Thursday, April 18, 2024

B. Ward Powers on Luke's "Great Omission" of Mark 6:45-8:26

   

The word πασιν (“everything”) shows the scope of Luke’s investigation. He wanted to find out all that could be known about Christ’s life and teaching. Thus Luke’s Gospel commences at an earlier point in time than either of the other Synoptics and carries through to a later point in time; it also includes a great deal of Jesus’s teachings (especially in parables) and a number of his miracles and other events that do not occur elsewhere. Luke’s interest in tracing the course of everything from the beginning raises a question about the Markan Priority theory. Why would Luke have omitted so much of the detailed information of Mark’s Gospel if he used it as his source? And in particular, why would he have left out completely a number of Mark’s pericopes, including the entire section Mark 6:45-8:26, often called “the Great Omission”? Advocates of Markan Priority have suggested a number of possible explanations: (a) Luke was not interested in points of detail; (b) he already had stories rather similar to those he omitted; (c) he cut his Gospel to a length that would fit into a single roll; (d) he considered some of Mark’s materials irrelevant or theologically objectionable; and (e) the edition of Mark from which he was working lacked the Great Omission. But the question is raised in an even more acute form if one is forced to conclude (as many scholars do) that the most valid explanation of much of the material that Luke shares with Matthew but not with Mark is that Luke had access to Matthew’s Gospel. If one seeks to avoid this problem by saying that Luke had access only to some portions of Matthew, that is in fact to adopt a view similar in its essentials to the Progressive Publication Hypothesis. But these other explanations virtually amount to a denial of Luke’s expressed interest in tracing every aspect of Christ’s life. (B. Ward Powers, The Progressive Publication of Matthew: An Explanation of the Writing of the Synoptic Gospels [Nashville, Tenn.: B&H Academic, 2010], 41)