JW:
This Thread is inspired by a recent post by the Holy Con/Pro Fessor of the Faith in historical Jesus, James McGrath (JM)[bold mine]:
I read this (which I now read in place of the Sunday Comics) as I was having my customary breakfast of sour grapes and had a John Stewart moment of a reflexive spewing onto my screen (thanks Jim). The accurate geography is evidence for historicity? What you talking bout Baruch Wills us!?Where Jesus May Have Walked
We also passed through Cana. This led to a thought about mythicism: The likelihood that Christians in some other part of the world decided to turn a belief in a purely celestial figure into a narrative about a historical one, set it in this part of the world, and got so many place and people names authentic and accurate would be nothing short of a miracle. And so historical study prefers a more probable scenario, that there is some genuine reminiscence of actual events this part of the world in the origins of Christianity. Everyone gets some things wrong, and many of the stories told are at best highly mythologized developments from stories about things that happened. But this is only one part of the picture. Getting details right in a time before accessible written records or encyclopedias was far more difficult than mythicists seem to realize, and so when it happens, it often reflects access to accurate information, whether oral or written.
For the more learned Skeptics here, "Mark", the original Gospel, has something of a reputation for bad geography. Our own Diogenes the Cynic has a, as Larry David would say, pretty, pretty good summary of "Mark's" god-awful geography here:
Shredding the Gospels: Contradictions, Errors, Mistakes, Fictions
As usual I've inventoried some of the more grievous Markan geographical errors at ErrancyWiki such as Jewrassic Pork (above):3. The Gospels contain factual errors
It's hard to know where to start with this one or how to categorize the errors so I guess I'll just take the Gospels one at a time starting with Mark.
Errors in Mark
Mark probably has the greatest number of factual inaccuracies. He makes mistakes of geography, custom and law. The trial before the Sanhedrin is Mark's invention and is a catalogue of errors unto itself but let's start with geography.
Geographical Errors
The Gerasene Demoniac:
In Mark 5:1, Jesus and company sail across the Sea of Galilee and come to "the land of the Gerasenes." There they encounter a man possessed by unclean spirits. Jesus drives out the spirits, the spirits enter some pigs and the pigs run down a hill and jump into the lake.
If you look at the map below you can see that Gerasa is 30 miles south southeast of the lake. That's a pretty big jump for those pigs. There is also no 30 mile long embankment running down from Gerasa to the lake.
Matthew recognized Mark's blunder and tried to correct Gerasa to Gadara (the Matthew story also contains two demoniacs instead of one so Matthew's version of the story contains two contradictions with Mark) but Gadara was still six miles from the lake. Luke retains Gerasa in his version indicating that Luke didn't know much about Palestinian geography either.
Mark 5:1
which I think is now the best article ever written on the subject and in customary fashion, after having checked a few related references in books, some related searching on the Internet when I had nothing better to do and fruitlessly arguing with one or two Apologists, I have Faith that I Am the foremost authority the world has ever known on the subject.
The traditional question asked in Polemics regarding the relationship of "Mark" and geography is:
Did "Mark" get any geography wrong?
but after skimming (love that word) through "Mark", again, thanks to JM, I think the better question is:
Did "Mark" get any geography right?
I confess that the title of this Thread is an attention getter. I think everyone except for aa/MM would agree that "Mark" got some geography right, like say Jerusalem being in Israel (But how do we know Jesus was not Mel Torme?). But if we raise the Bar (so to speak) for geographical competence to Geographical Relationships, did "Mark" get anything right? Let's say for the sake of argument that "Mark" was composed in Rome. It strikes me that it would be typical for Romans of the time to have heard the names of some places in Israel and the surroundings but not to be familiar with the geographical relationships. Let's say you are from New York. You know that Minneapolis and St. Paul are in Minnesota but do you know where they are in relation to each other?
The purpose of this Thread will be to count how many geographical relationships "Mark" probably got wrong and how many, if any, he got right.
Joseph
ErrancyWiki