In this segment, I just want to give a brief summary in conclusion of what we’ve done. In the first segment, we dealt with the content of Mark, did sort of a run-through there. And Mark being the first gospel, we then segued into the next segment and we dealt with Matthew’s use of Mark, highlighting Matthew’s material being correlated with Mark’s material and what that looks like. We used a couple of examples. Matthew 3:1-12, we correlated it with Mark 1:1-8. And we also dealt with Matthew 3:13-17, correlating that with Mark 1:9-11. So those were kind of in sequence. The first example of Matthew 3:1-12 involved the ministry of John the Baptist, which Matthew expands significantly in his use of the Marcan tradition, in tandem with his use of the Marcan tradition. And then, of course, you’ve got a slight expansion of the baptism of Jesus as ascribed in Matthew over against Mark’s description of the baptism.
In the segment after that, we dealt with Luke’s use of Mark. And that is a bit more complicated because technically we’re talking about Luke’s use of Mark, the use of Lucan material in tandem with Marcan material. But it opens up the question, at least in the case of the temptation in the wilderness as depicted in Luke. That can actually be compared to the Matthean tradition. What does Matthew do in relation to Luke, and vice-versa? But we did not address that issue because that would have gone beyond the boundaries of what we intended to do today. So we looked at the content of Mark. We looked at Matthew’s use of Mark and we looked at Luke’s use of Mark, using two examples from each of those segments in terms of the use of Mark.
And so the upshot of all of this, the summary of all of this is that the evangelists are quite creative under the impress and the direction of the Holy Spirit in their use of the material. They use Mark in different ways. A full study of their use of Mark would show that they use Mark in divergent ways. They break up Mark differently, but they use all of it. But in all of that, their sequence remains unchanged. Even though the structure of Mark is broken up according to their editorial purposes, the writing of their gospels under the impress of the Holy Spirit, they use all of Mark and they use all of Mark in sequence.