The Language of the Day

We have demonstrated that in New Testament times, it was the language of the day to describe someone as being possessed with demons if they were mentally ill or had a disease which no one understood1. The contemporary Roman and Greek cultural belief was that demons possessed people, thereby creating mental disease. Those Christians who believe in the existence of demons are effectively saying that the contemporary pagan beliefs in this area were perfectly accurate2. The first century Jews definitely thought that ‘demons’ were ‘immortal souls’3. But the Bible knows nothing of ‘immortal souls’. Therefore we must conclude that the Bible speaks of contemporary ideas which are doctrinally wrong without highlighting the fact that they are wrong.

Paul says that Sinai is “in Arabia” (Galatians 4:25), but “Arabia” was understood in the first century as a specific area, Nabatea, which isn’t the Sinai Peninsular where we now believe mount Sinai to be located. However, “in antiquity, people venerated Nabatea as the place of Moses’ vision”4. This factually incorrect idea was used by Paul because he wasn’t concerned so much with the details as in using those popular beliefs to present an allegory, connecting Sinai to Gentile Arabia and the Jerusalem of the temple system. The appropriacy of the mention of Arabic/Nabatea may have been because the area was inhabited by Arabs who practiced circumcision and who were therefore despised by the Jews as being fake Jews. We see here in essence the same thing as happened in the Lord’s development of allegories and parables using the popular ideas of Satan and demons, e.g. His parable of the binding of the strong man (Matthew 12:29).

The miracles of Jesus exposed the error of local views, e.g. of demons, without correcting them in so many words. Thus in Luke 5:21 the Jews made two false statements: that Jesus was a blasphemer, and that God alone could forgive sins. Jesus did not verbally correct them; instead he did a miracle which proved the falsity of those statements. It was clearly the belief of Jesus that actions speak louder than words. He rarely denounced false ideas directly, thus he did not denounce the Mosaic law as being unable to offer salvation, but He showed by His actions, e.g. healing on the Sabbath, what the truth was. When He was wrongly accused of being a Samaritan, Jesus did not deny it (John 8:48,49 cp. 4:7-9) even though his Jewishness, as the seed of Abraham, was vital within God’s plan of salvation (John 4:22). Even when the Jews drew the wrong conclusion (wilfully!) that Jesus was “making himself equal with God” (John 5:18), Jesus did not explicitly deny it; instead He powerfully argued that His miracles showed Him to be a man acting on God’s behalf, and therefore he was not equal with God. The miracles of Jesus likewise showed the error of believing in demons. Christ’s miracle of healing the lame man at the pool was to show the folly of the Jewish myth that at Passover time an angel touched the water of the Bethesda pool, imparting healing properties to it. This myth is recorded without direct denial of its truth; the record of Christ’s miracle is the exposure of its falsehood (John 5:4). Another example would be the Jewish myth that the High Priest’s Passover address was a direct speaking forth of God’s words; this wrong idea isn’t specifically corrected, but it is worked through by God—in that Caiaphas’ Passover words just before the crucifixion came strangely true, thus condemning Caiaphas and justifying the Lord Jesus as Israel’s Saviour (John 11:51).

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