The Case For Christ

about Mark and Luke saying that Jesus sent the demons into the
swine at Gerasa, while Matthew says it was in Gadara. People look
at that and say this is an obvious contradiction that cannot be
reconciled-it's two different places. Case closed."
"Well, don't shut the case yet," Blomberg chuckled. "Here's one
possible solution: one was a town; the other was a province."
That seemed a little too glib for me. He appeared to be skimming
over the real difficulties that are raised by this issue.
"It gets more complicated than that," I said. "Gerasa, the town,
wasn't anywhere near the Sea of Galilee, yet that's where the
demons, after going into the swine, supposedly took the herd over
the cliff to their deaths."
"OK, good point," he said. "But there have been ruins of a town
that have been excavated at exactly the right point on the
eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee. The English form of the
town's name often gets pronounced 'Khersa,' but as a Hebrew word
translated or transliterated into Greek, it could have come out
sounding something very much like 'Gerasa.' So it may very well
have been in Khersa-whose spelling in Greek was rendered as
Gerasa-in the province of Gadara."
"Well done," I conceded with a smile. "I'll surrender on that
one. But here's a problem that's not so easy: what about the
discrepancies between the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and
Luke? Skeptics often point to them as being hopelessly in
conflict."
"This is another case of multiple options," he said.
"Such as?"
"The two most common have been that Matthew reflects Joseph's
lineage, because most of his opening chapter is told from
Joseph's perspective and Joseph, as the adoptive father, would
have been the legal ancestor through whom Jesus' royal lineage
would have been traced. These are themes that are important for
Matthew.
"Luke, then, would have traced the genealogy through Mary's
lineage. And since both are from the ancestry of David, once you
get that far back the lines converge.
"A second option is that both genealogies reflect Joseph's
lineage in order to create the necessary legalities. But one is
Joseph's human lineage-the gospel of Luke-and the other is
Joseph's legal lineage, with the two diverging at the points
where somebody in the line did not have a direct offspring. They