A Genealogy of Satan, Part 6: Demon-Haunted Gospels

The Gospel of John agrees with the other gospels that the world is occupied by demonic forces able to thwart the will of God. Christ has come to free the world from this Satanic (and Roman) domination, and his miracles are signs of this mission--victories for good in a war against evil.

         John differs from the synoptic gospels in containing much less storytelling. What there is, before the crucifixion narrative, inserts seven "signs" between blocks of preaching in Jesus' voice. Only three times is Satan mentioned by name. There are exactly three references to demon possession, and in all three Jesus denies that he himself is possessed. This is in sharp contrast to Mark, Luke, and Matthew, where Jesus repeatedly casts out other people's demons.

As noted earlier, the Greek gospels distinguish between the Devil (Diabolos, 'Accuser,' a literal translation of Hebrew Satan) and demons (daimonia, Greek for lower gods or spirits). Satan goes by other names, but they all refer to the same personification of evil. When crowds accuse Jesus of casting out demons as an agent of "Beelzebul, ruler of demons," he replies, "If Satan is also divided against himself, how will his kingdom stand?" (Luke 11:15-18). There is a Zoroastrian pattern throughout the Gospels: Jesus, who leads a unified kingdom of angels and good people, is at war with the Devil, who leads a unified kingdom of demons and bad people.

Three times in the Book of John (in chapters 7, 8, and 10), Jesus himself is accused of being demon-possessed. The first time references his impressive learning and his healing on the sabbath. In the second instance, he calls listeners who don't believe his teaching children of the Devil, "the father of lies" (8:44), and they respond in kind, with their own insults, ethnic and religious: "Are you not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?" Samaritans were, of course,  a hated Jewish sect--tainted by race mixing during Babylonian Captivity--that rejected the Jerusalem temple. A grain of truth is that Jesus grew up in the northern province of Galilee. He is in that sense foreign. Jesus lets the ethnic slur pass. Earlier in John, he had, in fact, offered Samaritans salvation (4:5-42). Here Jesus simply denies that he has a demon, but then goes on to assert that anyone who keeps his word "will never taste death." This confirms to "the Jews" that he has a demon (8:52) because it is an obviously false claim. The Devil was earlier defined as "the father of lies." This episode, though it shares mythology with the other gospels, reads as a swapping of insults, a flyting, not an argument of substance. 

          The third time Jesus is accused of having a demon is right after his parable of the Good Shepherd and seems to pivot again on whether he lies, not on accusations of other evil. Neither of these three episodes implies the kind of demon-possession that Jesus cures in the Synoptic Gospels. There is no dysfunction. Rather, "you have a demon" is like "you're a liar.".

Jesus calls Judas, his betrayer, a devil (diabolos, Greek for 'satan'), and Satan "enters" Judas at the Last Supper (John 6:70, 13:27), but John avoids describing others as possessed by demons like the legions of evil spirits in the Synoptic Gospels. In John's world, unbelievers are children of Satan, but this is a guilty choice, not an innocent derangement. Demons signal dishonesty, not infirmity. This is in contrast to the Gospel of Mark, written decades earlier, which blames demon possession for mental illness. Albert Nolan notes that the ailments attributed to demons such as paralysis, weakness, mania, and fever "are what we would call dysfunctional. Diseases which appear outwardly on the skin would not have been described in this manner because they were of the body rather than of the spirit inhabiting the body" (p. 32). But this distinction is not always clear.

Jesus' performs many exorcisms in the Gospel of Mark, the precursor of Matthew and Luke. Twelve times in the shortest gospel, Jesus models the cleansing of the world and the coming Kingdom of God by casting out "demons" (daimonia) or "unclean spirits" (pneumata to akatharta). Sometimes the reference is general, as when Jesus drives out "many" of them (1:32) or gives his disciples authority to do so (3:15), but other passages describe specific ailments caused by specific demons. Loud raving, even breaking of chains, describes obvious maniacs who become docile when spirits are cast out in Mark 3. Epilepsy seems the diagnosis of a child in possessed in an unspecified way by an unclean spirit in Mark 5:25-30, and epilepsy is obvious in the case of a mute boy who "fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth" (Mark 9:20).

Various diseases are directly cured by Jesus in the synoptic gospels with no attribution to demons. These include the restoring of withered hand, causing a paralytic to walk, stopping hemorrhaging, and curing ordinary deafness, blindness, and muteness. But muteness is demon-possession, in Luke 11:14, and a demon prevents a woman from standing up straight in Luke 13:11. 

          Matthew distinguishes between types of sick people brought for healing: "those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics" (NRSV 4:24). This translation carries over demoniacs and paralytic (diamonizomenous and paralytikous) directly from the original Greek, but epileptics is a modern term paraphrasing a Greek word meaning "moon struck," the source through Latin of the English word lunatic (the unhelpful translation in the King James version). Matthew distinguishes between (1) demon possessed, consistent behavior attributable to a indwelling parasite like those in Invaders from Mars, and (2) moon-struck, intermittent erratic behavior attributable to lunar phases, like the lycanthropy of Lon Chaney, Jr., in The Wolf Man. What they have in common is that, though they may  be consequences of sin--perhaps the sins of ancestors--the afflicted are helpless. They aren't sinners but all-but-robotic victims needing deliverance. Here the demons control rather than tempt.

In contrast to legions of anonymous demons causing mania and disease, there is the Devil, a supernatural person with a name who doesn't stoop to common possession. Rather, he tempts people to sin, and, if they comply, recruits them into his army. They become living demons. Mark's gospel opens, after Jesus' baptism, with the story of such temptation, a ordeal of initiation establishing his sinlessness: "He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he went with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him." Matthew and Luke expand this with derailed temptations so similarly worded that either one writer must have read the other or there is a common source (Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13). 

In all three gospels the defeated Devil leaves. Matthew's Jesus formally dismisses him with words of authority. "Get thee hence, Satan" in the King James version translates the Greek Hypage Satana. Jesus uses this same wording in two gospels (with the addition of behind me) speaking, not to Satan but to Peter. Satan's name is shorthand to describe human tempters. The occasion is when is Jesus tells his disciples that he must be killed but will rise in three days. Peter rebukes him for this, but Jesus turns to the disciples and rebukes Peter: "Get behind me, Satan!" ("Hypage opiso mou Satana"). "Your thoughts are not of the things of God but of the things of men" (Mark 8:33; Matthew 16:23). Ordinary human concerns, such as for long life, security, wealth, and pleasure, come from the Devil, understood throughout the gospels to be the ruler of the "world" (kosmos) or at least of the current age (aion).

The natural world, the one before a second birth, is more like Halloween than Christmas, described in Paul's letter to the Ephesians: "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath" (NIV, 2:1-3). The kosmos in the gospel aion is demon-haunted, permeated by sin, from which Paul promises release in Christ.

Reference

Nolan, Albert. Jesus Before Christianity. Orbis, 2001.