Reading the Gospels Together The Movement of Jesus to Galilee – Part 2 Whereas John does agree that following his anointing with the Holy Spirit as witnessed by John the Witness, Jesus moves to Galilee, his story if very different. There is no mention of the arrest of John the Witness. Instead John tells his readers that Jesus called his first three disciples while yet in Judea – Peter and Andrew are among the three along with an unnamed disciple who will become a prominent personality in John’s gospel. It is only after having called these three that Jesus moves to Galilee where two more disciples are called. The place in Galilee to which John brings Jesus is Cana – a city never mentioned in the other three gospels. And following the sign of the water turned into wine John brings Jesus to Capernaum. John will tell his readers no stories of the ministry of Jesus in Capernaum – the only locations in Galilee John mentions where any action takes place are Cana and beside and on the Sea of Galilee. But it is highly significant that John mentions Capernaum at all. In a strange sort of way his mention of Capernaum lends great credence to the fact that much of Jesus’ ministry in the synoptic gospels was centered there. John knows about that ministry even though he says nothing about it. Reading the gospels together does reveal a clearer picture of the story of Jesus. Following the brief episode at Cana in Galilee John does a surprising thing – he brings Jesus back to Judea and Jerusalem. Once Jesus reaches Galilee in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus will not leave again until he takes his fateful journey to Jerusalem where he will be betrayed, suffer, be killed, and on the third day rise. In the synoptic gospels Jesus will travel only outside Galilee to nearby Gentile territory on occasion but the focus is completely on a Galilean ministry. How are we to explain this major difference in perspective between John and the synoptic writers? It is likely Mark who is responsible for creating an exclusively Galilean ministry for Jesus. Likely a good deal of Jesus’ ministry really did take place in Galilee, but not necessarily all of it. What might have been Mark’s reasons for creating the story as he has? For one thing, keeping Jesus away from Jerusalem does serve Mark well in the ending of his story. It makes the story far more dramatic and powerful – Jesus makes a single journey to Jerusalem where he encounters the religious leaders and where his destiny as the Crucified Messiah is fulfilled. Mark’s story is a “journey to the cross!” The cross is the focus, the destiny, and the final revelation of who Jesus is. What better way to make that point than to construct the story in such a way that Jesus moves in a relentless way to his destiny! Mark takes Jesus and his disciples to Caesarea Philippi which is in the farthest north part of Galilee to begin the journey and then marches Jesus to Jerusalem and his death all the while Jesus is attempting to teach his disciples the meaning of his death as the Crucified Messiah. Mark may also have been speaking to the community to which he was writing warning them that Jerusalem is the place of danger – and consequently Galilee is a place of safety. If it is true that Mark was writing his gospel just before, during, or even right after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, then such a warning about the perils of Jerusalem would make sense. And some of that warning likely had to do with the religious leaders of Judaism who were themselves attempting to make sense of the destruction of the Temple. Beware of Jerusalem. Mark’s community may well have needed such a warning. So Mark has created his storyline with a purpose. The storyline serves his purpose. The exclusive ministry in Galilee, the determined journey to Jerusalem, the relentless movement of the Messiah to his destiny as the Crucified Messiah – all of these and more are served well by Mark’s storyline. Without John’s gospel we would likely not be asking many of these questions. But John tells a different story – Jesus moves back and forth between Galilee and Judea and Jerusalem. Could it be that John’s storyline reflects reality more accurately? Of course we cannot answer that question definitively. We could ask why John would write the story as he has if in fact Mark was accurate in his story. And there are reasons we could observe. We will look later at John’s use of Passover in his storyline and that could be a clue about why John might write as he did. But it seems to me that the better conclusion to arrive at is that John is actually more accurate in the picture he paints of Jesus’ ministry – a ministry that was not exclusively limited to Galilee. We have not mentioned Matthew and Luke to this point. It is likely that they inherited Mark’s storyline and are thus not responsible for the exclusive ministry of Jesus in Galilee. In fact, Luke seems aware of some stories that do not fit in the Galilean ministry – the Mary and Martha story to name an obvious one. Both Matthew and Luke may have maintained Mark’s storyline without investing near the purpose in it that Mark does. As we continue our investigation we need to be aware of the movement of Jesus to Galilee and the reality that all four gospel writers share that movement near the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. We will have more to say about the interaction of Mark’s and John’s gospels later, especially when we consider the Jerusalem Controversy.