The HSH in the Context of Johannine Studies

I thought I'd finally put this post up--I wrote it last fall as part of my ongoing exploration of the role that the Signs Gospel plays in the Hyper-Synoptic Hypothesis, but got busy with other things and it's been sitting for a while.  But I'd like to explain how the Hyper-Synoptic Hypothesis relates to the study of the Gospel of John, so I've revised this post and here it is.  


The HSH, at least with regards to the role of the Signs Gospel, does fit into a previously-established tradition of Johannine scholarship, though this tradition is perhaps not a mainstream one.  The Signs hypothesis in general (that is, that there was a source for the Gospel of John that contained a sequence of symbolic miracles called "signs") is not universally accepted, and indeed one might argue that it has never been mainstream opinion.  I wanted to explain that I am aware of this, but that there is nevertheless an ongoing thread in Johannine studies that does assume the existence of a Signs document (of some sort or other), even one that relates to the Gospels of Mark and John in the way that I claim it does.


I'll present this as a more-or-less chronological study of the concept of a Signs source in the history of New Testament criticism.

A Brief History of Scholarship on the Relation of GJohn to the Synoptics

In linking GMark with GJohn, and also with the Signs Gospel, I am of course only following in the footsteps of the greats.  D. Moody Smith provides an excellent survey of scholarship on the relation of GJohn to the Synoptics in John Among the Gospels (1992; 2001 2^nd ed.). I should mention that in general there is a great deal of German-language scholarship on the subject of source-criticism of GJohn that I draw less attention to below than I should.

The proposal that John relied on all three Synoptics was first made in the early decades of modern criticism, though James Moffat in 1914 maintained that GMark was the primary source, with the other two used infrequently.  Burnett H. Streeter in 1924 refined Moffat’s proposal, maintaining that only GMark and GLuke (or a proto-GLuke) were sources for GJohn. 

Raymond Brown, in Section B of his 1966 Introduction to the Anchor Bible Commentary on GJohn (vol. 1 1966, vol. 2 1970), notes that the theory of Johannine depedence on the Synoptic tradition was by then a long-standing one, and for Johannine dependence on GMark specifically he cites E. K. Lee's 1956 article "St. Mark and the Fourth Gospel" and Charles Kingsley Barrett's commentary on GJohn, also from 1956.  (Barrett held a view similar to Streeter.)  In 1975, Werner Kümmel would basically repeat Streeter’s position, that only GMark and GLuke or proto-GLuke were Johannine sources.  And, of course, Morton Smith in 1973 would be the first to propose dependence of GJohn not on GMark, but rather on a “Secret Mark”.

Norman Perrin, in his 1974 Introduction to the New Testament, pointed out that the evidence was growing that the entire Passion Narrative (PN) was essentially a Markan composition, and that these Markan elements could also be found in GJohn, strongly suggesting Johannine use of GMark.  Dennis Duling’s revision of Perrin’s book in 1982 would repeat this statement, though both Perrin and Duling would add to this that John could also have used a semeia-source (i.e. a signs-source), in addition to GMark.  D. Moody Smith cites several scholars who later followed this opinion, and the 1976 collection The Passion in Mark (edited by Werner Kelber) featured essays by members of the so-called “Perrin School”: Norman Perrin himself, his students John Donahue, Vernon Robbins, Kim Dewey, and Kelber himself, as well as Ted Weeden and John Crossan.  In that 1976 discussion of the Markan PN, the consensus was that John knew and used GMark, though he did not rely on it alone. John Crossan argued later, in 1985, for indirect dependence of GJohn not on canonical GMark, but on Secret Mark (as with Morton Smith), but also on a hypothetical “Cross Gospel” which lay behind the Gospel of Peter tradition (while not leaving out the possibility that GJohn also used GMatt and GLuke). 

