E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Again the Lukan "Great Omission
Synoptic Gospels Section
SBL National Meeting, 21-25 November 2008, Boston

Abstract
This paper was declined by the SBL panel to which it was submitted. See further below.

The commentaries tend to explain the Lukan Great Omission (usually given as Mk 6:45-8:26) as due to Luke's dislike of doublets (Easton 1926, Gilmour 1952, Caird 1963, Fitzmyer 1970, Evans 1990). This ignores the fact that doublets do occur in Luke. It also implies that Luke has omitted integral literary units. This is not the case. Streeter in 1924 noted that Luke's awareness of Mark ends, not at a unit boundary, but at Mk 6:47a, within the Walking on Water unit, and resumes at Mk 8:47b, within the Confession at Caesarea Philippi; Luke's join is distinctly rough. The theory of rejected integral units thus cannot stand, and Streeter's suggestion of a defective original must be reinstated. What can be inferred about that original? I here propose a damaged codex model in which the text of Mark before the Omission (minus the incorporated gloss Mk 7:3-4) occupies 16 leaves and the Omission itself 5 leaves, in a total codex of 46 leaves (23 sheets), the back page of the last leaf being blank. Its page format would have been slightly smaller than that of P46, from several centuries later. From such a codex, the Markan material unknown to Luke could easily have been lost.

This scenario seems to tell against the Farrer-Goulder Hypothesis, since if Luke knew Matthew, why did he not refer to Matthew to supply the obvious lacuna in his Mark? I believe the answer lies in a 2007 SBL suggestion of my own: Luke was composed in two stages, an A stage based on Mark, and a B stage when Luke encountered Matthew and revised his earlier material. On this view, the awkward join at Lk 9:17-18 is A material surviving in B, and some Lukan doublets are artifacts of Luke's second acquaintance with Mark, as processed by Matthew.

There will be a private session at SBL this November, where this and two other Luke papers, and the Lukan composition model which they together suggest, will be discussed and criticized by a few interested persons. If you would care to be part of that discussion, or of its E-mail counterpart (which does not require physical presence at SBL), please indicate your interest via the mail link at the bottom of this page.

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