gnosis92

to the extent of nearly wholesale copying, rather than write their own narrative (much like john and possibly peter)?

possibilities
1- jesus did not exist so matthew and luke were forced to use mark

2- mark was so widely accepted in matthew & luke's community that deviations from it would not have been accepted. it could be mark was seen as divinely inspired sacred tradition/scripture so any significant deviation from mark would be regarded as heresy.

3- matthew and luke thought mark was accurate but incomplete and wish to supplemented it with Q and their own material M and L (presumably they would not have used it if they thought it was historically inaccurate. if matthew and luke did know and read john, but did not include john's material into their gospel, it would be evidence they did not regard john to be historically reliable)

4- "laziness" since mark wrote down teh first narrative, and matthew and luke thought it was reasonably accurate, both in the events and sequence of events, they were lazy and thought it would be easier to simply use it rather than re-write the whole narrative

for possibility 1:
some jesus-mythicist attack the historical credibility of mark. i personally am open to listening to such arguments here. if mark is shown or proven to be historically unreliable, but matthew and luke thought mark was historically reliable, and matthew and luke are believed to have written their respective gospels 10-20 years after mark, then it is surprising they did not take liberties to correct those accounts mark got wrong.


personally i favor 4 from personal experience --it would be easier for me, 4example, 2 take a screenplay like star wars or shakespeare, and make changes, then to write a completely new story from scratch.

an example of 4 would be, say there's an event everyone knows, like the jon bene ramsey murder. how about the jon benet ramsey murderl? i could write my own sequence of events and characters, based on my memory of it. this would be pretty challenging.

or, if someone else, say a wiki wrote a brief but what seemed to me to be both chronologically and materially accurate sequence of events that was simple and well written, but i know more of the jon ramsey story than the wiki article states i could use the wiki as a basic framework and then add my own material as i see fit. supposedly even shakespeare did this, i was told that for example romeo and juliet is a rip-off from an earlier story, and hamlet was based loosely on real events, not to mention his historical plays.



whether there is a direct dependence of john or peter on mark remains unknown. peter kirby claims that many scholars think that john and thomas and peter were written independently of mark.

Rick Sumner

5) They regarded Mark as an authoritative source.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

gnosis92

that overlaps with reason 2

Rick Sumner

Partially. But reason 2 refers to the community, and implies that if the community would have tolerated it, deviation would have been acceptable. My reason has no such implication: It's not the community that won't tolerate it, it's Matt. and Lk. themselves.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

gnosis92

i may have been unclear but when i said matthew's community, it would include matthew himself. ditto luke.

regards
gnosis

Buck Laser

Mark probably existed as a widely known oral tradition before it was reduced to writing--similarly, Matthew and Luke probably had wide circulation as unpublished documents before they finally appeared in a definitive version. It's been a very long time since I researched the synoptic gospels, but I studied with a scholar who was convinced that Matthew was the earliest gospe. I've never been convinced, owing mainly to the point at which the narrative begins in Mark--no birth or childhood stories, just the beginning of Jesus's ministry.

Chris Weimer

We cannot readily infer what Matthew's and Luke's community thought from their own gospels. They may not even have had a community.

Newton's Cat

It's my opinion (derived from many years of close study of the text) that Mark, as we have it today, is a fraudulent alteration (by interpolation and addition) of an original text. I suspect that Matthew was aware of this.

Solo

And in your opinion, the "original text" was what: Q ? Ur-Markus ? Secret Mark ? Yuri Kuchinsky's Proto-Luke ?

Jiri

S.C.Carlson

Over the years, I've been collecting many different solutions to the synoptic problem. If something similar to what you're explaining has been published, please let me and I'll add it to my list.

Stephen