Devil vs Demon: One Devil, Satan, and Many Demons

In the Bible there is one devil and there are many demons. The devil is Satan, the fallen angel who leads the others. Demons are the evil spirits who follow him, and Christian teaching holds that they too are fallen angels. The words get tangled because the King James Version calls demons “devils” and calls Satan “the devil.”

The Gospels add something we might not expect. The demons know who Jesus is. In the synagogue at Capernaum an unclean spirit cries out, “I know thee who thou art, the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24), and Mark tells us that Jesus “suffered not the devils to speak, because they knew him” (Mark 1:34). James turns that into a warning for us: “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). They know the truth and run from it. We are given the same truth to love.

Here the two are side by side, as Scripture and the churches describe them:

	The devil	Demons
How many	One	Many: “My name is Legion: for we are many” (Mark 5:9)
Other names	Satan, Beelzebub, the tempter	Unclean spirits, evil spirits
Greek word	diabolos, “slanderer”	daimonion, a spirit
King James Version	“the devil”	“devils”
NKJV, ESV and other modern Bibles	“the devil”	“demons”
What churches teach they are	A fallen angel, their prince	Fallen angels who follow him
Their end	“Everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41)

So when Jesus is accused of casting out “devils” by “Beelzebub the prince of the devils” (Matthew 12:24), the accusers mean that he drives out demons by the power of their chief. Jesus answers with a question: “if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?” (Matthew 12:26). The answer takes for granted what the accusation said. Satan has a kingdom, and the demons belong to it.

Because the King James translators used one English word for two Greek ones. The New Testament calls Satan diabolos, a word that means a slanderer or false accuser. It occurs 38 times in the Greek text behind the King James Version, which translates it “devil” 35 times. The other three show what the word means on its own. In 1 Timothy 3:11 Paul says “their wives” must be “not slanderers.” In 2 Timothy 3:3 he warns that in the last days men will be “false accusers,” and in Titus 2:3 he asks older women to be “not false accusers.” Among the 35, Jesus once uses the word of a man: “Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?” He meant Judas (John 6:70–71). The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives the word its sharpest picture: the devil is the one who “throws himself across” God’s plan (paragraph 2851).

Demons are a different word, daimonion, used 60 times. Its root word daimon comes five more times, and the verb daimonizomai, to be under the power of a demon, 13 times, most often rendered “possessed with” a devil or devils. The King James translators put “devil” or “devils” into almost all of these. Add the 35 for diabolos and you have the 112 times the New Testament of the King James says “devil” or “devils.” “Devil” alone comes 61 times, every one of them in the New Testament. Thirty-five translate diabolos and mean Satan, or once Judas. The other 26 are about demons, as when people said of John the Baptist, “He hath a devil” (Matthew 11:18). “Devils” comes 55 times and always means the many. Where the King James says “the devils besought him” (Matthew 8:31), the New King James Version and the English Standard Version both say “the demons begged.”

Four times the King James Old Testament says “devils” too, for two Hebrew words. Moses says Israel “sacrificed unto devils, not to God” (Deuteronomy 32:17), and the psalmist that they “sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils” (Psalm 106:37). Both use shedim, a rare word for demons. In Leviticus 17:7 and 2 Chronicles 11:15 the word is se’irim, “hairy ones,” goat-like demons that were worshipped as idols. The King James never uses the word “demon” at all.

He is the devil, and in a sense the first of the demons. The Catechism quotes the Fourth Lateran Council: “The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing” (paragraph 391). “The other demons” puts Satan in the same company as the rest, as their head. John of Damascus, the eighth-century Eastern teacher, speaks of “the devil and his demons” in the same way.

Is he stronger than they are? Scripture calls him “the prince of the devils” (Matthew 12:24) and “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2). Beyond that, it gives no ranks among the demons. Lists of princes of hell with their own sins and offices come from much later books, as the seven princes of hell explains.

