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>Matthew and Luke both appear to omit all 9 instances where Mark uses the phrase “he began to teach”, “he taught them”, or “in his teaching”, and Matthew and Luke both appear to omit all 7 instances in which Jesus is trying to get privacy from the crowds (1:33, 1:45, 2:1, 3:20, 6:31, 7:24, 9:30)
>Burkett's model helps make us understand that the gospels were not simply written by an author using one or two sources, but rather, the evangelists were typically using many different sources, switching around between them, causing rifts in the narrative that would be otherwise hard to explain as creative choices by the author. The gospels that we know about are only the ones that winners of history's theological battles allowed to survive. The earliest gospels were only sayings -- good tidings -- which is literally what the word gospel means. Narratives eventually creeped up around them and the sayings were given a context of Galilee in 30 CE. Mark took tiny phrases from two different Proto-Marks as well as other lost source texts and combined them to make denser word structures and even combined two exorcism stories into one. The original (Ebionite) author of Matthew did not use the Mark we know as a source but one of the two Proto-Marks and Lukan tradition received the other one. These later authors did not conflate passages but rather combined the smaller Proto-Mark episodes into larger story arcs, creating larger and larger texts. The combining of gospels did not stop with the four that are in the Bible. The mid-second century Christian philosopher and martyr Justin used a single lost source that he called the “Memoirs of the Apostles” that used verses that were conflations of sources also present in Matthew and Luke. A student of Justin's named Tatian harmonized all four gospels into a “super gospel” called the Diatessaron
