Entering or Leaving Jericho?

DEFENSE

There are several responses to this challenge.

To begin, let’s look at the texts describing where Jesus was when the event took place:

• “As they went out of Jericho, a great crowd followed him” (Matt. 20:29).
• “And they came to Jericho; and as he was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a great multitude, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside” (Mark 10:46).
• “As he drew near to Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging” (Luke 18:35)

Matthew and Mark have Jesus leaving Jericho, whereas Luke has him approaching it.

It would be possible to explain this in an excessively artificial manner, either by saying Jesus was leaving Jericho but turned around and started to go back, or by saying he was heading toward Jericho but turned around and started to leave. These explanations are logically possible but not plausible. Fortunately, there are better explanations.

One involves the fact that there were two sites for Jericho: an ancient and a recent one. Thus, Jesus could have passed through the older site (mentioned by Matthew and Mark) and been approaching the newer settlement (mentioned by Luke), which had been built by the Hasmoneans and recently renovated and expanded by Herod the Great. The newer settlement is sometimes called “Herodian” or “New Testament” Jericho (Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, s.v. “Jericho [Place]”).

This is possible, but given the freedom the evangelists had in presenting events in a non-chronological order (see Day 89), it’s possible Luke set the encounter with Bartimaeus before Jesus arrives in Jericho because he wants next to relate an event that occurred in Jericho (the dinner with Zacchaeus; Luke 19:1–10).

Tradition preserved the fact that the encounter with Bartimaeus occurred just outside Jericho and that the encounter with Zacchaeus occurred in it. But it is an open question whether Luke grouped these two together because of their chronological order or because of their association with Jericho. Either way, the Gospels agree the healing occurred just outside Jericho. Jesus’ direction of travel falls below the level of precision that the Gospel authors were expected to track.