If demons do not die what happened to the demons Jesus sent into the 2000 pigs that drowned?

A:

In Mark 5:1-20, the demoniac, wearing no clothes (5:15), cries out that Jesus not torment him. Jesus asks him his name and he replies 'Legion', because he has legion demons in him. Jesus sends out the demons into swine that are grazing nearby. The pigs run down the hill into the sea and drown.

This is a spectacular story, and readers have usually assumed that the demons drowned along with the pigs. However, as the question points out, demons are not supposed to drown. Logically, there was no point in Jesus killing all those pigs, or financially ruining their owner.

Dennis R. MacDonald (The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark) has identified a number of close parallels between the story of the demoniac and a similar passage in Homer's Odyssey. Just as Circe turned the sailors into pigs, so Jesus sent the demons into pigs in a very similar context. MacDonald believes Mark portrays the demons as saying his name was 'Legion' as a deliberate reversal of when Polyphemus asked Odysseus for his name and he replied, 'Nobody'. On this view, the event did not really occur, and Jesus was not guilty of destroying another man's livestock.