Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS
Matthew and Luke drawing upon and editing Mark's (for them) original. The
problem with the purely literary hypothesis is that most of the differences are so
inconsequential. Why, for example, as literary editors would it be necessary for
them to vary the description of the danger of the boat being swamped (each uses
different verbs) and to vary the account of Jesus sleeping and the references to
the disciples' fear and lack of faith? Is it not more plausible to deduce that Matthew
and Luke knew their own (oral) versions of the story and drew on them primarily
or as well? Alternatively, it could be that they followed Mark in oral
mode, as we might say; that is, they did not slavishly copy Mark (as they did
elsewhere), but having taken the point of Mark's story they retold it as a storyteller
would, retaining the constant points which gave the story its identity, and
building round the core to bring out their own distinctive emphases.
ii. The Syrophoenician Woman
The picture here is very similar. The story is again clearly the same: an event
which took place in the district of Tyre; a non-Israelite woman with a demonpossessed
daughter; healing at a distance. Most striking is the fact that the two
versions share very few words in common apart from the core section (underlined).
The core of the story is manifestly the exchange between Jesus and the
woman, held constant, more or less verbatim (Mark 7.27-28/Matt. 15.26-27).
Apart from that the retelling is completely variable: in particular, Mark emphasizes
the woman's Gentile identity, while Matthew both plays up the resulting
tension and the woman's faith. As with the story of the centurion's servant above,
the fact that the healing was successful is almost an afterthought in each telling.
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