VIII. Demonology Contemporary to Jesus

So far we have considered the effects of Old Testament, Persian, Apoca­lyptic, and Greek demonologies upon those of the time of Jesus. There seems to have been a continuous conflict between the attempt to limit the Jewish beliefs to one God and the tendency to absorb various demonological beliefs from neighboring cultures, especially a fundamental good-evil dual­ism from Persia. There also seems to have been a tendency strictly within educated Jewish circles to return to and re-write pre-Mosaic traditions of demonological monsters and fallen angels, etc., and thereby illuminate the origins of the kingdom of evil which the coming Messiah will destroy. Among the less educated classes there was probably a tendency to practice the magical rites, such as demon exorcism, which were common in sur­rounding countries.

We can learn a great deal about first-century Jewish beliefs from the New Testament itself. It cannot be over-emphasized that despite great efforts made by the chief priests to find charges to bring against Jesus, it is not once stated that Jesus commits heresy by acknowledging Satan and demon possession. There is a hint of such talk in the passage from Mark 3:22­

And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelze­bu!, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons."
Even if the two statements are meant to be casually connected, they say that simply Jesus must be mad in order to cast out demons. They do not say that he must be mad to recognize them.

Jesus counters the charge of the chief priests in the corresponding pas­sages from Matthew and Luke:
And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out?"(24)
It appears from this passage that the exorcism of demons was not an un­common practice in Israel. It was apparently not forbidden by the priests. If the priests themselves practiced exorcism as Jesus charges, and yet forbad its practice by others, why does Jesus fail to mention this in his many charges of hypocrisy?

Mention is made of other Jewish exorcists in Mark 9:38, Luke 9:49, and Acts 19: 13. In each of these cases the exorcist uses the name of Jesus. Does this mean that such exorcism sprang up in the wake of the success of Jesus'? Or had it existed all along'? The charge by Jesus that the sons of the Pharisees cast out demons indicates that it had existed all along.

Yet Jesus seems to be unique among Jewish exorcists:
And when the demon had been cast out, the dumb man spoke; and the crowds marvelled, saying, Never was anything like this seen in Israel."(25)
Jesus was not the only exorcist the people had seen. His uniqueness must lie in other sources. For one thing, many exorcists might well be operating in his neighborhood, but they were probably all of them much less success­ful than he. The very success of Jesus was unique. For another thing, primitive methods of demon exorcism rely upon elaborate rites using magic words, magic gestures, and special instruments, and Jesus was probably unique in his independence from these means. Josephus, the Jewish histor­ian who died in 95 A.D., gives the following account of an exorcism per­formed by a Jew named Eleazor before the emperor Vespasian :
The manner of cure was this: He put a ring that had a root of one of those sorts mentioned by Solomon to the nostrils of the demoniac, after which he drew out the demon through his nostrils; and when the man fell down immediately, he adjured him to return unto him no more, making still mention of Solomon, and reciting the incantations which he composed. And when Eleazor would persuade and demonstrate to the spectators that he had such power, he set a little way off a cup or basin full of water, and commanded the demon, as he went out of the man, to overturn it, and thereby to let the spectators know that he had left the man." (26)
Jesus, unlike Eleazor, need only say "Hold thy peace, and come out of him." and the demon departs. To be sure, we are still dealing with a magic phrase, but it is so unpretentious that the "authority" of Jesus must be of a new and remarkable kind.

There are vestiges of magical practice in the healing of the Gadarene. In this case Jesus asks the demon for his name and receives the answer "My name is Legion." Anyone familiar with Frazer's Golden Bough and similar accounts of primitive magic will recognize the high magical value attached to possessing the name of a demon. After being cast out, the demons flee from the Gadarene into the herd of swine. Here again we find a typical primitive belief in the transference of qualities from one object to another. Each of these two magical devices is also used in the ritual of Eleazor above.

In general, Jesus works without any emphasis upon ritual. The account of the healing of the Gadarene, which constitutes the one exception, seems so scientifically unlikely that we have some justification for attributing it to a folk tale which crept into the "memories" of Jesus. The conditions which Jesus imposes upon the father of the epileptic boy whom he heals are more in character: "If thou canst believe, all things are possible." And what kind of ritual could have been performed upon the daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman whom Christ healed without even seeing?

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24. Mark 1:27.
25. Matthew 9:33.
26. Josephus, Antiquities VIII, ii, 5, as quoted by Langton, op cit.

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