The Third Preaching Tour

150:0.1On Sun­day evening, Jan­uary 16, A.D. 29, Ab­ner, with the apos­tles of John, reached Beth­saida and went into joint con­fer­ence with An­drew and the apos­tles of Je­sus the next day. Ab­ner and his as­so­ciates made their head­quar­ters at He­bron and were in the habit of com­ing up to Beth­saida pe­ri­od­i­cally for these con­fer­ences.

150:0.2Among the many mat­ters con­sid­ered by this joint con­fer­ence was the prac­tice of anoint­ing the sick with cer­tain forms of oil in con­nec­tion with prayers for heal­ing. Again did Je­sus de­cline to par­tic­i­pate in their dis­cus­sions or to ex­press him­self re­gard­ing their con­clu­sions. The apos­tles of John had al­ways used the anoint­ing oil in their min­istry to the sick and af­flicted, and they sought to es­tab­lish this as a uni­form prac­tice for both groups, but the apos­tles of Je­sus re­fused to bind them­selves by such a reg­u­la­tion.

150:0.3On Tues­day, Jan­uary 18, the twenty-four were joined by the tested evan­ge­lists, about sev­enty-five in num­ber, at the Zeb­e­dee house in Beth­saida prepara­tory to be­ing sent forth on the third preach­ing tour of Gal­i­lee. This third mis­sion con­tin­ued for a pe­riod of seven weeks.

150:0.4The evan­ge­lists were sent out in groups of five, while Je­sus and the twelve trav­eled to­gether most of the time, the apos­tles go­ing out two and two to bap­tize be­liev­ers as oc­ca­sion re­quired. For a pe­riod of al­most three weeks Ab­ner and his as­so­ciates also worked with the evan­ge­lis­tic groups, ad­vis­ing them and bap­tiz­ing be­liev­ers. They vis­ited Mag­dala, Tiberias, Naz­a­reth, and all the prin­ci­pal cities and vil­lages of cen­tral and south­ern Gal­i­lee, all the places pre­vi­ously vis­ited and many oth­ers. This was their last mes­sage to Gal­i­lee, ex­cept to the north­ern por­tions.