Home"Now it happened, as we went to prayer, a certain slave girl possessed with a spirit of divination met us, who brought her masters much profit by fortune-telling. The girl followed Paul and us, and cried out, saying, "These men are the servants of the most High God, who proclaim to us the way of salvation." And this did she for many days. But Paul, greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, "I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And he came out that very hour. But when her masters saw that their hope of profit had gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to the authorities. And they brought them to the magistrates, and said, "These men, being Jews, exceedingly trouble our city, and teach customs which are not lawful for us, being Romans, to receive or observe".
Having read the above account, you may wonder why this section of our study is headed "A spirit of Python"! The reason is that a more literal translation of the Greek for "spirit of divination" (verse 16) would be "spirit of Python" (see AV & RV margins). According to the Greek myths, action by Zeus, the overlord of the gods, brought into existence at Delphi (a town in northern Greece) an oracle, a place where the gods could be consulted. The oracle was guarded by Python, a female serpent. Answers from the gods were obtained through a priestess. For reasons which are of no importance to us here, Apollo, the son of Zeus, killed the serpent and took control of the shrine. He made the priestess, thereafter known as the Pythia or Pythoness, his servant. As a consequence, Apollo became known as the god of prophecy, although still under the ultimate authority of Zeus. Sometimes the name "Python" was associated directly with Apollo. [There are different versions of the Greek myths. The information used here has been drawn from various sources, in particular A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology by Michael Stapleton, and The Larousse Encylopaedia of Mythology].
Based on the myth, there was an actual shrine and a succession of priestesses at Delphi. There are pictures of the Pythoness sitting on a three-legged stool, over a cleft in the earth from which the oracle was supposed to proceed. When about to prophesy, she would go into a kind of ecstatic trance and utter a stream of unconnected phrases and obscure words . This behaviour may have been induced by chewing laurel leaves, which contain a small amount of cyanide, known to cause such effects. People would come to the shrine to enquire of the oracle, especially concerning the future. A priest would put their questions to the Pythoness, and her utterances, supposedly inspired by Apollo, would be interpreted by the priest and presented to the questioner, often in an ambiguous form. For example, Croesus, King of Lydia, is supposed to have enquired about going to war against the Persians. The answer came that if he did so he would destroy a great kingdom. Encouraged by this, he wen to war against the Persians, and his own kingdom was destroyed in the process. The same kind of clever ambiguity is still employed today by fortune-tellers, astrologers, spiritists and others, but is no more evidence of supernatural powers now than it was two thousand years ago at Delphi.
The prophetic powers of Apollo, supposedly manifested in the priestess at Delphi, were also thought to be present in other women. Like the priestess, their utterances would be accompanied by a trance-like state, hysteria, convulsions or other abnormal behaviour, assumed to be evidence of the presence of a spirit from Apollo, a "spirit of Python". In some cases, such behaviours may have been self-induced; in other cases they may have arisen from mental disturbance, or physical defects in the brain, present before the woman became a Pythoness. Usually such a woman would be a slave, often owned by a group of men, who charged clients for her services. In some cases the woman would use the art of the ventriloquist (literally "belly-speakers", as the Greeks called them), tricking the clients into believing that the voice came from a nearby image of Apollo.
In Acts 16:16, the "slave girl possessed with a spirit of divination" (a spirit of Python) was one of these women supposed to have similar powers to those of the Pythoness at Delphi, and to whom people came seeking divination. The whole background to the incident is pagan, associated with the Greek gods, in particular Apollo, son of Zeus.
Before we proceed further, there is one thing of which we can be sure: the apostle Paul, and Luke, the writer of the Acts and Paul's companion at Phillipi, would totally reject everything associated with the Greek myths. This is made clear in an earlier chapter (Acts 14:11-15). Paul and Silas come to Lystra, a centre for the worship of Zeus. Following the healing of a lame man by Paul, the people cried "The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!". They went about to sacrifice to Paul and Barnabas, whom they identified with the Greek gods Hermes and Zeus respectively. Rushing out to stop them, Paul and Barnabas protested that they were ordinary men, and referred to the Greek gods as "vain things". In contrast, they called on the people to "turn to the living God who made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all things that are in them."
Again, in Acts 17:29-30, which we shall look at in detail in a later chapter, Paul dismisses the Greek gods and their representations in metal and stone, describing the pagan era as "times of ignorance". To the Corinthian Christians, until their conversions accustomed to worshipping the Greek deities, he wrote "There is no other God but one" (1 Cor. 8:4).
Zeus and Apollo did not exist, nor did the oracle, nor the spirit of Python, except as figments of human imagination. The supposed prophetic powers of the Pythoness at Delphi were therefore totally bogus, and so too were those of any other woman thought to be possessed by a "spirit of Python". This poor girl at Phillipi had no special powers. Rather, it looks as if she was mentally deranged and had been enslaved by these unscrupulous men for their own profit.
So how did the slave girl know that Paul and Silas were "servants of the Most High God, who proclaims to us the way of salvation"? This knowledge could not have been conveyed to the girl by the supposed spirit of a mythical serpent. Nowhere in the Acts or in his letters, is Paul recorded as using either the phrase "the Most High God" or "the way of salvation". However, the phrase "the Most High God", and others similar to it, is found in the Old Testament in contexts which contrast the God of the Hebrews with pagan gods (for example, Genesis 14:19; Daniel 5:21). The phrase, "the way of salvation" only occurs in Acts 16 in the mouth of the pagan slave-girl. However, Luke and Paul did use similar phrases such as, "the way of the Lord", "the way of God", "the way of peace" and, simply, "the way". So "the way of salvation" would not be an inappropriate phrase for the Gospel.
It is possible, therefore, that Paul and Silas may have employed these two phrases in their preaching in pagan Philippi. As in other superficially similar cases in the Gospels and Acts 19, the slave girl, in her disturbed state of mind, could have fastened on to them from Paul's preaching. But if so, one might have expected Paul to be pleased at this unexpected support for his mission. Instead, he was "greatly annoyed" (16:18). On the face of it this seems an unreasonable reaction on his part.
According to the New Bible Commentary, the phrases "the Most High God" and "the way of salvation" were definitely used in pagan worship. It may be that Paul is not recorded as employing them because he avoided doing so on account of this connection. Philippi was a Roman colony in Macedonia, largely peopled by veterans of the Roman army and their families, worshippers of the Roman gods. That the Jewish influence in the city was insignificant is evidenced by the fact that there was no synagogue there, the Jewish women meeting for worship in the open air by the river. On hearing the cries of the slave girl, it is very unlikely that the Gentile inhabitants of Philippi would immediately if at all, connect them with the God of the Jews. They would probably think first of Zeus or some other favoured pagan deity, and, as a consequence, there would be a very real danger of the unique truth of the Gospel being lost among the pagan myths. Such a prospect would have greatly troubled Paul, as it had earlier at Lystra (Acts 14:15). The same risk was present later at Athens, where the philosophers at first seem to regard the Jesus whom Paul preached as merely another god, in addition to those in which they already believed (Acts 17:18).
This view of the situation finds support in the behaviour of the slave-girl's masters. Without doubt they would know what she was saying, and it is curious that, apparently, they did nothing to stop her. Was this because, as shrewd men, they saw here a situation which they might be able to turn to their financial advantage? Perhaps they thought that some acknowledgement of these itinerant preachers by their Pythoness would enhance her reputation after Paul and Silas had moved on. They may have even put the words into her mouth themselves Either way, they evidently saw no danger to their income in what she was saying, because it was only after she had been healed that we are told they saw that "their hope of profit was gone".
We should not imagine that these rogues believed there was any more truth in what Paul and Silas were preaching than in their own disreputable activities. As their later behaviour shows, they were clearly not influenced to believe in Jesus by the remarkable change effected in the girl by Paul calling on His name. Their only concern was their loss of income, and they trumped up other charges for the magistrates rather than say what actually happened.
But since the slave-girl did not really have a spirit from Apollo, what, then, was Paul doing when he commanded "the spirit" to come out of her? It cannot be that Paul believed he was ordering a power from the gods to come out of the girl, otherwise we make him contradict himself. Nor would Luke, a physician, Paul's close companion and author of the Book of Acts, believe in the pagan gods and their powers, yet he says the girl was "possessed with a spirit of Python".
The crucially important point which this illustrates is this: when scripture writers use the language by which the common people would describe such phenomena, we should not assume they are thereby supporting the pagan ideas incorporated in the language. In particular, because the writers of the Gospels, of whom Luke was one, refer to people as having demons, thereby using the same language as the common people to describe certain kinds of afflictions, we should not immediately assume that they or Jesus believed these beings had any real existence beyond human imagination.
However, while not really possessed of a spirit, in the sense of a power directly from the gods, the girl at Philippi was clearly influenced, "possessed", by the ideas associated with the pagan myths. Her behaviour was not that of a mentally healthy person. Indeed, it is possible that being caught up with the pagan myths had itself turned her mind. Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, being mentally unbalanced before, she way have been an easy prey to her masters who had put these ideas into her mind.
As we shall see in a later chapter, evil and erroneous ideas and attitudes, alongside good and true ones, are sometimes described in the New Testament as "spirits". This girl was possessed of such a spirit of an evil kind. The casting out of the spirit can be understood as the removing from her mind of the pagan myths and the unbalanced mental state associated with them. And so it may be in the Gospels. In some cases of demon possession, the disturbed mental state way have been caused by belief in the demon. In other cases, abnormal behaviour caused by insanity, epilepsy or profound dumbness or deafness, may already have been present, leading observers to attribute this to possession by a demon. Widespread adoption of such a diagnosis would, almost inevitably, lead to the afflicted person accepting it as well. Matthew, Mark and Luke, when reporting such cases, use the language applied to them by other people, and Jesus does the same when effecting a cure. However, from the example of the slave-girl in the Acts, we should not take this to mean that they themselves necessarily believed in demons as supernatural beings.
It is consistent with the Acts example to understand the afflicted person as being possessed of a demon in the sense of the mind being possessed by pagan ideas, and that, when the demon was cast out, it was these beliefs and the associated mental disturbances which were removed.
The slave-girl doubtless believed that she did have a spirit from Apollo, and when Paul apparently addressed that mythical spirit directly - "I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her", he was using language to which she could relate and which might help her accept that she was indeed being delivered from her affliction. Again, we can understand the direct manner in which Jesus addresses the mythical demons in the same way. In a later chapter we shall see that the points being made here are reinforced by the striking similarity between the incident at Phillipi and the charge made against Jesus that it was by Beelzebub that he cast out demons. We shall also find support for them as we consider the background to demonology in the nations around Israel, and the language used in the Old Testament in relation to the pagan gods.
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