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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
At this point we should give some attention to the way Mark handles chronology and transitions. In 1:14 Jesus returns to Galilee. Then, in 1:16 he's suddenly walking along the shore of Lake Galilee. How long afterwards? A day? a week? ten years later? There's absolutely no way of knowing. My sense is that the author either wasn't much interested in establishing a correct chronology and time frame or his sources didn't provide him sufficient information to do so. It's likely that both of these factors are at work. Strict chronology is essential to the historian and of little consequence to the gospel writer. These abrupt transitions, which abound in Mark, simply move the story along. We don't know the actual sequence of events that lay behind Mark's gospel. The author arranges them, as we'll see, thematically not chronologically. This means that we don't know, from Mark's gospel anyway, how long Jesus' ministry actually was. There is a general consensus among mainline New Testament scholars that it's not possible to reconstruct from the Gospels a chronology of events in Jesus' life between his baptism and his final journey to Jerusalem. This is a frustrating situation for the historian, one that closes some doors to the treatment of Jesus' life historically. Indeed, in the strictest sense, it seems that a biography of Jesus isn't possible. The best we can do is to dig out historical data, such as there is, without hope that a coherent biography of Jesus will result.
A 2011 observation: This posting somewhat overstates the problem of chronology. There does seem to be a rough chronology in Mark, which for example documents an ever-increasing tension between Jesus and the religio-political establishment. Still, it remains true that this rough chronology cannot be transformed into a precise timeline.
