Mark 5.1: They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of the Gerasenes. (ESV)
In the town of Capernaum, after healing a number of people and seeing the crowd begin to grow, Jesus directed his disciples to cross the Sea of Galilee and go to the other side. It was on this trip that Jesus spoke to the waves of the storm and the wind and sea became calm. When Jesus and his disciples came to the land, they would be met with a new storm.
This event is documented in all three synoptic gospels. These accounts contain much variety in the details presented. This is an example of what scholars call the “Synoptic Problem”. I wrote about this in my September 16, 2018 post entitled “Put Down Your Nets, Part 3A”. That post states how I personally approach this issue.
I see these apparently differing facts set forth as solid testimony that these accounts can be trusted as telling us about something that really did happen. I think people who seek to use these differences as a basis to diminish the certainty of these accounts do not take into consideration the true nature of multiple eyewitness testimony of the same event.
The Matthew 8.28-34 account says that this took place in the region of the Gadarenes. And modern textual analysis of Luke’s 8.26-39 account brings agreement with Mark’s account stating that it took place in the region of the Gerasenes. The town of Gadara was closest to the seashore and there is scholarly thinking that this region of the Gadarenes extended to the sea. The town of Gerasa was further away from the sea, but its general area could also be understood by other people, namely the people of Gerasa, that its region extended to the sea.
I believe that these geographic names overlapped such that some people understood this place on the seashore as in the region of the Gadarenes, and other people thought of it as in the region of the Gerasenes. Perhaps they came to be used interchangeably, as K.W. Clark points out in the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Nevertheless, one place. One event.