I am not an expert on Koine Greek, so don’t take my word on this, but I suppose the word “lake” is not necessarily restricted to “sea”.
Also, Israel has been undergoing severe draughts for many years and its “waterscapes” are shrinking. For example, the reason that the Dead Sea is so salty is that it has been shrinking due to evaporation. I understand Raymond Brown may be an expert on the New Testament, but did he also dive into studies on geological indications of the ancient waterscape including ponds, lakes, sea levels, et cetera? Because geography is not a static phenomenon and I don’t think Mr. Brown is also an expert on that.
Anyway, enough uncertainties there to avoid such a strict conclusion as you seem to make. By the way, you did not respond to the first part of my previous post?
I think Jesus could have used this display of power for the purpose of showing that He has authority over everything in creation, including evil spiritual entities. Whenever He wishes to exert this authority, they have to obey. They basically had to beg Him for this small request. The pigs were considered spiritually unclean so it certainly has a special meaning that they were allowed to enter into these pigs. Anyway, as always in the miracles performed by Jesus, there are multiple layers of meaning. But this does not discount the actual occurrence of these events for me.
Yes. I know. My comments were tongue-in-cheek. And the very reason the idiom “giving me hell” exists is because it originates in the idea that people were deemed deserving of hell’s punishments. To “give someone hell” was to punish them as hell-bound sinners deserved to be punished. Of course, over time most such idioms tend to become generalized and even softened.
I find the term “Biologos types” especially interesting because I never really thought of an organization as diverse as Biologos as having a type! So this fascinates me. It is a reminder that we can easily take for granted ideas which others around us don’t take for granted at all.
Other than the obvious self-identifications within the ABOUT US of Biologos.org, it never occurred to me that there was a Biologos type—especially not a type known for enforcing a particular belief on the discussion forums. (But again, I may not be understanding the context.)
No doubt most of us here do not believe in all sorts of things which many who frequent other types of web forums would use to justify condemning us. I’m sure that all of our personal lists of non-beliefs would be quite long.
Thank you for that! I’ve lost touch with Craig since retirement. We tended to disagree on many topics but it was always so delightful working with him. I always appreciated Craig Keener’s perspectives because I was sure to learn something new in the process.
Someday I should survey the literature from retired missionaries. There’s much that I read skeptically but I would read such accounts far differently today than I did in the 1960’s, to say the least. Experiences can profoundly change us, even when we have limited understanding of those experiences.
@Casper_Hesp
Faith Comes By Hearing has an interesting story about how the story of the pigs and the demoniac was interpreted by an African culture where village herds are held in common: Here’s what the illiterate village elders decided the story meant.
[quote] As part of a communal-herding society themselves, they understood that 20 of the pigs belonged to one family, 30 to another, 100 to yet another, and so on. Those 2,000 pigs were the wealth and prosperity of the entire town. The Konkomba villagers were horrified by what they saw as complete economic devastation; they naturally identified with the frightened herders and townspeople who were negatively impacted and had begged Jesus to leave.
To them, inviting Jesus to become a part of their lives and community became a question of survival (imagine the reaction of a wealthy American to the story of the rich young ruler – “Will He ask me to give away all that I own?” – and you’ll see a fitting parallel). Would Jesus destroy their economy, too?
Now, while the debate went on, two of the elders discussed the passage between themselves. After a few minutes, they quieted everyone down and shared their conclusion. Mentioning the name of an insane man in the village they said, “You know we would rather that man died than one of our pigs.” After meeting with universal agreement they continued, “Jesus was trying to show us that the value of one man’s soul was worth more to Him than the whole economy of our village.”[/quote] News & Updates - Faith Comes By Hearing
I think it is important to remember that the gospel speaks to all cultures, not always in the same ways.
The main reason the Dead Sea is so salty is that it has no outlet (unlike, say, the Sea of Galilee. (That is the stuff of many sermons.) I don’t see what special expertise is needed here, since the text itself says the pigs rushed down the steep bank and were drowned.
