Do I Stay Christian?: A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned

by Brian D. McLaren

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter to me whether there was one demoniac or two. It doesn’t matter which city was the actual setting. It doesn’t matter whether the man was naked before and clothed after, or if the clothing motif is simply a literary way of saying the man became socially acceptable again. It doesn’t matter if the demons were literal. It doesn’t matter if the pigs committed suicide. That’s because if something truly extraordinary happened, I would expect the story to be told widely, and the more widely it was told, the more embellishment there would be. Some differences in details may have arisen accidentally (someone misremembering the name of the village). Other differences may have been intentional embellishments, but even they don’t necessarily falsify the story’s meaning. Each different detail points to something that was deeply meaningful to the earliest hearers and tellers of the story, so meaningful that they exaggerated or embellished it to draw attention to it.