Sinouhe wrote: ↑Thu May 02, 2024 5:35 am
If Mark were retouched that much, im wondering why Joseph is completely absent from the story.
Yeah, I think that's the difficulty, is trying to understand or explain the entire editorial framework. Why would an editor do X but not Y? And this issue has caused many people to assume that because a single coherent editorial framework is difficult to explain, there must have been no editing at all. But this is clearly not true.
First of all, we can easily see one way that the Gospels were edited in the presence of one another: their titles - "The Gospel According to X". They all have the same exact format of their titles. This means that their titles were all created by the editor of the collection and assigned as a group.
So basically everyone agrees that the at the very least, each Gospel was modified to give it a title by someone who knew all of the Gospels and was editing the works together in a collection.
A fairly obvious place where Mark was edited to conform to Matthew is Mark 14:
Mark 14:48 And Jesus said to them, “Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest Me, as you would against a robber? 49 Every day I was with you in the temple teaching, and you did not seize Me; but this has taken place to fulfill the Scriptures.”
Matthew 26:55 At that time Jesus said to the crowds, “Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest Me as you would against a robber? Every day I used to sit in the temple teaching and you did not seize Me. 56 But all this has taken place to fulfill the Scriptures of the prophets.”
Now, this is the one and only place in all of the Gospel of Mark that says anything about scriptures being fulfilled (except another instance in Mark 15 which is a widely acknowledged later modification because it is not in the earliest manuscripts).
So in the Gospel of Mark there are hundreds of parallels to the Jewish scriptures, and nowhere else in Mark it is said that anything happened in order to fulfill the scriptures, even though the events of the scenes parallel the scriptures. But in Matthew, over and over again Matthew calls out these parallels and says that they happened in order to fulfill scripture.
So this appears to be a fairly transparent case of Mark being conformed to Matthew by the original editor of the collection. We can ask, why only here and nowhere else? But we could ask teh same thing about the modification in Mark 15:27 They crucified two robbers with Him, one on His right and one on His left. 28 [And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “And He was numbered with transgressors.”]
15:28 is a known later modification. Why only there?
So once we acknowledge that someone created a collection that included the four Gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, that person was an editor who assigned those Gospels their titles, and that person also likely wrote John 21, and that every church father that cites Gospels except Justin Martyr, appears to cite from the four Gospel collection, then we know that certainly there was opportunity modify these Gospels by the editor of the collection and that orthodox Christians all cited the Gospels that were part of the four Gospel collection as the authoritative versions of the Gospels, against other independent versions of the Gospels.
There certainly is no reason tot assume that these works were not edited and harmonized as a part of putting them together in a collection. And there are multiple indications that they were. A couple examples are those that I cited.
But we also know that the editor of the collection had an editorial goal of producing "enough harmony" but not total conformity. This is why they included John, in order to produce a collection that could appeal to multiple views among Christians who worshiped a living Jesus of the flesh, as opposed to "Gnostic type" Christians. There was intentional diversity and disagreement to accommodate different beliefs, up to a certain point, as long as those beliefs didn't go over into docetism, etc.
