The Gadarene swine is an interesting one, because a lot of the context is to a greater or lesser extent obscured.
Again, RATS.
Fun fact, “Decapolis” (Mark 5:20) is probably the earliest use of the word in ancient literature.
Firstly, Jesus was in a Gentile area, ministering to an person with an impure spirit calling themselves “Legion” who lives among tombs with a nearby pig herd. It's about as unclean for C1 Judaism as it gets.
Jesus spends a lot of time in the NT, far far more than is generally realised, preparing the ground for a shift away from Torah to obedience to Him as the key criterion for being one of the People of God. Rome and Gentile impurity were seen as the enemy in C1 Judaism; not so, says Jesus, there is a real enemy using that as cover to fool Israel into missing the real enemy.
Jesus is demonstrating, in an acted parable, who the real enemy is (the pigs were good to stay otherwise), and who He is, that He has the Power to destroy the real enemy. Further, the incident illustrates that evil leads to destruction.
Secondly, on a pragmatic level, we don't know enough about the world of exorcism and its after-effects to speculate on what Jesus' alternatives were.
He may well have chosen the lesser of two lot-of-evils; all sorts of things might have happened if He'd just let Legion out to run riot. Remember that when Jesus was in human form, He didn't have full God powers (e.g. Mark 13:32).
Incidentally, a very good book on this is Deliverance by Jason Bray. It's consciously anti-dramatic, very British, with more to say about diocesan insurance than describing exorcism.
I hope this helps.
Again, RATS.
Fun fact, “Decapolis” (Mark 5:20) is probably the earliest use of the word in ancient literature.
Firstly, Jesus was in a Gentile area, ministering to an person with an impure spirit calling themselves “Legion” who lives among tombs with a nearby pig herd. It's about as unclean for C1 Judaism as it gets.
Jesus spends a lot of time in the NT, far far more than is generally realised, preparing the ground for a shift away from Torah to obedience to Him as the key criterion for being one of the People of God. Rome and Gentile impurity were seen as the enemy in C1 Judaism; not so, says Jesus, there is a real enemy using that as cover to fool Israel into missing the real enemy.
Jesus is demonstrating, in an acted parable, who the real enemy is (the pigs were good to stay otherwise), and who He is, that He has the Power to destroy the real enemy. Further, the incident illustrates that evil leads to destruction.
Secondly, on a pragmatic level, we don't know enough about the world of exorcism and its after-effects to speculate on what Jesus' alternatives were.
He may well have chosen the lesser of two lot-of-evils; all sorts of things might have happened if He'd just let Legion out to run riot. Remember that when Jesus was in human form, He didn't have full God powers (e.g. Mark 13:32).
Incidentally, a very good book on this is Deliverance by Jason Bray. It's consciously anti-dramatic, very British, with more to say about diocesan insurance than describing exorcism.
I hope this helps.
