<p>8:30 <i>And Jesus asked him: What is your name?- </i>The Lord focused the man's attention upon the man's beliefs about himself- by asking him &quot;What is your name?&quot;, to which he replies &quot;Legion For we are many&quot;. Thus the man was brought to realize on later reflection that the pig stampede was a miracle by the Lord, and a judgment against illegal keeping of unclean animals- rather than an action performed by the demons he thought inhabited him. The idea of transference of disease from one to another was a common Semitic perception, and it&rsquo;s an idea used by God. And thus God went along with the peoples' idea of disease transference, and the result is recorded in terms of demons which was how they understood illness going from one person to another. Likewise the leprosy of Naaman clave to Gehazi (2 Kings 5:27). God threatened to make the diseases of the inhabitants of Canaan and Egypt to cleave to Israel if they were disobedient (Dt. 28:21,60). Here too, God is accommodating the ideas of disease transference which people had at the time.</p><p><i>And he said: Legion. For many demons had entered into him</i>- Legion could be seen as representative of Israel in their weakness. Mark records how Jesus asked the man his name- as if He wished the man to reflect upon who he thought he was. He replied: &quot;Legion&quot;. And of course the word &quot;legion&quot; referred to a division of Roman soldiers, usually five or six thousand. The man felt possessed by Roman legions. Through the incident with the pigs, Jesus helped him understand that He alone had the power to rid the man, and all Israel, of the Roman legions. The observation has been made that the incidents of 'driving out demons' nearly all occur in &quot;militarized zones&quot;, areas where the Roman army was highly visible and resented (Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw<i>, Jesus for President (</i>Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008) p. 115). The man wished the &quot;demons&quot; he imagined to be possessing him to be identified with the pigs. And Jesus empowered that desire. The &lsquo;band&rsquo; of pigs is described using the same original word as used for a group of military cadets. And the pig was the mascot of Rome&rsquo;s Tenth Fretensis Legion which was stationed nearby; indeed, &quot;pigs&quot; were used as symbols for Romans in non-Roman literature of the time (Warren Carter, <i>Matthew and Empire: Initial Explorations</i> (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2001) p. 71; Warren Carter, <i>Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading</i> (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2000) pp. 212,213). William Harwood comes to the same conclusion: &quot;Jerusalem had been occupied by the Roman Tenth Legion X Fretensis, whose emblem was a pig. Mark's reference to about two thousand pigs, the size of the occupying Legion, combined with his blatant designation of the evil beings as Legion, left no doubt in Jewish minds that the pigs in the fable represented the army of occupation. Mark's fable in effect promised that the messiah, when he returned, would drive the Romans into the sea as he had earlier driven their four-legged surrogates&quot; (William Harwood, <i>Mythology's Last Gods: Yahweh and Jesus</i> (New York: Prometheus Books, 1990) p. 48). The claim has been made by Joachim Jeremias that the Aramaic word for &quot;soldiers&quot; was in fact translated &quot;Legion&quot; (The same point is made in Gerd Theissen, <i>Sociology of Earliest Palestinian Christianity</i> (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1978) pp. 101,102). Jesus elsewhere taught that through faith in Him, &quot;this mountain&quot; could be cast into the sea (Mt. 21:21; Mk. 11:23). Seeing that mountains are symbolic in Scripture of empires, it could be that He was referring to how the empire contemporary with Him as He spoke those words, the Roman empire, could be cast into the sea through faith in Him. The acted parable of the Legion of pigs running into the sea was surely teaching the same thing. In passing, I note the apparent discrepancy between the fact that a Roman Legion contained five or six thousand people and yet there were two thousand pigs drowned. I found the comment on an internet forum, by an unbeliever, that &quot;the governor of Judaea only had 2000 legionaries at his disposal&quot;. I have searched Josephus and other sources for confirmation of this, but can't find any. If it were to be found, it would be marvellous confirmation of the thesis I'm presenting here- that the pigs were to be understood as representative of the Roman Legions, who in their turn were responsible for the man's mental illness. In any case, there is evidence to believe that there were Roman troops stationed in Gadara, and the pigs were likely being kept in order to provide food for them (Michael Willett Newheart, <i>&quot;My name is Legion&quot;: The Story and Soul of the Gerasene Demoniac</i> (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004) p. 14). &quot;Pigs for the pigs&quot; would've been the common quip about that herd of swine.</p><p>There is a strange flip of the tail in all this. Josephus records how the Romans massacred many Jewish rebels in Gadara, the very place of the Legion miracle, in AD69: &quot;Vespasian sent Placidus with 500 horse and 3000 foot to pursue those who had fled from Gadara... Placidus, relying on his cavalry and emboldened by his previous success, pursued the Gadarenes, killing all whom he overtook, as far as the Jordan. Having driven the whole multitude up to the river, where they were blocked by the stream, which being swollen by the rain was unfordable, he drew up his troops in line opposite them. Necessity goaded them to battle, flight being impossible... Fifteen thousand perished by the enemy's hands, while the number of those who were driven to fling themselves into the Jordan was incalculable; about two thousand two hundred were captured...