Throughout all Syria. — The word is probably used popularly, rather than with the definite significance of the Roman province with which St. Luke uses it in Luke 2:2. Our Lord’s ministry, with the one exception of the journey to the coasts of Tyre and Sidon (Matthew 15:21), was confined to what is commonly known as Palestine. Traces of the wider fame are, however, found in the mention of hearers from Idumæa, and Tyre, and Sidon among the crowds that followed Him (Mark 3:8); in the faith of the Syro-Phœnician woman in His power to heal (Mark 7:26); perhaps in the existence of disciples at Damascus so soon after the Ascension (Acts 9:2); perhaps, also, in St. Peter’s appeal to the friends of Cornelius at Cæsarea, as knowing already the broad facts of our Lord’s ministry and miraculous working (Acts 10:37).
Possessed with devils.... lunatick. — The phenomena of what is called possession, and the theories to which the phenomena have been referred, will best be discussed in dealing with the great representative instance of the Gadarene demoniacs (Matthew 8:28). Here it will be enough to notice (1) that the word rendered “devil” is not the same as that used for the Tempter in 4:1, but “demon” in the sense of an evil spirit, (2) that the possessed with demons are at once grouped with the “lunaticks,” both exhibiting forms of mental disease, and distinguished from them. The latter term implies in the Greek, as in the Latin and our own, “moonstruck madness” — the belief that the moon exercised a disturbing influence on the brain (a coup de lune being dreaded by Eastern travellers almost as much as a coup de soleil), and that the intensity of the disturbance varied, when the disease had once set in, with the moon’s changes.
Those that had the palsy. — Here the word (literally, the paralytics) points, not to a view of the cause of the disease, but to its conspicuous phenomena — the want of muscular power to control motion, and the consequent “looseness,” in popular phraseology, of limbs or head.