Beelzebul Against Satan
This chapter is focused on the analysis of an extremely puzzling Gospel pericope. A careful redaction-critical examination of the texts recording the “Beelzebul accusation” shows that these Gospel materials preserve a much more complex and challenging representation of the dynamics of possession. In particular, the pericope describes, by employing a theological political idiom, the diversity and conflict that characterize the “spirit” world. In such a context a medium can find a way to cope with the traumatic and empowering experience of the Other that is at the root of possession and, in so doing, to cease being a “hostage” but rather a true “host.” The chapter's redaction-critical analysis reveals that the earliest form of this pericope represented the performative and dialogical nature of “emergent” possession. However, the immediate developments of the oral and textual tradition already began to re-center the episode christologically and to cast it within a polemical frame.