By Adrian VanVactor,
FaithSearch Evangelist
Jesus: Magician or Messiah?
I often heard the following from my mentor, illusionist André Kole.
Imagine Jesus and His disciples walking through the dusty streets of Galilee with five tractor trailers following behind them. That is what it would have taken for Jesus to have done the sort of things He did, if he were mere first century magician.
I had the privilege of touring as part of André Kole’s eight-member evangelism team. I performed as a guest-star, tech director, stage manager, and solo missionary during my years on staff. Every night we shuffled five tons of equipment in and out of auditoriums to accomplish the many magical inventions from the mind of André Kole.
André was also a top consultant for some of the world’s greatest illusionists. For decades, André collaborated with David Copperfield on his television specials. Nearly half of the grand illusions in Copperfield’s live touring show were André Kole inventions. André was also the mind behind the famed illusion of making the Statue of Liberty disappear.
Each night, I was behind the scenes as we made a fourteen-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty disappear… in slow motion… from the bottom up! When I joined the team, I was challenged to review Jesus’ miracles, to imagine how I might re-create the miracles, limiting myself to first century technology. With each theory, André would put it to the test. Each time I failed. This two-year study affirmed my faith in Jesus as the Messiah.
In the last Paraclete I wrote how I, as an illusionist, could debunk most if not all modern-day claims of the “supernatural.” When I put Jesus to those same tests, I found that He could not have been a magician and perform the miracles He did. No mere magician could. André Kole and I were not alone in this conclusion. In my section of the book Unmasking the Masquerade, I quote David Copperfield, who said during a television broadcast:
The miracles of the Bible go beyond anything that any magician or illusionist would ever perform… but greater than any physical miracle was the ability of a man named Jesus to bring purpose and meaning to the lives of millions of people throughout the centuries.
