Yuri Kuchinsky

Greetings, all,

Here's what Alfred Loisy writes about that famous "Great Omission" in Luke -- the material in Mark 6:45-8:26 that, under the mainstream 2ST, was "omitted" by the writers of Luke. But, in fact, it should be quite obvious that it wasn't an omission at all, but rather an expansion in Mark (and Matthew)!

These are just a couple of short quotes, but they sum up the situation pretty well.

Of course one needs to read the whole book in order to understand Loisy's reasoning fully.

[quote]

Alfred Loisy, THE ORIGINS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT, Chapter IV.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.co.../chapter4.html

No argument is needed to prove that [in Mk and
Mt] the second miracle of multiplication is a
duplicate of the first. ... It is noteworthy
that the second multiplication does not occur in
the third Gospel, and that the stories are omitted
which Mark has lodged between the first and the
confession of Peter: whence we may infer that
this long section of Mark (vi, 45 to viii, 26)
belongs to a late stage in the development of our
Gospel.

...

A complete misunderstanding of the
character and origin of our documents is shown
by those critics who explain the relation between
Mark and Luke, in this part of the two Gospels,
by supposing that Luke was making use of an
accidentally mutilated copy of Mark. Is it, then,
so natural that Mark, in its earliest form, had the
multiplication of loaves and the calming of the
tempest, etc., twice over? In these matters the
simplest hypotheses are not always the best. To
be sure, canonical Mark is a very slender
document; nevertheless it shows no lack of
duplications, re-shapings, overlays and editorial
superfluities.

[unquote]

The above quotes can serve as a nice reply to our friend Bernard Muller, whose webpage on the subject,

The great omission in Luke's gospel
http://www.concentric.net/~Mullerb/appf.shtml

is trying to explain this problem by a defective copy of Mark, that Luke allegedly used.

Great many weighty arguments can be made that all of this material in Mark 6:45-8:26 was quite late. It is clearly Gentile-oriented, as is obvious even on the surface. Koester _has_ made some of these arguments but, unfortunately, he never mentions even once that all this material is Gentile-oriented. This is the political bias in modern-day Synoptic scholarship.

All the best,

Yuri.