Another strong argument pro
Mcn and against Mark priority:
5)
Mark 5:1-20:
Jesus and his disciples crossed Lake Galilee and came to shore near the town of Gerasa. When he was getting out of the boat, a man with an evil spirit quickly ran to him from the graveyard where he had been living. No one was able to tie the man up anymore, not even with a chain. He had often been put in chains and leg irons, but he broke the chains and smashed the leg irons. No one could control him. Night and day he was in the graveyard or on the hills, yelling and cutting himself with stones.
When the man saw Jesus in the distance, he ran up to him and knelt down. He shouted, “Jesus, Son of God in heaven, what do you want with me? Promise me in God’s name that you won’t torture me!” The man said this because Jesus had already told the evil spirit to come out of him.
Jesus asked, “What is your name?”
The man answered, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” He then begged Jesus not to send them away.
Over on the hillside a large herd of pigs was feeding. So the evil spirits begged Jesus, “Send us into those pigs! Let us go into them.” Jesus let them go, and they went out of the man and into the pigs. The whole herd of about two thousand pigs rushed down the steep bank into the lake and drowned.
The men taking care of the pigs ran to the town and the farms to spread the news. Then the people came out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had once been full of demons. He was sitting there with his clothes on and in his right mind, and they were terrified.
Everyone who had seen what had happened told about the man and the pigs. Then the people started begging Jesus to leave their part of the country.
When Jesus was getting into the boat, the man begged to go with him. But Jesus would not let him. Instead, he said, “Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you and how good he has been to you.”
The man went away into the region near the ten cities known as Decapolis and began telling everyone how much Jesus had done for him. Everyone who heard what had happened was amazed.
Lord of Sabaoth = Lord of Hosts ---->
Legion = Sabaoth.
Read Matthew 26:52-53:
Those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword, or do you think that I cannot appeal to My father [i.e., the god of Jews], and He will at once put at My disposal more than twelve legions of angels?
(i.e., YHWH, who commands legions of angels; this name was sometimes translated in more archaic language as The Lord of Hosts).
Question: why do the demons beg Jesus to go into the pigs? Because the pig is the image of their god (or the image of a humanity made ''in image'' of their god), in Pagan (Plutarch,
Symposiacs, Book IV, Question 5) and Gnostic tradition. Epiphanius tells several times (
Haer. xxv. 2, xxvi. 10, xl. 5, xlv. 1) that, besides the Gnostics who gave the highest place to Ialdabaoth, there were others who gave that place to Sabaoth, and who identified him with the God of the Jews. Some of them ascribed to Sabaoth the form of an ass or a swine (Epiph. xxvi. 10), accounting thus for the Jewish prohibition of the use of swine's flesh.
Luke 8:38-39 (not attested in
Mcn according to Roth, but I suspect it was):
Now the man out of whom the devils had departed besought Him that he might be with Him. But Jesus sent him away, saying,
“Return to thine own house, and show what great things God [of the Jews] hath done unto thee.” And he went his way, and proclaimed throughout the whole city what great things Jesus had done unto him.
Jesus lied to Gerasene to hide his true identity (the real origin of the markan
Messianic Secret that represents the
marcionite influence on Mark).
Despite his lie, an
antithesis is raised: instead of proclaiming the power of the god
of the Jews, the man preaches the power of
Jesus (the son of a
different god). Instead of going to his home and family, the man preaches in all the city.
Mark realizes that an antithesis is found in this point but he doesn't remove it: only, he casts it in a
proto-catholic antithesis, by changing the lukan
''whole city'' in
''the region near the ten cities known as Decapolis'' (so that he remarks the
gentile character of the people who listen the 'amazing' news by the Gerasene, while in the original
Mcn the audience was only the
Jewish people of Gerasa). So in Mark the effect is that Jesus is the God of Jews
for gentiles. While in
Mcn the original meaning is that Jesus is a
different god from the god of Jews (hence the
fear of the
Jewish Gerasenes,
otherwise inexplicable in Mark).
NOTE: The Gerasene man is
not the God of Jews (just as Polyphemus is
not Poseidon in Homer).