[blue-duncan]

The O.T. had a fully developed sense of evil spirits and "familiar" spirits and how they can inhabit mankind by leave of God. they were told not to contact "familiar" spirits. The Jews performed exorcisms as can be seen with Saul and the calling for a musician to make him well. In Luke 8:1-2, "And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and shewing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him, And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils," Jesus equates evil spirits with devils which in Greek is demons. The seven sons of Sceba in Acts are just an extension of the Jewish exorcists.

When Jesus is speaking to the scribes, he is also speaking to the multitude and the disciples in and around the Sea of Galilee which is the area of the politically conservative Zealots and the conservative rabbinic School of Shammai which would not be using the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures as did the liberal rabbinic School of Hillel in Jerusalem. As Josephus, the renegade quisling Jew from Jerusalem said, the Hebrew scripture did not have the apocrypha and held a curse on any one who added to the Hebrew canon.

Jesus was speaking to scribes and the multitude who were knowledgeable that Satan, devils, evil spirits and "familiar" spirits were all of the same character from the Hebrew scriptures not the Septuagint or the apocrypha.

[kawaii]

Its hilareous to watch folks dance around the FACT that the quotations the apostles have in the new testament from hebrew scripture do NOT match the maeoretic text (made in the 8th centruy and subsequently had vowels added to it further distorting it) but rather with a different version of hebrew scripture which we've found at the qumran caves and dated to well before Christ coming.