, and all the more clearly if you were also a sort of Apelles, for whom it was possible to paint the water with colours so deceptively that he even deceived the birds with it.
8
Your magician is a famous jeweller, can make glass out of sand, likewise burnish and polish it, and is also one of the best magicians in the whole of India, particularly at drawing and painting the area, of course to a very narrow extent. He constructed his own device, to allow his painted landscape to be seen through such a glass blown especially for the purpose, and it is performed through such a visual illusion that you have seen yourself with your sea landscape.
9
That is now a very secret science which the Phoenicians, and through them also the Egyptians, discovered, and they, keeping it extraordinarily secret, used it for their most extraordinary conjuring tricks. In a few millennia all the nations will have the clearest insight into this; but then there will be no people any longer who, equipped with common sense, will consider such an event to be a miracle, and on top of that one of the most extraordinary sort."