Woke up to an interesting thought today - Jesus’ miracles in the New Testament mirror Old Testament miracles, but with an important distinction: where the OT ones were acts of creation ex nihilo, the NT ones were acts of transmutation.

Like, to feed a crowd God made manna; Jesus made fish and loaves… out of fewer fish and loaves. God made water spring from a rock, Jesus made casks of wine out of casks of water. I suppose God used dust and a rib to make the living Adam and Eve, but that’s still more raw creation than the NT parallel of making the living Lazarus out of the corpse of Lazarus.

And that does make a sort of sense, that God bound to a specific physical form would have powers bound accordingly. And it’s not like existing Christianity totally misses the transmutation thing - thematically, there’s the God made the world//Christ made it the world redeemed thing, but more than that, the Eucharist! Transubstantiation! (No, not “tea substantiation”, iPhone, wtf.) The central priestly ritual as not a blessing cast on the worshippers but an act of transmutation!

Now I wonder how that schema could account for the empowered artifacts - the Shroud, the Grail, the Spear.