A lot to take in! I might note my previous efforts to understand Mary Magdalene led to a paper which seemed to establish that she was the same as Mary of Bethany and the 'sinful woman'.

https://research.avondale.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=theo_papers

But what is this 'sin' she does? Prostitution in terms of single women having sex and charging money for it is not illegal in Jewish law. What they seem to mean by this "sinful" talk is not having sex but, perhaps, intercourse with unauthorized divine beings.

Note a passage from the Gospel of Mary: "There is no sin, but you create sin when you mingle as in adultery, which is called sin."

I'm thinking Mary M is 'sinful' and an 'adulterer' because of her demon inhabitation.

I've wondered if Mary M.—in keeping with the Qumran effort to do exorcisms—tried doing exorcisms on possessed people, but the demons came into her instead. Jesus comes along with a higher spirit juju and frees her.

Many gospel narratives seem to have exoticism as the undeclared context. Luke was likely a 'doctor' not of medicine but of exorcisms. The 'fever' that Jesus expels from Peter's mother-in-law seems to be demonically related.

Spirit medicine was a noted interest of the Dead Sea Scroll crowd, and many psalms seem to have been used for exorcisms. The Qumran community practiced a spirit medicine in which names of angels would be invoked as part of a healing, evidently.

I've wanted to ask you for awhile about the whole theology around demons. I don't know if you've written about this, but it seems to be the looming problem in the gospel—these disembodied beings, who might be understood as dead Nephilim, who returned to the "house" of the earth.

I think a real problem that biblical cosmology & narrative has to address is—what to do with dead beings! The original Creation had no place for disembodied creatures. The problem with demons might be that they have nowhere to go. Their angel daddies created them without thinking through the problem of what would happen to their children post-mortem.