We have here therefore two independent accounts of the same epoch in Jesus’s life. In their plan they match one another perfectly, differing only in the choice of the events to be related. These two narrative series are as it were predestinated to be [pg 166] united instead of being placed side by side. It happens that each of the northern journeys, according to the narrative, begins and ends with a sojourn in Galilee. Mk 7:31: After leaving the region of Tyre he came through Sidon to the Sea of Galilee. Mk 9:30, 33: And they went forth from thence (i. e. from Cæsarea Philippi) and wandered through Galilee and came to Capernaum. At the end of one narrative series one finds oneself again at the beginning of the other. Hence if one connect the one return from the north with the beginning of the other narrative series, one has, superficially viewed, a perfectly natural continuation,—only that Jesus must now, incomprehensibly enough, start back immediately for the north, instead of the return to Galilee being a stage on the journey to Jerusalem! This is the order that was finally followed, but it is only in the second return that the narrative finds a point of attachment for the journey to Jerusalem. This return movement in both series accounts for the fact that the two narratives, though they are really parallel cycles, are yet attached to one another in chronological sequence. The present text has completed the process of harmonising them. It is not simply that the story of the second feeding of [pg 167] the multitude makes reference to the first in the word “again” (Mk 8:1): the reconciliation is in fact carried so far that Jesus in one word addressed to the Disciples assumes both miracles (Mk 8:19-21)! How far this process was already accomplished in the oral tradition, and how much is to be charged to the account of the final literary composition, is a question which we are no longer in a position to answer. Only the first cycle is complete. Jesus and his Disciples travel by boat north-east along the coast and return then again to the country of Genezareth (Mk 6:32, 45, 53).