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Still another time, a man in the crowd said to him, “Rabbi, I brought you my son; he is possessed by a mute spirit, and when it attacks him, it throws him around, and he foams and grinds his teeth and gets stiff.”

And they brought the boy to him; and immediately he was thrown down violently, and he thrashed around, foaming at the mouth. And Jesus asked the father, “How long has this been happening to him?”

And he said, “Since he was a child. It has tried to kill him many times, and thrown him into the fire or the water. But if it is possible for you to do anything, take pity on us and help us.”

And Jesus said to him, “‘If it is possible’! Anything is possible when you believe it is.”

And Jesus put his hands on the boy and spoke to him. And the boy cried out and went into convulsions, and then became like a corpse, so that most of the people were saying he had died. But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him, and he stood up.

Anything is possible when you believe it is: The simple truth. But we have to believe in our depths, not just with our conscious mind.

I believe; help my unbelief: An honest and touching statement. By putting his belief first, he is able to acknowledge the presence of his unbelief, and to see that it needs help. What a different statement it would have been if he had said, “I disbelieve; help my belief.”

Almost all the Gospel accounts of exorcisms are tainted, because their intent is to show that the demons recognize Jesus as the Messiah or the Son of God. This incident and the healing of the Syrophoenician woman’s daughter are the only ones without a polemical agenda.

There are two famous ancient descriptions of exorcisms, one Jewish and one Gentile. The first is by Josephus:

And God granted King Solomon knowledge of the art used against demons for the benefit and healing of men. He also composed incantations by which illnesses are relieved, and left behind forms of exorcisms with which those possessed by demons drive them out, never to return. And this kind of cure is of very great power among us [Jews] to this day, for I have seen a certain Eleazar, a countryman of mine, in the presence of [the emperor] Vespasian, his sons, tribunes and a number of other soldiers, free men possessed by demons, and this was the manner of the cure: he put to the nose of the possessed man a ring which had under its seal one of the roots prescribed by Solomon, and then, as the man smelled it, drew out the demon through his nostrils, and, when the man at once fell down, adjured the demon never to come back into him, speaking Solomon’s name and reciting the incantations which he had composed. Then, wishing to convince the bystanders and prove to them that he had this power, Eleazar placed a cup or foot-basin full of water a little way off and commanded the demon, as it went out of the man, to overturn it and make known to the spectators that he had left the man. And when this was done, the understanding and wisdom of Solomon was clearly revealed.

(Jewish Antiquities, in Works, vol. 5, trans. H.St.J. Thackeray, Harvard University Press, 1934, pp. 595ff.)

The second description, which includes an account of the aftereffects of the exorcism, is by Philostratus:

The youth was, without knowing it, possessed by a devil; for he would laugh at things that no one else laughed at, and then he would fall to weeping for no reason at all, and he would talk and sing to himself. Now most people thought that it was the boisterous humor of youth which led him into such excesses; but he was really the mouthpiece of a devil, though it only seemed a drunken frolic in which on that occasion he was indulging. Now when Apollonius gazed on him, the devil in him began to utter cries of fear and rage, such as one hears from people who are being branded or racked; and the devil swore that he would leave the young man alone and never take possession of any man again. But Apollonius addressed him with anger, as a master might address a shifty, rascally, and shameless slave and so on, and he ordered him to quit the young man and show by a visible sign that he had done so. “I will throw down yonder statue,” said the devil, and pointed to one of the images which were in the king’s portico, for there it was that the scene took place. But when the statue began by moving gently, and then fell down, it would defy anyone to describe the hubbub which arose thereat and the way they clapped their hands with wonder. But the young man rubbed his eyes as if he had just woken up, and he looked towards the rays of the sun, and assumed a modest speech, as all had their attention concentrated on him; for he no longer showed himself licentious, nor did he stare madly about, but he returned to his own self, as thoroughly as if he had been treated with drugs; and he gave up his dainty dress and summery garments and the rest of his sybaritic way of life, and he fell in love with the austerity of philosophers, and donned their cloak, and stripping of his old self modelled his life in future upon that of Apollonius.

(Life of Apollonius of Tyana, vol. 1, pp. 391ff.)

There is also a vivid account in the nineteenth-century traveler Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta:

I enquired of Amm Mohammed, “Can you exorcise demons?”

“Indeed,” he said, “they are afraid of me. Last year a demon entered into my wife, while we were sitting here as we sit now, I and the woman and Haseyn. I saw it come in her eyes, which were fixed, all in a moment, and she lamented with a laboring in her throat.” (I looked over to the poor wife, who answered me again with a look of patience.) “Then I took down the pistol” (commonly such few firearms of theirs hang loaded upon the chamber wall) “and I fired it at the side of her head, and shouted to the demon, ‘Aha, cursed one, where are you now?’ The demon answered me, by the woman’s mouth, ‘In her eye.’—‘By which part did you enter her?’—‘Her big toe.’—‘Then by her big toe, I tell you, depart from her.’ I spoke the word terribly and the demon left her.” But first Mohammed made the demon promise him not to molest his wife any more.

“Are demons afraid of shot?” I asked.

“You are too simple,” he said. “It is the smell of the sulphur; they cannot abide it.”

(Charles M. Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, 1921, p. 191; English modified)