Austin Farrer (in a letter published posthumously in 1983) and Michael Goulder (in 1989) then proposed that John, while relying on all three Synoptics, primarily utilized GMatt.  Also around this time Marie-Emile Boismard began arguing for a more complex, interrelated sequence of hypothetical documents, which were basically earlier versions of the canonical gospels.  Boismard proposed, for example, that the Johannine tradition began with an independent gospel that slowly interacted with a growing Matthew-Mark tradition (itself interacting with a Q tradition) to produce a gospel with an original framework that was independent of the Synoptics, but the final contents of which largely depend on them.  Frans Neirynck and the “Louvain school”, reacting in part to Boismard, have rejected the complexity of those models, and instead argue for Johannine dependence on the Synoptics but with more creativity than is usually attributed to the Johannine school in reassembling Synoptic traditions.  (Neirynck has also provided detailed retrospectives on the scholarship of the Synoptic-Johannine question from the years 1965-1990 and even beyond—these can be found summarized in the Evangelica series of his collected writings) 

On the other hand, Raymond Brown has argued (in his 1966/1970 Anchor Bible commentary for example) for independence of GJohn from the Synoptic tradition, and D. Moody Smith noted in 1992 (and again in 2001) that most commentaries still assumed Johannine independence, discussing several scholars who have effectively come to the same conclusion. 

My own work has been done largely based on Fortna's understanding of the Signs gospel, but without drawing a distinction between a Signs source (SS) and a Signs gospel (SG).  I have also been influenced by Morton Smith's  proposal that Secret Mark was a source for GJohn.  I had not previously engaged with these other traditions of scholarship on the Johannine Signs, though naturally Fortna's work was performed within the larger context of those traditions.  So their influence on my approach has been only indirect, though nevertheless real.

The Hyper-Synoptic Hypothesis in the Context of Johannine Scholarship

So, the HSH builds upon the outlines of the work above, and assumes a fairly strong Johannine dependence on the Markan tradition.  To quote E. K. Lee briefly, from his 1956 article: "These literary parallels seem to us strong enough to reach the conclusion that John had use of the Gospel of Mark and had Mark's programme in mind during the writing of his narrative."  He continues:

"He merely takes Mark for granted and embodies him where he sees fit.  At times, no doubt with another tradition in mind, he deliberately contradicts Mark.  At times John leaves Mark as the narrative does not suit his purposes and follows another source." 

This is precisely what the HSH presumes, and I argue that the "other tradition" and the "(an)other source" are one and the same: the Signs Gospel.  Indeed, Raymond Brown in 1966, despite his skepticism about a direct Markan-Johannince relationship, had come to a similar conclusion:

           

“John drew on an independent source of tradition about Jesus similar to the sources that underlie the Synoptics.  The primitive Johannine tradition was closest to the pre-Marcan tradition but also contained elements found in the sources peculiar to Matthew (e.g., Petrine source) and to Luke.  In addition to the material drawn from this independent tradition, John has a few elements that seem to suggest a direct borrowing from the Synoptic tradition….Perhaps, although we are not convinced of this, in the final redaction of John…there were a few details directly borrowed from Mark.”

The HSH would explain these phenomena as follows:

1)     The “primitive Johannine tradition” that R. Brown describes was the Signs Gospel. The fact that GMark ultimately derives from Signs explains why Brown can call this Signs Gospel a “pre-Marcan” tradition.  (Fortna’s The Gospel of Signs was not published until 1970, so R. Brown, writing his Anchor Bible commentary in 1966 and 1970, would not have been familiar with the concept of a “Signs Gospel” strictly speaking, though see below for details on the Signs tradition in general.)

2)     It is important to recognize that John did know the Markan tradition directly, by way of Secret Mark, and that Secret Mark in turn relied on the Signs Gospel, so there are potentially two different paths by which Signs material found its way into GJohn.  Thus there are actually two possible middle terms for Signs material shared among the Synoptics and GJohn: the Signs Gospel, and Secret Mark.

3)     Any seemingly Johannine elements found in GMatt and GLuke are actually just derived from Signs as a middle term, by way of Q (equivalent to what Brown terms the “Petrine” source), since Q also used the Signs Gospel (in addition to using Secret Mark, as a separate middle term with GJohn).  The Johannine author did not know Q directly, though he likely knew of it.  In particular:

a.     When parallels are found between GLuke and GJohn, they are just points where Q and John (in GJohn) borrowed the same material from the Signs Gospel (and possibly also from Secret Mark), and where Marcion in turn borrowed the material from Q and Luke preserved it in his revision of Marcion’s gospel.

b.    When parallels are found between GMatt and GJohn, they are just points where Q and John (in GJohn) borrowed the same material from the Signs Gospel (and possibly also from Secret Mark), and where Matthew in turn borrowed the material from Q. 

