POSSESSION

of nervous excitement or alarm. The will was paralyzed (Mk 9"), and the sufferer was under the influence of illusions (Jn T^"). He identified himself with the demons, and was averse to deliverance (Mk l^* 5'). In such cases Jesus does not follow His usual course of exciting faith before he heals, but acts as though the sufferer were not in a fit state to believe or to trust, and must be dealt with forcibly first of all. Some confident and majestic word is spoken, of which the authority is immediately recognized; and only then, when the proper balance of the mind has been restored, is an attempt made to communicate religious blessing.

3. Our Lord's belief. — Two opinions have been held as to whether Christ actually shared the current views of His day as to demoniacal possession. That He seemed to do so is attested on almost every page of the Synoptics, (a) According to one opinion, this was nothing more than a seeming, and His attitude towards the phenomena must be explained. as a gracious accommodation to the views of the age. In addition to the serious objection that such a theory introduces an unwelcome element of unreality into Christ's teaching, and implies a lack of candour on His part, the arguments in its favour are singularly ineffective. To assert that Christ never entangled His teaching with contemporary ideas is to prejudge the very question at issue. That He adopted different methods from those followed by professional exorcists, whose success He expressly attests (Mt 12^'), is exactly what His difference in person from them would cause to be expected, but does not necessarily involve a difference in theory. To humour a patient by falling in with his hallucination is not a correct descrip-tion of Christ's procedure; for in many of the instances the treatment is peremptory and stern (ct. Mk 9^5, where the sufferer was not consulted, and any humouring followed the cure; so elsewhere), and the evil spirits are represented after expulsion as actual and still capable of mischief (Mk S'^). Christ's own language is itself significant. He makes the current belief the basis of argument (Lk 11'™), attributes the power to cast out devils to the disciples of the Pharisees, and implicitly asserts it for Himself (Mk 122"-, Lk II"'), and recognizes the power as resident in others (Mk 9'"-, Mt 7^), without a single intimation that He was speaking in metaphor, and that His hearers were blundering in assuming that He meant what He said.

(6) The real explanation is to be found in quite another direction. His humanity was true and complete, the humanity of the age into which He was born; and of His Divine attributes He 'emptied himself (Ph 2', 2 Co 8' 13'), except to the extent to which His perfect human nature might be the organ of their manifestation (Bruce, Humiliation of Christ, 136 ff.; Ottley, Doct. of Incarnaiion, 610 ff.). In virtue of this voluntary self- limitation, His humanity was not lifted clear of the intellectual atmosphere of His time; but He shared the conceptions and views of the people amongst whom He became incarnate, though His sinlessness and the wel-comed guidance of the Holy Spirit aided His human intelligence, removing some of the worst hindrances to correct thinking, but not making Him in any sense a prodigy in advance of His age in regard to human knowledge. Accordingly, He avoids the extreme and exaggerated demonology into which an unduly ex-tended animistic interpretation of the universe was leading His contemporaries, but does not reject or question the interpretation itself. At a later date there was a disposition to ascribe all diseases to possession, to multiply evil spirits bey ond calculation, and to invest them with functions and activities of the most grotesque kind. Christ's attitude was altogether different, though He consistently talks and acts upon the assumption that evil spirits were no creatures of the fancy, and that possession weis a real phenomenon.

That such an assumption was wrong it is outside the province of the real sciences to assert or to deny; and

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POTIPHAR

there are some considerations that make the conclusion at least probable, that personal spirits of evil exist, and cause by their activity some woeful sufferings amongst men. Metaphysics postulates transcendent personal power as the original cause of material phenomena, and is sustained in so doing by all that a man knows con-cerning the roots of his own moral procedure. Im-manent in man and outside, there is generally recognized a great spiritual existence, affecting human life in a thousand invisible ways; and the belief in One Supreme Spirit removes most of the difficulties from the belief in others, subordinate yet superhuman. In the asylums and hospitals, moreover, are cases of mental or nervous disease, not entirely explicable by physical law, but looking exceedingly like what cases of possession may be supposed to be; just as in social and civil life men are sometimes met with whose viciousness defies any other interpretation than that an, or the, evil spirit has secured the mastery over them. Psychical research, too, points to a large spiritual population of the world, and all the naturalistic explanations so far suggested have failed to solve the mystery. The conclusion seems probable that demoniacal possession was accepted by Christ as an actual fact, with modifications of the views of His contemporaries in the direction of economy in the bringing in of superhuman agencies, and of their due distinction from processes of physical law.

Possession may further be classed as one of the funda-mental and univeraal beliefs of mankind,with a solid element of truth in it, though running at times of excitement into extravagance. Homer held that a wasting sickness was caused by a demon, and the Greek dramatists generally attribute madness and quasi-Teli^oua frenzy to demonic or Divine possession. Tue Egyptians located a demon in each of the thirty-six members of the body; their presence was the cause of disease, which was healed by their expulsion. Seven evil spirits are grouped in Babylonian mythology (Mt 12«, Mk 16', Lk82 1126), and these with theirsubordinate genii kept men in continual fear, and were thought able to occupy the body and produce any kind of sickness. In almost every civihzation, ancient as those of the East or rude as those of Central Africa, a similar conception has prevailed; and the prevalence points to a certain rudi-mentary truth that need not oe renounced along with the elaborations by which in the courae of ages the actual fact has been overlaid. R. W. Moss.

POST.— 'Post' is used in 2 Ch 30», Est 8», Job g^, Jer 61*1 for 'a bearer of despatches,' 'a runner.' These runners were chosen from the king's bodyguard, and were noted for their swiftness, whence Job's simile (g*'), ' My days are swifter than a post.'

POST, DOORPOST.— See House, § 6.

POT.— See House, § 9.

POTIPHAR.— Gn 39, a high Egyptian offlclal in the story of Joseph. The name is perhaps a deformation of Potiphera (wh. see) or an unsuccessful attempt to form an Egyptian name on the same lines. Potiphar seems to be entitled 'chief cook' (EV 'captain of the guard'), and likewise sorts, 'eunuch' of Pharaoh. But the former title 'cook' may be only a mark of high rank; persons described as royal tasters in the New Kingdom were leaders of expeditions, investigators of criminal cases, judges in the most important trials, etc.; as yet, too, there is little indication that eunuchs were employed in Egypt even at a later period: so this also was but an honorific ofllcial title; the Hebrew word saris is actually found attached to the names of Persian officers in Egypt. Joseph was sold to Potiphar, on whose wife's accusation he was cast into the king's prison (in Potiphar's own house), to which Pharaoh afterwards committed his chief butler and chief baker The office thus held by Potiphar cannot yet be precisely identified in Egyptian documents. In the passage Gn 41« and the repeated description of Joseph's wife, the forms of the names and the title of the priest are much more precisely Egyptian. F. Ll. Griffith