Day 7: healing at Bethesda, arrest of John, early ministry in Galilee
chronological assignment for October 7: Mark 2
For more information about this study, see my introduction.
I follow two Bible reading plans yearly, one chronological and one with a daily Old Testament and New Testament reading. I publish those daily readings and prayer here. At the start of 2023, I started summarizing the books of the Bible, and those summaries can be found here.
Today we introduce the problem of chronology, which begs another question, “Can we trust the Gospels?”
Our chronological reading plan does its best to put the same stories together in daily readings, but it also tries to simplify by having all or most of a chapter read each day. When I started looking at the, as many as four, accounts told of the events in Jesus’ life, I found I had to break the scripture readings up into much smaller segments. We’re only on day 7, and I’m already going to introduce a departure from the assigned chronological reading plan. We’re going to read John 5, which is actually assigned for tomorrow. You may not be trying to stay on both plans, but I still thought I’d attempt to address that plan as we go along with our chronology. That plan has us reading in Mark 2 today. Mark’s account is the shortest, so it advances the timeline quickly. We likely won’t get to the events covered in Mark 2 in this study for several more days.
John is the only Gospel writer who discusses one more event that appears to have occurred before or around that time. After that, we’ll read about the arrest of John the Baptist, which does mark the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, about which we’ll also read excerpts.
JOHN 5 : Jesus at the feast in Jerusalem: healing at Bethesda and confrontation with the Jews
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