Geographical References - The Big Picture

This chart gives a summary view of the recent series on named geographical places in both the gospels recognized by the Christian church and in another set of documents that are sometimes discussed as alternative or non-canonical gospels.

The eight non-canonical documents reviewed had a total of 60 geographical references. Creating a summary group of the non-canonical documents can obscure some significant differences within the group: the majority of all geographical references there traced to one document, the Proto-Evangelium of James with 41 references.

As I studied the results on a document-by-document basis, I became interested in the "zoom" factor used on the maps: whether the reference was "zoomed out" to a general region (country, region, etc), whether it was a specific place (city, town, body of water, etc), or whether it was "zoomed in" to something within a city (a named building or garden, etc). The "zoomed out" general reference on the map (such as Israel or Judea) accounted for a decisive majority of the geographical references in the non-canonical gospels, and nearly half in the canonical gospels. Specific references (such as Jerusalem or Bethany) were the most common type of reference in the canonical gospels. The "zoomed in", nearly street-level references to places with proper names were relatively rare, and only occurred in the four canonical gospels among the documents currently being evaluated. These "street view" references were slightly more common in the Gospel of John than in the other canonical gospels, and slightly less common in the Gospel of Luke. It is likely that the more familiar the authors were with the geography, the more specific they were when referring to places.