You seem to be missing my point. I simply meant to say that, using current geography, it is difficult to prove that there was no source of water (near the location of the story of Legion) in ancient times big enough for drowning a herd of pigs. So I would not say this argument can be used to completely discredit the story.
About the Dead Sea, you are right but it doesn’t mean I’m wrong ;). Both mechanisms interact. Wherever its water comes from, it still needs to evaporate to eventually increase its salt concentration. That’s not a problem if the input is as large as the rate of evaporation. However, when I visited the Dead Sea I was told that this is currently not the case. The locals blame the salt extraction company “Dead Sea Works” for this shrinking.
One problem with the demon industry is that it seems to parallel the “God of the Gaps” idea. In God of the Gaps, we attribute to God phenomena in the natural world that we don’t understand. And that makes us stop looking for natural explanations.
In the same manner, if we still attributed mental illness, epilepsy, etc. to demonic activity we wouldn’t have developed an arsenal of medications to help those who suffer from such afflictions. And if the illnesses are not amenable to treatments we currently have, we should do further research, not throw up our hands and claim that it’s demonic activity.
I don’t think that believers should get so caught up in stories from faraway lands about demon possession. In the early days, as the church was spreading, it would absorb local spirituality. I believe that that is the way we ended up with purgatory, the relic cult, saints who never existed (formerly local gods and goddesses), and all that stuff.
This is exactly what I was asking you about before…
Maybe I didn’t make myself clear enough: Did Mr. Brown refer to geological evidence that provides strong support for the claim that there were no possible options of lakes/ponds in the ancient waterscape that Mark could have been referring to? Also, the coast of the Sea of Galilee could have been located more southernly and the pig herds could have been a number of miles away from the village. Anyway, I am not saying any one of these options is necessarily true. But if Mr. Brown only made use of current maps, his argument wouldn’t be very convincing.
Besides, assuming that the Gospels were written by locals, wouldn’t a claim of non-existing water be pretty easy to see through for many persons living in Israel? It seems unlikely that something elaborate like that would be used as an “embellishment”. It would just lead people to doubt the trustworthiness of the reports of the apostle Mark and hence the Gospel message he was bringing to them. The same holds if you believe this part was inserted later.
Why would you go for the option of rejecting this passage if there are other explanations possible? You seem to be very keen on rejecting this passage? It also seems a bit ad hoc to reject the validity of this occurrence and accept all the other miracles Jesus performed. Also, you still did not reply on my proposal that available medical explanations do not at all exclude spiritual relevance.
Although that may be the response of some people, that wouldn’t logically follow on two counts:
Christian theologians have long recognized the co-existence of ultimate causation and proximate causation. The same person can state that “God created humans” and “my parents produced me” with no sense of contradiction. (They can also look to God to bless them with children even while knowing their roles in what they had to do to produce children.) Likewise, one can say “God willed that objects fall to the ground” even while saying, “Objects fall to the ground because of gravitational forces.” Yes, some people in the Middle Ages said, “The heavenly bodies move as they do because God commanded them to do so” while Isaac Newton explained in terms of natural processes how and why the planets moved as they did. Obviously, attribution of phenomena to a spiritual being does not at all preclude understanding and addressing the natural processes as common sense would expect.
If you read missionary reports over the centuries, you will find many statements like “Demonic oppression has apparently caused people to do X and neglect Y and this has brought great famine in this land.” According to the logic you describe, those missionaries would have said, “Therefore, there is nothing we can do about this other than fight the demons.” No. What we usually find is that they applied many of the same solutions to the problem which someone who didn’t believe in demons would apply: they started feeding programs.
Thus, whether or not someone affirms the ultimate cause (e.g., God, angels, demons), logical people tend to address the proximate causes and conditions exactly as we would expect. That is why the same people who will usually pray about the problem (including demonic problems) also get busy addressing the problem in the ways we would expect.
