If demons are evil, sentient spirit beings, as many modern Christian scholars believe, why would these creatures follow after Jesus in what some claim to be an effort to expose him, knowing they would be silenced by Jesus and cast out of the ones they possessed (Mark 3:11-12; cp. Acts 16:16-18)? After all, if they saw one of their number cast out, wouldn’t logic demand that the others keep their distance? Yet, they kept coming in what seems to have been a suicide mission, which, for all intents and purposes, culminates in making Jesus famous. Why would otherwise extremely intelligent beings (or so they are declared to be by modern Christian scholars) do such a thing for their far superior and mightier Enemy? Yet, we are told this is what occurred, and we are expected to believe things happened just this way!
Mark tells us that these demonized folks kept coming to Jesus, and, if we accept the record as a literal account, like modern scholarship seems to do, they seemed focused on disclosing Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, but why would they do that?
And unclean spirits, when they saw him, fell down before him, and cried, saying, Thou art the Son of God. And he straightly charged them that they should not make him known. (Mark 3:11-12)
What would such a thing have looked like? Well, if we rid ourselves of Hollywood’s pagan interpretation of demons, which, unfortunately, many modern Christian theologians embrace, perhaps we can discover what really occurred. First of all, if we are left with strictly human beings coming to Jesus, much of the Hollywood fantasy surrounding demonic possession can be dropped and not even considered, because it is too fantastic and, quite frankly, not supported in the Biblical text. Indeed, the Jewish exorcists did treat demonic possession as though it were a spiritual phenomenon, whereby a spirit, identified as the spirit of a dead man[1] took possession of a living being.[2] How that occurred isn’t said, but this is what was believed by ancient Jews. Nevertheless, all the tales surrounding such possession have the air of pagan superstition, as far as the spirits, themselves, are concerned. Moreover, a theatrical display for the ancient exorcist was involved, and he seems to have desired to appear as some great one (cp. Acts 8:9), having power / authority over the dead or the spiritual realm. Sound familiar?
Secondly, if demons were merely human, what might that look like? We are given a picture of what demon possession was like in Acts 16, at least in so far as such possession involved spiritualism. There, a young Jewish woman followed Paul around for several days telling everyone Paul and those with him were men of God having knowledge of the way of salvation (Acts 16:16-18). This sounds a little like the demons telling those around Jesus that he was the Messiah. What did the young woman (or more probably her master) hope to gain? It seems the young spiritualist was very useful to her master in gaining some degree of wealth (Acts 16:19). Nevertheless, once the spiritualist was exorcised, all hope of gain through the phenomenon was lost.
It seems the young woman’s master had hoped to gain some wealth through Christ after Paul and company left Philippi—something similar to how charlatans make money off the name of Christ today. If the young woman could have been identified with Paul and company, she might have been used by her master as “the Lord’s prophetess” after Paul left the city on other missionary journeys. In this manner her master may have had a sizable income coming from Christians who used her gift—through ‘donations’ of course.
Seen in this light, one may be able to understand why these psychics or clairvoyants kept coming to Jesus, saying he was the Christ. They hoped to gain a living off the vast number of folks who fanatically followed him. Most folks weren’t so much interested in what Jesus taught, as they were in seeing a new miracle. Such people were fertile ground for psychics and clairvoyants, who were all about slight of hand, causing people to wonder over what they were able to do in the presence of an audience (cp. Acts 8:9-11), and making money off the name of God has always been and still is big business (cp. Matthew 21:12-13).
How this particular matter transpired seems to be understood from Matthew’s account of Mark 3:11-12. In Matthew 12:23, just after Jesus cast out a demon (verse 22), folks began to wonder if Jesus were the Christ. Thus, they seem to have taken the witness of another demonic (a psychic or a clairvoyant), which, no doubt, Jesus would have immediately silenced, but only after he had begun to tell folks Jesus was the Christ (Mark 3:11). Moreover, seeing that the people began to receive the witness of a demonic (i.e. the psychic or the clairvoyant), the Pharisees began accusing Jesus of casting out demons by Beelzebub (Matthew 12:24). After all, didn’t the demonic say Jesus was the Christ? Thus, the logic of the scribes and Pharisees seems to be: if the people were receiving the witness of a demonic, Jesus must be using him to preach his message. Although their argument was soundly refuted by Jesus in Mark 3:22-30, the Pharisees’ tale was still effective in turning the people away from the Gospel.
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[1] See Josephus: Wars of the Jews 7.6.3 (185).
[2] Such an understanding is unbiblical. In the era prior to the coming of Christ, dead folks were dead and had no understanding or consciousness in the grave (Psalm 146:4; cp. Job 14:21; Ecclesiastes 9:5; Isaiah 63:16).
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