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The man among the tombs: Legion, Kursi and the Decapolis

Where Jesus met the man called Legion: the Gadarene name question, the Byzantine monastery at Kursi, the Gentile Decapolis, and the man sent home to tell.

Mark 5:1-20 records one of the most dramatic meetings in the Gospels. Right after Jesus calmed the storm, His disciples asked, "What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?" (Mark 4:41). On the other side of the lake they found out, when He was met by a man no chains could hold. Luke 8:26-39 and Matthew 8:28-34 record the same event.

Where it happened

Mark says they came "over unto the other side of the sea, into the country of the Gadarenes" (Mark 5:1), on the east shore. The Gospels name the place a little differently, and it is worth being honest about why:

This is not a new question. Around AD 230 the scholar Origen weighed all three names. Gerasa had no lake near it, he noted, and Gadara no steep bank above the water, so he preferred Gergesa, an old town by the lake with a steep place where, people said, the swine went down. Scholars still debate which spelling the Gospel writers first used, but the setting is clear: the eastern shore, with a steep slope running down to the water (Mark 5:13).

Kursi: the traditional site

Christian tradition places Gergesa at Kursi, on the east shore below the Golan Heights, about three miles north of Ein Gev. Around 1970 road builders uncovered ruins there, and archaeologists excavated them in the early 1970s. They found the largest Byzantine monastery known in Israel: a walled complex from the fifth century, with a church paved in mosaics of birds, fish and plants. It was badly damaged in the Persian invasion of 614 and abandoned after the earthquake of 749. On the hillside to the south, a small chapel was built against a cave and a large rock, apparently honoured as the place where the man met Jesus.

To be honest about it, the ruins show where Christians believed the event happened by the fifth century. No inscription from Jesus' own day marks the spot, and some have suggested other places on the same shore, such as near Hippos to the south.

The Decapolis, and why there were pigs

The east side of the lake belonged to the Decapolis, the "Ten Cities." As GotQuestions.org explains, these were mostly Gentile cities with a strong Greek culture, including Gadara, Hippos and Gerasa. Under the law of Moses swine were unclean (Leviticus 11:7), but in Gentile country "a great herd of swine" (Mark 5:11) on the hillside was nothing unusual. Jesus had crossed into a land Israel thought of as far from God.

What "Legion" meant

When Jesus asked his name, the answer came: "My name is Legion: for we are many" (Mark 5:9). Luke adds, "because many devils were entered into him" (Luke 8:30). A Roman legion was the largest unit in the army, several thousand soldiers; GotQuestions gives about six thousand in Jesus' day. The Bible does not give an exact number of spirits, but the name means a great multitude. The herd they entered numbered "about two thousand" (Mark 5:13).

Matthew mentions two men. As GotQuestions explains, this is not a contradiction: Mark and Luke never say there was only one. They tell us about the one who spoke with Jesus and was sent home.

The authority of Jesus

For years these spirits had terrified the whole shore. Yet when the man saw Jesus "afar off, he ran and worshipped him" and cried out:

What have I to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of the most high God? I adjure thee by God, that thou torment me not. (Mark 5:7)

The demons knew exactly who He was: "the devils also believe, and tremble" (James 2:19). They begged, and they could not even enter the swine until "Jesus gave them leave" (Mark 5:13). GotQuestions.org notes that Jesus had complete control over demonic forces, and that asking the name showed His authority over all of them. So believers need not live in fear: "greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world" (1 John 4:4).

Sent home to tell

The townspeople found the man "sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid" (Mark 5:15), and they asked Jesus to leave. The man begged to go with Him, but Jesus gave him a different calling:

Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee. And he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men did marvel. (Mark 5:19-20)

When Jesus later passed "through the midst of the coasts of Decapolis" (Mark 7:31), people there brought a deaf man to Him to be healed.

How it points to Christ

The man among the tombs had nothing to offer. He could not free himself, and no one else could. He was set free by the word and compassion of Jesus alone, and that is how every one of us is saved. "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8). "For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost" (Luke 19:10). And like this man, we can go home and tell what the Lord has done.

Sources

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