The country of the Gergesenes. — The exact determination of the locality presents many difficulties. In all the three Gospels we find various readings, of which the best supported are Gadarenes in St. Matthew, and Gerasenes in St. Mark and St. Luke. “Gergesenes” is, however, found in some MSS. of high authority, and the variations are obviously of very early date. The main facts as to the three regions thus indicated are as follows: —
(1.) Gadara was a city east of the Sea of Galilee, about sixteen miles from Tiberias. It is identified with the modern Um Keis, the ruins of which are more than two miles in circumference, and stand at the north-west extremity of the mountains of Gilead, near the south-east corner of the Lake. The tombs of the city, chambers in the limestone rock often more than twenty feet square, are its most conspicuous feature, and are, indeed, the sole abode of its present inhabitants. Under the Roman occupation it was important enough to have two amphitheatres and a long colonnaded street.
(2.) Gerasa was a city in the Gilead district, twenty miles east of the Jordan, described sometimes as belonging to Cœle-Syria, sometimes to Arabia. It also has ruins which indicate the former splendour of the city. Of these two, it is clear that Gadara fits in better with all the circumstances of the narrative; and if “Gerasenes” is more than the mistake of a transcriber, it could only be because the name was used vaguely for the whole Gilead district. The reading “Gadarenes” in that case would probably come from some one better acquainted with the position of the two cities.
(3.) There was no city named Gergesa, but the name Gergesenes was probably connected with the older Girgashites, one of the Canaanite races that occupied the country before the invasion of Israel (Genesis 10:16; Genesis 15:21; Joshua 3:10; Joshua 24:11; et al.). Apparently, however, from the last passage referred to, they were on the western side of the Jordan. It is, on the whole, more likely that the reading was a mistake, than that the old tribe still remained with its old name; but it is possible that the name of Gerasa may represent an altered form of Girgashim.
Two possessed with devils. — St. Mark and St. Luke speak of “one” only. A like difference meets us in St. Matthew’s “two blind men” at Jericho (Matthew 20:30) as compared with the “one” of the two other Gospels. The natural explanation is that, in each case, one was more prominent than the other in speech or act, and so was remembered and specified, while the other was either forgotten or left unnoticed. The difference, as far as it goes, is obviously in favour of the independence of St. Matthew’s narrative. The “tombs” in the neighbourhood of Gadara, hewn out in the rock, have been already mentioned. To dwell in such tombs was, to the ordinary Jew, a thing from which he shrank with abhorrence, as bringing pollution, and to choose such an abode was therefore a sign of insanity.
St. Luke adds that he wore no clothes (i.e., strictly, no outer garment; the word does not imply actual nakedness). St. Mark (whose account is the fullest of the three) notices that he had often been bound with fetters and chains, and that, with the abnormal strength often found in mania, he had set himself free from them. The insanity was so homicidal that “none could pass by that way,” so suicidal that he was ever cutting himself with stones, howling day and night in the wildness of his paroxysms.
For a full discussion of the subject of demoniacal possession, see Excursus at the end of this Gospel.
III. — DEMONIAC POSSESSION (Matthew 8:28).
(1.) As to the word, the Greek δαίμων (the “knowing,” or the “divider”) appears in Homer as interchangeable with Θεός (God). In the mythology of Hesiod(Works and Days, i. 108) we have the first downward step, and the δαίμονες are the departed spirits of the men who lived in the first golden age of the world. They are the good genii of Greek religion, averters of evil, guardians of mortal men. The next stage introduced the neuter of the adjective derived from δαίμων as something more impersonal, and τὸ δαιμόνων was used by Plato as something “between God and man, by which the former communicates with the latter” (Symp., p. 202), and in this sense Socrates spoke of the inward oracle whose warning he obeyed, as his δαιμόνον, and was accordingly accused of bringing in the worship of new δαιμόνια, whom the State had not recognised. The fears of men led them, however, to connect these unknown intermediate agents with evil as well as good. The δαίμων of the Greek tragedians is the evil genius of a family, as in the case of that of Agamemnon. A man is said to be under its power when he is swayed by some uncontrollable, frenzied passion that hurries him into guilt and misery.
Such were the meanings that had gathered round the word when the Greek translators of the Old Testament entered on their task. They, as was natural, carefully avoided using it in any connection that would have identified it with the God of Israel. It appears in Psalms 90:3, where the English version gives “destruction;” in Deuteronomy 32:17, and Psalms 106:37, where the English version has “devils,” and in this sense it accordingly passed into the language of the Hellenistic Jews, and so into that of the writers of the Gospels. So St. Paul speaks of the gods whom the heathen worshipped as δαιμόνια (1 Corinthians 10:20).
