Skeptics used to argue that Mark 7:31, which describes Jesus leaving the vicinity of Tyre and going through Sidon down to the Sea of Galilee, was absurd. That just didn't look right when looking at a map. Tyre is in the north, the Sea of Galilee is to the south, and Sidon is even further north of Tyre. Saying Jesus traveled from Tyre to Galilee by way of Sidon is like saying you drove from New York to Philadelphia by going through Boston. For decades, skeptics laughed at this passage as an ignorant geographical blunder, claiming Mark was a fiction writer who didn't know the first thing about the local geography.

But a closer examination of the geography pulled a total uno reverse on this argument. The skeptics made a classic mistake by looking at a two-dimensional map rather than actual terrain. When historians began to study the physical topography of the region, everything suddenly made sense. Directly between Tyre and the Sea of Galilee sits the massive Mount Meron range. In the ancient world, attempting to march a group straight south through these mountains was brutal and nearly impassable. To avoid the climb, travelers took the valleys. The standard, most logical route was to head north up the coast to Sidon, where a natural mountain pass and an ancient road cut eastward through the foothills, allowing travelers to bypass the high peaks entirely before swinging south toward the Decapolis and Galilee. What looked like an embarrassing mistake to armchair critics turned out to be a piece of hyper-specific accuracy. A fabricator making up a story from afar would have naturally written that Jesus went straight south. Only someone who actually knew the real-world terrain would describe a route that went north to Sidon to circumvent a mountain range, turning an old objection into powerful evidence for the Gospels' reliability. What Mark recorded was simply the actual route that Jesus took, and that's because what Mark wrote was simply real history.