I saw this as a chaplain in a major metropolitan hospital: the Roman Catholic doctors treated out of control, berserk patients in the same ways as the agnostic doctors–usually with a quick injection of medication and then ongoing dosing from day to day—even if they were personally convinced that the patient was “demonized.” Has there ever been a doctor somewhere in the world who said, “I’m not going to bother medically treating this person because I believe they are demonized”? Probably. Yet I would suspect that one can find just as many instances where doctors who did not believe in demonization failed to medically treat similar patients for all sorts of other reasons.
What I have witnessed in the developing world is lots of medical neglect that ultimately stemmed from (a) lack of resources, and (b) a sense of futility. As a result, I’ve seen families of a patient given all sorts of lame excuses for why nothing will be done for the patient, especially when those excuses are likely to make sense to the family and cause them to take their problems elsewhere. For example, I once saw a Ugandan doctor get a terminal cancer patient out of his clinic by telling the family, “There is nothing I can do for him because his sickness is probably due to a curse, probably by some neighbor who wishes him ill.” Because curses in that society tended to be associated with making pacts with demons/spirits, he probably found this a convenient way to pass the buck. Did belief in demons cause the medical neglect? No.
Of course, to say that attributing various symptoms to demons would prevent the development of medications and treatments to address those symptoms is contradicted by the history of Western Europe. Were the cultures which associated various symptoms with demonic activity the last to develop and apply medical solutions to those symptoms? No. In fact, contrast the development of medical science in the Christian west with the Hindu world where samsara (the inevitable suffering that accompanies the cycle of life and which is considered a good thing which the devout Hindu should desire in order to find enlightenment and to eventually escape samsara) actually discouraged proactive compassion. Religious worldview can play a huge role in how a society develops science, technology, and medical treatments. Viewing patients as victims deserving compassion and being made in the Image of God actually helped stimulate the development of modern medicine. Compare that to societies where elimination of the weak through sickness and revering quiet stoicism as an ultimate virtue were encouraged.
Yes, one can always find illogical people doing illogical things for illogical reasons. (So we can expect to find instances where belief in demonization was used as an excuse to give up and do nothing.) But that kind of illogical thinking happens because people are often illogical. Thus, during the Middle Ages there were some theologians who complained about scientists and said, “The heavenly bodies move through the heavens as they do because God willed it so and commanded His angels to propel them. End of story.” and they didn’t think beyond that. But there were also plenty of Christians in the sciences who thought otherwise, such as Isaac Newton and Copernicus, who said that the theological ideas about God’s involvement in no way precluded investigating how the Creator meant for the natural processes to bring about God’s will for the heavenly bodies.
Obviously, the above analysis is not at all original to me. We learned about this in undergraduate western civilization courses, although I probably learned the terminology from various Bible.and.Science.Forum essays which have always emphasized the ultimate vs. proximate distinction.
To me this indicates the complete lack of explanatory power and practical utility of the “demonic” explanation. If the best way to address demonic attack is to act as if the demons don’t exist, then it’s not simply treating them as an ultimate cause rather than a proximate cause, it’s actually ignoring them completely. And if the problem goes away when you take the same steps you would take as if the demons didn’t exist, then maybe it’s because the demons don’t exist (or at least were never involved in the first place).
I used to agree, even preaching against what I called the “seeing a demon behind every bush” mentality that had come into my church community because of a rapidly growing charismatic-type cult just down the road from us. [Yes, I use the word cult both carefully and accurately in this case. It eventually became a national news story after a series of deaths.] I assumed that we erred when placing too much emphasis on demonic activity.
Unfortunately, after personal experiences, both in the USA and on the mission field overseas, I was forced to face squarely the reality which the Apostle Paul warned us about. (BeagleLady calls it getting “caught up in stories from far away lands” but I call it life.) Believe me, I would far prefer that it were nothing but vague stories from faraway lands which I could easily dismiss----just as I did dismiss them in my early years of ministry. I was quite opposed to the Charismatic Movement of the 1970’s and with it, its emphasis on the demonic. As long as the “stories” came from other people, I was always able to explain them away and dismiss them. I tended to lump them together with the Apostolic gifts of the first century church: I was quite willing to accept them as the Bible described but I relegated all of those things to a “special time” in the spread of the Gospel. (I still do for the most part treat the sign-gifts as having a special role for that special time.) I was even willing to give some leeway to reports from the mission field, but I doubted that there was all that much demonic activity in the USA. After all, if I didn’t personally observe it, why should I believe what people were claiming?
