Thomas Henry Huxley

“ Gladstone's account of them:—
"Now, in the Gadarene affair, I do not think I am unreasonably sceptical if I say that the existence of demons who can be transferred from a man to a pig does thus contravene probability. Let me be perfectly candid. I admit I have no à priori objection to offer.... I declare, as plainly as I can, that I am unable to show cause why these transferable devils should not exist."... ”

“ The conception of a pomœrium as a "vicinage attached to" a city, appears to be something quite novel and original. But then, to be sure, I do not know how many senses Mr. Gladstone may attach to the word "vicinage."
Whether Gadara had a pomœrium, in the proper technical sense, or not, is a point on which I offer no opinion. But that the city had a very considerable "rural district" attached to it and, notwithstanding its distinctness, amenable to the jurisdiction of the Gentile municipal authorities, is one of the main points of my case. ”

“ For the distinguished Anglican divine and Biblical scholar that is part and parcel of the teachings respecting the spiritual world which we owe to the founder of Christianity. It is an inseparable part of that Christian orthodoxy which, if a man rejects, he is to be considered and called an "infidel." According to the ordinary rules of interpretation of language, Mr. Gladstone must hold the same view. ”

“ Moreover, since pigs are hardly likely to be kept for the mere love of those unsavoury animals, pig-owning, or swine-herding, must have been, and evidently was, regarded as a suspicious and degrading occupation by strict Jews, in the first century A.D. But I should like to know on what provision of the Mosaic Law, as it is laid down in the Pentateuch, Mr. Gladstone bases the assumption, which is essential to his case, that the possession of pigs and the calling of a swineherd were actually illegal. ”

“ It would seem that I have a feline tenacity of life; once more, a "fatal error." But Mr. Gladstone has forgotten an excellent rule of controversy; say what is true, of course, but mind that it is decently probable. Now it is not decently probable, hardly indeed conceivable, that any one who has read Josephus, or any other historian of the Jewish war, should be unaware that there were Jews (of whom Josephus himself was one) who "Romanised" and, more or less openly, opposed the war party. ”

“ And he treats the entire question, in the narrowed form in which it arises upon secular testimony, as if it were capable of a solution so clear and summary as to warrant the use of the extremest weapons of controversy against those who presume to differ from him.
The six heretical propositions which have gone before are enunciated with sufficient clearness to enable me to prove without any difficulty that, whosesoever they are, they are not mine. But number seven, I confess, is too hard for me. I cannot undertake to contradict that which I do not understand. ”

“ There are no known savages, nor people sunk in the ignorance of partial civilisation, who do not hold them. The great majority of Christians have held them and still hold them. Moreover, the oldest records we possess of the early conceptions of mankind in Egypt and in Mesopotamia prove that exactly such demonology, as is implied in the Gadarene story, formed the substratum, and, among the early Accadians, apparently the greater part, of their supposed knowledge of the spiritual world. ”

“ In my paper on "The Keepers of the Herd of Swine" I point out, at some length, that, "in accordance with the ancient Hellenic practice," each city of the Decapolis must have been "surrounded by a certain amount of territory amenable to its jurisdiction:" and, to enforce this conclusion, I quote what Josephus says about the "villages that belonged to Gadara and Hippos." As I understand the term pomerium or pomœrium, [166] it means the space which, according to Roman custom, was kept free from buildings, immediately within and without the walls of a city ”

“ Except for certain sacrificial purposes, pigs were held in such abhorrence by the ancient Egyptians that swineherds were not permitted to enter a temple, or to intermarry with other castes; and any one who had touched a pig, even accidentally, was unclean. But these very regulations prove that pig-keeping was not illegal; it merely involved certain civil and religious disabilities. For the Jews, dogs were typically "unclean" animals ”

“ The immediate effect of such judgment will be the decision of the question whether the men of the nineteenth century are to adopt the demonology of the men of the first century as divinely revealed truth, or to reject it as degrading falsity. ”

“ It may be, nevertheless, that the practice of keeping pigs may have found its way into Palestine in the Græco-Roman time, in consequence of the great increase of the non-Jewish population; yet there is no evidence of it in the New Testament; the great herd of swine, 2000 in number, mentioned in the narrative of the possessed, was feeding in the territory of Gadara, which belonged to the Decapolis; and the prodigal son became a swineherd with the native of a far country into which he had wandered ”

“ I have shown that, according to Josephus, who surely ought to have known, Gadara was as much a Gentile city as Ptolemais; I have proved that he includes Gadara amongst the cities "that rose up against the Jews that were amongst them," which is a pretty definite expression of his belief that the "ethnical character of the general population" was Gentile. There is no question here of Jews of the Roman party fighting with Jews of the Zealot party, as Mr. Gladstone suggests. It is the non-Jewish and anti-Jewish general population which rises up against the Jews who had settled "among them." ”

“ Persons who, like myself, having spent their lives outside the political world, yet take a mild and philosophical concern in what goes on in it, often find it difficult to understand what our neighbours call the psychological moment of this or that party leader and are, occasionally, loth to believe in the seeming conditions of certain kinds of success. ”

“ And when some chieftain, famous in political warfare, adventures into the region of letters or of science, in full confidence that the methods which have brought fame and honour in his own province will answer there, he is apt to forget that he will be judged by these people, on whom rhetorical artifices have long ceased to take effect ”

“ We must implicitly follow the most ancient and creditable testimony, which clearly pronounces in favour of Γαδαρηνῶν. This reading is adopted by Tischendorf, Alford, and Tregelles."
162 ↑ I may call attention, in passing, to the fact that this authority, at any rate, has no sort of doubt of the fact that Jewish Law did not rule in Gadara (indeed, under the head of "Gadara," in the same work, it is expressly stated that the population of the place consisted "predominantly of heathens") , and that he scouts the notion that the Gadarene swineherds were Jews. ”