The fifteenth passage of the Sefer Yeshua is based on Mk 3:24-25, Mt 12.25, Lk 11:17. The differences between the saying in Mark, compared with the one in Matthew and Luke (which are more similar to each other), are sufficient to conclude that the version in Matthew and Luke came from the Q-Gospel. However, both Matthew and Luke use the saying the same way as Mark does.
15. 1Yeshua urgently tried to dissuade his fellow Galileans from joining the Zealots, and said to the people, ‘Any kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste, 2and no city divided against itself will remain standing.’
Overview
The way this saying is used in the gospels, they make it out to mean that Satan cannot fight against himself – Jesus is accused of casting out demons on behalf of Satan, and Jesus counters that no one who fights against himself can stand.
Someone who is brought up in the Christian tradition will find nothing odd or incongruous about the passage in Mark 3:20-30. For Christians, Satan is the prince and ruler of all demons, the lord of all evil, so this episode presents no conceptual problems. The only thing is, Yeshua was a Jew, and so were his very earliest followers, and in ancient Judaism, Satan was not the lord of all evil, or the ruler of a kingdom of evil. In the beliefs of Second Temple Judaism, Satan was an angel who was completely subservient to God, and only acted as the counsel for the prosecution when souls were judged.
In Mark, Jesus is effectively being accused of sorcery. There are a number of places recorded in the Talmud where Yeshua is mentioned as being a sorcerer and a magician who sought to control demons, and such supernatural magic is forbidden in the Jewish faith. As we proceed, I will explain why, and why I therefore think that Jesus’s supposed control of demons is a Gentile Christian belief, not an original Jewish one (for a full list of the references in the Talmud, see page 142, note 88 of William Lane’s NICNT Commentary on Mark).
Before I go into the way the saying is used in the Sefer Yeshua, I first need to get the gospel-setting out of the way, and explain to you the cultural context of demons.
How the foreign idea of Satan was introduced into Judaism
In Yahwism, evil actions are attributed completely to the freely-taken decisions of the individual – every human being has the free will to do either good or evil, and every individual is answerable to God for their own actions. Within every human mind there is the potential to do either good or evil, and the goal of the religious person who loves God, is to conquer that negative side of their own personality and overcome it. This is the type of advice that God gave to Cain – to overcome his evil desires (Gen 4:7).
After the Babylonian Exile, due to the influence of Persian Zoroastrianism, there later developed the belief that evil actions were caused by evil spirits, and so you were not responsible for the evil that you do (and you could claim, ‘an evil spirit made me do it’). The verses in 1Sam 16:14-23 (and certain other places in the Book of Samuel) were redacted after the Babylonian Exile, and they make it appear like evil spirits cause people to do evil things – which is completely contrary to what the original Israelite faith taught. Similarly, in 1Chr 21:1, composed after the Exile, it is Satan who causes David to sin, but in the exact same story in the earlier Yahwist version of the story from before the Exile, in 2Sam 24:1, there is no mention of Satan whatsoever. Any mentions of Satan in the Hebrew Bible are later redactions, and would not have appeared in any text composed before the Exile.
It also needs to be said that the very idea of Satan came from Zoroastrianism. That religion is dualistic, which means that it believes the cosmos is ruled equally by a good god (Ahura Mazda), and an evil god (Ahriman). The idea of battles in heaven also came from Zoroastrianism, which taught that the reason why evil exists, and why bad things happen to good people, is because these two gods and their angels are at constant war in heaven. After the return from the Babylonian Exile, Judaism became heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism; the idea of Satan was not native to the Israelite faith – it originated in Zoroastrianism.
In contrast, the prophets teach a God who is sole Sovereign over everything, and there is only peace in heaven (eg Ezekiel chapter 1). In Yahwism, bad things simply happen in life, and God gives you the strength and courage to endure those things that you have no control over with dignity. In Yahwism, there is no need to fear being attacked by evil spirits, because Adonai has full sovereignty over all creation.
In the late 1990s, the Tennessee Ebionites and Massorite Talmidis debated all these ideas which had come from Zoroastrianism, and the result was that we decided to ditch all those negative beliefs which were foreign to the Israelite faith – you can read about that process here. One of those beliefs we ditched was about Satan, and so Satan plays no part in the theology of the Tennessee Ebionites and Massorite Talmidis; we hold instead to the idea of the full Sovereignty of Adonai.
Historically, the belief in Satan had to be adapted to fit with Jewish beliefs – no one and nothing is equal to God – so in Judaism, Satan does not have the status or power he has in Christianity (or even that he has in Islam and Zoroastrianism, for that matter). The long and short of it is that, the beliefs underpinning the story in Mark 3:20-30 reflect a Gentile cultural environment, not a Jewish one (because the supposed ability to control demons – which don’t exist anyway – is a form of magic, and supernatural magic is forbidden to a Yahwist).
The belief in demons causing illnesses
Because of contact with pagan Gentile beliefs, it is true that many ordinary Jewish people of that time believed in demons. For them, serious physical and mental illnesses were all caused by demons – for example, they believed that demons caused epilepsy, and that the only cure was exorcism. However, if you read Torah’s original view (eg Lev 17:7 and Dt 32:17), you will see that priestly teaching and God had a very negative view of belief in demons – basically, that they were false gods and didn’t exist. The original Israelite faith rejected all belief in demons, and therefore as Talmidis, so do we.
