The Second Preaching Tour

149:0.1The sec­ond pub­lic preach­ing tour of Gal­i­lee be­gan on Sun­day, Oc­to­ber 3, A.D. 28, and con­tin­ued for al­most three months, end­ing on De­cem­ber 30. Par­tic­i­pat­ing in this ef­fort were Je­sus and his twelve apos­tles, as­sisted by the newly re­cruited corps of 117 evan­ge­lists and by nu­mer­ous other in­ter­ested per­sons. On this tour they vis­ited Gadara, Ptole­mais, Japhia, Dabaritta, Megiddo, Jezreel, Scythopo­lis, Ta­ri­chea, Hip­pos, Gamala, Beth­saida-Ju­lias, and many other cities and vil­lages.

149:0.2Be­fore the de­par­ture on this Sun­day morn­ing An­drew and Pe­ter asked Je­sus to give the fi­nal charge to the new evan­ge­lists, but the Mas­ter de­clined, say­ing that it was not his prov­ince to do those things which oth­ers could ac­cept­ably per­form. Af­ter due de­lib­er­a­tion it was de­cided that James Zeb­e­dee should ad­min­is­ter the charge. At the con­clu­sion of James’s re­marks Je­sus said to the evan­ge­lists: “Go now forth to do the work as you have been charged, and later on, when you have shown your­selves com­pe­tent and faith­ful, I will or­dain you to preach the gospel of the king­dom.”

149:0.3On this tour only James and John trav­eled with Je­sus. Pe­ter and the other apos­tles each took with them about one dozen of the evan­ge­lists and main­tained close con­tact with them while they car­ried on their work of preach­ing and teach­ing. As fast as be­liev­ers were ready to en­ter the king­dom, the apos­tles would ad­min­is­ter bap­tism. Je­sus and his two com­pan­ions trav­eled ex­ten­sively dur­ing these three months, of­ten vis­it­ing two cities in one day to ob­serve the work of the evan­ge­lists and to en­cour­age them in their ef­forts to es­tab­lish the king­dom. This en­tire sec­ond preach­ing tour was prin­ci­pally an ef­fort to af­ford prac­ti­cal ex­pe­ri­ence for this corps of 117 newly trained evan­ge­lists.

149:0.4Through­out this pe­riod and sub­se­quently, up to the time of the fi­nal de­par­ture of Je­sus and the twelve for Je­ru­sa­lem, David Zeb­e­dee main­tained a per­ma­nent head­quar­ters for the work of the king­dom in his fa­ther’s house at Beth­saida. This was the clear­ing­house for Je­sus’ work on earth and the re­lay sta­tion for the mes­sen­ger ser­vice which David car­ried on be­tween the work­ers in var­i­ous parts of Pales­tine and ad­ja­cent re­gions. He did all of this on his own ini­tia­tive but with the ap­proval of An­drew. David em­ployed forty to fifty mes­sen­gers in this in­tel­li­gence di­vi­sion of the rapidly en­larg­ing and ex­tend­ing work of the king­dom. While thus em­ployed, he par­tially sup­ported him­self by spend­ing some of his time at his old work of fish­ing.