Personal observation and a lifetime of experiences has a way of humbling some of our rigid stances. I don’t expect to “win over” anybody to convince them of the things I’ve witnessed, which is one of the reasons why I rarely provide many details of the bizarre phenomena I witnessed. (That would only solicit the same kinds of denialism logic I used to apply, and nothing much would be accomplished by it. As a skeptic I was always able to suggest alternative explanations—and if I couldn’t, I simply dismissed the story as a lie or a product of hallucination or “mass hysteria”. Indeed, that tends to be my view even today when it is about an event which I didn’t witness. I’ve spent time on Youtube looking for events which at all compare to the things I’ve witnessed, and I’d have to say that almost everything I saw there was likely rubbish by showmen praying upon the gullible.)
I figure that if God wants people to change their mind, he’ll expose them to similar personal observation opportunities. It is not up to me to convince the adamant of what I’ve witnessed. Frankly, I wouldn’t wish my own experiences on anyone. (If I could erase various experiences from my memory, I would certainly do so.) However, I do wish that in my 30’s and 40’s especially that I would have thought more seriously about what the Bible says concerning what it means for Satan to go about “as a roaming lion, seeking whom he may devour.” I’ve observed the devouring process. It is dreadful to watch. Frankly, in many ways I envy those who find it easy to reject these concepts. I miss the spiritual naivete of my younger years. It seemed much more safe and comfy.
I don’t reject the passage. I’ve already mentioned that I accept the miraculous healing. I consider the demonized pigs falling into the water from miles away a stretch. You mention other options, so I will also. The pigs might have flown, or been levitated into the air and teleported, or the lake might have been put there just for the occasion. What would I know?
Not accepting demons is certainly the best option for personal health and safety! People have always enjoyed ghost stories and legends, but these days the market for the occult seems to be booming! Look at shows like “The Walking Dead,” “Supernatural,” “The X-Files.” Not to mention horror movies.
The difference is that I provided plausible options…
Let’s say that you reject the part about the legion of demons entering a whole herd of pigs which subsequently commit mass suicide… I would say that nothing remains of this passage of Legion. Although the spiritual part is heavy, I still don’t see any proof of geographical impossibilities here.
Okay. So you have provided some reason to reject the story of Legion, although I still don’t really see how this reason can be convincing. But suppose you’ve solved that issue. There is still a whole load of other stories that are explicitly based on bad spirits. For example, in Acts 16:
16 It happened that as we were going to the place of prayer, a slave-girl having a spirit of divination met us, who was bringing her masters much profit by fortune-telling. 17Following after Paul and us, she kept crying out, saying, “These men are bond-servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation.” 18She continued doing this for many days. But Paul was greatly annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” And it came out at that very moment. 19 When her owners realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities.
I have never heard of any mental illness that miraculously gave a person the ability to do accurate (!), business-worthy (!) fortune-telling. There is no reason to assume that Paul is simply talking about an illusional existence of a bad spirit here. He is exerting spiritual authority over a spiritual entity in the almighty name of Jesus. I think much of the New Testament concentrates on how Jesus and His disciples use that authority to command spirits to leave.
Frankly speaking, I don’t see how you can explain all of that within your view, unless you assume that they were all completely delusional.
My point is that those whom Jesus encountered as “demonic” where suffering from some sort of psychopathy, mental illness, or personality disorder (attributed to any number of factors causing the neuroses or psychoses). Although the Greek text basically labels these incidences as “demonization” today we understand that what these particular individuals are suffering from is due to personal psychological problems of maladaptation to social functioning and/or to dealing with past traumatic experiences. There is no need to summon “demons” or “demonization” into the fray (except to provide convincing evidence of their non existence). And if by “demons” or “demonization” or “spiritual attack” you are referring to “psychic attack” from past memories of “traumatic experiences,” then please, let’s drop these deceptive terms and discuss the issues with the appropriate language used among psychologists to explain the phenomena.
