Matthew 8:30 — Community Reflections

MATTHEW 8:30 — KING JAMES VERSION 0

“And there was a good way off from them an herd of many swine feeding.”

Now a herd of many pigs was feeding at some distance from them. The detail of the pig herd locates the narrative in Gentile territory: Jews did not keep pigs. The large herd — about two thousand in Mark 5:13 — grazing at a distance from the possessed men provides the context for the demons' request. The presence of pigs in a Gentile region also carries symbolic weight: the unclean animals from Leviticus 11 grazing in the place where unclean spirits dwell and possess human beings, all of it outside the boundaries of Jewish covenantal space.

Church Fathers on Matthew 8:30

Because there were who thought Christ to be a man, therefore the daemons came to proclaim His divinity, that they who had not seen the sea raging and again still, might hear the daemons crying; 'And when he was come to the other side in the country of the Gergesenes, there met him two men having daemons.'
Chrysostom · 4th century

Gerasa is a town of Arabia beyond Jordan, close to Mount Gilead, which was in the possession of the tribe of Manasseh, not far from the lake of Tiberias, into which the swine were precipitated.
Rabanus Maurus · 9th century

Whereas Matthew relates that there were two who were afflicted with daemons, but Mark and Luke mention only one, you must understand that one of them was a person of note, for whom all that country was in grief, and about whose recovery there was much care, whence the fame of this miracle was the more noised abroad.
Augustine · 4th century · De. Cons. Evan., ii, 24

Read all 27 entries in the readerCatena Aurea · St. Thomas Aquinas, tr. J. H. Newman · public domain

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