(As an aside, Marcion seems to have picked out more Signs Gospel material from Q than Matthew did, though this is probably sheer happenstance.)

ETA: This also suggests that if elements of a double-tradition could be found in the PN (that is, a double Matthean-Lukan tradition), then that tradition could be attributed to the Signs Gospel.  I leave this observation aside for now without further speculation.

GJohn’s Use of a Signs Source: A Theoretic History

The most comprehensive history of scholarship on the relation of GJohn to a Signs Gospel or source is that of Gilbert van Belle (BETL 116, 1994), who reaches back into 19^th century scholarship for the earliest studies on miracle sources in GJohn.  Nevertheless, it is actually Robert Fortna (1970) who attributed (probably correctly) the original idea of a Wunderquelle (“miracle source”) for GJohn to Julius Wellhausen and Eduard Schwartz, who proposed in 1908 (separately, though both taught at Göttingen) that the miracles in GJohn formed the core of a Grundevangelium (“base gospel”).  Fortna (and Willem Nicol in 1972) both also mention J. M. Thompson, writing independently in English 1915 that the Johannine miracles formed the oldest layer of GJohn. 

(Van Belle mentions Thompson as well, but he doesn’t mention Wellhausen and Schwartz except as footnotes in a discussion of Friedrich Spitta, who referred to them in 1910).

The idea of a Zeichenquelle (“signs source”) more specifically, is commonly attributed to Rudolf Bultmann's commentary on John (1941 in German/1971 in English) though Bultmann himself (and later both Fortna and Nicol) cites a 1922 article by Alexander Faure for the original concept of a semeia-collection (Bultmann 1971, p. 113, n. 2; Faure also called it a Wunderbuch or Wunderquelle, i.e. a “miracle book”/”miracle source”).  Faure assigned the following miracles or signs to this source:

The Water into Wine (The Wedding at Cana)

The Healing of the Official's Son

The Healing of the Paralytic/Crippled Man

The Healing of the Blind Man

The Raising of Lazarus

Hans Windisch would also, the following year (1923), propose a miracle-source for GJohn, to include only the first four of these miracles, excluding the Raising of Lazarus.

Bultmann first mentions a Johannine "miracle-source" (the English term, from the 1971 translation) in his Introduction (ibid, p. 6), and proposed that it contained seven miracles.  He later discusses semeia in the preface to Chapter 2, linking various elements of GJohn together using the semeion concept (p.112).  Then, on the next page, in the Prelude to Chapter 2, he refers back to the miracle-source mentioned in the Introduction, this time calling it not a "miracle-source" but "the semeia-source" (again, to use the English term).  Bultmann explicitly (p. 114, n. 1) equates semeion with "miracle", citing usage in the Septuagint and ancient Greek, as well as Rabbinic Judaism: for the Rabbis, "sign" meant "miraculous sign".  And so, this is how Bultmann identifies a "miracle-source" with a "signs source", though arguably he is just following Faure's example.

I should note, however, that Bultmann does not, in the end, present a list of seven miracles.  It is true that in his introduction he parenthetically happens to cite seven miracles, but on p. 112, n. 3, he admits that there is no evidence in GJohn that seven was a meaningful number for John.  Bultmann himself joins the Water-Walking to the Feeding of the 5000.  I agree with Bultmann that the number seven had little or no meaning for the Johannine author--however, it did have meaning for the Signs author. 

(I should also note that Bultmann did not think John relied on the Synoptics at all, and felt that any resemblances between a Signs source and the Synoptics were due to shared traditions which I guess he assumed could be dated back to historical experiences.  Conversely, Werner Kümmel, though he accepted Johannine reliance on the Synoptics, did not accept a Signs source.)

The Content of the Signs Source: From Source to Gospel

In the two decades following Bultmann, a number of scholars, mostly German, accepted at least the outlines of his thesis, with some debate about exactly how much gospel material the source contained.  Bultmann, for example, had not included a passion narrative in his semeia-source, but critics pointed out the unity of John’s gospel overall.  Some proposed a mini-source containing only two or three miracles, which was perhaps added to a kind of proto-GJohn.  (This hypothesis continued to be popular well into the 1990s at least).  Whereas the first to propose a signs-gospel that included a passion narrative appears to have been Wilhelm Wilkins in 1958.

