On St. Patrick’s Day, I had the privilege of hearing Nick Perrin, a professor of New Testament from Wheaton College. He spoke about the story in Mark 5:1-20 of Jesus healing a demon-possessed man from the “country of the Gerasenes,” most likely on or near the northeastern edge of Lake Galilee. The eye-catching part is that Jesus sends the man’s demon into a herd of pigs, and the pigs all rush into the lake and drown. For some reason the hog farmers were not too excited about having Jesus stick around.
Of course people raise a number of questions. Didn’t the man have a mental illness, not an evil spirit? Where was Gerasa (there are three possibilities)? Why do the demons call themselves “Legion?” What was Jesus doing in that neck of the woods anyway? It was Gentile territory, and the text says nothing about going off for a rest or for prayer.
Dr. Perrin believes the best way to read the story is to take it pretty much at face value as a story about what the historical Jesus actually did. That in itself is a pretty big move, but let’s grant that it’s a reasonable and proper thing to do.
From his lecture it sounds like the key to understanding is linguistic. Jesus calls the demon an “unclean spirit.” That term appears in only ten stories in the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), so it’s not very common. It appears once in the Hebrew scriptures, in Zechariah 13:2.
Perrin’s reading is that Jesus consciously uses the term from Zechariah in order to evoke or express the same basic agenda Zechariah had: to oppose false prophets, idolatry, and the unclean spirit in the land. When Jesus calls the demonic presence an “unclean spirit,” he specifically links it with the presence of a larger unclean spirit in the land, the Romans. That’s why the unclean spirit calls itself “Legion.” Get it? As in a Roman legion. Perrin pointed out that the Fourth Legion of Rome had a major garrison in the neighborhood, near the palace Herod had built in northern Galilee, to catch the lake breezes presumably.
The heart of the unclean spirit of Rome (my term, not Perrin’s) lay in its arrogant assumption of ethnic superiority. There’s a lot of evidence, a lot of which Perrin cited, that most Romans believed they were by birth better than non-Romans. By a long shot.
So Jesus performs a “prophetic speech act” (Perrin’s term) against the Roman ideology of ethnic superiority.
It’s a provocative reading, and one I hadn’t come across before. To the degree that it’s true, it means Jesus was more political than we thought. It also means he had no patience with what we would likely call racism (which is largely what Perrin called it) –hatred of another based on ethnic heritage. (I recognize, by the way, that “race” as we think of it is largely a modern concept, created mostly as means for the wealthy to justify exploiting those different from them. The notion that some people are inherently superior, however, is ancient.)
My question, though, is this: doesn’t that leave Jesus open to the charge of being racist? Zechariah, after all, was preaching to Israel. His was a critique from inside the fold. Jesus here criticizes Rome from outside the fold. To a Roman, I think he would appear to be doing nothing more than asserting the superiority of his own faith (Judaism) to the ideology of empire (Caesar worship with it’s attendant notions of ethnic superiority).
That stance, to be quite reductionist, fits the stance of many prophets in Israel when they denounce foreign nations for attacking Israel and not worshipping the one true God. In time, they say, the "nations" ("goyim" in Hebrew; "ethnoi" in Greek) will all come to Zion to worship. The step from there to notions of superiority, be they racial/ethnic or religious or social, is not large.
What do you think? Is Perrin’s reading, or my blundering attempt to summarize it, persuasive?
Thanks for reading this far. Jamie
