re: #1035 Obdicut

Yes, that helps. I know all the OT stuff on witchcraft (though likewise it’s rather confused), but I didn’t have the impression that Jesus himself said much about it.

Thanks for the Acts passage. That’s a real OT style showdown, in a way. However, it’s a Jewish false prophet, not a Christian witch, so it doesn’t really address a Christian tradition that embraces witchcraft. Assumedly, the witches of that tradition claim to be acting under God’s name and asking him for favors, in the end.

That’s the point I’m making— a ‘false prophet’ is only discernible by a ‘true prophet’. A hard-line Sunni will say that a hard-line Shi’ite is not a Muslim, but obviously, anthropologically or in common-sense, they are.

I get you. Jesus’ myriad approaches to healing and help, to me, demonstrate the point that it’s not about the technique.

Once you start to think that mixing herb A with toenail B and chant C, you’re trusting in the technique and not the God.

There are plenty of folks who live in the margin there. However, it seems like the Nigerians in question were pretty far into witchcraft, to the point where it’s easy to say that they were waaay past simply praying that Jesus would work through them to do miracles.