Ancient Art of Jesus and the Maniac of Gadara
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This is a guest postal service past Lex Lata (prompted by Jonathan MS Pearce'due south video, Biblical Contradictions: Demons and Gadara vs Gerasa).
In the matter of proper names, the Greek copies are often incorrect, and in the Gospels one might be misled by their dominance. The transaction well-nigh the swine, which were driven down a steep place past the demons and drowned in the body of water, is said to have taken place in the state of the Gerasenes [τῇ χώρᾳ τῶν Γερασηνῶν]. Now, Gerasa is a town [πόλις] of Arabia, and has most it neither body of water nor lake. And the Evangelists would not have fabricated a argument then obviously and demonstrably simulated; for they were men who informed themselves carefully of all matters connected with Judæa. But in a few copies nosotros have institute, into the country of the Gadarenes [τὴν χώραν τῶν Γαδαρηνῶν] . . . .
These candid sentiments were put to papyrus most 1,800 years ago by hyper-skeptical militant atheist Church Father and eminent scholar Origen of Alexandria (ca. 185-254 CE), in his Commentary on the Gospel of John, VI:24. He was describing a articulate discrepancy in the Gospel copies at his fingertips—the dubious identification of the location at which JC purportedly bandage the demons "Legion" into a herd of two 1000 doomed pigs.
(Feel free to apply "Two G Doomed Pigs" for your metal band's proper name).
Origen would take been less than ecstatic, so, to larn that the discrepancy he lamented came to nest securely in the manuscript tradition and get canon:
They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately at that place met him out of the tombs a homo with an unclean spirit. Mark v:ane-ii (ESV).
Then they sailed to the state of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. When Jesushad stepped out on country, there met him a man from the metropolis who had demons. Luke 8:26-27 (ESV).
And when he came to the other side, to the state of the Gadarenes, ii demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no ane could laissez passer that manner. Matthew 8:28 (ESV).
Math-savvy readers might detect an issue also with the dæmoniac(s), and of grade, the historicity of any supernatural tale is problematic, but nosotros'll pass over those matters for the purpose of our discussion here, and focus solely on the geographic predicament. But put, our scriptures link the aforementioned result to two dissimilar and noncontiguous communities. Opposite to the dutiful and not especially coherent harmonization efforts of some apologists, the archaeological and documentary evidence does not support the notion that "the state of the Gerasenes" somehow encompassed, or was more-or-less interchangeable with, "the country of the Gadarenes."
First, some geography
Gerasa (mod Jerash) and Gadara (near mod Umm Qais) were two distinct, politically co-equal, semi-autonomous city-states in the Decapolis, a grouping of Hellenistic communities largely founded during Ptolemaic and Seleucid occupation of the surface area. (See too P. Cimadomo, The Southern Levant During the First Centuries of Roman Dominion (64 BCE–135 CE): Interweaving Local Cultures (2019), pp. 88-180.) As this map illustrates, Gerasa and Gadara were not particularly close neighbors. In fact, several other communities both within the Decapolis and without lay nearer than Gerasa to Gadara—Scythopolis, Pella, Hippos, Tiberius, and even Nazareth, among others.
Gadara's urban heart was close enough to the Sea of Galilee for residents to view it at a altitude. In contrast, Gerasa's lay much farther to the southeast and inland, separated past about thirty miles of rough, hilly terrain. Given the transportation technology and roads then available, that meant a journey of at to the lowest degree ane or two days. In other words, measured in terms of practical overland travel time, Gerasa was approximately as close to the Ocean of Galilee as Rome is to the North Sea today.
(A side note: Most likely having seen the terrain with his own eyes during his travels, Origen wasn't satisfied fifty-fifty with Gadara as the setting for the satanic swine stampede. He felt that a 3rd and more than northerly location he chosen Gergesa, nearly Hippos, better matched the concrete landscape and spiritual import of the Gospel narratives. For more about Gergesa and its absenteeism from most mod editions of the Synoptics, see R. Clapp, "A Study of the Place Names Gergesa and Bethabara," Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 26, no. ane (1907), pp. 62-83.)
