32. The contrast which the Gospel of John presents to the other three
concerns not only the teaching of Jesus, but the scene of his ministry and
its historic development as well. Whatever may be the final judgment
concerning the fourth gospel, it is manifestly constructed as a simple
collection of incidents following each other in what was meant to appear a
chronological sequence. It has been seen that the biographical framework
of the first three gospels is principally Mark's report of Peter's
narrative. Now it is a fact that in portions of Matthew and Luke, derived
elsewhere than from Mark, there are various allusions most easily
understood if it be assumed that Jesus visited Jerusalem before his
appearance there at the end of his ministry. Such, for instance, are the
parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke x. 25-37), the story of the visit to
Mary and Martha (Luke x. 38-42), and the lamentation of Jesus over
Jerusalem (Luke xiii. 34, 35; Matt, xxiii. 37-39). All three gospels,
moreover, agree in attributing to emissaries from Jerusalem much of the
hostility manifested against Jesus in his Galilean ministry (Luke v. 17;
Mark iii. 22; Matt. xv. 1; Mark vii. 1), and presuppose such an
acquaintance of Jesus with households in and near Jerusalem as is not easy
to explain if he never visited Judea before his passion (Mark xi. 2, 3;
xiv. 14; xv. 43 and parallels; compare especially Matt, xxvii. 57; John
xix. 38). These all suggest that the narrative of Mark does not tell the
whole story, a conclusion quite in accordance with the account of his work
given by Papias. It has been assumed that Peter was a Galilean, a man of
family living in Capernaum. It is not impossible that on some of the
earlier visits of Jesus to Jerusalem he did not accompany his Master, and
in reporting the things which he knew he naturally confined himself to his
own experiences. If this can explain the predominance of Galilean
incidents in the ministry as depicted in Mark, it will explain the
predominance of Galilee in the first three gospels, and the contradiction
between John and the three is reduced to a divergence between two accounts
of Jesus' ministry written from two different points of view.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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