Healing of the Gerasene demoniac

The eastern shore of the lake, where Jesus and the disciples land, is Gentile country, part of the Decapolis, which is a cluster of Greek-speaking cities, and the presence of a herd of pigs establishes that immediately.

The man lives among the tombs, which were rock-cut chambers in the hillside, and nobody could bind him any more, not even with a chain. He had often been chained hand and foot, and he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he cried out and cut himself with stones.

That is a description of a man who has been institutionalised in the only way available, by being restrained, and who has broken out of it repeatedly and lives in a graveyard injuring himself.

He runs and falls on his knees in front of Jesus and shouts at the top of his voice, what do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God's name do not torture me. The title used is one a Gentile would use.

Asked his name, the answer is my name is Legion, for we are many. A legion was a Roman formation of around five thousand men, and it is the vocabulary of occupation applied to what is inside him. The word would have carried a political charge on that shore.

The spirits beg not to be sent out of the area, and ask to be sent into a herd of about two thousand pigs feeding on the hillside. Permission is given, and the herd rushes down the steep bank into the lake and drowns.

The economic loss is enormous and it is the reason for what happens next. The herdsmen run off and report it, and people come out to see, and they find the man sitting there, dressed and in his right mind, and they are afraid. Then they begin to plead with Jesus to leave their region.

A man who had been uncontrollable for years is sitting quietly in clothes, and the town asks the person responsible to go away. Nothing softens that.

He gets into the boat, and the man begs to come with him and is refused. Go home to your own people and tell them how much the Lord has done for you. He goes away and begins to tell it all over the Decapolis, and all the people are amazed.

Everyone else in these accounts is told to keep quiet. The one man sent out to talk is a Gentile in Gentile territory.

The place is called Gerasa in some copies, Gadara in others and Gergesa in others again, and the confusion is old. Gerasa is fifty kilometres from the lake, too far for pigs to run into it; Gadara is about ten, with territory that may have reached the shore; and a site on the eastern bank near modern Kursi has steep ground running down to the water and was identified with the episode by the fourth century.

Pigs are the detail that fixes the population. This is Gentile country, where a herd of two thousand animals was an ordinary agricultural asset rather than an abomination, and the loss of it explains why the region asked him to leave rather than to stay.