I shall in this essay thoroughly review the synoptic-gospels' account of the swine-of-gadara(or gerasa depending on your gospel du jour) tall tale and shall prove it to be entirely fabricated but based on distorted bits of tragic I-century AD history.
brace yourselves - and lose your faith.

our first evangelist,"matthew" or whoever he or they were,covers the swine at 8:16 and ff.
at the beginning of the story "evening has come".
i am not following any bloody given translation,i am offering you my own translation from the original greek text the gospels have been handed down to us in as scientifically established by the standard scholarly nestle/aland edition called novum testamentum graece et latine,2002 edition.

it's the evening of a long and hard workday for "jesus",who's been performing many healings and exorcisms.we are in capernaum on the lake of tiberias also called sea of galilee aka lake gennezareth.
that we are in capernaum we learn from matthew 8:5.
i am not aking you to blindly believe me,grab your bible and verify.
and if you know greek and latin,grab your nestle/aland and crosscheck me.
i do not want you to go on bleating in a church flock - nor in my flock or any other:
i want to propose to you to quit bleating and acquire a rational critical logical perspective.

"jesus" is still being cornered by crowds eager for healing and he can't take it anymore,so he calls it a day,it's dark already,and at 8:18 "ordered (his disciples) to leave (with him of course) for the other side" - of the lake of tiberias,that is.

again: it's dark,it's been a heck of a long and hard day,"jesus" wants to escape the crowds and find rest elsewhere so he orders his disciples to ready a boat and cross the lake in search of a quiet spot.

the spot being - matthew 8:28 - "the territory of the gadarenes".
now the city of gadara - IF it existed at all at the time of the alleged "jesus",that is roughly around 26 AD - lies 12 kilometres or about 10 miles southeast of the sea of galilee in a region then called decapolis.

therefore you cannot land at gadara directly from the boat because gadara does not lie on the lakeshore.
but again its "territory" may,although what exactly "matthew" here means by territory - if administratively or traditionally or whatever - i haven't been able to verify so far. certainly the portion of southeastern lake of tiberias shore in the decapolis is closer to the city of hippos than to that of gadara according to nestle/aland's map.

anyway let's assume for working purposes that "matthew" is accurate here and that the territory or region of gadara does include the stretch of lakeshore "jesus" is pictured landing at at mt 8:28.

this would mean that since he was coming from capernaum all the way up northwest on the lake,he had crossed the entire north-south lenghth of the lake,about 20 km then and now according to historian vitucci in his comment to historian flavius joseph's jewish war book which also has roughly similar measurements for the lake of tiberias.

probably a bit more than 20 km since they were allegedly going to gadara from capernaum that is northwest to southeast and not straight north-south.

now go figure this exhausted "jesus" after a hell of a day choosing to take a lenghthy and dangerous boat trip of over 20 km at night!
just to find a bit of rest...
now "matthew" does not say whether it was a rowboat or sailboat,either way it would have taken hours and hours,possibly all night long to cross all the way down to the gadara region.at the very least.
utter madness at night,totally unnecessary.

because it would have sufficed to cross the lake west to east more or less,and after 4 or 5 km they would have landed at bethsaida or maybe a bit further down at...GAMALA in the lower golan or gaulanitis.
or maybe they could have chosen a desert spot in between for relaxing on their own.

"jesus" is so fucked up that he immediately falls asleep on the boat - why would he want to sail all night long?

gadara sounds suspiciously like gamala doesn't it?
in the gadara region where they are pictured as landing there's almost noone and nothing to eat ,why would "jesus" wanna go that far?

thus the gospel fiction does not appear plausible.
anyway let's again assume that all of this bs is true and that "jesus" chose to be taken all across the 20-km stretch of the lake to the gadara region.
can we at least be sure that "matthew" really meant to say gadara?
not at all!
scientific or critical editions of texts in philology carry a body of notes at the bottom of each page called "critical apparatus" - so if you grab your nestle/aland novum testamentum graece et latine and look at the bottom of the greek page here,you will notice that there are ancient manuscripts/papyri and other ancient sources that do NOT have gadara but instead:
gerasa or
gergesa or
gazara .

now if the nestle/aland editors chose gadara among all 4 different variants provided by different manuscripts it means that according to them what they judge to be the most reliable matthew manuscripts bear gadara.
but this does not imply that the most reliable manuscripts must always be right.
therefore we do NOT have 100% certainty here of what the original "word of god" really was like here.
the variant gerasa makes no sense at all because gerasa is a city - again IF it existed at all around 26 AD - that lies at least 50 km southeast of the sea of galilee and you cannot land at its region at all because its region most certainly could not have included any portion of lakeshore.
yet we shall presently see how,incredibly,the best manuscripts for mark and luke at the same junction have gerasa!!!!!!!!!!!!
so much for the "word of god" - apparently "god" disagrees even with itself from one gospel to the next...
the other matthew-manuscripts variant gergesa would make a lot more sense - again if any cty by this name existed at all around 26 AD - :nestle/alands' map places gergesa on the eastern lakeshore but with a big interrogation mark...
anyway if there was a gergesa there it would have been much closer to capernaum and a much better choice to cross over to and spend the night at then faraway gadara not to mention the ludicrous gerasa of mark and luke.
the last variant gazara is so far-out i haven't found mention of any city by this name for the time anywhere.

-end of part 1- stay tuned for the rest comin' up in the next days!!!!