Where did the devils ask not to go?

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: Usually considered reconciled

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.

In Mark's telling, Legion "begged him earnestly not to send them out of the region" (Mark 5:10, exō tēs chōras) — a local, spatial plea: do not expel us from this territory. Luke, narrating the same exorcism, has the demons beg "that he would not command them to depart into the abyss" (Luke 8:31, eis tēn abysson). The difference is not cosmetic. Abyssos is freighted vocabulary. In the Septuagint it renders tehom, the primeval deep (Genesis 1:2; Psalm 104:6), and in Second Temple and apocalyptic literature it becomes the cosmic prison reserved for rebellious spirits: the bound Watchers of 1 Enoch 18–21, the locust-demons released from "the shaft of the abyss" in Revelation 9:1–2, 11, and Satan's thousand-year confinement in the abyss in Revelation 20:1–3. Luke has converted Mark's request about local geography into a request about eschatological imprisonment — the demons fear premature consignment to their appointed place of punishment.

The standard harmonizing reading, represented by I. Howard Marshall, treats the two pleas as complementary: the demons asked both not to be driven from the region and not to be sent to the abyss, and each evangelist preserved one facet. As far as logic goes, the two requests are not contradictory — both express the demons' resistance to expulsion, and one could in principle entail the other. That keeps the tension genuinely mild and earns a partial harmonization: nothing in Mark is *falsified* by Luke.

But the "both happened" reflex is exactly the move Synoptic source criticism cautions against. The mainstream account, given Markan priority, is that Luke is editing Mark, and abyssos is a Lukan substitution that fits his more developed demonology rather than an extra detail recovered independently. Joseph Fitzmyer identifies the term as a Lukan touch reflecting his theological framework; François Bovon similarly reads Luke's redaction as heightening the cosmic stakes of the confrontation. This is not an isolated case but part of a consistent pattern in which Luke theologizes Markan source material — sharpening the apocalyptic register, clarifying motives, smoothing geography. Graham Twelftree's study of the exorcism narratives situates the Gerasene episode within precisely this redactional development of early Christian demonology.

The payoff is less about the plea itself than about what the difference reveals. If Luke and Mark were independent eyewitness depositions, the divergence between a geographic plea and a cosmological one would be a puzzle. On the dominant two-source model it is exactly what we expect: Luke had Mark in front of him and reworked it. The verse is therefore a clean, low-stakes specimen of Lukan redaction. The contradiction in the demons' words is real but minor; its significance is evidentiary — it tells against the claim that the Synoptics are three independent reports.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable as complementary on the surface, but best explained as Luke theologically editing Mark.