5 They came to the other side of the sea, to the region of the Gerasenes.[a] 2 And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man from the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. 3 He lived among the tombs, and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain, 4 for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces, and no one had the strength to subdue him. 5 Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. 6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him, 7 and he shouted at the top of his voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” 8 For he had said to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” 9 Then Jesus[b] asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” 10 He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the region. 11 Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding, 12 and the unclean spirits[c] begged him, “Send us into the swine; let us enter them.” 13 So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine, and the herd, numbering about two thousand, stampeded down the steep bank into the sea and were drowned in the sea.
14 The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came to see what it was that had happened. 15 They came to Jesus and saw the man possessed by demons sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion, and they became frightened. 16 Those who had seen what had happened to the man possessed by demons and to the swine reported it. 17 Then they began to beg Jesus[d] to leave their neighborhood. 18 As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. 19 But Jesus[e] refused and said to him, “Go home to your own people, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and what mercy he has shown you.” 20 And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him, and everyone was amazed.
The story of Jesus healing a man with an unclean spirit that turned out to be "Legion" is the second of three "mighty deeds" or "miracles" that Jesus performs in Mark subsequent to a section on Jesus' teachings in order to legitimize his teachings and to give them authority. There is a lot we can unpack here, but I am going to start by reminding myself of the audience of this story and look at some of the context.
As explored in earlier posts, the author of Mark is writing for a mainly gentile audience in Greek (at least the earliest copies are in Greek) as part of a community that some have suggested may have been in Rome (Mark uses a number of Latin terms), Galilee, Antioch (third-largest city in the Roman Empire, located in northern Syria), or southern Syriathat. Wherever the community resided in the Roman empire it was part of a world shaped by Hellenistic culture. Written around 60 CE, this would put it at the time of the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and most certainly amongst the Jewish revolt.
There is a Greek pagan connection to the audience by the setting of the story being in Gerasa in the region of the Sea of Galilee, one of the "ten cities of the Decapolis of the province of Syria. The people of the region were mainly Macedonian/Greek settlers of the Seleucid period who had adopted Greek culture and with a smaller number of Jews, mostly traders and artisans, but not culturally dominant. Following the Greco-Roman worldview, their local spirits, or Daimones, were intermediate beings between gods and humans. These Daimones could be protective, neutral, or malevolent and were blamed for illness, madness, and misfortune. Local spirits were believed to be tied to land and city boundaries and to inhabit tombs, ruins, and caves. Because of this tombs were feared and exorcisms and protective rituals were common. The story in Mark fits this description of the local Greco-Roman belief about spirits to a tee. In the Mark story the possessed man lives among the tombs and the unclean spirits beg Jesus not to send them out of the region, suggesting that they are tied to the land.
An exorcism as a mighty deed legitimizing a teacher's authority also fits Greek custom as a rhetorical device and would be familiar to the Gospel's Hellenistic audience as would the earlier miracle of calming the storm. Mighty deeds, signs, and supernatural insight were sometimes portrayed as confirming a philosopher’s closeness to divine wisdom (theios anēr, “divine man”). Pythagoras was said to have been able to calm storms and control natural forces as in Jesus' earlier miracle. Apollonius of Tyana, a first century CE philosopher and wonder-worker was claimed to heal the sick, exorcise demons, and to have raised a girl from the dead (Jesus' next miracle).
I notice elements of the story referring to that which is "pagan", or "unclean", outside the Jewish system of holiness and purity laws and rules that were intended to provide access to God. The possessed man lived among tombs which were considered ritually unclean in Second Temple Judaism. They were considered unclean because death represents the strongest contradiction to the holiness of the Temple which embodies life and God's presence. Numbers 19:11 states that, "Whoever touches a dead person...shall be unclean seven days". This meant that a person could not enter the Temple, the site of the presence of God for seven days. This was extended to contact with graves as the impurity of death was seen as so powerful that it transmits through enclosed spaces (Num 19:14) . Tombs were seen as permanent sources of impurity and were whitewashed before pilgrimage festivals to guard against accidental defilement.
The possessing spirits are also labeled as "unclean" in the story and would have been seen as representing the foreignness and idolatry of the Greek and Roman culture and local gods tied to the land and the people of this region. This is further reinforced by the spirits naming themselves "Legion' referencing both the idea that they were many and powerful, and alluding to the foreign Roman occupiers.
We also have the herd of swine which as a ritually unclean food became a powerful symbolic and cultural boundary marker in this period. Pigs were religiously charged above the other unclean animals due to Antiochus IV Epiphanes (167 BCE) enforcing pig sacrifice and consumption as a loyalty test.
Given this background, I would suggest that for Gentile members of the community of Mark who we believe lived in a predominately Hellenistic community under Roman rule and the expectation of public religious participation in honoring Roman gods, this story would be seen symbolically as Jesus's, or the way of Jesus's, predominance and power over Rome and Hellenistic culture. I can also see this as being interpreted as Jesus's way removing barriers to God and being a conduit to God that supplants the ritual holiness and purity laws. Jesus is shown to have both done away with the impurity of the powerful hoard of spirits that made the possessed man impure and made him dwell in tombs that made him unclean and ineligible to be in God's presence, he also removed the herd of pigs, a huge herd of 2,000, that were a source of uncleanness and a symbol of foreign rule that demands loyalty to Caesar over God. I would believe the inference here would be that the Way of Jesus for accessing God for these Gentile followers makes removes that which make them "unclean" or a barrier to God's presence, does not demand observance to the Jewish purity laws, and is not defiled or defeated by the pagan practices of the society, "the spirits of the land" in which they live.
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