Women and their Demons in the Life of Jesus: Guest Post by James McGrath
This now is the final guest post by blogger and New Testament scholar, James McGrath, based on his book What Jesus Learned from Women. Are you interested in more? Buy the book! As you’ll see here, it gets onto important ground, with intriguing hypotheses that you probably have never heard before! Many thanks to James for making these posts for us. - James McGrath is also the author of Theology and Science Fiction and The Burial of Jesus, among other books. ************************* It is almost impossible for modern readers of the New Testament to come across the word "demon" and to not think of The Exorcist and other depictions of the phenomenon of "demon possession." Ancient people certainly attributed what we today would categorize as psychiatric conditions or mental illnesses to demons. However, these are but a small subset of the ailments that they thought of in these terms. We see this in the stories about women in the Gospels. In no instance are we presented with a woman whose symptoms are specified to have [...]