A Ghost among the Tombs

Abstract

This chapter tackles the longest and most articulated exorcism narrative in the Gospels, Mk 5:1–20. Mark and the other Gospel traditions inherited from the earliest groups of Jesus followers a conceptualization of the Otherness of the “spirits” rooted in the cultural idioms of Enochic traditions. The identity of these “spirits” as “unclean” is widespread in Second Temple Judaism and indexes the mytheme of the partial survival of the primeval giants, the ill-fated offspring of the union between angels and women. However, Mark combines such a mythological representation with pan-Mediterranean ideas about the return of certain classes of troubled dead, which are well attested in antiquity. The chapter moves from these initial observations to a more detailed analysis of Mk 5:1–20, in which the foreignness of the possessing “spirit” is further compounded by the insertion of an anti-Roman political theme. By reading the narrative of Mk 5 as a reflection on and a refraction of a ritual of exorcism, the chapter shows that an interpretation informed by the insights of anthropological literature can understand the exorcism not simply as an inverted imitation of Roman imperialism but as a means to reshape imaginatively the local structure of ethnic identities in Gerasa, a locale in which Jewish and Gentile identities had to cohabit in flux and in contrast up to the catastrophic events of the first Jewish war.