HomeAs we have seen in the Gospels and the Acts, an implied link can be made between someone described as having a demon or unclean spirit, and the possessed person suffering from insanity, epilepsy or profound dumbness, any one of which can result in chronic, markedly abnormal behaviour. The incident at Philippi, where a slave-girl is described as being possessed by "a spirit of Python", points us in the direction of an association with the myths concerning the pagan gods. Are these associations found elsewhere in scripture? Indeed they are. We shall proceed by exploring then first through Paul's experiences in Athens.
The Lord Jesus said of Paul "he is a chosen vessel of mine to bear my name before Gentiles ..." (Acts 9:15). We have already seen Paul's attitude to the Greek gods, Zeus and Hermes, which the Gentiles worshipped at Lystra (Acts 14:8-18). There Paul described them as "vain things", in the sense of being useless.
In Acts 17:15-33, we find Paul in Athens, the capital city of ancient Greece. Almost every street of Athens was lined with statues, altars, shrines and temples, each devoted to one of the vast number of gods worshipped by the Greeks. There were scores of prominent gods, such as Zeus, Hermes and Artemis, to name three which appear in the Acts, myriads of lesser gods of the winds, the waters, the trees and so on.
In response to Paul preaching about Jesus and the resurrection, the Athenian philosophers said, in verse 18, "He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods". Now, the point of particular importance here is that the Greek word translated as "gods" is one translated in the Gospels and elsewhere as "demons"! Have the translators got it wrong then in Acts 17? By no means, because we learn from books about the myths of ancient Greece that the Greeks used this word, demons, as a general one for their gods, especially the less prominent ones.
The Greeks also honoured their ancestors, the most illustrious ancestors being called "heroes". After death, a hero became a kind of demi-god, an intermediary, midway between men and the gods on Mount Olympus. Again, the word for "demons" was also applied to them. It is possible that the philosophers at Athens at first thought that Paul was speaking to them of such a hero, Jesus, who had died but was now alive as yet another intermediary between the gods and men.
The word "demon" is also present in verse 22, but again not obviously so in our English versions. As we find it in the NKJV, Paul said to the Athenians, "I perceive that in all things you are very religious"; in fact, the italicised words here come from one compound Greek word which literally means much given to reverence of demons; in other words, the Athenians were very devoted to their gods, as the scores of monuments in Athens testified. As at Lystra, Paul preaches to them about the God who made the world and everything in it and, by implication, shows their "demons", their gods and demi-gods to be of no account.
Interestingly, in Acts 26:19, Festus uses almost the same word when describing to Agrippa the charges laid against Paul. He says the Jews brought questions against him "about their own religion" (literally, reverence for demons). He was referring, of course, to the Jews' worship of their own God, so religion" is as good a translation as any, and better than "superstition" as in the AV.
Paul left Athens and moved on to preach in Corinth, another prominent city of Greece. A community of believers was established, but some time after he had left the city, Paul learned of various problems the new converts were experiencing. He wrote letters to them, of which the first we have is 1 Corinthians. In chapter 8 of that letter, Paul underlines the Christian belief concerning the gods of other nations, including Greece, of course.
Before they were converted to Christianity, the Corinthians had been accustomed to buying, in the market, meat which had been part of a sacrifice to one or other of their gods. It seems that there was now a difference of opinion among them as to whether it was permissible for them, as Christians, to continue eating such meat. See what Paul says as he begins to consider this problem:
"Therefore concerning the eating of things offered to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and that there is no other God but one. For even if there are so-called gods in heaven or on earth (as there are many gods and many lords) yet for us there is only one God, the Father ... and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ ..." (1 Cor. 8:4-6)
It could hardly be clearer: "there is no other God but one", namely, the God whom Paul preached. The "so-called gods" of the Gentiles had no real existence, and their idols, the images of the gods, no power.
In chapter 10, Paul returns to the problem. The verses of particular interest here are from v 14 to v 22, but the whole section from v l to v 22 is relevant. The earlier verses are about the experiences of the people of Israel in the wilderness. after they had come out of Egypt with Moses. In verse 7, Paul mentions how they turned away from God and worshipped idols. In verse 14, he exhorts the Corinthian believers "flee from idolatry". In verse 19 he continues:
"What am I saying then? That an idol is anything, or what is offered to idols is anything? But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God, and I do not want you to have fellowship with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the Lord's table and of the table of demons. Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he?" (1 Cor. 10:19-22)
Paul has already answered the question about an idol in chapter 8. An idol is nothing. Why, then, does he go on to talk about demons? Again he is using the same word as in Acts 17, which the Greeks used for their gods. The idols which the Greeks made were not themselves their gods but simply images, material representations of their gods. All over the Greek and Roman world, there were images to the same gods. Sometimes there would be several images to the same god in one city. Worshippers would have replicas in their homes, as was so with the goddess Diana (Artemis) in Ephesus (Acts 19:24-27). All these images were believed to have powers which came from the gods they represented; gods who, it was imagined, roamed the heavens and the earth; gods whose experiences were the stuff of the Greek and Roman myths.
When the Greeks or Romans placed a sacrifice before an image, it was in honour of the god it portrayed. It was this to which Paul referred when he wrote of "idols" and "demons". The sacrifices placed before the "idols" were offerings to the "demons", the gods the idols represented. Paul did not want the Corinthian converts to Christianity to go back to worship of the pagan gods.
As well as the word daimonion (demon), the Greeks had another word commonly used for a god, namely theos, from which we get words like "theology". This was the word which Greek-speaking Jews and Christians used for the God whom they worshipped. It is the word used for "God" throughout the New Testament. Paul could have used the plural of this word for the pagan gods, but by using a different word he brings out more starkly the distinction between them and the God the Christians worshipped. This is particularly so in 1 Cor. 10: 20:
"they sacrifice to demons (daimonion) and not to God (theos)"
Demons, then, in Paul's letters at least, refer to pagan gods, of one kind or another, and this is how the Greek-speaking recipients of those letters would understand the word. But, like Paul's letters, the Gospels were also passed on in Greek, and it seems reasonable to assume that Greek-speaking readers of the Gospels would also make the same connection there between the word "demons" and pagan gods. In due course, we shall find evidence of that connection in the Gospels themselves.
Moreover, that evidence will have a very significant implication. If the demons of the Gospels can be identified with pagan gods, then just as Paul rejected those gods as "vain things", so too would Jesus, the Lord whom he served. The Son of the One living God would certainly not believe that pagan gods, demons, had any real existence. He would know that they existed only as malign ideas in the minds of those who believed in them.
However, before we return to the Gospels, there is another line of enquiry to be followed through from 1 Corinthians 10:20. When Paul wrote, concerning the sacrifices the pagans made to their gods, "they sacrifice to demons and not to God", he was quoting from the Old Testament, from Deuteronomy 32:17. In the next chapter we shall explore this quotation and other O.T. verses, where we shall find the association between demons and pagan gods confirmed.
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