Disabled Demons

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 1 traces how ancient ideas regarding the primordial “disablement” and misplacement of the demonic inform Jesus’s ritual “enablement” in the Gospel of Mark. The chapter first examines Mark’s portrayal of demons as impaired entities, which closely mirrors ancient Jewish traditions that identify demons as the residual souls of antediluvian giants. The second part of the chapter traces how the demons’ misplacement as foreign “spiritual” entities in a fleshly world contributes to Mark’s demarcation of relations between Jewish and non-Jewish members of the Jesus movement. The chapter concludes by exploring how Mark constructs the human body as prone to possession by external spirits, as evidenced in the exorcism narratives as well as Jesus’s claim to being possessed by the “holy spirit.” In antiquity, such porosity was characteristic of “weak” bodies. The Gospel of Mark, however, emphasizes Jesus’s masculine potency through his “binding” of the Devil through exorcism.