Disquisitio philol. de Iudaeorum odio et abstinentia a porcina, eiusque c ausis

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of those is to be preferred who demonstrate that Gadara was a Greek city, inhabited by Greeks. For JOSEPHUS, Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVII, 13, testifies in express words: γαδαρα καὶ ἵππος Ἑλληνίδες εἰσὶ πόλεις Gadara and Hippus are Greek cities. For Gadara and Gergesa were two towns of one and the same region and not far distant from each other. The celebrated WOLF in Critical Cures on these passages, LIGHTFOOT Works, Vol. II, p. 225 and 418, AUGUST PFEIFFER Philological Works, p. 475 and 1008, and the authors cited by them have examined these places of the Holy Scriptures and the difficulties occurring around this matter more extensively. Add DILHERR Academic Disputations, Vol. I, p. 195; J. CYPRIAN on Franz, p. 697. What if I assert that the Gadarene pigs belonged to the Roman soldiers, and were pastured there to that end? In this heresy, one must not reject the most eloquent THEOPHANES CERAMEUS, Archbishop in Tauromenium, Sicily, homily IX, who first dissolves the objection which the Gentiles had raised, namely, that by divine prescription it was not lawful to raise pigs in Judea, nor to touch them with the hand, and then explains the question of why Judea raised herds of pigs from the fact that all of Palestine was tributary to the Romans, and those pigs belonged to the Roman army, which was very alien to the customs of the Jews, p. 56. Compare also FRANC. SCORSUS in notes, p. 473. You may therefore not incongruously opine that these pigs were not those of the Jews, but of the Gentiles (I add, or even of the soldiers) living among the Gadarene Jews; for a mixture of that kind was most common in the cities and regions of the Israelite land. The words are those of JOHN LIGHTFOOT, Works, Vol. II, p. 309.

M. PSELLUS moves a question here in the booklet On the Operations of Demons, p. 79: Why the demons begged from our Savior that they might rush into the pigs. τι δὲ βούλεται τούτοις τὸ καὶ τοῖς ἀλόγοις ἐπισπίπτειν ζῴοις. καὶ γὰρ καὶ κατὰ τὴν γαργεσων παρὰ χοίρων γέγονεναι, τὰ ἄχραντα διδασκουσι λογια What do they mean by this, that they also fall upon brute animals? For the holy Scriptures teach that this also happened near Gergesa among the pigs.