D. Moody Smith then laid out, in English, the contents of Bultmann's semeia-source in The Composition and Order of the Fourth Gospel in 1965.  He did not enumerate them, but he did list each miracle separately among the other Signs source material, and mentioned the obvious Markan parallels with the Feeding of the 5,000 and the Water-Walking (separating the two miracles, unlike Bultmann).  Smith however did not accept Johannine dependence on the Synoptics, or the existence of any of Bultmann’s other sources.  He did agree that GJohn must have used some sort of miracle-source, however, and concedes the possible existence of Bultmann’s version of this miracle source, i.e. the semeia-source (Smith 1965, pp. 110-13). 

Then, Raymond Brown, in Appendix III of his 1966/1970 Anchor Bible Commentary, appears to follow D. Moody Smith in separating the Feeding of the 5000 from the Water-Walking, and writes of "the seven Johannine miracles"; however, in his Introduction, he wonders whether John meant for them to be separated, while at the same time noting that there are in fact seven signs in total.  Nevertheless, he notes (as did Bultmann) that the number seven is not mentioned even once in GJohn.  He links three of the signs directly with the Synoptic gospels (The Official's Son, Feeding the 5000, and the Water-Walking) and three indirectly (the Paralytic, the Blind Man, Lazarus), leaving the Water into Wine as the odd one out, seemingly without any Synoptic parallels. 

Brown would also criticize George Buchanan’s 1968 suggestion that the Signs source contained fourteen miracles; this criticism is certainly correct, but it is intriguing that Buchanan made a link between this source and the 2 Kings miracles of Elisha.  (The HSH would argue that Buchanan was just picking up on the original Markan author's efforts to revise the Signs Gospel, in light of the image of Jesus as an Elisha-like prophet.) 

It would be Fortna in 1970 who would propose a slightly amended version of Bultmann's list, accepting his combination of the Water-Walking and the 5000, but adding the Catch of Fish.  He enumerates eight miracles (p. 100) but decides that they must really a have numbered seven (p. 101).  Fortna admits that in 1970, it was a "very widespread opinion" that Jn 21 was a later addition to GJohn, but he points out that arguments from "lexical comparisons" between Jn 21 and the rest of the gospel lead scholars to contradictory opinions about its authenticity.  (And in his verse-by-verse analysis of Jn 21, Fortna points out several elements that seem pre-Johannine.)  He suggests that any non-Johannine vocabulary is best explained as "Johannine redaction of pre-Johannine material".  Just so does the HSH propose that John was working from two different, though related, documents; the Signs Gospel and the original Gospel of Mark.

Fortna also proposed that the Signs source was later added to a “passion-source” to form a “signs gospel” (which Fortna calls “SG”), and that it is this Signs Gospel that is properly the source for GJohn.  The HSH rejects this, too, as a needless multiplication of hypothetical documents; instead, my Signs Gospel (which I likewise call SG) already included a simple crucifixion narrative, which was elaborated by the Markan author into the passion narrative as we know it.  John simply used both the more primitive crucifixion tradition of SG, as well as the more elaborate version of original GMark. 

Jürgen Becker, too, in 1970 presented (in German) a similar attempt to delineate the outlines of the Signs source, in light of the work by Bultmann.  He agrees there were seven signs and includes all the miracle material that Moody Smith does (he likewise leaves out Jn 21, and also leaves out the PN), though he does not group them into a narrative of seven miracle-stories as Fortna does, but includes them in a different organization of the source into five sections.  However, when broken down by pericope and verse, his source resembles fairly closely the Signs section of Fortna’s reconstruction (besides the PN).

Willem Nicol made a similar attempt in 1972 to define a Signs Gospel, and his is perhaps closest to Bultmann’s original plan, leaving out Jn 21 and combining the 5000 with the Water-Walking, leaving only six signs properly speaking.  (Nicol, like Becker, does not include a PN in the Signs source.)  Other scholars have made contributions towards identifying the content of a semeia-source, but these four mentioned (Bultmann, Smith, Fortna, and Nicol, though perhaps Becker should also receive some credit) have done the most work in constructing coherent lists of the sign-miracles themselves.  What’s interesting, however, is that none of these scholars—including Fortna and Nicol—seem to have argued that John used both a Signs source and a Synoptic one.  They (and their predecessors) all seem to be arguing for the use of a Signs source in lieu of the Synoptics.

