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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
As mentioned in the fourth posting in this series, Jesus didn't begin his public ministry until John was imprisoned. And it's interesting to note that Jesus wasn't even in Galilee when that event took place. He had to return there. Assuming this sequence of events is correct, we have no way of knowing Jesus' reasons for rejecting a Judean ministry or a desert ministry in favor of a Galilean town & country ministry. A number of things are possible. Jesus, being Galilean, may have felt more comfortable at home in his own setting. We can assume that Galileans had their own foods, their own speech-ways, and a host of other mores familiar to Jesus. He may, on the other hand, have wanted to dissociate his own style and message from that of John, which would have been harder to do if he'd stayed in Judea. Funding may have been an issue. Jesus may have had sources of financial support in Galilee that he didn't have in Judea. We'll see that Marks' Jesus tried to remain semi-covert in some ways, and that may have been easier to do in Galilee than in Judea. All of this is purely speculative, of course, and all that we know for sure is that, if Mark is correct, Jesus consciously decided to initiate his own ministry in Galilee. It's also interesting to note that there was an interval of some time between Jesus' baptism and his ministry. The text implies that he stayed on with John, which again reinforces our sense that Jesus was John's disciple.
