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Mark's "apotheosis"
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Stephen
4962 Posts
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February 15, 2026 - 11:41 pm

Stephen’s idea is that the gospel of Luke is an earlier witness to the text of Mark than any manuscript evidence we have regarding the text of Mk 1,11. Thus if this was the original text of Luke, and Luke, to a large extent, copied Mark’s account, then it is possible that this was also the original text of Mark’s gospel.

Supposition of course.  Not a claim.  Scholars are bound by the evidence.  Layfolk may speculate beyond the data.  In the past conservative evangelicals made claims that fragments of an early First Century copy of Mark had been found – falsely it turned out – but I wonder if they really want what they say they want.  If we ever found a fragment with a variant at 1:11 I’m not sure how enthusiastic they would be. 

…Bart believes it somewhat probable that an early version of Luke beginning with what is now Chapter 3 circulated prior to the current canonical version of Luke.

My suggestion is that version 2 of Luke was not just written with awareness of Matthew but written in response to Matthew.  

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BruceRMcF

263 Posts
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February 16, 2026 - 2:15 pm

Stephen said
… My suggestion is that version 2 of Luke was not just written with awareness of Matthew but written in response to Matthew.  
  

In the Marcionite priority over canonical Luke hypothesis, canonical Luke is a response to proto-Luke, with Marcion including the version of proto-Luke that he had at hand as his Evangelion in his New Testament, rather than engaging in “editing” canonical Luke “with a knife”.

However, that hypothesis places Luke toward the end of its autograph time window, between the release of Jospehus’ Antiquities and the first witnesses to the existence of canonical Luke, making it even more plausible that Matthew was available to the compiler of canonical Luke, so it would be reasonable to view it as also a response to Matthew, because if Matthew was seen as an appropriate response to Marcion’s Evangelion, then it seems like advocating for Matthew and against Marcion’s Evangelion would have sufficed.

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