Note 59 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

From the course of the narratives hitherto, it would appear that the demons, in this as in the first narrative, addressed Jesus in the manner described, before anything occurred on his part; yet the two intermediate Evangelists go on to state, that Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. When did Jesus do this? The most natural answer would be: before the man spoke to him. Now in Luke the address of the demoniac is so closely connected with the word προσέπεσε, he fell down, and then again with ἀνακράξας, having cried out, that it seems necessary to place the command of Jesus before the cry and the prostration, and hence to consider it as their cause. Yet Luke himself rather gives the mere sight of Jesus as the cause of those demonstrations on the part of the demoniac, so that his representation leaves us in perplexity as to where the command of Jesus should find its place. The case is still worse in Mark, for here a similar dependence of the successive phrases thrusts back the command of Jesus even before the word ἔδραμε, he ran, so that we should have to imagine rather strangely that Jesus cried to the demon, ἔξελθε, Come out, from a distance. Thus the two intermediate Evangelists are in an error with regard either to the consecutive particulars that precede the command or to the command itself, and our only question is, where may the error be most probably presumed to lie? Here Schleiermacher himself admits, that if in the original narrative an antecedent command of Jesus had been spoken of, it would have been given in its proper place, before the prayer of the demons, and as a quotation of the precise words of Jesus; whereas the supplementary manner in which it is actually inserted, with its abbreviated and indirect form (in Luke; Mark changes it after his usual style, into a direct address), is a strong foundation for the opinion that it is an explanatory addition furnished by the narrator from his own conjecture.59 And it is an extremely awkward addition, for it obliges the reader to recast his conception of the entire scene. At first the pith of the incident seems to be, that the demoniac had instantaneously recognized and supplicated Jesus; but the narrator drops this original idea, and reflecting that the prayer of the demon must have been preceded by a severe command from Jesus, he corrects his previous omission, and remarks that Jesus had given his command in the first instance.