A while ago I was reading one of the Gospels and discovered an apparent discrepancy between them. Being a reasoning Christian, I wanted to research this. Here is the discrepancy that I thought I found:
In Matthew 8:28-34, there is a story about a time when Jesus and his disciples landed by boat at a place called Gergesenes. When they got there, Matthew says that Jesus was confronted by two demon-possessed men. The story explains how Jesus cast the demons out into a herd of pigs and was, as a result, asked to leave the area by the townspeople.
This wasn’t a problem, except that I had remembered reading the story in Luke, and there it said that there was only one man. Luke explains the story in Luke 8:26-39. This story they landed in the same place, in the same set of circumstances, but it says: "there met them a certain man from the city".
It bothered me that the two writers didn’t have the same story. This could be a very serious problem. You see, even according to Jewish law in the Bible, there has to be two witnesses who agree to the same story before something can be assumed to be true. Not properly understanding this simple problem, could reflect poorly on the rest of the Bible.
To make matters even more interesting, Mark also tells the same story in Mark 5. He says: ".. there met Him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit,...". Now, I thought, only Matthew says it’s two men. How could this be?
Now, I had already solved many problems such as these before. I usually find out that I was making an assumption based on my own ignorance of the facts. I am usually assuming too much about something without even realizing it. It turns out that this time it wasn’t any different except I was also making an even greater judgment. I was assuming that all authors were intending to talk about the same thing.
If we attack this problem with simple faith, here’s what we see:
Since Matthew, Mark, and Luke must all be correct in order for the Bible to remain true there had to be two not one. You would really have to twist the story beyond the intent of the author to make it appear that Matthew actually only saw one person but he thought he would say two. Is it possible that Mark and Luke knew that there were two in the story, but wanted to only mention one?
I still had my doubts. How could Luke be so absent minded as to not mention that there were two in the story, then I read some notes from a Bible commentary. It revealed to me that Mark and Luke’s story was too detailed to be speaking about two different people. Mark and Luke were most likely telling a detailed story about one of the two men because this is the part of the story that they wanted to share in the first place.
You see, Luke goes on to explain that the man wasn’t wearing any clothes and that he didn’t even live in a house but in the tombs. He explains that this one asked Jesus if he could stay with him, but Jesus said "No", and that he should stay and tell the people of the town what He had done for him.
Even more interesting, Mark explains details of this man’s history. He says that the people had attempted to chain this man, but he would be so violent that he would break any chain that they put on him. He explains that this man would wail day and night and that he would not only do it from the tombs where he lived but in the mountains as well.
Sure Mark and Luke could have at least mentioned the other man somewhere, but they didn’t have to. Perhaps Mark and Luke didn’t have time to go into detail about the other one, but it is obvious from the text that the one that they did talk about, played an important role in telling his whole town about what Jesus did for him. This, apparently, was the story that Mark and Luke wanted to tell in their writing. Matthew only tells a very abbreviated story that ends with Jesus leaving the area, Mark and Luke tell the story about the completely hopeless man who ended up influencing his own town.
My oversight was that I wasn’t paying attention to the difference in detail between Matthew’s story and the story told by Mark and Luke. Mathew purposefully is telling the parts of the story that involve the two and leaving out the rest. He was focusing on what Jesus did and what happened to him. He probably never intended to go into detail about the man who went back and talked about Jesus.
So, you can see that there were two men, but Mark and Luke most likely only wanted to share the story about one of them. They could have mentioned the two, but they didn’t. Perhaps they were aware that Mathew had already mentioned the two in his version. Perhaps Matthew was writing later and wanted to provide a more complete perspective of that moment, I don’t know. But I do know that once again the Bible was proven to be less questionable than I thought and my assumptions were exposed.