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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
I'm fairly sure that this passage from Mark 2:23-28 never happened as Mark described it (but see below). First, the author gives no specific time frame and offers no specific details, such as would lead us to feel there was an actual event involved. Second, why were Pharisees out walking in wheat fields with Jesus and his disciples on the Sabbath? Seems unlikely. Third, the whole scene must have taken place close to where Jesus and the disciples were lodging. Sabbath travel laws were strict, but the Pharisees didn't criticize the disciples for traveling on the Sabbath. But, if they were close to home and it being the Sabbath, would they have been likely to eat the wheat? Why didn't they just return their lodgings and eat there? What they did couldn't have been done casually, in spite of Mark making it seem that way. They transgressed the Sabbath Laws in a serious manner. The author may have made the story up entirely as the context for Jesus' teaching about keeping the Sabbath, specifically the statements in verses 27-28. Or, he may have pieced the story together from scattered fragments of his sources' memories and writings. Fourth, the whole sequence of events in 2:13-28 is artificial. Mark doesn't disguise that fact in any way. He's clearly presenting a line of argumentation. The story fits too neatly to be taken as an actual event.
Now, of course, one can invent a logical set of reasons why this story could have happened as Mark tells it. But those reasons have to be fairly complicated and aren't the sort of thing likely to have survived a generation of failing memory to reach Mark's time. What I'm saying is that there are none of those little details that have given other Marcan stories a sense of specificity and probability.
Note: I haven since come across information that, in fact, Jesus himself rejected the idea that picking grain on the Sabbath was a violation of it. The matter, evidently, was in dispute in his time, and he took a less strict view. Thus, an actual historical dispute is reflected here, and it's quite possible that the disciples actually did pick and eat the grain quite casually, knowing Jesus approved.
2012 comment: If it is true that the author of Mark depended on memories gathered through oral history interviews, a third scenario for this story is that one or more of "his" sources remembered something like it. The details of being out in the fields with the Pharisees watching does seem a little complex, but not far-fetched. It could have been that perhaps a Pharisee happened to see the disciples eating the grain on the Sabbath or heard that they did. However the details worked out, the point is that historians can be reasonably certain that Jesus held a view of the Sabbath that conflicted with that of some Pharisees. And the disciples could well have done what this story reports them doing. That is, there is an evidentiary basis to the story—which is the point of this whole long series of postings on the Gospel of Mark.
