Taking stock of my study of the four gospels, I’ve basically covered the following pericope sequences:

  • Prologue and Infancy Narratives (nos. 1–12)
  • Pre-Ministry (nos. 13–21)
  • Initial Ministry in Galilee (nos. 22–45)
  • Sermon on the Mount/Plain (nos. 46–73)
  • Post-Sermon Miracles (nos. 74–83)
  • Commissioning of the Twelve (nos. 84–93)
  • Middle Ministry in Galilee and First Parables (nos. 94–115)
  • Short Journey to Jerusalem (nos. 116–118)
  • Death of John the Baptist and Return of the Twelve (nos. 119–121)
  • Feeding of the Multitude and Walking on the Water (nos. 122–123, 129)

Students of the four gospels have commonly divided up Jesus’s ministry into the following segments:

  • Early Galilean ministry

    • from the discourse on the Nazareth synagogue

    • to the Sermon on the Mount/Plain

  • Major Galilean ministry

    • from the Sermon on the Mount/Plain

    • to the return of the Twelve

  • Final Galilean ministry

    • from the return of the Twelve

    • to Jesus’s last departure from Galilee

  • Judaean ministry

    • from Jesus’s last journey from Galilee to Judaea

    • to the triumphal entry into Jerusalem

  • Jerusalem ministry

    • from the triumphal entry into Jerusalem

    • to Jesus’s arrest

These segments don’t divide time equally but rather note important narrative signposts in the gospels, particularly the Gospel of Matthew. (For some reason, chronologies often bias toward Matthew and memorable stories often bias toward John; I can’t say why.) In other words, we can’t exactly work out how long Jesus ministered in Galilee and Judaea, though we do have a solid timeframe for the Jerusalem ministry—the gospels all agree this was less than a week.

In other other words, I don’t know if we’re halfway, a third of the way, or nearly completely through the ministry. The gospels, unfortunately, don’t lay out time scales very much at all, so we’re left guessing.

Since all we have are the gospels (really) for historical documentation on the events of the overall ministry, relative to those accounts, I think there are some takeaways—but always with the caveat that we won’t know for certain, and there is always room for any one interval between pericopes to have lasted days, months, or years.

  1. The combined narrative seems to treat the early Galilean ministry as something on the order of weeks, not months.
  2. The narrative also seems to treat the major Galilean ministry as something on the order of months, not weeks or years.
  3. The narrative further treats the final Galilean ministry as something on the order of weeks, not months or years, with one complicating factor: the short roundtrip journey to Jerusalem (most likely to have occurred during this segment) could have taken months and could have been bookended by weeks or months as well.
  4. The departure from Galilee and journey to Judaea (in the past, often called the “Peraean ministry” on a supposition that Jesus journeyed through Peraea to Judaean towns) seems to be presented on a time scale of weeks, not months or years.
  5. The Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem episode is treated as something on the order of days, not weeks.
  6. The narrative seems to treat the Judaean ministry as something on the order of weeks at minimum, and probably months but not years.

Because students in decades past have picked up on Jesus being approximately 30 years of age when he started his ministry (Luke 3:23: “Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age” at the time of the baptism), and then references to three Passover seasons in the gospels, readers have taken Jesus’s ministry to have been three years long and his age between 30 and 33 across that ministry.

Truth is, it’s more complicated. For one, the Julian and Gregorian calendars in use across our historical documents weren’t aligned precisely with Jesus’s birth, and so Jesus was almost certainly not born in the year 1 CE. (There was never a year 0 CE by any of these calendars.) The sources that indicate the death of Herod the Great put an upper limit on when Jesus could have been born, since Herod the Great is directly associated with the occasion of Jesus’s birth. Herod died (by our calendar) in 4 BCE, meaning at the latest, Jesus was born that year, but possibly born as early as 7 BCE (due to Matthew’s intimations of Jesus’s age at the arrival of the Magi and Jesus being “about thirty years of age” at the baptism). Luke says that John the Baptist began baptizing “in the fifteenth year” of the reign of Tiberius, which, despite its apparent specificity to time, is actually a little ambiguous because of how Tiberius came to power. Nevertheless, this situates John’s ministry within a window of 27–29 CE. And then we have the timing of Jesus’s death. All roads there, on multiple reckonings of Jewish calendars, the Passover sequences, and the strong association of Jesus’s execution with Pontius Pilate, lead to April 7, 30 CE as the very day Jesus died.

Working back from 30 CE and having somewhere between 27 and 29 CE as the starting point for the ministry, that would mean:

  • a week before April 7, 30, Jesus entered Jerusalem for Passover
  • weeks or months before Jesus entered Jerusalem for Passover, he visited towns in Judaea
  • six months before Jesus entered Jerusalem for Passover, he visited Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles
  • weeks before visiting Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus departed Galilee for the last time
  • weeks before departing Galilee for the last time, the Twelve returned to Galilee from their short mission
  • months before the Twelve returned from their mission, Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount/Plain
  • weeks before Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount/Plain, he declared his ministry from the Nazareth synagogue
  • weeks before Jesus declared his ministry from the Nazareth synagogue, he fasted in the wilderness
  • forty days before Jesus fasted in the wilderness, he was with John the Baptist near Bethany-beyond-Jordan at the Jordan River

It would seem from this breakdown that the ministry was rather short, something less than a year. It could work out that he visited John in 29 CE just after the Passover (which occurred on April 18 that year, by our reckoning), then spent forty days in the wilderness between late April and early June. Then during the summer of 29, he declared his ministry in Nazareth and toured synagogues throughout upper Galilee, sending out the Twelve sometime in the summer. Then, in September, the Twelve returned from their mission, and weeks later, Jesus departed Galilee for the last time for the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem. Between late October 29 CE and early April 30 CE, Jesus visited towns across Judaea, remaining close to Bethany. And then on April 2, he entered Jerusalem, and on the night of April 6–7, he was arrested. If Jesus was born, at the latest, in 4 BCE and died on April 7, 30 CE, then he would have been at minimum 32 years old at the start of his ministry and 33 years old at his death, by this chronology. At a maximum, he was between 35 and 37 years old during these events. A total range looks like 32 to 37 years of age from his baptism to his death.

I haven’t accounted for road travel and routes, which could add days or weeks to those blocks of time when Jesus traveled to Tyre, Gadara, Jerusalem, and Ephraim. This just takes the narrative sequence on the whole, pericope by pericope, and aligns them textually, then projects a timeline between milestone events, like the Feast of Tabernacles, Passover, reign of Tiberius, prefecture of Pilatus, reign of Herod the Great, reign of Herod Antipas, and so on. What matters to me is coherence, narrative coherence especially. I’m not fixed to Jesus’s ministry having to transpire over a particular timeframe, but I do want to understand the four gospels as a narrative, and getting my narrative bearings.