Jesus encounters a person with a medical condition known today as “Tonic seizure” which involves the stiffening of the body. But it was not called that in His time – it was known as a “spirit” like most other medical problems of that time were. It may have been associated with epileptic fits.
In another case whom He encountered (unless it was the same case in a different gospel book), the person was “thrown into the fire”, only it says that “the spirit threw him into the fire”. The condition appears to have been epilepsy.
There were many “spirit” associated conditions, a list of which may be attached here, such things as a “dumb spirit” (could not speak) or a “spirit of infirmity” (was bent over). Things like blindness could be looked at to see what is said about it, but the list of “spirits” attributed to the medical conditions is quite extensive.
So a study of these might well reveal the supernatural superstitions that prevailed at the time. I would say that Jesus Himself was NOT in accordance with believing in these spirits, although He obviously would believe in the sickness, just not in its origin. He corrected some who asked Him, “who has sinned, this man or his parents that he be born blind?” In this case they may not have attributed it to a spirit, because they attributed it to SIN.
So Jesus, though not believing in the superstitious origin as purporting to be from an evil spirit, went along with their own thinking, necessarily correcting their errant view of righteousness and sin, but not correcting that which was their whole basis of understanding as to the cause of sicknesses. Many cultures believe in evil spirits, I do not think that Jesus was included in that. There are also cases of ‘talking spirts’ which are then called demons.
Satan is an untranslated word meaning “adversary” and devil means accuser or false accuser. The use of these individual words, where they are used and in what context, may bring some truth to bear on the reality of these two words. People in the bible were called satan and devil (Judas was a devil, Peter was a satan, even God has been called satan, etc.
Without translation of the word, we end up with the sentence “…your satan the devil walks around…”. Then Revelation calls them all by the same name in the one sentence, devil satan dragon serpent, collectively the same source of evil.
So what does a list of spirits reveal? [can be found on the web]. What does an examination of the context of satan and devil reveal?
CROSSROMAN 