The Multidisciplinarian

Mark vs. Matthew and Luke: Redaction, Not Clarification

Matthew and Luke didn’t set out to clarify Mark, as many scholars have claimed. They were authors writing for different communities with different needs. They either misunderstood Mark’s rhetorical style, understood it but disliked it, or were indifferent to it altogether, merely reusing his stories and text. They took Mark’s gospel and Q as starting points, then reshaped them to fit their theological goals. In doing so, they smoothed its edges, filled in its silences, and reframed its mysteries using their own rhetorical styles.

Matthew, by most accounts, is rhetorically more refined than Mark. His Greek is more polished, and his theological framing is clearer. But Matthew and Luke lose Mark’s vividness. In my view, the most rhetorically daring gospel in Christianity was overwritten by its successors, and it is inaccurate or disingenuous to frame this as clarification.

Matthew and Luke reworked the fig tree. Mark’s fig tree vignette (11:12–14, 20–21) is famously strange, as discussed earlier: Jesus curses a tree for having no fruit out of season and Mark wraps the episode around the cleansing of the temple to enforce the metaphor.

Matthew’s version (21:18–22) changes the tempo: the tree withers immediately. The temple scene is unlinked. And the point is made explicit: it’s a lesson about faith and prayer. Luke (13:6–9) avoids the destructive miracle and cursing the tree, giving instead a parable that calls for repentance while there’s still time. A summary shows the transformation:

Feature	Mark	Matthew	Luke
Type	miracle + symbol	miracle + moral	parable
Timing of Withering	next day	immediate	not applicable
Commentary	faith and prayer	faith and prayer	repentance and mercy
Relation to Temple	surrounds cleansing	follows cleansing	precedes healing on sabbath
Theological Emphasis	judgment, irony, failure of temple	power, faith, moral clarity	warning, grace, call for repentance

What was rhetorical structure in Mark becomes illustrative theology in Matthew and Luke. Riddle becomes sermon; the silence is gone.

A comparison of approaches to the fig tree shows the progression toward theological evolution and loss of irony:

Detail	Mark	Matthew	Luke
Fig tree cursed	Yes	Yes	No (parable only)
Disciples mentioned	Yes: “heard it”, “Peter remembered”	Yes: they “marveled”	No
Delayed withering	Yes	No	N/A
Delayed narrative payoff	Yes	No	N/A
Irony/suspension	Yes	No	No

A comparison of the way Mark and Matthew mention the disciples in this story shows still more about their rhetorical mindsets. Mark (11:14) reports:

And he said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard it. (ESV)

His disciples heard it? Of course they did. But what an odd thing for Mark, given his economic prose, to include. The statement doesn’t advance the plot and interprets nothing. No, this is Mark the author signaling that he’s hung Chekov’s gun (give a reader no false promises) on the wall. Take notice, something is going to happen, so remember what is being marked here.

What’s going to happen is that Jesus will cleanse the temple. The marker (they heard him) marks the curse and is a small, almost invisible trigger, narratively minimal, ironically loaded, and structurally strategic. Matthew and Luke steered clear. Mark delays firing Chekov’s gun until he returns to the tree. Bang, it’s dead.

Mark ends his gospel with silence and fear. The women flee the tomb. No resurrection appearances. “They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Matthew and Luke add resurrection appearances, dialogue, comfort, and commissions. Matthew gives us theatrical effects: guards, earthquakes, angelic speech. Luke gives us the road to Emmaus, meals, and final instructions.

These endings do more than continue the story. They close a loop Mark left open. They give theological assurance where Mark offered emotional tension. By explaining what Mark left implied, they take the burden of interpretation off the reader and place it into the narrative.

Mark’s disciples are never right. They botch the parables and miss the miracles. They sleep, flee, and deny. Mark never resolves that arc. The disciples have no epiphany. Peter is given a beatitude in Matthew: “Blessed are you, Simon… you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:17–18).

Luke dials back the disciples’ failures and paints a more stable community. By the time we reach Acts, the apostles are the theological center of gravity.

Modern scholarship tends to treat Matthew and Luke as consciously adapting Mark rather than misunderstanding him or cringing at his telling. But their treatment of the fig tree is revealing. Whether their changes stem from narrative or theological agendas, the result is a loss of Mark’s narrative complexity. In that sense, even if they didn’t misunderstand or dislike Mark’s meaning, they did dismantle his rhetorical scaffolding – and with it, the deeper tension he built into the scene.

In Mark, Jesus says explicitly that parables are designed to (in order that they) conceal, not clarify (4:11–12). It’s a shocking claim. Jesus doesn’t teach in parables to illustrate the truth, but to hide it from those unready to hear it. It’s a clear challenge to you to show your readiness.

