sotto voce

The Holy Land?

Toto

Gentile areas = Tyre, Sidon, the Decapolis

Do you see the pattern? Mark (as we now have it) has Jesus interacting with Jews and gentiles. Luke has Jesus preaching to Jews, and saves the interaction with gentiles for his second volume, Acts. Either Luke omitted the gentiles from Mark's account, or Mark added that saga in after the earlier version that Luke used.

The theological purpose is of course speculative, but most likely has something to do with Paul and with the theme that Jews rejected Jesus, so his message was redirected by Paul and/or Peter to the gentiles. It's not a question of whether Jesus was "precluded" from performing miracles for gentiles, but of whether his mission was only to the last sheep of Israel, or to the whole world.

Duvduv

I already identified #4 in Lebanon, but Decapolis may still refer to "ten cities" in Judea. Besides, if GMark were more Jewish-oriented than GLuke, what would be the purpose of GLuke being "more catholic than the Pope" (sorry for the pun) by allegedly excluding events occurring outside of the Holy Land? And of 8 only a couple are alleged to have been outside the Holy Land or involving gentiles.

There is the healed Samaritan in GLuke 17 and the parable in GLuke 10.

I am not persuaded yet by this argument, especially if the gospel writers were hardly interested in fine details of Jewish attachment to the Holy Land or other Jewish elements. Besides, wasn't GLuke supposed to be the gospel adapting the Jewish Jesus story to the gentiles?

Toto

There were Hellenistic cities inside Judea, so geography is not the deciding factor.

Look, the gospel stories do not make sense. The scholars who have spent their professional careers trying to make sense of them from a rationalistic point of view seem to think that what we have is the result of compromises and a coalition between different schools of thought, but the result has been rewritten so often that it is impossible to recover the originals.

I don't know why you think that the gospels writers were not interested in Jewish elements. There are Jewish elements throughout - at times, Jesus seems to uphold the details of Jewish law, at other times to oppose it.

But notice that in Luke's 2 volume work Luke-Acts, the gospel is not spread to the gentiles until Acts, where Peter receives a vision that tells him that all food is kosher, and goes on to convert Cornelius, the Roman official, who had already received the holy spirit.

sotto voce

Jewish devotion to the pope, it seems!

But then they both oppose justification by faith.

Iskander

Why Mark wrote something that can’t be found in Luke? Their stories are different because they were written by different men.
There is no other explanation.

Luke developed themes that are only found in his gospel such as the parables of the Good Samaritan and the prodigal son, and also Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary, Jesus boyhood trip to the temple, details of the Ascension, the magnificat, bennedictus, nunc dimitry and Gloria.

I see no reason to expect Luke to include everything the previous writer has written – if that is how it is supposed to have happened.

andrewcriddle

One possible issue was that Luke was uneasy about accounts of Jesus healing using material means such as saliva and omitted Mk 07:31-37 and Mk 08:22-26 for that reason. It may have seemed too much like magic.

Andrew Criddle

Duvduv

By Jewish elements I mean elements similar to GMatt in terms of "Jewish flavor." However, I wanted to address the issue of the missing stories if GLuke had intentionally left out particular ones that he saw in GMark.

Of course there is always the lingering question as to whether the gospel writers were writing what they thought was historical fact or mythology.

Clivedurdle

What other frameworks might these documents "map" to?

sotto voce

No doubt Luke understood that this was not magic, and that his readership need not have thought so, either. These material means suited Mark's particular purpose, but not Luke's. Mark wanted to show Jesus as both fully God and fully man, to a general audience, probably one unfamiliar with Jesus. When Jesus used spittle, he made the healed persons aware that he personally was responsible for the healing, unlike the healings of prophets and others before him, who had credited deity with these occurrences. So the healed person went away and considered that Jesus was the manifestation of deity, not just another healer. Mark's readers took the same point, and also that Jesus was fully human, spittle and all.

Many of Luke's readers would have already accepted that there was a view that Jesus was the manifestation of deity. They may have been better educated than the generality, may therefore have possessed a spirit of noblesse oblige; Luke is concerned, as may be expected of a physician anyway, with healing, but also with the poor and needy. Mark emphasised Jesus' action, and focused on the person of Jesus as seen by an eye-witness; whereas Luke was more concerned with wider context, with Jesus' teaching, with theological explanation, and his gospel is apologia as much as gospel.