(2.) As to the phenomena described, the belief of later Judaism ascribed to “demons,” in the sense which the word has thus acquired, many of the more startling forms of bodily and mental suffering which the language of modern thought groups under the general head of “disease.” Thus, in the history of Tobit, the daughter of Raguel is possessed by the evil spirit Asmodeus, and he slays her seven bridegrooms (Tob. 3:8). Or passing on to the Gospel records, we find demoniac agency the cause of dumbness (Matthew 9:32), blindness (Matthew 12:22), epilepsy (Mark 9:17-27), or (as here, and Mark 5:1-5) insanity. To “have a devil” is interchangeable with “being mad” (John 7:20; John 8:48; John 10:20, and probably Matthew 11:18). And this apparently was but part of a more general view, which saw in all forms of disease the work, directly or indirectly, of Satan, as the great adversary of mankind. Our Lord went about “healing all that were oppressed of the devil” (Acts 10:38). “Satan had bound” for eighteen years the woman who was crippled by a spirit of infirmity” (Luke 13:16). And these “demons” are described as “unclean spirits” (Matthew 10:1; Matthew 12:43, et al.) acting under a “ruler” or “prince,” who is popularly known by the name of Beelzebub, the old Philistine deity of Ekron, and whom our Lord identifies with Satan (Matthew 12:24-26). The Talmud swarms with allusions to such demons as lurking in the air, in food, in clothing, and working their evil will on the bodies or the souls of men. St. Paul, though he refers only once to “demons,” in this sense, and then apparently as the authors of false doctrines claiming divine authority, but coming really from “seducing spirits” (1 Timothy 4:1), seems to see in some forms, at least, of bodily disease the permitted agency of Satan, as in the case of the chastisement inflicted on the incestuous Corinthian (1 Corinthians 5:5; 2 Corinthians 2:11), his own “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7), and possibly in other like hindrances to his work (1 Thessalonians 2:18).
(3.) The belief bore its natural fruit among the Jews of our Lord’s time. The work of the exorcist became a profession, as in the case of the sons of Sceva at Ephesus (Acts 19:13). Charms and incantations were used, including the more sacred forms of the divine name. The Pharisees appear to have claimed the power as one of the privileges belonging to their superior holiness (Matthew 12:27). Josephus narrates that a herb grew at Machærus, the root of which had the power of expelling demons (whom he defines as the spirits of wicked men), and that he had himself beheld, in the presence of Vespasian, a man possessed with a demon, cured by a ring containing a root of like properties. As a proof of the reality of the dispossession, a vessel of water was placed at a little distance from the man, which was overthrown by the unseen demon as he passed out from the man’s nostrils (Wars, vii. 6, § 3; Ant. viii. 2, § 5). The belief as to the demons being “the souls of the dead,” lingered in the Christian Church, was accepted by Justin, who, coming from Samaria, probably received it from the Jews (Apol. I., i., p. 65), and was recognised as at least a common belief by Chrysostom (De Lazaro, I., p. 728).
(4.) Our Lord’s treatment of the cases of men thus “possessed with demons” stands out partly as accepting the prevailing belief in its highest aspects, partly as contrasted with it. He uses no spells or charms, but does the work of casting out as by His own divine authority, “with a word.” He delegates to the Twelve the power to “cast out demons,” as well as to cure diseases (Matthew 10:8); and when the Seventy return with the report that the devils (i.e., demons) were subject unto them in His name, He speaks of that result as a victory over Satan (Luke 10:17-18). He makes the action of the demons the vehicle for a parable, in which first one and then eight demons are represented as possessing the same man (Matthew 12:43-45). It may be noted that He nowhere speaks of them, in the language of the later current beliefs of Christendom, as identical with the “fallen angels,” or as the souls of the dead, though they are evil spirits subject to the power of Satan.
(5.) It is obvious that many hard questions rise out of these facts. Does our Lord’s indirect teaching stamp the popular belief with the seal of His authority? or did He, knowing it to be false, accommodate Himself to their belief, and speak in the only way men were able to understand of His own power to heal, teaching them as they were “able to hear it?” (Mark 4:33). If we answer the former question in the affirmative, are we to believe that the fact of possession was peculiar to the time and country, and that the “demons” (either as the souls of the dead, or as evil angels) have since been restrained by the influence of Christendom or the power of Christ? or may we still trace their agency in the more obscure and startling phenomena of mental disease, in the delirium tremens of the drunkard, in the orgiastic frenzy of some Eastern religions, in homicidal or suicidal mania? And if we go as far as this, is it a true theory of disease in general to assign it, in all cases, to the permitted agency of Satan? and how can we reconcile that belief either with the temper which receives sickness as “God’s visitation,” or with that which seeks out its mechanical or chemical causes? Wise and good men have answered these questions very differently, and it may be that we have not the data for an absolutely certain and exhaustive answer. It is well to remember, on the one hand, that to speak of the phenomena of the Gospel possessions as mania, hysteria, or the like, is to give them a name, but not to assign a cause — that science, let it push its researches into mental disease ever so far, has to confess at last that it stands in the presence of unknown forces, more amenable often to spiritual influences than to any medical treatment; and on the other, that our Lord came to rescue men from the thraldom of frenzy and disease, and so to prepare them for the higher work of spiritual renovation, rather than rudely to sweep away the traditional belief of the people as to their source, or to proclaim a new psychological theory.