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The story of the "legion" of demons is described as possessing two men in Matthew 8:28-34, but only one man in Mark 5:1-20 and Luke 8:26-39.

Was there one man, or two, or am I missing something else?

Mark 5:2 (ESV)

And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit.

Luke 8:27

When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town.

Matt 8:28

When he arrived at the other side in the region of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men coming from the tombs met him.

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    Haha, first time I've ever flagged my own question as a dupe. As disappointing as it is to learn that definitively "no one really knows" that will have to do. I had to ask, as sometimes there are some interesting place-culture-context explanations that answer the question logically.
    – John Mee
    Commented Feb 22, 2022 at 23:43

1 Answer 1

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"One of the two demon possessed men was limping and not as quick as the man who first met with Jesus".

Explanation: There were two demon possessed men, according to Matthew. The number one is a factor of the number two, but not the other way around. So if we believe that they were all telling the truth, the source saying that there were two men has to be the more correct one.

The reason Mark and Luke said that there was only one man must have been because the second man stayed a bit in the background. The reason he did so most likely was because he wasn't as able-bodied as the first man, possibly because of a bad leg. The word "immediately" in Mark gives it away:

"immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit".

An other reason why Matthew’s account is the more correct one is that he was the only one of the three narrators that had been an apostles and close disciple of Jesus. Thus, he was there when it happened, being an eyewitness to the event. Mark and Luke, on the other hand, wrote down a retold story, with the non-bare essentials trimmed off.

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