As a consequence of what Torah says, and the mindset it projects, it is very likely that the teachers among the ordinary priests serving in the Temple also rejected belief in demons – Torah’s wording regarding priests treating sicknesses is very careful to make sure that there is no possibility that sicknesses can be caused by demons. Even the rituals prescribed by Torah for cleansing after recovery from sickness, are deliberately designed to preclude any belief in demons.
With all that in mind, I myself am very sceptical that Yeshua believed in demons and Satan. There are biblical scholars who are firmly convinced that Jesus only believed what the majority believed (which implies he couldn’t think for himself), and therefore he must have believed in Satan and the demonic realm. I don’t accept this logic at all, or its conclusion. If Torah rejects beliefs in demons, then surely there would have been some godly people around in Yeshua’s time who still maintained this original Yahwist belief – such as priests who regularly examined the sick, and if so, such people could have influenced Yeshua to take on the same mindset. Moreover, if Yeshua was genuinely a prophet of God, then he would have known that demons and Satan don’t exist. If Yeshua was a true prophet of God, he would have known that demons do not cause epilepsy, and furthermore, that exorcisms do not cure epilepsy.
The travelling Jewish healers who did believe in demons that caused sicknesses, cured people in ceremonies which, for all intents and purposes, looked like magic rituals (eg Honi the Circle-Drawer). Historians love to drag them up and say, ‘Oh look, Jesus was just a typical itinerant healer!’ However, Yeshua wasn’t like them; he merely laid hands on people, and taught his apostles to pray for the sick and to care for them. There was no magic ritual involved, and so I don’t think that Yeshua believed in demons. We cannot compare Yeshua to those itinerant healers who performed magic rituals, because unlike them, it is obvious that Yeshua did not go through the motions of performing magic at all.
There is one parable where Yeshua even seems to mock belief in demons, Mt 12:43-45. In that episode, Yeshua talks about expelling demons in exorcisms, but if a person is unrepentant, then those demons come back. The general tone mocks the whole idea of demons and the pointlessness of believing in them, and I therefore do not think that Yeshua himself believed in Satan or demons; if he was one of the discerning few who was influenced by Jewish teachers, such as priests, who still faithfully believed in the old Yahwist ideas, then it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Yeshua did not believe in demons.
In the end, it needs to be said that battling demons and controlling them, all comes under the realm of pagan magic, and magic is forbidden in Yahwism. Yeshua would have rejected any charges of magic, which is what his words seem to suggest in the gospels. He was either a typical magician of his time who believed in demons, or he was a prophet of God who knew that demons are not real; he cannot have been both.
The context of the saying in the Sefer Yeshua
The reason for me explaining all this in so much detail, is that I suspect that the context in which the saying about a divided kingdom and a fallen city appear in the gospels is artificial. A saying of Yeshua might have been required by the gospel-writers to underline the story about demons, and so this one was selected. However, I do not believe that this was its original context.
As I explained in my commentary for passage 7, I am convinced that Yeshua was firmly opposed to the violent methods of the Zealots, and that furthermore, they were opposed to him. It is possible that Yeshua could see how their way of conducting murderous campaigns against the occupying Romans, as well as of assassinating Jews who disagreed with the Zealots, would one day bring down calamity on the Jewish people – you didn’t need to be a prophet to see that coming!
I therefore would like to propose the hypothesis that, in its original context, the kingdom Yeshua was obliquely referring to was not the kingdom of Satan, but the kingdom of Antipas in the Galilee. The Zealots murdered their fellow Galileans if they didn’t agree with them, and so if the Zealots continued to act this way, their country would fall and be destroyed by the Romans – ‘a kingdom divided against itself would be laid waste’.
Similarly, ‘a city divided against itself’ would come to be Jerusalem, where in the late 60s CE, Zealots fought against each other even in the Temple precincts, battling competing factions for control of different parts of the Temple complex, and so desecrating it by shedding human blood there. Their own infighting weakened them to the extent that they were unable to wage effective war against the Romans.
I firmly believe that Yeshua’s view was that the Jewish people should not take up arms against the Romans, because such a mighty empire was well-known for the severity and sadistic cruelty of its retribution. The people of the Galilee, for the most part, heeded the message of Yeshua and his apostles, and the Galilee was spared the worst excesses of the Jewish-Roman war; but Jerusalem did not listen, and the city fell to the Roman onslaught, and was completely destroyed.
Final thoughts and summary
In summary, I don’t think that the context in which this saying is placed in the gospels is its original one, given the incongruity of its beliefs about Satan and demons in a Jewish context. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Yeshua might have been influenced by Jewish teachers who did not believe in demons and Satan; I don’t accept the claims of those scholars who say that Jesus could only have believed in the beliefs of the majority (and so ignoring the principle of, ‘You shall not follow the majority when they do wrong’, Ex 23:2).
In my personal view, the more likely context – that of the saying as a political comment on the actions of the Zealots being a real danger to society – would make the saying a prophetic insight into what would happen in their immediate future. As history records, the kingdom of the Galilee survived and became a refuge for the Jewish people, while the city of Jerusalem did not stand.