Thursday, November 12, 2020

Shandon L. Guthrie on the Historicity of the Gerasene Demoniac Episode on the Synoptic Gospels

Commenting on the historicity of the Gerasene Demoniac (Matt 8:28-34/Mark 5:1-20/Luke 8:26-39), Shandon L. Guthrie noted the following “undesigned coincidence” contained in the narrative:

 

. . . there is the presence of one king of “undesigned coincidence” that underscores the historicity of the event in an unexpected way. An “undesigned coincidence” is a descriptive phrase that was originally used by William Paley. Such a coincidence is considered “undesigned” if the presence of one or more features of an alleged eyewitness account seems awkward or inexplicable on its face but s subsequently explained unintentionally by either another, independent eyewitness account of the same event or by some underlying fact that is later disclosed by another independent source that was not deliberately engineered to “fix” any tension prompted by the initial witness. What makes undesigned coincidences quite remarkable is that they are too subtle to have been picked up by any casual reader. If an ancient forger is colluding with other forgers, and wants to relieve any awkwardness left by the others, he would not bury his solution to or explanation of the awkwardness as an incidental feature to an unrelated story only to be found by scholarly eggheads nearly two millennia later. This is why such subtleties are undesigned, for we imagine that forgers do not want to leave any unnecessary awkwardness in the telling of their lies. Accordingly, an undesigned coincidence evidences the fact that an alleged eyewitness was not colluding with others in order to fabricate his testimony.

 

So, let us look at the particular case at hand regarding the Gerasene demoniac. In the present case, it is curious that herdsmen would have pigs as livestock feeding near the Sea of Galilee since they were unambiguously declared unclean (Leviticus 11.7). Most readers would simply gloss over that fact as a trivial though awkward feature of the story. But a curious scholar would wonder, if the author of Mark were inventing a Jewish story, why he would have mentioned this kind of animal as the basis of their livelihood in such a region.

 

The answer comes from the first-century Jewish historian, Josephus. Josephus reports as an aside in a completely unrelated context that “Gaza, and Gadara, and Hippos, . . . were Grecian cities, which Caesar separated from his government and added them to the province of Syria” (Antiquities of the Jews, XVII.11.4.568). That Caesar annexed these cities, all a part of the region near the Sea of Galilee where the incident took place, implies that the community would have become increasingly secularized and would have had more relaxed policies regarding livestock. Without meaning to do so, and without Mark’s anticipating any later clarification of his account, Josephus unintentionally explains why there would have been pigs as part of the community’s livelihood. A forger would not have anticipated that a Jewish historian would incidentally affirm why pigs might be part of the local economy. And neither was Josephus writing to justify the Synoptic’s telling of the Gerasene demoniac which helps confirm Jesus as the messianic “Son of God” (why would he?). As such, this incidental whisper of congruity suggests that the event likely occurred in the way one might expect from an eyewitness uninterested in explaining every awkward detail of his forgery. (Shandon L. Guthrie, Gods of this World: A Philosophical Discussion and Defense of Christian Demonology [Eugene, Oreg.: Pickwick Publications, 2018], 135-36)