of the Gospels did not know their geography.86 It is a fair assumption that the whole episode is an invention! Jesus was never in the Decapolis. Nonetheless, it is important for the Gospel writer to set the episode in Gentile territory.87 (). Jesus had said “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit” (Mark .). Yet the demoniac’s response was not of gratitude, but of anger! “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” (Mark.). It has long been recognized that the GreekτM ελ M αM σ ι “what to me and to you?” is a Semitism. As Raymond E. Brown has emphasized,88 in the Hebrew Bible the expression has two shades of meaning. First, it may be used when one person unjustly bothers another, “What have I done to you that you should do this to me?” Second, when someone who was asked to get involved in something replies “That is your business. How am I involved?” The first but not the second implies hostility. But in the New Testament, the Greek has always the first hostile sense: Mark.; Matthew.; John.; also in the Septuagint, Kings .ff. Not only that, but our text continues, “Do not torment me.” (Mark .). We can understand that evil spirits ordered out of the demoniac would be hostile, but the text emphasizes that it is the man himself who is furious with Jesus for ordering out the evil spirit. We can see some of the difficulties for conventional theologians in Painter’s puzzled treatment: “Certainly there is no reason to think that Jesus intended to torment the man. There is every reason to think that, in Mark, the unclean spirits feared destruction. Alternatively, we may 86 For puzzlement with the geography see, e.g. Mann, Mark, p. 278; Painter, Mark, p. 89. 87 David Daube has very properly noticed that in Mark the wordειη ρis sometimes used to mean not “at once,”but “duly:” ‘Zukunftsmusik: Some Desirable Lines of Exploration in the New Testament Field,’ 68Bulletin of the John Rylands Library University of Manchester (1985), pp. 53ff, at p. 54. But that cannot be the meaning here. After all, Mark 5.13 relates that the swine into which the spirits entered “rushed down the steep bankinto the sea.” 88 The Gospel according to John I - XII (New York, 1966), p. 99
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