Secret City #3 - Part 1 of 4 Parts

Secret City #3 - 

Three Proposals, All Wrong?

The Oval Plaza in Ancient Gerasa

The Bible is  never wrong, but our interpretation of it is wrong too often. Here's the wrong question: "Which city did Jesus visit, when he sent the herd of pigs crashing into the Sea of Galilee?" Let's look at the Bible, Starting with the best and most ancient texts of Mark and Luke:

Mark 5:1 - "They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes."

Luke 8:26 - "They sailed to the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee."

Matthew 7:28 has "Gadarenes," in two places. We will deal with Matthew's version next week. Some less ancient texts have "Gergesenes." We will deal with those in two weeks. Three weeks from now, I will reveal my choice of the secret city that actually saw the stampede of pigs. (Can you wait that long?)

But which one is the correct answer, Gerasenes or Gadarenes? The answer? Both are correct. The gospel writers are not talking about cities, but of the regions under the influence of the cities. And their concern is not even the regions, but instead the kind of people that live there. These people live within the Decapolis, translated as ten towns.  A map would be useful right now:

The Ten Towns of the Decapolis.

The Ten Towns, from south to north, are Philadelphia, Gerasa, Pella, Scythopolis, Gadara, Raphana, Hippus, Dion, Canatha, and Damascus. Several of them are cities in their own right. Each of them is a Roman Polis, a self-governing city under the jurisdiction of Rome. 

Notice that Gerasa lies some 26 miles from the Sea of Galilee. It is hard to imagine a herd of pigs on a 26-mile stampede to drown in the Sea of Galilee. Some sources, perhaps informed by  our scripture, claim that the boundary of the sphere of influence of Gerasa stretched all the way to the Sea of Galilee. Looking at the map, that is hard to imagine.

Stadium in the Ancient City of Gerasa. (Modern Jerash in the background)

The point is this: Jesus has landed in a foreign land. The people are not only Gentiles (non-Jews), but Gentiles who love Rome. The gospel writers are letting us know that the local residents may react differently to message of Jesus. Damascus had a substantial Jewish population, but Gerasa stood as the epitome of Roman Culture in the Middle East. Both Mark and Luke have chosen to highlight Gerasa as the identifier of the type of people who would be reacting to the miracles of Jesus, and to the stampede of pigs downhill to drown in the sea.

The Arch of Hadrian, Built in AD 131 or 132.

A century later, the people of Gerasa built Hadrian's Arch, in celebration of the emperor's visit to Gerasa and his largess in the development of a completed pagan temple complex, and a hoped-for expansion of the city (which failed to happen).