<p>5:2 <em>And when he got out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit</em>- &quot;Immediately&quot; suggests the man was waiting for Him; although :6 says that Legion ran to the Lord from far away, which would make the &quot;immediately&quot; here relative, and intended to create an impression of fast moving action. From his isolated hideouts on the cliffs, he had seen the boat traversing the lake so many times. And he was convinced that within it there was the Son of God. &quot;With an unclean spirit&quot; appears to contradict the idea that he had a legion of such spirits within him- until we accept that this is just the language of the day for mental illness. We are not reading here about literal spirits. See on :7. But when we meet a similar situation in Acts 8:7 of unclean spirits crying out, the Eastern (Aramaic) text reads: &quot;Many who were mentally afflicted cried out&quot;. This is because, according to George Lamsa, &quot;&quot;Unclean spirits&quot; is an Aramaic term used to describe lunatics&quot; (George Lamsa, <em>New Testament Commentary</em> (Philadelphia: A.J. Holman, 1945) pp. 57,58). It should be noted that Lamsa was a native Aramaic speaker with a fine understanding of Aramaic terms. He grew up in a remote part of Kurdistan which had maintained the Aramaic language almost unchanged since the time of Jesus. It's significant that Lamsa's extensive writings indicate that he failed to see in the teachings of Jesus and Paul any support for the popular conception of the devil and demons- he insisted that the Semitic and Aramaic terms used by them have been misunderstood by Western readers and misused in order to lend support for their conceptions of a personal Devil and demons.</p>