The Map Room
Where Jesus went
Four Gospels, four routes, drawn separately. Build each one in the order its own writer tells it, and the differences between them stop being a puzzle and start being the point.
Why these are not merged
Most Bible atlases print one map called the ministry of Jesus. Making that map means deciding, on the reader's behalf, how John's several Passovers in Jerusalem fit against the single journey there that Matthew, Mark and Luke describe, and where Luke's long travel section belongs in the sequence. Those are live questions among people who read carefully and in good faith, and a map that settled them quietly would be making an argument while looking like a reference.
So each Gospel gets its own route, in its own order. John alone has Jesus going up to Jerusalem for feast after feast (John 2:13, 5:1, 7:10, 12:12), which is why his line keeps returning to the same pin. Mark alone sends him from Tyre north to Sidon and then southeast to the Decapolis (Mark 7:31), which is the long way round to the lake by any reading of the geography. Read side by side, they are doing different things with the same life.
The traditional harmonising answer is that the ministry ran about three years, which is worked out mainly from John's Passovers, and that the other three simply compress. The traditional non-harmonising answer is that each writer arranged his material to make a case rather than to file a report. Both readings are old, both are held now, and the maps here work for either.
What only one of them has
- Matthew: the flight into Egypt, which runs off the edge of this map
- Mark: the detour north through Sidon to reach the Decapolis
- Luke: Nain, the Samaritan village that refuses him, and the Emmaus road
- John: Cana, Sychar in Samaria, and Jerusalem over and over
Counting the pins is the quickest way to see the difference. Matthew and Mark run thirteen and fourteen stops across almost as many places. John takes fourteen legs but touches only eight, and four of those legs land on Jerusalem.