Okay, just finished reading the Gospel of Mark tonight. To me it seemed very repetitive of the Gospel of Matthew. I am wondering whether the reason for that is to make both more worthy of belief, corrobrating each other or is there some other reason? Redeemed? Care to help a brutha out?
Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source. The order of "writing" seems to have been <sources now lost>, Mark, Matthew, Luke + Acts (a continuation of Luke). Note that Luke starts by saying that others have written accounts.
The Epistles of Paul are probably the oldest works we have; Luke seems to have been a co-worker with Paul.
Bart Ehrman is very good on explaining the way the earliest churches copied and passed around written versions of the books that, around 400, were established as the NT canon.
Important to remember that:
- very few people in the anicent world were literate
- of those who could read or write, all were from the powerful upper class.
- Jesus preached to and gathered followers from the poorest and least respected. Peter and his crew were fishermen; Jesus always seemed to have many women followers, and several of them were important leaders of the earliest congregations. Paul mentions some by name. This at a time when women were oyherwise almost invisble (note how many women speak in Plato's dialogues? About none.)
- (Once Romans took notice of Christians, one of the first criticisms were that Christians were nobodie: poor, outcasts, women, slaves. Early Christian apologists did not dispute that.)
- early congegations met in the houses of the one or two members wealthy enough to have a house big enough. They might have been literate enough to make copies of Pauls letters and the other rare and treasured collections of saysings and doings of Jesus that formed the foundations of the gospels.
- given the copying, given the mistakes that naturally happen (try hand-writing a copy of Luke and see how many mistakes you make!) there came to be slight variations in the texts. People would misunderstand a passage and "correct" it to what they assumed the original authaor had written, or they would fill in something that seemed missing.
- For example, note the last 10 or 15 verses of Mark (I think from v7 to the end). Mark has been talking about Mary Magdelene going to the tomb, discovering a young man in white who say, "He's not here. He is risen. Go tell the others" (approximately). Mark says Mary and companions are frigethened, so they run away. Bang, in the next verse, the traditional text re-introduces Mary M., identifying her as "the Mary who", as if the last sentence hadn't been about the same Mary. It seems likely that an early copiest either had a copy of Mark missing its ending, or disliked the endiong, so they pulled out another story and copied it.
- Good source, if you have time, is Bruce Metzger on the establishment of the NT text. He led the RSV and NRSV team of translators for many years.
- See also several books by Bart Ehrman, a student of Metzger's. For example "Lost Christianities", which describes the various early documents that did not make it into the canon, including the gnostics. Also his just-published "Misquoting Jesus", which, in spite of its sensationalized title, is a sober account of how textual critics work to compare the variant readings of all the several thousand NT documents that have been discovered.
- On the original question, for more on the Gnostics, (a) do a Google and read their books (b) keep in mind that there were many different sects, rather than one single and coherent set of Gnostic beliefs (c) Elaine Pagels wrote one of the earliest introductions to them in "The Gnostic Gospels"; Pagels has since written many books about variants (d) the recently published "Gospel of Judas" comes from only one sect; in it, Jesus tells Judas the secret of the universe, and that's a pretty wild story.
