Note 85 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

After the completion of the cure, Luke dismisses the narrative with a brief notice of the astonishment of the people; but the two first synoptists pursue the subject by making the disciples, when alone with Jesus, ask him why they were not able to cast out the demon? In Matthew the immediate reply of Jesus accounts for their incapability by their unbelief; but in Mark, his answer is, This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting, which Matthew also adds after the discourse on unbelief and the power of faith. This seems to be an unfortunate connexion of Matthew’s; for if fasting and praying were necessary for the cure, the disciples, in case they had not previously fasted, could not have cast out the demon even if they had possessed the firmest faith.85 Whether these two reasons given by Jesus for the inability of the disciples can be made consistent by the observation, that fasting and prayer are means of strengthening faith;86 or whether we are to suppose with Schleiermacher an association of two originally unrelated passages, we will not here attempt to decide. That such a spiritual and corporeal discipline on the part of the exorcist should have effect on the possessed, has been held surprising: it has been thought with Porphyry,87 that it would rather be to the purpose that the patient should observe this discipline, and hence it has been supposed that the προσευχὴ καὶ νηστεία, prayer and fasting, were prescribed to the demoniac as a means of making the cure radical.88 But this is evidently in contradiction to the text. For if fasting and praying on the part of the patient were necessary for the success of the cure, it must have been gradual and not sudden, as all cures are which are attributed to Jesus in the gospels, and as this is plainly enough implied to be by the words, καὶ ἐθεραπεύθη ὁ παῖς ἀπὸ τῆς ὥρας ἐκείνης, and the child was cured from that very hour, in Matthew, and the word ἰάσατο, he cured, placed between ἐπετίμησε κ.τ.λ. Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, and ἀπέδωκε κ.τ.λ. delivered him again to his father, in Luke. It is true Paulus turns the above expression of Matthew to his advantage, for he understands it to mean that from that time forward the boy, by the application of the prescribed discipline, gradually recovered. But we need only observe the same form of expression where it elsewhere occurs as the final sentence in narratives of cures, to be convinced of the impossibility of such an interpretation. When, for example, the story of the woman who had an issue of blood closes with the remark (Matt. ix. 22) καὶ ἐσώθη ἡ γυνὴ ἀπὸ ὥρας ἐκείνης, this will hardly be translated, et exinde mulier paulatim servabatur: it can only mean: servata est (et servatam se præbuit) ab illo temporis momento. Another point to which Paulus appeals as a proof that Jesus here commenced a cure which was to be consummated by degrees, is the expression of Luke, ἀπέδωκεν αὐτὸν τῷ πατρὶ αὐτοῦ, he delivered him again to his father, which, he argues, would have been rather superfluous, if it were not intended to imply a recommendation to special care. But the more immediate signification of ἀποδίδωμι is not to deliver or give up, but to give back; and therefore in the above expression the only sense is: puerum, quem sanandum acceperat, sanatum reddidit, that is, the boy who had fallen into the hands of a strange power—of the demon—was restored to the parents as their own. Lastly, how arbitrary is it in Paulus to take the expression ἐκπορεύεται, goeth out (Matt. v. 21), in the closer signification of a total departure, and to distinguish this from the preliminary departure which followed on the bare word of Jesus (v. 18)! Thus in this case, as in every other, the gospels present to us, not a cure which was protracted through days and weeks, but a cure which was instantaneously completed by one miracle: hence the fasting and prayer cannot be regarded as a prescription for the patient.