Tom de Bruin: Demons in the Organs

Tom de Bruin, “Excision as Exorcism: Some Possible Demonic Roots for Jesus’s Sayings in Mark 9:43-48,” Novum Testamentum 67 (2025), 11.

The key here is that these ancient writers [e.g., 4Q4441 1-4] portray themselves as under threat from invasive supernatural entities that could settle in organs. They find a solution to this invasion in divine intervention, where they imagine God replacing their organs with new ones.

These texts show evidence of a tradition in ancient Judaism where body parts can become foreign, alien or other to the self. God can intervene in these cases, which is represented by exorcistic language, by removing that organ and supplying a new one. It is in this tradition that I would place the saying of Jesus preserved in Mark, where Jesus relies on a more human method of removing morally defective body parts: amputation. Other texts written by Christ-followers show evidence of the same or a similar tradition to the one Newsom highlights. Most obviously, these demonic body parts are present in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, in the Markan passage under discussion, and other passages in the New Testament, such as Matt 6:22–23, Luke 11:33–36, Rom 6:12–23, 7:14–23 and Jas 4:1–2.