ThirdTerm wrote:Jesus and his disciples travelled to the land of the Gerasenes or the Gadarenes, which is the area around the cities of Gerasa and Gadara. James, the son of Zebedee and brother to John, was a local missionary in Judea and he was killed by Herod and was buried there.
So are you saying the Dead sea area is were the story occurred? What was the city by the sea? Where are the tombs in the caves and the cliff were the pigs went into the sea a drowned? And wouldn't the pigs float in the Dead Sea like people do today?
Did you watch the video closely and read the following:
The traditional view is that all this happened on Israel’s Lake Kinneret, known in English as the “Sea of Galilee”. According to the traditional Christian view, Jesus crossed the tiny Galilean lake to the other side, landed in what is today Kursi and then proceeded to perform his miracles with the demonics and the swine. There’s a byzantine monastery commemorating the event at Kursi, and a nearby cave has been designated as the “cave of the demonics”.
Writing on the Jesus episode with the demonics, Porphyry casts doubt on the whole story: “There is no ‘Sea’ in the locality [i.e., the Galilee],” he says, “but only a tiny lake which springs from a river that flows through the hills of Galilee near Tiberius. Small boats can get across it in two hours and the lake is too small to have seen whitecaps caused by a storm.”
Some people say that since there was a confederation of non-Jewish cities on the east side of Jordan called the Decapolis, Jesus must’ve been sailing there. This is a way of justifying the swine. But the whole story doesn’t fit. You can jog from Capernaum to Kursi in a matter of minutes, at most hours. Nothing – I repeat – nothing fits – not the geology, and not the archeology. Jacobovici begins by examining the story as found in Luke , and immediately has trouble with the geography central to the story. The problem is that Jesus and his disciples cross the 'body of water' to minister to the Gadarenes, and of the three possible places on the opposite side of what is essentially a lake, can be found no place that really satisfies the requirements of the story.
There are some cliffs, but none that have ever come close to the edge of the water. There is no necropolis, from which the demoniac dwelled. And there is no evidence of any pig bones in the region. An examination of the original Greek reveals that the word used for the body of water was that for 'sea' and not used for that of a lake. There also does not seem to be enough room for a person to lay down and sleep on a typical fishing vessel used on the Sea of Galilee of the day. Jesus was said to have slept through a great storm until awakened, before he calmed the storm. Compared to the ocean or the Mediterranean there are no real great storms on the Sea of Galilee, and besides one is never more than 15 minutes from the shore.
Next Jacobovic and an associate visit a place in Jerusalem that claims to have the oldest manuscript of Luke known, and find that it has a passage deleted from subsequent versions. This passage has Jesus unhappily inform some questioners of the sign they are looking for, and that this sign refers to the story of Jonah.
Jonah is identified as the son of Amittai, and he appears in 2 Kings aka 4 Kings as a prophet from Gath-Hepher, a few miles north of Nazareth. He is therein described as being active during the reign of the second King Jeroboam (c.786–746 BC), and as predicting that Jeroboam will recover certain lost territories.
Jonah is the central character in the Book of Jonah. Commanded by God to go to the city of Nineveh to prophesy against it "for their great wickedness is come up before me," Jonah instead seeks to flee from "the presence of the Lord" by going to Jaffa, identified as Joppa or Joppe, and sailing to Tarshish, which, geographically, is in the opposite direction. A huge storm arises and the sailors, realizing that it is no ordinary storm, cast lots and discover that Jonah is to blame. Jonah admits this and states that if he is thrown overboard, the storm will cease. The sailors try to dump as much cargo as possible before giving up, but feel forced to throw him overboard, at which point the sea calms. The sailors then offer sacrifices to God. Jonah is miraculously saved by being swallowed by a large whale-like fish in whose belly he spends three days and three nights. While in the great fish, Jonah prays to God in his affliction and commits to thanksgiving and to paying what he has vowed. God commands the fish to spew Jonah out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah
Here, Jonah is going to Jaffa, a port on the Mediterranean and so obviously is going to sail on that sea, to Tarshish. While there is some debate about just where Tarshish was, one theory is that it was on the south Atlantic coast of Spain, just outside the gates of Gibraltar. Another researcher, not mentioned by Jacobovici has recently found a site just north of Cadiz that seems to match the actual site description for Tarshish. But importantly for this scenario, there are a lot of Gad names in the region, including Cadiz, which was known as Gadez. Others such as Guadalajara, Guadalupe, etc..
By the way, your reference has this backward:
In the KJV, Matthew is the one that has "Gergesenes" and Mark and Luke both have it as" Gadarenes" -- Most modern versions even translate Matthew 8:28 with "Gadarenes" but a few have it as "Gerasenes" just for your info. I think the video makes a pretty good argument for the Mediterranean Sea as the the sea they were crossing. But he could be wrong also. Praise the Lord. HalleluYah.
I have a copy of the Majority Text Greek New Testament and the Greek word translate as does the KJV. But on biblehub.com, they seem to be using another text of the Greek new Testament versions, probably the Nestle-Aland version of the Greek New Testament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_New_Testamenthttp://biblehub.com/matthew/8-28.htmhttp://biblehub.com/mark/5-1.htmhttp://biblehub.com/luke/8-26.htm