Do the Deuterocanonicals promote magic?

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Hey everyone. I read on a website that the Deuterocanonicals promote magic. I think it was talking about in the book of Tobit where it says that the smoke of a fish heart drives away demons. Could someone please explain this to me? Thanks.
 
Far from presenting an exercise in magic, Tobit presents the ancient Christological symbol of the fish (who is, in Tobit 6:3, literally a catcher of men) salted and roasted on coals (as Christ was scourged and roasted in the sun on the cross) in order to destroy the power of a murderous demon and drive him away from a virginal bride. The fish is used to heal a blind man (cf. John 9) by making things like scales fall from his eyes (cf. Acts 10:18).
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I am really puzzled by this assertion. We can draw a simple comparison between the Tobit passage and the Hebrew canon, however:

In 2 Kings 5, Naaman dips seven times into the Jordan and is cured of leprosy.
  • Naaman dips in the river at the word of a prophet of God. Tobiah uses the fish guts at the word of an angel of God.
  • There is nothing inherent to the river to cure the disease. There is nothing inherent in fish guts to drive away demons or cure disease.
  • Upon being cured of leprosy, Naaman praised God. Upon driving away the demon, Tobiah praised God. Upon being cured of blindness, Tobit praised God.
All these used physical objects at the command of God to effect their cures. All of them praised God first and foremost. Tobiah specifically renounced his own desire (for his bride) in the expulsion of the demon.
 
I don’t know anything about fish guts being magic or not, but Jesus rubbed spit and mud in a blind man’s eye and the blind man was healed, after washing, no less. To the best of my knowledge, neither spit nor mud has been proven to have any empirically measurable ability to cure blindness, but faith works wonders.

Consider Moses raising his staff over the Red Sea. Was the staff “magic”? No. The reason the Red Sea parted is because God said it would. Faith again.

There is a vast difference between “magic” and faith, though some people have had problems making the distinction. “Magic” is something you do(or try to do, more often than not). “Faith” is something God does in you, or sometimes even despite you.
 
Holly3278 said:
Hey everyone. I read on a website that the Deuterocanonicals promote magic. I think it was talking about in the book of Tobit where it says that the smoke of a fish heart drives away demons. Could someone please explain this to me? Thanks.
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Did Jesus promote magic?–there was a time when a tax collector (no doubt someone trained him on Jesus in order to find some excuse to arrest Him and eventually put Him to death) dropped in on Jesus as He and Peter were chewing the cud (or whatever they did back then); Jesus proposed to Peter the absurdity of the Owner’s Son having to pay taxes… still, Jesus told Peter to “go fish” and the very first fish will provide the means to pay for both our tax fees!

…or Yahweh’s Command to Moses to make a serpent so that those who got bitten by serpents could save themselves by simply looking up at the graven image of the animal whose poison was cursing through their bodies–they got life instead of death if they obeyed!

It is not the smoke/burning that drove away the demon but the fact that what Yahweh God Commanded, through the Archangel Raphael, was adhered to by Tobiah (ditto with the situation with Tobit’s blindness).

Remember the 10 lepers that Jesus healed–what healed them, was it the fact that they went to look for a Priest or was it Jesus?

Every single instance when anything supernatural took place in Scriptures, through God’s Divine intervention, nothing of magic occurred since magic is both a trick and a reliance on the occult!

…further evidence?, if the books found in Protestant Bibles were inspired by the Holy Spirit and the compilation of these books was also inspired by the Holy Spirit, why would the Holy Spirit also inspire the various Bishops that gathered during the three Councils to include, as part of the Holy Canon, those books that would cause man’s demise?

Maran atha!

Angel
 
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