Next, a scrap of Greek
The Gospels of Mark and Luke tell us that Team JC traveled across the Sea of Galilee to "τὴν χώραν τῶν Γερασηνῶν," typically translated equally the land or region of the Gerasenes. The give-and-take χώρα (khora/chora) can mean country, region, land, hinterland, expanse, location, place, etc. Of form, context frequently determines the precise sense of a word, and in the context of Hellenistic city-states—our context hither—χώρα likewise refers more than specifically to the rural territory within the jurisdiction of a given city-state (πόλις, polis) outside the main urban heart (ἄστυ, asty). (See B. Antela-Bernárdez, "Poleis, Choras and Spaces, from Civic to Royal: Spaces in the Cities Under Macedonian Dominion from Alexander the Bang-up to Seleucus I," Pyrenae, vol. 47, no. 2 (2016), pp. 27-38; M.H. Hansen, ed., A Comparative Study of Thirty City-Land Cultures (2000), p. 19; and "polis," in South. Hornblower and A. Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary (1996), p. 1205.)
It was natural, and then, for readers in antiquity to see this connotation in "τὴν χώραν τῶν Γερασηνῶν"—the territory of the πόλις of the Gerasenes, or Gerasene territory. Indeed, such was Origen's understanding of the phrase. (Too worth noting is that writers of aboriginal Greek occasionally fabricated the stylistic selection to identify a community non by the πόλις proper noun, but by its people, which can sound peculiar to us moderns. For example, "I visited the Minneapolitans" and "I visited the country of the Minneapolitans," would have been unremarkable alternatives to, "I visited Minneapolis.")
Once again, geography
Bearing this in heed, allow's turn to the χώρα within the political geography of the Decapolis. Have a few moments to expect over the map on the second page of this chapter from Prof. Michael Eisenberg, a University of Haifa archaeologist who digs in the surface area. (We aren't posting an image here for copyright reasons).
And the inaccuracy cannot exist convincingly cured by any corporeality of ad hoc apologetics.
Gerasa's χώρα did not extend to the Sea of Galilee. Information technology did not fifty-fifty share a edge with Gadara's; the χώρα of Pella separated the two entirely. If a history teacher using this map asked me to put my finger on the state of the Gerasenes, and I pointed at the gray-chocolate-brown patch around Gadara rather than the sienna patch around Gerasa, my teacher would justifiably doubtfulness whether I was cut out for simple map-reading.
Ἡ χώρα τῶν Γερασηνῶν wasn't some vague, largeish, thataway area comprising the territories of Gerasa plus one or more other Decapolitan communities; it was the land over which Gerasa exercised authority, and from which it drew economic back up. But as ἡ χώρα τῶν Γαδαρηνῶν was the land subject to the jurisdiction of Gadara, and as ἡ χώρα τῶν Σκυθοπολίτων was the country subject to the jurisdiction of Scythopolis, and so on.
We can think of these city-states as being coordinating to states in the U.Southward. (In fact, Madison, Hamilton, and other Framers would applaud us doing and then; lessons fatigued from the history of classical city-states informed their thinking nearly federalism and the U.S. Constitution). Just as Virginia or New York or whatsoever other state has its own governing assembly, residents, and bounded territory, and so too did Gadara, Gerasa, and the other communities of the Decapolis. And referring to Gadarene territory as the land of the Gerasenes would exist tantamount to calling Virginian territory the land of the New Yorkers.
A rationalization offered, and found wanting
Still. One might wonder if perhaps calling the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee the χώρα of the Gerasenes was notwithstanding acceptable and authentic usage because Gerasa was so meaning, wealthy, and influential that its reputation or identity loomed above that of Gadara, every bit a large city might chronicle to a suburb today. For instance, when Lady Lata and I resided in Alexandria (non Origen'southward), about Washington, DC, for the sake of convenience we frequently told distant friends and family that we lived "in the DC expanse."
This hypothesis, variations of which appear in certain apologetics, suffers from two cardinal defects.
