How many men were possessed by the Legion of demons?

Three of the gospels tell this story: Jesus crosses a lake and meets a violent man who is being controlled by a group of demons, who call themselves Legion. The demons assume Jesus is there to banish them and torture them. But they convince him to just send them into a herd of pigs instead. The man regains his sanity, and the pigs kill themselves. The locals make Jesus go away so he’ll stop pointlessly destroying their livestock. And everybody forgets about the demons, who are now homeless and on the loose.

The details are mostly the same in these three accounts, so they’re presumably all meant to be describing the same event. But there’s one unreconcilable difference: According to Matthew, Jesus drove the demons out of two men. According to Mark and Luke, there was just one demon-possessed man.

Share this post:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *