On my page discussing pseudepigraphical compositions in the letters of Paul, I point out that the custom of writing letters under the name of an assumed author was a common practice in the time of the early church, and the churches composed letters written in this traditional style which were then assigned to the school of Pauline thinking. I also point out on my page discussing harmonization and editing of the Church Testament documents (notably in the fourth century) that the church fathers were in the habit of editing manuscripts, including gospels, in an attempt to bring the divergent accounts into a greater harmony (these editorial revisions were mainly in the form of sharing of parables across the gospels. This page is currently under construction as I am writing this, but I have posted the little that is complete just to give the reader some idea of the process I am going to be documenting on this page..)

     As I point out on so many pages on this site, whenever a doctrine is found in a manuscript that introduces bizarre inconsistencies into the manuscript, it is an indication of later editorial redaction, normally for the purposes of harmonization. (For one of the most obvious examples of this sort of thing you can consider the redaction done on the story of David and Goliath or the strange and inconsistent insertion into the book of Nehemiah, documented on my page discussing the late dating of the composition of the Torah.

      Another good example of this form of editorial harmonization is found in Mark's gospel. In my discussion of Mark, I pointed out that Joshua was a minister to the Gentiles, and that Mark opens Joshua's ministry in the northern town of Capernaum in Gentile territory. (A Gentile refers to a non-Jewish person.) Joshua ministers throughout the regions of the Phoenician and the Syrian territories, healing people, and when he entered a Gentile town, ‘the whole town came out to meet him.' At the very end of his life he entered Judea and went straight to Jerusalem, where in another of his radical acts, he promptly sacked the temple and cursed the sacrificial system, and was quickly crucified and put to death. In Mark's gospel this is the first time he set foot in Judea. In Matthew's gospel, Joshua is ‘sent to the Jews only' and it goes without saying that Matthew's version of events collides with the earlier description given by Mark. Luke also collides with Mark's version of events in that early in Luke's account we are told that

"he (Christ) was preaching in the synagogues of Judea." (Luke Chapter 4 verse 44)

      These manuscripts are inconsistent. For this reason, in order to try and force some harmony between these widely divergent accounts, the scribes of the church edited the manuscripts, sharing parables across gospels, and adding lines here and there to help gospel parables to agree (something to be discussed more fully on my page on variants in the church Testament). Manuscript evidence exists for some of these interpolations, others we must deduce (just as we do with the Jewish Testament, as so many pages on this site illustrate.) They added an inconsistent and out of place parable into Mark's gospel. In Matthew's gospel a parable is found which describes Gentiles as 'dogs'. Joshua was sent only to the 'children' who were Jewish, and not 'the dogs'. Stay away from Gentiles and Samaritans Joshua instructs his disciples. In Mark's gospel, Joshua visits Gentile towns, and 'the whole town came out to meet him' and 'he healed many of them'. In order to downplay the differences found between these manuscripts, the editors moved a parable found in Matthew describing Gentiles as ‘dogs' and incongruously placed this parable into the mid section of the gospel of Mark. I say the placement is incongruous for obvious reasons, because after Joshua has already toured the Gentile lands, having whole Gentile towns come to meet him and get healed and preached to, it is a little late to have Joshua then calling Gentiles ‘dogs' and refusing to heal them or acknowledge them.

      The source of this incongruous parable was the gospel of Matthew. It does not represent Mark's point of view (some have gone so far as to call Mark's viewpoint 'anti-Semetic'. Joshua does not set foot in Israel in Mark's gospel until the very end of his life, at which time he promptly sacks the temple, and is immediately crucified. The second Joshua's feet hit the ground of Judea, Mark begins to allude to the crucifixion and establish an atmosphere of menace. The editors of the gospels did not want their newly established canon opened up to critique based on the fact that gospel's were not ‘historically accurate documents' but rather religious polemic, even deeply personal polemic.)

      Mark presents Joshua as a minister to Gentiles, and he never set foot in Judea until the time of his death. One line of thought in Matthew presents Joshua as a minister to ‘Jews only' and forbids contact with Gentiles. Matthew's account and Mark's account diverge and represent different ideological viewpoints, and this stream of tradition in Matthew sits in isolation from Mark. This is not the only example of isolation found when we compare certain statements found in Matthew with the ideological other gospel authors.