First, mainstream archaeological and historical scholarship provides scant justification for attributing such boggling political or cultural prominence to Gerasa at the time. If anything, the all-time candidate for an argument of this sort would accept been Scythopolis (modernistic Beit She'an), which lay a mere fifteen miles from Gadara, and seems to have been the largest and most prosperous Decapolitan community through at least the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, due to its economically and militarily strategic location. (The aforementioned site had likewise served as Egypt's principal authoritative and military outpost in the region until around 1150 BCE, when 3 centuries of Egyptian hegemony over Canaan finally concluded.)
To exist sure, Gerasa'south economy and infrastructure experienced vibrant growth beginning especially in the latter function of the onest century CE. But the same was true of its siblings throughout the Decapolis, including Gadara, during the Pax Romana. And Gadara was not some one-horse town hands lost in Gerasa'south long shadow. Scholars provisionally estimate Gadara's population during this menstruum to have been around 8,000, with Gerasa's being not much larger, at roughly 10,000 (see W. Pierson, Spatial Assessments of Urban Growth in Cities of the Decapolis (2021), pp. 167, 170). Gadara produced noted poets and philosophers, boasted theaters and a hippodrome (like Gerasa), and warranted mentions from Pliny, Strabo, Josephus, and Ptolemy, amidst others (like Gerasa). (See South.T. Parker, "The Decapolis Reviewed," Periodical of Biblical Literature, vol. 94, no. iii (1975), p. 437-441.) Gadara even minted its own silver coinage—unlike Gerasa and most other Decapolitan communities, whose mints appear not to have gone beyond bronze currency. (See A. Lichtenberger, "The Decapolis," inT. Kaizer, ed., A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman About East (2022), p. 217.)
Second, and more than significantly, any notion of Gerasene reputational prominence didn't warrant even a mention by Origen, our all-time aboriginal source to consider the Gerasa/Gadara problem. He had his hands on some of the earliest Gospel papyri, spoke and wrote Koine Greek with native fluency, lived in Roman Palestine a little over a century after the Gospels were composed, and traveled extensively throughout the area to teach, collect important manuscripts, and trace JC'due south footsteps as best he could. He literally talked the talk and walked the walk. If Gadarene territory might reasonably and correctly have been called the state of the Gerasenes in the Greek usage of the time—for whatever reason—we should await Origen to have told us that, or to have stayed silent nigh a non-issue.
But he did neither. Quite the opposite. Origen dismissed the nomenclature as "plainly and demonstrably false" ("προφανὲς ψεῦδος καὶ εὐέλεγκτον").
Terminal thoughts
And then why do the Gospels of Mark and Luke refer to "τὴν χώραν τῶν Γερασηνῶν" rather than "τὴν χώραν τῶν Γαδαρηνῶν?" Dunno. Nosotros accept little basis for any confident conclusions. Peradventure this was a case, much equally Origen supposed, of misapprehension or miscommunication, of an inadvertent but tenacious mistake during composition, translation, or transcription. Or maybe someone in the concatenation of oral or written transmission made a deliberate choice to sacrifice geographic precision and invoke Gerasa to convey some rhetorical or symbolic meaning lost on us (and on Origen). Either way, the result is the same: a lakeside expanse was confusingly and inaccurately given the proper noun of a landlocked community one or two days to the southeast.
To be clear, I don't expect the fuss about a place name in a spectacular exorcism story to deal a stunning blow to anyone's religion. By itself, this is a mere foot mistake in the broader context of the New Attestation. Nor is information technology my position that the Gerasene difficulty must mean the Gospels and other books of the Bible are unusually defective with regards to geography. On the contrary, I call back they become a good deal of that stuff right, roughly on par with many analogous texts from antiquity.
I discuss this misidentification merely to illuminate one notable case of human error creeping into approved holy writ that many believers of a fundamentalist aptitude tell us is inerrant. Origen discerned the problem of the Gerasenes immediate well-nigh ii millennia agone. Nosotros run into it still today. And the inaccuracy cannot exist convincingly cured past any amount of ad hoc apologetics.
[Most the writer: Lex Lata holds Associates Degrees in Drinking and Knowing Things from Casterly Stone Customs College. He lives with Lady and Lad Lata in a weird old house near Minnesota'south nine,997th lake.]
Source: https://onlysky.media/jpearce/you-say-gerasa-and-i-say-gadara/
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