I fail to see the distinction. Particularly Matthew contains 94% of gMark, often almost verbatim. That's one of the reasons why gMark was often considered to be a superfluous addition to the Bible. Luke still contains 79% of gMark. Or, in other words, these are indeed just edits of the same text. They are extensive edits, as they extend gMark considerably (or gMark shortens them, if you prefer), but still edits of the same text.Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 9:59 amI agree, but this „meddling“ happened in different texts (Stephan’s three birds) and not in different editions of one text.
Just think about it: Antique authors didn't shy away from such extensive edits that you consider these to be different texts, although they clearly used the same text base.
Well, yes, we agree on point two. Note that the early church fathers usually don't source their quotes, which leads to the often heard interpretation in your sense, i.e., that "church fathers just quoted from memory". However, that's just one possible interpretation. I think Ben made a few statistics regarding certain church father texts, how often they quoted almost verbatim, how often it was at least halfway discernible what text the quote may relate to, and how often they quoted stuff that is in none of our existing texts. Yes, you can have different explanations, but given the state of our current gospels, the existence of rather differently looking texts at their time is not an unlikely explanation. The big cleanup happened during the following centuries, which, by the way, is sometimes attested to.Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote: ↑Tue Jan 28, 2020 9:59 amI did not follow closely the considerations of our members in this direction, but I remember that there were two kinds of arguments. Please correct me if I miss something.
First, that in the church fathers are quotations of an explicite mentioned or apparently canonical gospel that can’t be find in this exact form in a canonical gospel. But imho such an argument did not consider that interpretively modified quotations are in all relevant texts (starting with the Hebrew Bible itself, interpretative translations in the LXX, interpretively modified quotations by the Qumranies, the Rabbis, Paul, Mark and so on).
Second, that in the church fathers are other texts mentioned, for example „the logia of the apostle Matthew, written in the Hebrew language“. But imho such an argument did not consider that this could be a simple trick to justify the primacy of the more orthodox and more pleasing Matthew over Mark when the whole world knows that GMark was first.