Several scholars writing after Fortna would agree with his list of signs, though not necessarily with his inclusion of a Passion Narrative in the source.  Edwin Freed and Russell Hunt in 1975 argued against the inclusion of Jn 21, though they would include the Passion Narrative.  Howard Teeple in 1974 would, like Fortna, add some sort of Passion Narrative to the original Signs source, though he left out any resurrection elements.  I would strongly disagree with this—the Signs Gospel of my HSH ends with at least one resurrection appearance (though I have not yet demonstrated this).  Anitra Kolenkow in 1976 agreed that the Signs source included a Passion Narrative.  Urban von Wahlde in 1989 also included the crucifixion in the Signs source, and a resurrection, and the HSH agrees, though von Wahlde would not include Jn 21, and my Signs Gospel does include the Catch of Fish as one of the signs; however, I do relocate it to elsewhere in that gospel, i.e. to where the Water-Walking is found now.

The List of Signs

Bultmann's original group of signs (put in order by Moody Smith) included the following:

The Water into Wine (i.e. The Wedding at Cana)

The Healing of the Official's Son

The Healing of the Paralytic/Crippled Man

The Feeding of the 5000

(+The Water-Walking)

The Healing of the Blind Man

The Raising of Lazarus

They are found in this order in GJohn.

Fortna numbers seven signs, following in Bultmann in combining the Water-Walking with the Feeding of the 5,000, but then adding the Catch of Fish at the end:

1. The Water into Wine (i.e. The Wedding at Cana)

2. The Healing of the Official's Son

3. The Healing of the Crippled Man

4. The Feeding of the 5000

            The Water-Walking

5. The Healing of the Blind Man

6. The Raising of Lazarus

7. The Catch of Fish

These also fall in this order in GJohn (though Fortna rearranges them for his proposed Signs Gospel).   

Becker effectively accepts the first list, but keeps the 5000 and the Water-Walking separate; Nicol effectively accepts items 1.-6. from Fortna’s list, blending the 5000 and the Water-Walking.  Burton Mack (A Myth of Innocence, 1988) dismisses Fortna's work, claiming "Fortna's reconstruction has not produced a strong following" (p. 220).  He says the Bultmann-Smith list is the "most interesting", calling it "more conservative" and "less complicated".  It should be noted however that Mack does not quite duplicate the work of Bultmann and Smith; he accepts Becker’s separation of the Feeding of the 5000 from the Water-Walking, and like Fortna he numbers the signs-miracles in order, which is something neither Bultmann nor Smith did (nor even Becker). Thus Mack’s version looks like Bultmann’s list, but with the 5000 and the Water-Walking kept separate, and with each miracle numbered from 1-7 (p. 221).    

I am not sure Mack’s version can really be called “more conservative”.  It does date back to Bultmann's research, but it relies on the assumption that Jn 21 is a late addition to GJohn.  This is admittedly a fairly old idea, but it is a source of great contention and again, I myself would hesitate to call it a conservative notion.  Furthermore, Mack separates the Feeding of the 5000 and the Water-Walking, which is not conservative—it is innovative, even though it may be quite reasonable.

In some sense Mack’s list can be called “less complicated”, because Fortna must make a special plea for combining the 5,000 with the Water-Walking, and he tries to relocate the Catch of Fish earlier in the list.  On the other hand, Mack must arguably make his own special pleading to leave out Jn 21, and the Catch of Fish in general.  The real problem for any scholar is that GJohn includes eight sign-like miracles, and as Mack puts it "[t]he suspicion is that the Signs Source originally contained seven miracles" (p. 222).  Thus, each scholar must make a case for dropping one or the other, and no final list will really be simpler than several other possibilities.  Thus we will have to look to other criteria to judge among the competing lists, such as evidence and scope.

