How many men were possessed with devils?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The numerical discrepancy is straightforward, but its real interest lies in a documented Matthean redactional habit that the additive harmonization cannot account for.

Mark 5:1-20 narrates a single demoniac. At 5:2 a man with an unclean spirit (*anthrōpos en pneumati akathartō*) meets Jesus among the tombs; he has snapped his chains and shackles, gashes himself with stones, and is inhabited by a legion of demons that, named and expelled, enter a herd of swine. Throughout, the figure is singular — he is healed, clothed, and 'in his right mind' (5:15), and sent home to proclaim what the Lord has done. Luke 8:26-39 follows Mark with the same single man, adding only that he had been possessed *chronō hikanō*, for a long time, and *ouk emenen en oikia*, did not live in a house. One demoniac in both.

Matthew 8:28-34 retells the same episode — the same crossing, the swine, the townspeople's plea that Jesus leave — but reports that *dyo daimonizomenoi*, two demoniacs, met him. This is not an isolated arithmetic. Matthew doubles in at least two other Markan miracles. Mark 10:46-52 has one blind man, named Bartimaeus, at Jericho; Matthew 20:29-34 has two unnamed blind men. Mark 11:1-7 has a single colt for the entry into Jerusalem; Matthew 21:1-7 has both a donkey and a colt, harmonizing Zechariah 9:9 with wooden literalism. Three Markan singulars become Matthean pairs.

The strongest additive harmonization — Carson, Blomberg, France's NICNT — argues that there genuinely were two demoniacs, two blind men, and two animals, and that Mark and Luke simply spotlighted the more prominent or more memorable member of each pair (Bartimaeus being named, for instance). On this reading 'one' never denies a second; Matthew merely supplies a detail his sources passed over. As a bare logical proposition this is unassailable: two does not formally contradict one if 'one' means 'one of two.' Stated in its own defenders' terms, it is coherent.

What it cannot explain is the pattern. The harmonization must posit that Mark independently dropped the second demoniac in the most vivid single-demoniac narrative in the Gospels, that Luke independently made the identical omission, and that both then repeated the maneuver at Jericho — three times, in the same direction, always reducing Matthew's pair to a Markan singular. Coincidence of that regularity strains credulity. The redaction-critical reading (Davies-Allison; Luz; Held's classic study in Bornkamm-Barth-Held) is that doubling is a Matthean compositional tendency. Held's 1960 essay made the case in detail and it has been broadly accepted across the critical commentary tradition. A plausible motive is the two-witness requirement of Deuteronomy 19:15 — 'by the mouth of two or three witnesses' — a principle Matthew's Jesus invokes at 18:16; doubling the recipients strengthens the testimony to Jesus's power within a Gospel attentive to legal validation.

A textual-critical complication reinforces that the tradition was unstable rather than carefully preserving headcounts. The site name varies across manuscripts and Gospels: Gerasenes in Mark, Gadarenes in Matthew, with Gergesenes attested as a variant. Origen himself observed that Gerasa lies some fifty kilometers from the lake and Gadara about ten, neither possessing a steep cliff plunging into the water, and proposed Gergesa to fit the swine's plunge. That the evangelists and copyists could not agree on the geography signals a tradition transmitted with literary freedom — exactly the milieu in which Matthew's doubling is best understood as redaction, not as the recovery of a detail Mark and Luke happened to lose.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine contradiction at the level of the texts — Mark and Luke report one demoniac, Matthew two — and the additive defense, though logically possible for any single case, fails as an account of the consistent Matthean doubling pattern.