Catholic, Orthodox and Reformed teaching all say that they are the angels who fell with Satan. Scripture speaks of “the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41), and of the dragon who “was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (Revelation 12:9). The Catholic Church teaches it in the words of Lateran IV, quoted above. The Orthodox Church in America says that “together with the devil are his hosts of wicked angelic powers who have rebelled against the goodness of God.” The Belgic Confession, a Reformed statement of 1561, says that some angels “have fallen from the excellence in which God created them,” and calls them “the devils and evil spirits.” How and why those angels fell is told in how and why Satan fell.

Some early Christians answered differently. They read Genesis 6, where “the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair” and “There were giants in the earth in those days” (Genesis 6:2, 4), as the story of where demons began. Justin Martyr, writing in the middle of the second century, said that angels “were captivated by love of women, and begot children who are those that are called demons.” Athenagoras, about 177, wrote of “the souls of the giants, which are the demons who wander about the world.” The churches’ later teaching followed the other line, and the Catechism today speaks only of fallen angels.

In the Gospels they torment people. A man in the synagogue cries out under an unclean spirit; another “had his dwelling among the tombs” with a legion of them (Mark 5:3). Mary Magdalene was one of the women “out of whom went seven devils” (Luke 8:2), and she stood by the cross and came first to the empty tomb (John 19:25; 20:1). Peter, summing up Jesus’ ministry, looked past the demons to their master: Jesus went about “healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him” (Acts 10:38).

They also stand behind false worship. Paul tells the Corinthians that what the pagans sacrifice, “they sacrifice to devils, and not to God” (1 Corinthians 10:20), and he warns that some “shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (1 Timothy 4:1). In both, the demons do what their master does. They deceive, and they draw worship away from God.

Every time they meet Jesus, they lose. “With authority commandeth he even the unclean spirits, and they do obey him,” the crowd says at Capernaum (Mark 1:27). Jesus said what it meant: “if I with the finger of God cast out devils, no doubt the kingdom of God is come upon you” (Luke 11:20).

No. Evil is what is done; the devil is someone who does it. The difference matters every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, “deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13). The Catechism says that in this petition “evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God” (paragraph 2851). The next paragraph quotes Saint Ambrose: “One who entrusts himself to God does not dread the devil.”

In the Bible, yes. In older Greek writing, no. Greek authors used daimon for “a god, a goddess; an inferior deity, whether good or bad,” as Thayer’s lexicon puts it. In the New Testament the word always means an evil spirit. Strong’s concordance spells it “dæmon,” and the meaning in Scripture is the same.

Christians answer this in different ways, and with care. The Catholic Church practises exorcism, though the Catechism does not say in so many words whether a baptised Christian can be possessed. The Catechism says that a major exorcism “can be performed only by a priest and with the permission of the bishop,” and adds a plain warning: “Illness, especially psychological illness, is a very different matter; treating this is the concern of medical science” (paragraph 1673). Before an exorcism, it says, the Church must be sure it is “dealing with the presence of the Evil One, and not an illness.”

Some evangelicals hold that a believer cannot be possessed at all. GotQuestions.org, an evangelical ministry, teaches that a Christian is indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and “The Holy One will not share space with the wicked one.” It allows that believers face “demonic influence and oppression,” and it rests its answer on a verse every Christian can hold: “greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world” (1 John 4:4).

Others in deliverance ministry draw the line in a different place. Derek Prince, a Bible teacher who spent more than thirty years in that ministry, disliked the translation “demon-possessed” and preferred “demonized,” from daimonizomai. “My answer is a true Christian cannot be possessed by the devil,” he taught. “A true Christian is possessed by Jesus. However, in many true Christians, there are some areas where they are demonized, where they are afflicted and affected by demons.” GotQuestions disagrees with that view. Both sides agree that a believer belongs to Christ.

If you or someone you love is suffering in mind or body, a doctor is a good first call, and so is a pastor or priest. The Catechism itself sends illness to medical science.

Because Scripture never asks us to be fascinated by demons, and it never leaves us afraid of them. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). When the seventy came back from their mission, they were full of it: “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through thy name” (Luke 10:17). Jesus turned their joy toward something better. The demons know his name and tremble. We know his name and are known by him. “Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20).

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