Letter from Minerva McGonagall to her father, Reverend Robert McGonagall ######################################################################## :date: 2022-09-06T16:54:29 :status: draft :category: literature :tags: review, harryPotter, blogComment (from the conversation on `the HPfanfiction subreddit post`_ with some questions from other readers of the thread). While reading “`When the Roses Bloom Again`_” by TheBlack'sResurgence I have been again hit by the nonsense of the Biblical verse “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:17). I don’t want to bother you with details (tiny part of it is in “`Thou Shalt Not Suffer`_” by TheWizardsHarry), but a good biblical argument can be made that this verse in the Hebrew original doesn’t mean what the English (and almost any other) translation seems to indicate it means (hint: what do we know about the magical terminology of the Ancient Israel 1500 BC? Nothing, absolutely nothing), meaning it is not universal renunciation of all magical activity (and this is Harry Potter related post, so let us not deal with the question whether magic is real or not). I still hope to see in the course of the story a letter written by (quite scholarly and intellectual, and trained by him in the Biblical exegesis) Minerva McGonagall to her father explaining, that he really doesn’t have to live with a bad conscience from protecting his sinful anti-Christian or anti-God daughter. .. _`the HPfanfiction subreddit post`: https://www.reddit.com/r/HPfanfiction/comments/x58xm2/letter_from_minerva_mcgonagall_to_her_father/ .. _`When the Roses Bloom Again`: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13954844 .. _`Thou Shalt Not Suffer`: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/5176787 The second group is Leviticus 19:26, 20:27, and Deuteronomy 18:10-11. All of them have the same problem IMHO: using highly technical terminology we know absolutely nothing about (and on the top of that half of the words are *hapax legomenon*, words found only once in the whole Bible). There are examples in the Bible of actual witches IIRC, Saul(?) goes to one and asks her to summon the spirit of Samuel. We also know from other descriptions vaguely the kind of things they do, commune with the dead and curse people. Of course, if you’re writing a HP story you kinda have to assume Christianity is false (or at least WILDLY misunderstood), so it’s description of a witch shouldn’t need to line up with HP-verse anyway Yes, and I am not saying that any magic is perfectly OK (it is obvious that Necromancy and most of the divination are not), but that negative doesn’t apply either: most of magic which would be OK under the UK laws (by mostly for the other reasons than it being magic … murder, enslavement, etc.) would be OK for actual true wizards and witches of the HP world. I am quite forcefully saying that most of Muggle occult (i.e., when Muggles try to make magic without being given the gift of magic) is quite definitively NOT OK. I guess, Biblically one of the most suspicious things in the whole HP series is Mr Filch’s Kwikspell. And to witch-hunts: I am a Protestant, so I am quite able to distinguish between the church doing something wrong (have you ever read the book “Biblical Foundation of Slavery” from 1810 or so? I did) and what is actual Biblical teaching on the matter. That is what were talking about here. I think witch-hunts were completely wrong for many reasons (and which were mostly driven by non-holy reasons … see any Muggle history book on the topic), but it doesn't have to mean that the Church or the Christianity would be against Hermione Granger personally. ---- I (also Protestant) agree completely. My point is that in the Harry Potter world, Christianity as we know it cannot be true (at least it would be VERY difficult to mesh the two in any way that’s even slightly philosophically consistent). So, when I’m writing/reading Harry Potter fanfic, I have my characters operate on the nearest moral system I could come up with that has at least an incline of reason behind it. 🤷🏻‍♂️ I really do not understand. Why? I don’t think you tell me that your faith depends on Jesus’ changing water in wine is the sign of his Divinity. And yes, wizards and witches can be probably do more than His contemporaries, but heck, we can do more than them. So, what’s the problem? ---- My first objection would be that, while Christ’s miracles were not the foundation for his divinity, they were supposed to be proof of it (John 10:37-38, 20:30-31). If there was whole societies going around doing what Jesus did (and according to HP they were doing that kind of thing then because it’s pre-secrecy) then they’re not really proof of anything. Couple of comments on your verses, each one of them would deserve full-size treatise though: 1. John 10:37f … I truly don’t believe that “works of my Father” have to mean miracles here (and if NLT translates it so, it is one more reason why not use that translation … sometimes they are really inserting something which isn’t there). Second, I don’t think that this is primarily about the Jesus’ divinity. I mean, I am a Trinitarian, I do believe in the teaching of first ecumenical councils and all that good stuff, but I see something much more important there. “The Father is in Me, and I am in the Father” really doesn’t feel to me here as an evidentiary proof of the Jesus’ divinity, but it seems to me talking much more about the deep father/son relationship between Father and Jesus, which is in my opinion one of the most important themes in gospels (and especially in the Gospel of Saint John), and which is the relationship which we should try to emulate in our life as our path to holiness. 