Smoke & Mirrors

Abstract Smoke & Mirrors: Discourses of Magic in Early Petrine Traditions is a book about how magic disappears from early Christian texts that feature the apostle Peter. It offers a discursive genealogy of magic as it shifts and coalesces across four texts ranging in date from the New Testament period to late antiquity: the Gospel of Luke, the Acts of the Apostles, the Acts of Peter, and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies. Smoke & Mirrors shows how writers in this Petrine literary tradition came to redescribe those of Peter’s activities that, in the wider Roman literary imagination, were stereotypically associated with magic. Petrine authors first mitigated the resemblances of these activities to ancient magic and then began attributing to the same activities a series of new conceptual associations—associations that allowed the category of miracle to coalesce in the conceptual space left by magic’s elision. Equipped with a distinctively Christian category of wonderworking, these authors used it to help forge their individual orthodoxies, leveraging miracle toward such decidedly nonmagical ends as establishing apostolic authority, articulating group boundaries, generating conversion, and signifying heresy. Ultimately, Smoke & Mirrors argues that magic and miracle—categories co-constituted in Petrine texts—are fundamental to early Christian self-fashioning.