How do the four gospels evolve then?
The first gospel, Mark, is around the year 70. So within 70 and, say, 95, we have the four gospels. 25 years. But that leaves 70 to 30. 40 years before that. If you watch the creativity within that 25 year span, from Mark being copied into Matthew and Luke, possibly also by John, then you have to face the creativity of that 40 years, even when you don’t have written gospels. And that may be equally intense. And so you’re making it sound as if the gospels are extremely unreliable as evidence. The gospels are, first of all, extremely reliable historical documents for their own time and place. Mark tells us very much about, say, a community writing in the 70’s. John, a community writing in the mid-90’s. But, since we have four of them, we get four vectors, then, on the basic tradition that they’re working with. What is common, we might be able to then work, by going back very carefully through those deliberate… what scholars call “redactional” elements in there. If Mark just made it up
