Those Pesky Demons

My paper will focus on demon possession. I will mainly do a study of the history of exorcism, and how different cultures dealt with demon possession. Then I will compare that to how Jesus dealt with the demons he encountered. I will also take a look at how the people around Jesus (both those who followed Jesus and despised Jesus) reacted to the exorcisms. The two main focus passages concerning this will be taken from Jesus casting out a demon in the synogogue and the Gerasene Demoniac. This seemed like a fun paper to write, and it is a topic which greatly interests me. Today I'm sure there are demon possessed people around us, but I can't help but wonder how many of them we have written off as mentally ill or pyschos.