2. John 20:30f … obviously this verse means that whole gospel is using something to prove something else. The question is what these somethings are. The goal of the gospel is in my opinion something more than just accepting the divinity of Jesus. The goal of a gospel is in my opinion our conversion, accepting Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, accepting his sacrifice on The Cross as healing of our sin, etc. etc. (I could continue for a long time). To this end one doesn’t get however just by reading a book (fill-in complete missiology and theory of evangelization). Any book could serve only as “a sign”. “Sign” (σημεῖα (sēmeia), Strong's G4592) is defined as “neuter of a presumed derivative of the base of semaino; an indication, especially ceremonially or supernaturally”. It seems to me that a sign here is really just a sign: something like a traffic sign telling to a driver “Slow down! Put down your foot from the gas pedal! There is something really important going on here, which you should really not miss.” Miracles are for me only one type of such signs, and not even the most important ones. I am acutely aware that many of those healings or releases from demonization could be probably explained by the current medicine as some kind of natural disease, that quality of scientific reporting in the first century AD certainly doesn’t satisfy our current requirements, and that the transfer of the information from the first century to us doesn’t help either. If some of these miracles could be explained by the science, my attitude towards Jesus would not change at all. And the same goes for the real magic. If some of these miracles could be explained by magic, my attitude towards Jesus would not change either. Miracles are just signs which should turn our focus to Jesus and who he is. Besides, for me much more persuasive sign than healing of the possessed in Gerase is Jesus sitting next to the adulterous woman telling her and saying “Go and sin no more” or “[…] you have had five husbands, and the man you are living with[as] now is not your husband”. That’s for me like the stop sign: “Get out of the car and don’t do anything else until you discover who this guy is”. Witches and Wizards are in direct violation of God’s decree in Genesis 6:3. Next you mention Genesis 6:3. “Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.’” WHAT? I don’t get it. I think it’s very clear in the Bible that any power that can manipulate realty like magic does is either the Holy Spirit, or demonic. That isn’t correct even in our Muggle world. There are many natural powers that can manipulate reality, like any powers at all, and they are just that, natural powers. We are changing reality every day, every second, and most of the time there is nothing super-Spiritual or demonic about it. It is just our ordinary life. You want to limit those powers to ones “that are like magic”, but that is a bad, circular, definition. Magic is whatever is magical, and vice versa. What I think is needed is to redefine “miracle” and “supernatural event”. I think these terms are unfortunate, because they seem to suggest that they are somehow breaking the God given natural order of things. I don’t think they do. They are just working outside of what we understand. I think the foundation of any Christian epistemology must be that sum of everything we know (both as individuals and as total of humanity) is always less than the God’s creation. So, all those “supernatural events” are actually natural, except they are outside of our knowledge. So, yes there are powers outside of human (any human) control, which can be driven by the Holy Spirit or evil. However, the hypothetical Harry Potter-type magic could be very much neither of these: it is just natural gift which is given just to some small group of humans, like the perfect pitch. Somebody just got it, somebody didn’t, but it doesn’t have to mean anything spiritually. ---- As far as I know, the exact meaning of witchcraft is specified if you read through various parts of the bible. Off the top of my head, anyone who communicates with the dead, uses any mystical means to find information, and anyone who unnaturally changes a person's perception or emotional state is performing witchcraft. So the killing curse would be murder, but not witchcraft. The cheering charm would be witchcraft. Chapter and verse, please? I had a look and I cannot for the life of me find the source I read originally that explained it, so I'm going to assume I'm remembering incorrectly. Instead, I looked it up again and compared the source words used in the original languages, which in the Old Testament mostly came down to necromancers (people who spoke with the dead) and diviners (people who used magic to obtain information either current or future.) In the New Testament there is also an instance of the word that the modern 'pharmacist' comes from is used, but the context is different there where it means to condemn drugging and/or poisoning people rather than just making all potioneers out to be witches. A large problem, as I understand it, is that the ancient Hebrews simply used the word witch because 'everyone knows what is meant by it' and everyone then did, but these days we don't understand the context, so we have to try looking at other sources to build a better point of view. That leads to reading sources from nearby peoples like the Babylonians and such. While this gives a vague idea of it all, it's not really a precise way of assigning a definite definition to a word. TL;DR I couldn't find my original source and was probably remembering wrong, witchcraft will basically only include divination, legillimency, and necromancy. That’s exactly what I was trying to say. Whether magic actually exists or not is immaterial for this, but there was certainly a community of people who were dealing with activities described in those verses (be they true magicals, or Muggle magicians doing just some show, or doing something completely else, like dealing with herbal remedies), and they had their own jargon. Bible was most likely written and transferred to us mostly by people outside of this community (just pure probability: number of practitioners of the art divided by number of population) and so it was probably transferred poorly. And then we got to actually translating from Hebrew to current languages (including the modern Hebrew) and there the situation was certainly much worse. I am not saying that Bible as such is unreliable or it is not possible understand it. Mostly its message is quite clear, but there are parts where we really need to tread lightly. We may never understand correctly what was really going on in these verses, we may never know what was actually The Noe’s Arch made from (“Gopher wood” is a true Hapax legomenon), and others; fortunately at least with these I can live pretty well.