Note 29 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

In order to remove this inconceivable difference between the conditions of one age and another, avoiding at the same time any imputation on the New Testament, Olshausen, whom we may fairly take as the representative of the mystical theology and philosophy of the present day, denies both that all states of the kind in question have now a natural cause, and that they had in the time of Jesus invariably a supernatural cause. With respect to our own time he asks, if the apostles were to enter our mad-houses, how would they name many of the inmates?29 We answer, they would to a certainty name many of them demoniacs, by reason of their participation in the ideas of their people and their age, not by reason of their apostolic illumination; and the official who acted as their conductor would very properly endeavour to set them right: whatever names therefore they might give to the inmates of our asylums, our conclusions as to the naturalness of the disorders of those inmates would not be at all affected. With respect to the time of Jesus, this theologian maintains that the same forms of disease were, even by the Jews, in one case held demoniacal, in another not so, according to the difference in their origin: for example, one who had become insane through an organic disorder of the brain, or dumb through an injury of the tongue, was not looked on as a demoniac, but only those, the cause of whose condition was more or less psychical. Of such a distinction in the time of Jesus, Olshausen is manifestly bound to give us instances. Whence could the Jews of that age have acquired their knowledge of the latent natural causes of these conditions—whence the criterion by which to distinguish an insanity or imbecility originating in a malformation of the brain, from one purely psychical? Was not their observation limited to outward phenomena, and those of the coarsest character? The nature of their distinctions seems to be this: the state of an epileptic with his sudden falls and convulsions, or of a maniac in his delirium, especially if, from the reaction of the popular idea respecting himself he speaks in the person of another, seems to point to an external influence which governs him; and consequently, so soon as the belief in demoniacal possession existed among the people, all such states were referred to this cause, as we find them to be in the New Testament: whereas in dumbness and gouty contraction or lameness, the influence of an external power is less decidedly indicated, so that these afflictions were at one time ascribed to a possessing demon, at another not so. Of the former case we find an example in the dumb persons already mentioned, Matt. ix. 32, xii. 22, and in the woman, who was bowed down, Luke xiii. 11; of the latter, in the man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech, Mark vii. 32 ff., and in the many paralytics mentioned in the gospels. The decision for the one opinion or the other was however certainly not founded on an investigation into the origin of the disease, but solely on its external symptoms. If then the Jews, and with them the Evangelists, referred the two chief classes of these conditions to demoniacal influence, there remains for him who believes himself bound by their opinion, without choosing to shut out the lights of modern science, the glaring inconsistency of considering the same diseases as in one age natural, in another supernatural.