Matthew retains many of the same parables but softens the intent. He writes:

This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see… (Matt. 13:13)

The subtle change from “in order that” to “because” shifts the parables’ purpose from concealment to explanation. This contrast doesn’t result from translation; it’s present in the Koine manuscripts. I agree with scholars like R.T. France and Joel Marcus that Matthew must have deliberately changed Mark’s ἵνα to ὅτι to soften the implication that Jesus’s parables intentionally obscure truth. That implication was theologically problematic for Matthew. What Mark presents as rhetorical filtering, Matthew turns into compassionate pedagogy. Matthew and Luke, in moving away from literary puzzle toward religion, wrote for churches, for instruction, for catechesis. Their redactions obscured the most subversive thing Mark had done: trust the reader.

Paul vs. Mark

While the epistles – especially those commonly attributed to Paul – show formidable rhetorical skill, their style is strikingly different from Mark’s. Paul’s prose is argumentative, insistent, full of digression and appeal. He leads the reader, often with intensity, sometimes with exasperation, and always with a strong sense of his own position in the exchange. Paul’s voice dominates. There’s no narrative mask, little humble pretense. The authority of the letter comes not from its structure but from the voice behind it. Even Paul’s moments of self-deprecation – “I speak as a fool” – seem more performative than self-effacing.

In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul all but dares his audience to compare him to rival apostles, saying,

Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? so am I. Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as one beside himself) I more; in labors more abundantly… (2 Cor 11:22-23 ASV)

In Galatians, Paul shows that he is the conduit. He is bound to his message; it’s his claim, his proof, his identity. He states outright that he is bypassing both tradition and community—no apostolic succession, no collective discernment. It’s just him and revelation.

For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man’s gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. (Gal 1:11–12 ESV)

In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul defends his apostleship with personal passion and rhetorical intensity:

Am I not free? Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? Are not you my workmanship in the Lord? If to others I am not an apostle, at least I am to you… (1 Cor 11:1-2 ESV)

Here, Paul’s rhetorical command is on full display, but so is his presence. He becomes part of the message. He is its defender and its embodiment. Mark, by contrast, disappears. His narrator rarely intrudes, and when he does, it is briefly, obliquely, or through broken syntax. The reader, not the writer, is meant to emerge in command. That difference of posture – one text rhetorical to persuade, the other rhetorical to implicate the reader in the story’s meaning and cost – is perhaps the clearest sign of Mark’s literary distinctiveness.

James – Rhetoric Without a Narrator

The Epistle of James warrants a mention because its rhetoric is also shrewd. The book is famous for its assertion that “faith without works is dead.” He sets up a contrast between empty belief and active compassion:

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food… what good is that? (2:14–17 ESV)

Here, “works” clearly means acts of charity and mercy. The moral framing is universal, hard to argue with, and rhetorically effective. It appeals to shared values. But elsewhere in James, “works” may implicitly include behaviors not so obviously ethical at root:

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God… is this: to visit orphans and widows… and to keep oneself unstained from the world. (1:27)

The second clause – “unstained from the world” – is vague, but loaded. It likely gestures toward purity behaviors that are more Jewish than Christian in tone.

Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? (4:4)

Again, this moves from moral to separatist rhetoric – potentially reinforcing ethnic or cultural boundaries. We can’t be certain, but James seems to be framing his argument in terms everyone can agree on. Then he gradually broadening the meaning of “works” to smuggle in a stricter behavioral code, includes Jewish law-adjacent customs. Cunning. He avoids direct confrontation with Paul’s theology, but still answers it implicitly but forcefully.

James often sounds like Proverbs or Sirach, surely no accident. His use of tight, balanced structures gives his writing an oracular, gnomic quality:

Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger… (1:19 ESV)

From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. (3:10 ESV)

Do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath; but your yes is to be yes, and your no, no (5:12 NASB – note the syntactic ellipsis between “no” and “no”, lost in many translations)

James’s imagery is concrete, unlike Mark and Paul. He compares the tongue to a spark, an uncertain man to a bobbing wave, and the rich to withering grass. His imagery persuades while bypassing formal argument.

A short comparison between Mark, Paul, and James shows:

Writer	Narrative Presence	Rhetorical Voice	Ego/ Authority	Style of Engagement
Mark	Minimal, oblique	Structural, ironic	Effaced	Reader discovers meaning
Paul	Occasional but strongly personal	Assertive, argumentative	Central	Reader  is persuaded
James	None	Moral, aphoristic	Neutral	Reader exhorted, corrected

Mark is the early outlier, followed by a literary trend toward clarity and control. The text becomes the instrument of the Church, not a provocation to the reader. Tastes of the church turned institutional, doctrinal, and mass-oriented. Mark wrote for those with ears to hear (4:9). The Church wrote for those who sought a creed.

Next and final: Mark Before Modernism