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>The Farrer Hypothesis is not providing the simplest explanation for a simple problem. Rather, it is trying to answer a complex problem with a simple answer by delegating the inherent complexity of the problem to the supposedly inscrutable minds of Matthew and Luke so as not to have to necessitate the complexity and uncertainty of hypothetical sources. The fact is that we know there were dozens of variant versions of the gospels that were floating around among the many different Jesus sects of the second century that inherited their gospels from other sects so there is no reason to believe that the ones that got canonized were the earliest
>In 1983, the German Biblical scholar Helmut Koester advanced the complexity of the Two/Four Source Hypothesis further by suggesting that Luke had used an earlier version of Mark that did not include the “Bethsaida Section” in Mark 6:45-8:26. The section begins and ends in the village of Bethsaida and consists mostly of loose retellings of an earlier narrative arc of miracle stories. Koester also suggested that our canonical Mark was a censored version of a still-later version of the Gospel of Mark called Secret Mark which included a resurrection story similar to the Lazarus story in the Gospel of John, based on controversial evidence supposedly discovered by the Biblical scholar Morton Smith in the Mar Saba monastery in the West Bank in 1958. Crossan accepted Koester's Bethsaida/Secret Mark model but also included the Cross Gospel, another hypothetical source text covering the Passion of Jesus' execution based on Crossan's comparison of the four Passion narratives in the gospels with the apocryphal Gospel of Peter from Nag Hammadi
>Yet even Crossan's model, with all of its unprovable hypothetical texts, turns out to be not complicated enough
