Day 8: calling the early disciples in Galilee, Sermon on the Mount
chronological assignment for October 8: John 5
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.
The assigned chronological reading plan I follow does its best to put the same stories together in daily readings, but it simplifies by having usually whole chapters read each day, so that you usually end up reading different accounts of the same story on different days.
My goal in this study is to look at each account of the same story simultaneously, in order to glean what the Lord is trying to teach us through each. Therefore, our daily scripture readings will be increasingly broken up into verse, rather than chapter, segments, explaining our departure from the assigned chronological reading plan, which will only intensify.
As we follow various clues in the Gospel writers’ accounts, our departure from the daily assigned reading will only intensify, revealing the problem of chronology, which begs the question, “Can we trust the Gospels?”
We did cover John 5, the healing at Bethesda, assigned today in the chronological reading plan, yesterday. I go into a lot of detail today about the chronology of Mathew, Mark, and Luke compared to the different chronology of John. The first chapters of John cover episodes the other Gospel writers do not. We’ve finally reached the point where all the accounts coalesce into Jesus’ early ministry in Galilee and His calling on His disciples there. We’ve read all these stories in our daily chronological reading plan already. But today, following Matthew’s lead, we make the quick transition to the Sermon on the Mount, which we aren’t scheduled to read in the daily chronological plan until October 10.
MATTHEW 4:18-25; MARK 1:16-20; LUKE 5:1-11 : Jesus calls Peter, Andrew, James, and John
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