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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
Mark 1:21-38 is a chronological unit. It covers two days in Jesus' life. A Sabbath and the day after. In those two days, Jesus preached in the synagogue, healed a man there, healed Peter's mother-in-law, healed many others, and went off to a lonely place to pray. He stayed in Peter and Andrew's home. Now, if the author would only carry on with such careful chronicling of events, Mark would give us a good biography of Jesus. He doesn't. In 1:39 Jesus goes off to preach and do exorcisms all over rural Galilee. At some indeterminate point thereafter a man suffering a "dreaded skin disease" (1:40, TEV) comes to see him. We've totally lost the thread of any chronology. This is no minor matter for the biographer of Jesus. On the one hand, it is highly unusual to have so much information about two days in the life of someone who lived 2,000 years ago. On the other hand, there's no way to fit them into a larger, credible sequence of events. And, we have the problem that the author puts things together sequentially by theme. There's no reason in the world why he might not have pasted these events together into two days. Mark provides important gospel data on Jesus. He doesn't have to stick to an empirical sequence of events to do so. We, therefore, can't be at all confident that these events actually happened on two actual days.
2012 comment: When working on a topic, one of the most important things a historian does is to establish a chronology, a timeline. It is vital to writing the history of anything to get the sequence of events correct. The point in this above posting from 1998 is that the author of Mark was not concerned with a proper sequence of events as such but rather with a proper presentation of Jesus as the Christ, the Risen One. The description of a "typical day in the ministry of Jesus," thus, fits right in with the author's purpose as well it should.