&quot; (<i>Wars of the Jews, </i>Book 4, Chapter 7). This is all very similar to the picture of the Roman legions being driven into the water, as Jesus had implied would happen. Perhaps we are to understand that what was made potentially possible for the Jews by the work of Jesus was in fact turned around against them- they suffered the very punishment and judgment which was potentially prepared for Rome, because they refused their Messiah. This is possibly why the destruction of Rome / Babylon predicted in the Apocalypse is described in terms of Jerusalem's destruction in the Old Testament. The judgment intended for Babylon / Rome actually came upon Jerusalem and the Jews.</p><p>I suggest that the man's mental illness was related to the possession of his country by the Roman Legions. Perhaps he found huge power within himself to smash the chains with which he was restrained because he imagined them as symbolizing the Roman grip upon his soul and his country. In this case, his self-mutilation, gashing himself with stones (Mk. 5:5), would've been from a desire to kill the Legions within him, the 'demons' of Rome whom he perceived as having possessed him. He saw himself as representative of his people; Walter Wink sees the man's gashing himself with stones as a result of how he had &quot;internalized Judah's captivity and the utter futility of resistance&quot; (Walter Wink, <i>Unmasking the Powers</i> (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986) Vol. 2 p. 46). So often the mentally ill internalize their abusers; they act and speak as if their abusers are actually them, within them. This is why the abused so often end up abusing others; it's why Israel treat some Palestinians in a way strangely similar to how they were treated at the hands of the Nazis; and it's why Jesus urges us to pray for those who persecute us, to the end we might place a psychological distance between them and us, be ourselves, and not become like them. Jesus recognized this long before modern psychiatry did; hence he asks the sick man his name, &quot;Legion&quot;. The man's reply really says it all- as if to say 'I am my abusers. I have internalized them'. Hence one commentator writes of how Legion &quot;carries his persecutors inside him in the classic mode of the victim who internalizes his tormentors&quot; (Robert G. Hammerton-Kelley, <i>The Gospel and the Sacred: Poetics of Violence in Mark</i> (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1994) p. 93).</p><p>Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist who analysed the psychological damage done to those living under repressive regimes. Taking case studies from the French colonization of Martinique and Algeria, Fanon demonstrated that many darker skinned local people came to see themselves as second rate and dirty, and that when these darker skinned natives interacted with the white colonizers, they often experienced a tension between who they really were, and who they had to act as in secular life with the white masters. One of his books says it all in its title: <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i>. Having listed the various types of mental illness and multiple personality disorders which he attributed to French colonialism, Fanon concluded that there was brought about &quot;this disintegrating of personality, this splitting and dissolution... in the organism of the colonized world&quot; (Frantz Fanon, <i>The Wretched of the Earth</i> (New York: Grove Press, 1963) p. 57. See too his <i>Black Skin, White Masks</i> (New York: Grove Press, 1967)). Similar observations have been made, in a white-on-white context, about the psychological damage done by the Soviet occupation to the ethnic Baltic population, perhaps explaining why the tiny countries of Latvia and Lithuania have some of the highest suicide and mental illness rates in the world. The point is, however exaggerated these studies may be in some areas, there is indeed huge psychological damage caused by occupying, colonial powers; and this was the case in first century Palestine, and I submit that Legion with his multiple personalities was an example of mental illness caused by such a scenario. Paul Hollenbach likewise interprets the case of Legion, commenting in that context that &quot;mental illness can be seen as a socially acceptable form of oblique protest against, or escape from, oppressions... his very madness permitted him to do what he could not do as sane, namely express his total hostility to the Romans; he did this by identifying the Roman legions with demons. His possession was thus at once both the result of oppression and an expression of his resistance to it&quot; (Paul Hollenbach, &quot;Jesus, Demoniacs and Public Authorities&quot;, <i>Journal of the American Academy of Religion, </i>Vol. 99 (1981) p. 575). Richard Horsley takes the idea further: &quot;The demon possession of the manically violent man among the Gerasenes can be understood as a combination of the effect of Roman imperial violence, a displaced protest against it&quot; (Richard Horsley, <i>Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark's Gospel</i> (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001) p. 145). By asking the sick man for his name, the Lord Jesus was surely seeking to help the man clarify the fact that his real issue was with Rome, and the man actually need not fear supposed 'demons'. This refocusing upon the real problem is a common feature of how the Bible deals with the whole subject of Satan and demons, as we've often seen in the course of this book. Horsley is right on target in his conclusion: &quot;The casting out and naming of &quot;Legion&quot; is a demystification of demons and demon possession. It is now evident to Jesus' followers and to the hearers of Mark's story that the struggle is really against the rulers, the Romans&quot; (<i>Ibid </i>p. 147). Newheart writes in very similar terms: &quot;Jesus... demystified the demons, showing that the real culprit was Rome&quot; (Newheart, <i>op cit</i> p. 84).</p>