> Are you perhaps strongly invested in a particular position on this subject?

I'm strongly enough invested in the truth to ask you for references, read them, and engage critically with them. I can honestly say that if I was wrong, I would want to know. I've even thought carefully about what kind of evidence could be presented to me to convince me that I was wrong. Can you say the same?

> Again, you're echoing the sentiment of people reading these works and wondering why there's no source citations, why the authors don't identify themselves, why there's no record of dates, why there's no critical analysis offered.

The difference is, Mark isn't a 21st century skeptic claiming to represent scholarship. He's a first-century author trying to write down what's happened for common people to read. The proper thing to compare him to is other books of his time to which we give credence.

> As noted, this was a walking journey. It could be hand-waved away, but aren't you curious why someone would mention an 80km detour but not give the reader any tidbits about why, or what went on in Sidon that was worth a) the massive detour & effort, and b) mentioning?

The key thing here is that Tyre and Sidon are "foreign" places in the same region. You make a big deal about how far away they are, but almost everywhere in the New Testament they're lumped together. For example, in the Matthew version of this story (15:21-29), Matthew says, he "withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon". It then tells the story, followed by "Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee". Mark, on the other hand, says "Jesus... went to the vicinity of Tyre"; then tells the story, and then says "Jesus left Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee".

Nobody would at all wonder why, if I was in Paris, I decided I wanted to visit Lyon first before returning to London; or why if I was in Manchester I'd visit the Lake District before returning to Cambridge. Mark mentions Sidon for the same reason Matthew mentions Sidon: they think it's important to let us know that Jesus wasn't stuck south of Galilee, and/or that opposition at some point literally drove him out of the country. He doesn't tell any stories about Sidon for the same reason Matthew doesn't: nothing that happened there was worth the space on the scroll. That he went there, not what he did there, was the point. If anything, the fact that Mark feels it necessary to add a chronology (Tyre first then Sidon) when he could well have glossed over it like Matthew did, is a small amount of evidence that he's trying to be more accurate.

A more evidentiary approach here would be to look at other uses of the word "dia" (the word translated "by way of" in that verse) in ancient Greek. If other ancient sources exclusively use "ek X dia Y eis Z" (from X through Y to Z -- those are the prepositions used in that verse) to mean that Y is between / on the way from X to Z, then that lends credence to the "Mark is bad at geography" theory. If we have other examples of that pattern being for large-ish detours, then it undermines the "Mark is bad at geography" theory.

> That book I pointed you at contains a lengthy bibliography, and in fairness was intended to provide an overview of the field.

What you'd normally do in this case is to include the most convincing or most representative pieces of evidence. If among the top bits of evidence against Mark are, "He didn't include the story of how Peter got his name", and "He said Jesus went from Tyre to Galilee through Sidon", it gives me a lot more confidence in Mark.

I mean, sure, I'll take a quick look at Price et al; but my experience so far leads me to expect more like this -- people eager to find something to quibble with, uncritically making large lists of things that don't really mean anything.