Here again, my point is that men struggle to dominate the world. My statement, “What would be the purpose for Satan or any demon to levitate a small sleeping child? Aren’t they in the business of world domination?” was to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to suggest that Satan or any demon would be interested in levitating a small child, since supposedly their aim is to battle against and prevent God’s Kingdom from attaining full control of the world. Of course the truth is that this battle is occurring upon the earth between nations of men—not a spiritual realm. Also, Satan could not offer Jesus the kingdoms of this world because the kingdoms of this world belonged to Tiberius Caesar during the time Jesus is said to have had this experience. Further evidence that Satan could not offer Jesus the kingdoms of this world is that the empires that were to rule the world until the Second Coming of Jesus were written in stone (so to speak) in the books of Daniel and Revelation. And, if the Satan in Jesus were to become stronger than the Satan in Caesar, Satan would be fighting against Satan himself. This reasoning makes no sense whatsoever.
It’s terrible that children are exposed to, or personally experience abuse of any kind. And I’m glad that the child was finally rescued from her afflictions, many are not. Manifestations, ongoing harassment and a “protest” against the change in status quo? It’s only natural that the child would continue to be haunted by distressful memories of the experiences she witnessed and was subjected to. Whether psychic phenomena occurs and whether it is generated by the relationship of the mind and the human body itself, or whether is generated by disembodied souls, or spirits—I will have to lean on the side of the relationship between the mind and the human body itself. I consider disembodied souls and spirits to be a deception of the most high magnitude.
My personal experience and research into these matters of psychology and psychic phenomena were also involved with skepticism and with debunking popular nonsense and conspiracy theories. I have had to follow the evidence where it led me. My conclusion is that psychic phenomena can be explained through the framework that parapsychology has developed. Just as the symbolism of biblical prophecy needs to be interpreted correctly for a clear understanding of its meaning, so does understanding the meaning of the symbolic representations of witchcraft, the occult, and parapsychology. What cannot yet be explained naturally requires but investigation into what we already do know regarding nature of the unexplained phenomena—the supernatural is really only the supernormal (that which is normal but has not yet been experienced).
I have also come to appreciate the metaphorical description of that statement. For me, Satan walking around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour implicates the sociopathic predator who will do everything in his power—bribe, deceive, defraud, con, intimidate, and physically attack (usually by someone else, to not incriminate himself) to safeguard his privileged lifestyle.
[quote=“Casper_Hesp, post:31, topic:4581”]
Also, the coast of the Sea of Galilee could have been located more southernly and the pig herds could have been a number of miles away from the village. … But if Mr. Brown only made use of current maps, his argument wouldn’t be very convincing. … Besides, assuming that the Gospels were written by locals, wouldn’t a claim of non-existing water be pretty easy to see through for many persons living in Israel?[/quote]
Yes. Exactly. It is yet another mountain out of a molehill—or at least a small mud puddle out of a large sea. [Yes, I intentionally reversed the metaphor.] The ancients were not stupid. And the authors of the New Testament wouldn’t have spouted geographic rubbish which made no sense to the locals who would spot an error from miles away. Ahh, memories of the exegesis of days gone by:
Levitating Pigs? The Demoniac & Proximity to the Sea
This alleged geography problem concerning pigs “drowning in the sea” makes a great case study in how a knowledge of linguistics and narrative can greatly enhance avoiding a lot of simplistic complaints about Bible errors.
