Mark 3:22-23

[jack]

And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”

Beelzebub

So Jesus called them over to him and began to speak to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan?"

Modern readings tend to run lucifer and beelzebub and satan and so on all together, I think there's a lot of theology in what different entities were actually envisaged by the author, but I doubt I could do it justice.

FWIW, Beelzebub was the name of another semitic philistine god worshipped, and hence propaganda-ly referred to as a nasty demon in the bible. It literally means "lord of the flies". "Baal" meaning "lord" crops up elsewhere. And "zvuv" onomatopoeicly meaning fly, but with the vets turning into bets at some point during the transliteration process

Satan drive out Satan

I suspect this is partly placed here as a preemptive rebuttal to people who might accuse Jesus of black magic. "Some people will claim jesus was doing black magic. But this already came and Jesus' official response was..."

But what does it mean for something to be black magic?

There was a long essay about necromancy in DnD. This is similar, but I'm not sure if it's the one I actually read: http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/Tome_of_Necromancy_(3.5e_Sourcebook)/Morality

The gist was, was necromancy inherently evil? Or just prone to tempt people into evil uses, but itself morally neutral? And DnD never really specifies, being ambiguous or contradictory, and leaving different players and DMs to form their own assumptions.

If Beelzebub is a demon as commonly imagined, ie. quite evil, then consorting with him, even for potentially good ends, is indeed extremely suspect and probably a bad thing.

If black magic just says "he made people less ill and we don't understand how", then I'm suspicious that it's automatically "evil". To me, it seems like anything else: if you can't give any good reason WHY you should think it's evil, I don't see why it should be.

If you already have sufficient demonstration of the good intentions of God, and God says "if it looks like magic, it's bad", then you have good reason to trust him/her. But if you don't, then the God healing people seems like a good candidate for "the" God, even if it wasn't the God you started with (assuming there aren't other warning flags that there may be something wrong with them).

Jesus' argument that one demon wouldn't help cast out others could be read suggesting a specific theology, that all bad things come from a single source. Alternatively, it could be read as a metaphor for what I said above: rather than "it's not a demon, it must be from God" read as "it's not doing any harm, so it must be from a good source".

Comments

[eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com]

I think purity/impurity is interesting and a useful way to look at it. One of the big things (as I have been taught to understand it) about Jesus was that in some sense he reversed the polarity of the (neutron? ;) ) flow - in that purity spread from him, rather than impurity spreading to him. So for example the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years, when she touched him, he didn't become unclean, she was healed instead.

And yes, I think modern readings are woefully inadequate on devils/demons/hell/the place of death/darkness <-- running all of those together. It wasn't until quite recently (last couple of years) reading through bits of the Bible that I'd been generically led to believe referred to hell (in the "there is A Place Called Hell With Fire And Pain And It's Where You Go After You Die If You Are Bad And There Is No Way Out" way) actually could have a whole host of perfectly reasonable differing interpretations. Is every darkness/pain/evil hell(TM)? I don't think so ...