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)
