reviewer dismissed Jesus Christ Superstar as "A sorry redaction, in short, of one of the greatest books we possess" (Brendan Gill). 27 What is a redaction? It is, quite simply, and edited and/or revised version of a prior document. It may have been redacted by the original writer, trimming it of what now seems superfluous verbiage or erroneous notions. Or it may have been redacted by a later author. In the latter case, the original writer may himself have submitted his manuscript to an editor believing the latter has a more objective judgment. Or it may be that a much later editor/redactor has taken it upon himself to update, revise, improve an older work.
The gospels of the New Testament all represent works of redaction. None of them seem to have been written up from whole cloth, like a novel or an original biography. None seems to have been eye-witness reportage either. Mark, apparently the oldest of the official four, seems to have been working with various traditional individual sayings attributed to Jesus as well as stories of various types about him. These had filtered down over some decades by word-of-mouth transmission--yes, like a game of "Telephone." There is no telling how much of it really goes back to Jesus at all, much less in its extant form. But at any rate, Mark must have edited these various bits and pieces. How much flexibility, how much creative freedom did he allow himself? Opinions differ. It is beginning to look as if the wording is pretty much all his, i.e., he preserved very little of the wording as he had heard it but felt free to put everything into his own distinctive idiom. (See Frans Neiyrinck, Duality in Mark; Robert Fowler, Let the Reader Understand). A modern parallel would be one of those celebrity "autobiographies" that credit authorship this way: "By Charles W. Kingsfield [and in fine print:] with Michael de Leeuw."
Other scholars think he preserved a good bit of the wording in the sayings and anecdotes as he received them, but that he combined the bits and pieces in new ways with little regard for their original context (which he was in no position to know anyway, though often we can surmise it). This seems to be what the writer of John's Gospel did with the various pieces of Jesus tradition available to him. He may have taken individual striking sentences and combined them into wholly different meaning-units than we find in the other three gospels. It almost looks like someone had thrown into the air a collection of words scissored out of a newspaper, and then did their best to make what sense they could of the snippets, trying to recombine them.
A couple of intriguing ancient manuscript fragments, The Secret Gospel of Mark and the Egerton Papyrus are even better examples. One reads them with a sense of deja vue: the individual sentences are all familiar from the gospels, but they never appear in the gospels in precisely these combinations. The puzzle has been put together a different way. Mark may have followed this "jigsaw puzzle" method in assembling his gospel.
On the other hand, his narrative moves so fast, spending virtually no time on scenery, characterization, description, that it reads almost like an abridgement of some earlier, more fulsome document now lost. There's probably no way to tell for sure. We have the same problem with An Ephesian Tale, a second century C.E. (= A.D.) novel written by Xenophon of Ephesus. Scholars still debate whether Xenophon was just a hasty, sketchy writer, or whether he had for some reason condensed a longer original into a sort of Reader's Digest version.
Matthew and Luke both independently made their own redacted versions of Mark, preserving by far most of his original verbatim, cutting superfluous, confusing, or embarrassing bits here and there. Matthew and Luke each had on hand another document that must have been as popular and well-known as Mark's Gospel, and that one, now lost, scholars call simply "Q," for Quelle, German for "source" [it was German scholars who first figured all this out]. It was a lengthy compilation of sayings of Jesus, with only a few short pieces of narrative. There was no crucifixion or resurrection in Q. The Gospel of Thomas, one of the great number excluded from the official list of the churches, is very much like Q in these respects: mainly sayings with no narrative context, no cross, no resurrection. A lot like the Book of Proverbs, actually.
How do we know there was such a thing as the Q Gospel? It seems a safe bet, since there is quite a bit of material, a number of sayings, that both Matthew and Luke have in their gospels which they couldn't have gotten from Mark, since Mark doesn't have it. When we look carefully at the differences between Matthew, Luke, and Mark in those places where all three overlap, we soon get an idea of the ways, stylistically and theologically, that both later gospel writers made changes in their common source-document Mark. Then when we take a look at how Matthew and Luke differ in their wording of non-Markan sayings they share in common, we can hardly escape the impression that here, too, Matthew and Luke were working on a prior document, one independent of Mark. And this is what we dub "Q" for want of any information of whatever title it may actually once have had.
Matthew and Luke each have a good deal of "extra" material of their own, i.e., stories or sayings not to be found in Mark or in Q. Where did Matthew and Mark come by this material? There are several possibilities. Each may have had access to traditional orally transmitted sayings or stories (such material continues, in fact, to surface, quoted by various Christian writers through the next couple of centuries) that the other had never heard of. Of some of it may have been included in Q but picked out for use by only either one of the evangelists (= gospel writer). Or Matthew and Luke may have separately made up various new stories and sayings and attributed them to Jesus. This sort of thing was quite common in early Christian gospels including the Pistis Sophia, The Dialogue of the Savior, The Apocryphon of James, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, etc. I think that very much of the uniquely Matthean and Lukan material is their own invention. Usually their style and their theology have left fingerprints all over the text at these points.
A comprehensive comparison of the gospels suggests to most New Testament scholars that it is possible to draw up a profile of each evangelist based on the tendency or pattern of changes he made in the earlier gospels he used in producing his own redacted version. By seeing what Matthew added to Mark or omitted from Mark, or what he tried to "clarify" (really, to correct) in Mark's text so that Matthew's own readers might not be left with the "wrong" idea. You can catch the drift of Luke's changes to Mark (or Q) in the same way, and it turns out that Matthew and Luke's beliefs and agendas differed from one another as much as either differed from Mark. Of course there must have been more agreement than disagreement, or Matthew would never have used Mark in the first place. Not enough of it would have suited him. So with Luke. And Matthew and Luke cannot have been drastically different, or they never would have used the same sources.
John, on the other hand, must have found himself a lot less satisfied with Mark (or the other two, all of which he may had in front of him as he wrote) since he did pretty much a wholesale rewrite. The Fourth Gospel is so radically different from the other three in events, order of events, the type of teaching attributed to Jesus, etc., that one does not at first notice that they have much specific in common at all. A closer scrutiny does, however, imply that John knew Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He never simply reproduces their wording, as Matthew and Luke often reproduce Mark's. Sometimes John seems to have been acquainted with another version of a story or a saying and preferred it to Mark's or Luke's. Sometimes he seems to have been freely creating out of his own head (or, as he put it in John 16:14, from the inspiration of the Parakletos of Jesus). Other times he actually seems to be referring to an earlier gospel's version but only by way of refutation.
An illustrative example might be appropriate at this point. Both will be instances of later evangelists smoothing out Christological "rough spots" in their sources. In other words, places where the earlier gospel did not presuppose such an exalted and superhuman understanding as the later writers themselves held.
Let's take the baptism of Jesus at the Jordan River by John the Baptizer. As we read the story in Mark 1:2-11, the scene presents several elements that made later orthodoxy cringe. For one thing, what's he doing there in the first place? It's a baptism of repentance, for Pete's sake! Jesus? Repenting? That's pretty much like going forward at a Billy Graham rally. Mark apparently had no problem with the idea. He had as yet no dogma of Jesus' absolute sinless perfection to worry him. Similarly, in Mark 10:17-22, an inquirer approaches Jesus with polite flattery, "Good rabbi,
