A city of the Decapolis eight miles southeast of the Sea
of Galilee and seven miles east of the Jordan river. Situated at
more than 1200 ft. above sea-level the site offers a breath-taking panorama
of the surrounding region.
Gadara was a typical Hellenistic city that became a
center of Greek culture under
the Seleucids. It was the hometown of the Cynic philosopher Menippus
[3rd c. BCE] who invented the genre of mocking narrative satire imitated
by later Greek and Latin writers [e.g., Petronius' Satyricon] &
birthplace of the poet Meleager [1st c. BCE] who compiled the first
Greek poetic anthology.
In good satiric style Mark 5 portrays Jesus as
expelling a demon named "Legion" — the basic unit of
the Roman army — from
the region of the "Gerasenes" (an inland city-state of the
Decapolis south of Gadara high in the Jordanian mountains, miles from
any major body of water). Matthew sets this incident closer to the Sea of Galilee in the territory of
the "Gadarenes." Like the satires of Menippus, however, the
setting of this exorcism story is purely imaginative, since there are
no cliffs in the region of Gadara, much less Gerasa, that border on
a lake. The site usually shown tourists as the location of this exorcism
— Kursi below the slopes of the Golan 12 miles north of Gadara — has cliffs that descend to the sea
but lacks evidence of a settlement in the 1st c. CE and or any association with either Gadara or Gerasa.