I’ve even seen novice M.Div. students do 100+ page papers on this passage so I won’t try to reproduce it all here. But some highpoints are instructive:
A lot of English speakers see the word “sea” and think “A sea is a body of water with lots of salt in it.” That’s laudable (if one is a sixth grader) but not especially significant when exegeting the passage. And that is why seminary students study Koine Greek. (Of course, if they are going to do doctoral study, they have to master Hebrew, Aramaic, and least German and/or French. And to be fully prepared for this kind of topic, Syriac and extensive Peshitta studies.) Even the M.Div. students learn that although THALASSA typically refers to a sea, it sometimes refers to fresh water lakes. In fact, many are confused to learn that the Sea of Galilee is a fresh water lake! And for that reason as well as the translators’ knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac, the NIV Bible tends to use the word lake where previous Attic Greek, classically-trained translations had usually chosen sea.
Another complication is the name of the place: Matthew calls it the region of the Gadarenes. Mark and Luke use the word Gerasa. Some old translations use Gergesa which was based on a rather late manuscript family.
There’s a town in northern Jordan called Umm Qais (“Mother of Qais” in Arabic) known to tourists for its proximity to the ruins of the ancient Gadara some distance away. It is situated very high up and overlooking, far below, the Sea of Galilee, aka the Sea of Tiberias, aka the Lake of Tiberias. The variety of names is another reminder that THALASSA doesn’t have the rigid saltwater/freshwater distinctions in Greek that the English rendering of sea would demand.
Just to make it more interesting, notice that Matthew says that the “Demoniac & the Pigs” incident happened “in the region of the Gadarenes" not in Gadara itself. Larger villages also had “daughter settlements” a few miles away, sometimes many miles away, especially when flocks of sheep or herds of pigs might require that a village people inhabit a rather large area in the management of their livestock. Therefore, worrying about exact distances in trying to find fault with the Biblical text is rather silly in the context of the ancient culture. What may seem problematic for a pedant today would have been nothing unusual or suspicious to the ancients. The geographic terms used in the Gospel texts actually leave open a lot of generalizations and ambiguity about the exact location. So supernatural transport of hogs over large distances, not to mention “levitation”, would hardly seem necessary.
I should also mention that THALASSA was often used as a general “body of water” term that simply contrasted with dry land—much like our English expression “He’s the master of land and sea” uses “land” and “sea” as general opposites referring to the two types of places one finds on earth. In this context, there is no thought of saltwater or fresh. Just water and the fact that water is opposite of dry land.
To the ancients of that region, a THALASSA (whether we choose to call it a lake or sea) could also refer to a small body of water which might only exist after a major rain or only seasonally. Farmers and ranchers in the USA are quite accustomed to this phenomena, even though we tend to use the terms “pond” or “wetland”. More importantly, it takes very little water to drown a pig. Moreover, if the pigs are plunging off of a cliff, even a few inches of water would be enough to drown them if they break their necks and/or are knocked unconscious from the impact of the fall.
Conclusion
It has been years since I researched this topic, but if memory serves, I concluded that the authors were probably referring to one of the various “subsidiary settlements” of the residents of Gadara, the inhabitants which were most certainly known as the Gadarenes. Of course, if the location was modern day Umm Qais, the dramatic plunge of the pigs from the top of such a high ledge down to the lowest freshwater body of water in the entire world would have been quite amazing to see! In fact, I think the ancient audience understood that, whether by personal observation of the geography or by hearing about the the place described. They probably pictured in their minds this amazing mental image of pigs dropping some 300 meters into the water! You can bet that the ancient authors gave little thought to the fact that their general geographic description allowed for a rather large area, and that modern day critics would obsess on how far the pigs had to go before plunging into water. What some may think a problem today would not have been one in the first century.
In fact, this geographic question provides a great example of something which doesn’t bother the average academic at all, no matter how agnostic they may be and no matter how much they dislike the Bible. But for which those Bible critics looking for something to complain about, they can easily find in the Demonic & the Pigs pericope all sorts of alleged “Bible errors”. Needless to say, it’s not on my list of problem passages! (If you really want something interesting to complain about in the New Testament, start with something much more curious, such as the Census of Quirinius.)
[Thanks to all for bringing up a fascinating topic!]