How Many Miles Did Jesus Walk?

Fr Pat McNulty asks the question:

What!?

I was on the internet trying to figure out the mileage of the round-trip-by-foot which God sent Elijah on in the Old Testament. That’s when I discovered a blog by a man who measured the number of miles he thinks Jesus walked.

Now that’s what I call trivia with a capital “T”. I can’t believe you’re into that. I mean, who cares how many miles Jesus walked anyway?

I didn’t start out looking for that. I started out trying to put some real life on the incident from 1 Kings 19:4-8 about Elijah. That’s one of the readings for Sunday, August 12th.

The story only takes up about 12 verses, and yet it tells how Elijah had to travel from somewhere around modern day Haifa to the Sinai and back again, all within a couple of months.

And he did it mostly in the desert—a desert I’ve been to as well. I couldn’t help wanting to know how many miles this poor guy had to walk for God.

According to my measurements, it was about 600 miles, give or take. But in the process of figuring out Elijah’s biblical travelogue, I came across this blog by somebody who tried to calculate how many miles Jesus walked.

OK, let’s hear it for biblical pedometers. How many miles did Jesus walk while he was on this earth? Ho, hum.

Well, this man who obviously loves his Lord and his Bible—he often walks many miles carrying a cross similar to Jesus’—figures from the information in the Gospels that in his lifetime, Jesus must have walked about 21,500 miles—give or take.

Come on! That’s almost the distance around the equator.

How would you know something like that?

You’re not alone in your trivial pursuits, Reverend, but tell me, what in the world would interest you in something as trivial as how many miles Jesus might have walked while he was on this earth?

It’s not the number of miles that interested me but the sense of how many individual people he must have met and dealt with along the way simply by being present to them as he walked however many miles. But you never hear a thing about those people in the Bible.

I thought the Spirit put into the Bible what is necessary for salvation and not all the little tidbits which might tickle our trivial attention.

The point is, I think, that we can often forget about all the life going on behind the biblical episodes…

Do read on here.

 

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