How did the Jewish exorcists of Acts 19:13 cast out demons before they undertook to invoke the name of Jesus?

Question

Acts 19:13 informs us about the existence of iterant Jewish exorcists who, inspired by Paul, decided to undertake the practice of invoking Jesus' name to cast out demons, probably because they wanted to reach the same success ratio as Paul:

13 Then some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, “I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims.” [Acts 19:13, ESV]

Based on later verses it appears that they managed to see some success and the practice gained some traction, until they came across an evil spirit that was way too strong for their level. All this is very interesting and food for thought, but for this question I would like to bring your focus to the fact that there were Jewish exorcists in the first place. We know this because Acts 19:13 says "[...] some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists undertook [...]". This means that there were many itinerant Jewish exorcists around at the time and only a fraction of them began to invoke the name of Jesus (meaning that the rest continued doing their exorcisms the way they used to do them).

Question: How did the itinerant Jewish exorcists cast out demons before they undertook to invoke the name of Jesus?

Evidently they couldn't have used the name of Jesus to cast out demons before they started using the name of Jesus (duh), so they had to have employed a different method and receive authority from a different source prior to that. In fact, a more generalized version of the question would be: How did Jewish exorcists (and people in general) cast out demons before the name of Jesus became popular? I don't know if these are questions that can be answered relying solely on the Bible, so I'm open to answers that incorporate useful insights from historical records.

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A closely related question for the interested reader: How do Christians make sense of exorcisms in other religions?

Answer 1

Casting out demons was not something that only came about as a result of Jesus coming onto the scene. This practice had been going on since the times of King David.

By the time of Jesus, casting demons followed a practised routine. The first step was determining the demons ‘name(s)’. The practice had varying levels of success, and was certainly not always successful. And, the Pharisees practiced this. All of this from mostly non canonical sources, although there are brief glimpses in the Bible. Example, the evil spirit that tormented King Saul (1 Samuel 16:14).

So, because the source is non-canonical, you will need to decide whether to consider this - but - it is relevant to your question which will at best be difficult (impossible?) to answer using scripture - although I could be quite wrong. (We’ll see)

The difference Jesus made was he did actually cast demons out of people who were dumb - unable to ‘speak’, therefore you couldn’t determine the demons name. This was (1) thought to be impossible, and (2), therefore this was a specific Messianic sign that only the coming Messiah would be able to perform.

That’s why in Matthew 12 when Jesus did this, the audience turned to the leaders and asked ... ‘is this him’!

Answer 2

This is just my thought. Unbelievers remove unbelievers from different positions in this world because they are powerful enough to do that. So why wouldn't Satan be able to cast out demons from their own only to use it in their narcissistic way to make people believe they had power.We Know well that Satan does nothing but counterfeit what the original plan of God is.