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

[ptc24]

Of course, in these days of D&D, the idea of demons fighting demons is not particularly shocking. The idea of demons theatrically staging "being driven out" is less unsurprising, but doesn't seen odd to modern sensibilities; it's less odd than controlling all of your sense perception, for instance.

That said, I don't know what the explicit demonology was, and even then, it makes me wonder whether you want to consider the phenomenology of "the crawling darkness" as the D&D article puts it.

In modern terms, perhaps it's like this example I came across once: imagine a professor talking to a class. He says, "Here's a second hand jumper, who wants it?" Some hands go up. He then says, "It used to belong to a serial killer", the hands go down. Asked about it later, one student says, "I'm an atheist, I don't believe in souls or ghosts or metaphysical evil or anything like that, but I'm embarrassed to say that that jumper creeps me out and I'm not wearing it".

ETA Put it another way: I don't think it's about harm as such, more about purity/impurity. If you imagine demons as being like disease, filth, corruption, pestilence etc ("Lord of the Flies" is highly suggestive here), then it sort-of makes sense; you can't clean something with something that is dirty, you clean something with something that is clean.