Beware of Demons -Part 1

Demons are just as plentiful today as in Jesus's time.

This article is the start of a short series about Jesus’s use of the Greek word translated as “demons, “devil,” and “evil spirits.” This Greek word has taken a very different meaning today than it had in Christ's time. As importantly, the Greek word had a different meaning in Judea, during his life, than it did generally in Greek history. For those who have trouble with parts of the Gospel seeming "outdated," the large role of "casting out demons," in Jesus’s story can be a stumbling block. Strangely enough, however, the ancient Jewish view of demons has more in common with modern thinking than it did with the Greek philosophy from which the term comes.

We talk about people fighting against their internal demons today. We do this by adding a veneer of terminology for mental disorders. If the Jesus story occurred today, it would be filled with people having "addictions," "troubled minds," "mental disorders," and "delusions." These terms come from specialized professions today that dealing with mental disorders, having their own terminology. However, the real delusion here is that we have a better understanding of the human mind and the human spirit today than people did two thousand years ago. What we really have is a new way of talking about what we don't understand. Understanding brain chemistry is not the same as understanding people’s minds and their ability to agree with how others see reality.

The difference between our terminology and Jesus’s words in describing mental disorders is that Jesus’s ideas can be understood by people of all cultures throughout human history. Our terminology today is a new and possibly temporary phenomenon, dying out almost as quickly as it is invented by fad and fashion.

Greek Demons Versus Judean Demons

The Greek word daimonion (δαιμόνιον) does not mean "demon" as an "evil spirit", much less the "devil" in Greek. The Greek word means "divinity", "divine power", "a lower divine being." It is not a negative term. Quite the opposite. As an adjective, it meant "miraculous," and "marvelous," not "demonic." It was used as an honorific, "a good lady" was a demoness, "a good sir” was a demon. On the spiritual side, it referred to "visitations of heaven" and the "ways of the gods". As a verb, it meant "to be possessed by a god".

However, this is clearly not how Jesus or others in Judea during his era used the word. Both Greek and Judean use daimonion to refer to "spirits," that is, to things that exist in a non-material way, as all mental concepts are non-material. Jesus describes daimonion with the Greek word for "spirit" (pneuma). For example, in Matthew 12:27, he uses daimonion at the beginning of a discussion about casting out demons, but later in the same discussion, he switches to pneuma, in Matthew 12:43 and Matthew 12:45, equating the two ideas. (More about the meaning of pnuema and related words in this article.)

Jesus only uses the Greek word, daimonion, thirteen times himself. It is variously translated as "devil," "evil spirit," or "demon." Translators mixing it with other words such as diabolos, so those reading English translations cannot tell which Greek word he was using. He usually uses daimonion in the context of describing the specific act of "casting out devils." In other words, he discusses the cure more than the disease.

How did the positive Greek idea of daimonion become the idea of a mental disorder in Jesus’s time? Remember, the verb form of this term means "to be possessed by a god." To the Jews, the Greek "gods" were false, false ideas, delusions. Being possessed by them was to be deluded or crazy. From that small step, the term became a general term for mental disorders. Remember, they didn't have our own vocabulary for mental disease. Nor did they have a vocabulary for ideas that take on a life of their own, what we describe today as a “meme,” a word invented in only 1976.

Of course, for various historical reasons, the idea of “demons” today has become confused with various mythologies describing various types of malicious spirits. Certainly, some of Jesus’s own words are used to suppert those folk tales. In this series of articles about demons, we will examine what he said more closely and see how many of these ideas vanish upon closer inspection of what he actually said.

Has Our Thinking Advanced?

If you view people as foolish then and more enlightened now, perhaps you should read this article in Nature, the leading international journal of science. It explains how modern psychology is unable to reproduce the results of its “scientific” studies. Our most famous and influential psychological studies are based on little or no science. Some of them have been demonstrated to be built on faked data. Our "scientific" understanding of the human mind is largely an illusion. Science knows many new things about brain chemistry, but little about the conscious mind.

Look back on our "scientific understanding" of the human mind through recent history. Every major influential psychological theory starting with Freud has been proven wrong to the degree that they are testable at all. What we commonly find in the treatment of mental disorders is a list of horror stories: lobotomies, electroshock, the abuse of drugs, and s so on. Except for the use of electricity, none of these methods are particularly new. Evidence of brain operations and certainly the use of drugs to address mental illness go back to well before Jesus’s era.

Indeed, much of alcoholism and illegal drug use today, while seen as "demons" in themselves, are also thought to be self-medication for undiagnosed mental disorders. Both the mental disorders and this self-medication has been going on throughout human history. Indeed, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate the disease from its treatment.

Conclusion

As a translator, my desire is to represent what Jesus said as accurately as possible for today’s reader. This means I have to avoid presentism: the bias of judging our views today as inherently better than the thinking of prior eras. This means I have to present Jesus’s ideas in terms we can appreciate today.

In translating the daimonion, this is less difficult than it appears. My translation is simply “personal demons.” This perspective avoids the whole mythological aspect of the idea of spiritual entities that are mysterious rather than a part of us. It should eliminate many of the problems people have in believing that Jesus and his followers, “cast out demons.” Indeed, we might say that their mission of bringing “good news,” was asking people to reevaluate their thinking in the light of a “realm of the skies” and the possibility of perpetual life. Jesus and his students taught that curing people of common mental disorders requires only surrendering to a higher set of values.

In the next article in this series, I will examine how Jesus describes “spirits” having a life of their own independent from the minds they inhabit. This againA is not as alien an idea as we make it appear.