Note 94 — Chapter IX · MIRACLES OF JESUS.

If in conclusion we cast a glance on the gospel of John, we find that it does not even mention demoniacs and their cure by Jesus. This omission has not seldom been turned to the advantage of the Apostle John, the alleged author, as indicating a superior degree of enlightenment.94 If however this apostle did not believe in the reality of possession by devils, he must have had, as the author of the fourth gospel, according to the ordinary view of his relation to the synoptical writers, the strongest motives for rectifying their statements, and preventing the dissemination of what he held to be a false opinion, by setting the cures in question in a true light. But how could the Apostle John arrive at the rejection of the opinion that the above diseases had their foundation in demoniacal possession? According to Josephus it was at that period a popular Jewish opinion, from which a Jew of Palestine who, like John, did not visit a foreign land until late in life, would hardly be in a condition to liberate himself; it was, according to the nature of things and the synoptical accounts, the opinion of Jesus himself, John’s adored master, from whom the favourite disciple certainly would not be inclined to swerve even a hair’s breadth. But if John shared with his cotemporaries and with Jesus himself the notion of real demoniacal possession, and if the cure of demoniacs formed the principal part, nay, perhaps the true foundation of the alleged miraculous powers of Jesus: how comes it that the Apostle nevertheless makes no mention of them in his gospel? That he passed over them because the other Evangelists had collected enough of such histories, is a supposition that ought by this time to be relinquished, since he repeats more than one history of a miracle which they had already given; and if it be said that he repeated these because they needed correction,—we have seen, in our examination of the cures of demoniacs, that in many a reduction of them to their simple historical elements would be very much in place. There yet remains the supposition that, the histories of demoniacs being incredible or offensive to the cultivated Greeks of Asia Minor, among whom John is said to have written, he left them out of his gospel for the sake of accommodating himself to their ideas. But we must ask, could or should an apostle, out of mere accommodation to the refined ears of his auditors, withhold so essential a feature of the agency of Jesus? Certainly this silence, supposing the authenticity of the three first gospels, rather indicates an author who had not been an eye-witness of the ministry of Jesus; or, according to our view, at least one who had not at his command the original tradition of Palestine, but only a tradition modified by Hellenistic influence, in which the expulsions of demons, being less accordant with the higher culture of the Greeks, were either totally suppressed or kept so far in the background that they might have escaped the notice of the author of the gospel.