The reason why Mack finds the Bultmann-Smith list the most interesting is because the five center miracles (2.-6. in Mack’s version) resemble the pair of miracle sequences that Paul Achtermeier in 1970 claimed lay behind the center of Mark's gospel, running first from the Storm-Stilling to the Feeding of the 5,000, then from the Water-Walking to the Feeding of the 4,000.  (Mack presents these on p. 216.)  Mack seems to suggest that these sequences were circulating in various yet similar forms, one of those forms being a Signs source that John used, and two other forms becoming combined by Mark.  But Achtermeier and Mack must then presuppose the existence of not one, but two hypothetical documents behind GMark, and if Mack takes a Signs source seriously (as he seems to) he must then presuppose not two, but three hypothetical documents.  While this may be legitimate, it does not seem to make anything "less complicated".  (See also Lawrence Wills’s comments on Achetermeier on pp. 76-78 of The Quest of the Historical Gospel, 1997).

In contrast, my HSH only needs to presuppose one hypothetical document: Fortna's Signs Gospel.  Original GMark (which we have evidence of in the Mar Saba letter) and GJohn then drew from this; Mark created the paired sets of miracles himself, simply doubling what he found in his source SG, but John (using both SG and original GMark) just included the signs basically as he found them in SG (with some additional influence from original GMark).

Petr Pokorny in 1985 would propose that GMark and a Signs source themselves shared a written source, and made GJohn dependent on GMark.  The HSH rejects this as needlessly multiplying hypothetical documents.  Instead, the HSH makes Secret Mark dependent on the Signs source itself (i.e. the Signs Gospel).  Indeed, in a similar though not identical vein, John Crossan proposed in 1991 a five-miracle source behind both GMark and GJohn, effectively the Bultmann-Becker list (keeping the 5000 and the Water-Walking separate), but without the first two (the Water into Wine and the Official’s Son).  Though my HSH considers this proposal incomplete, Crossan was among the first to link both the Markan tradition (using Secret Mark) and GJohn to the same Signs source, and as such his proposal is a precursor to the Johannine portion of my HSH. 

The HSH has gone further than this, however, and links both the Water into Wine and the Official’s Son with GMark, where they were radically transformed and relocated by the (Secret) Markan author.  The HSH also explains why some view these first two miracles as coming from a separate source: because they are the signs that had no direct parallel in Secret Mark in their original locations, only indirect ones in new locations.  Hence, the Johannine author did draw them from another, non-Markan source: he drew them solely and directly from the Signs Gospel itself. 

My post on the Official's son also shows how Lazarus was not one of the original signs (though it is related to SGM1), and how the Storm-Stilling was a sign but the Water-Walking wasn’t (instead, the Water-Walking is a Markan creation, though inspired by elements in the Signs Gospel).

GJohn and GMark in Light of a Signs Source

Mack doesn’t really explain what he thinks the relationship between GMark and GJohn was, but he discusses it in a footnote (p. 225, n. 12).  Mentioning Kelber’s 1976 collection, Mack admits it would “constitute a coincidence of fantastic proportions” if John wrote his gospel without any knowledge of GMark at all, but at the same time he proposes that any Johannine use of GMark was indirect, while remaining a bit vague about exactly how this worked.  Mack may, however, be the first scholar to suggest that John could have used both GMark and a Signs source at the same time, however indirectly in either case, predating Crossan’s stronger claim by three years (1988 vs. 1991).

Crossan, in 1988 (The Cross That Spoke, p. xiii) did propose that John’s sayings/miracles narrative is independent of the Synoptics, but also that the Johannine PN depends on the Synoptics in general (Neirynck 1992, p. 60/61).  Crossan may have been the second scholar, and I think the only since Mack, to take seriously the idea that John used both a Signs source and GMark.  I should also mention Marvin Meyer, who was one of the first (if not the first, along with Crossan) to repeat Morton Smith’s claim that Secret Mark was prior to canonical GMark.  Helmut Koester, although he feels Secret Mark derives from canonical GMark, is also to be noted for arguing in general that many extracanonical texts are demonstrably as ancient as the canonical ones.

So, the HSH picks up on Mack and Crossan’s somewhat ambiguous suggestions, and proposes outright that both the Signs Gospel and original GMark did indeed serve as sources for GJohn—original GMark itself being a radical revision of the Signs Gospel.  And the HSH also takes a cue from Meyer’s and Crossan’s insight, placing Secret Mark prior to canonical GMark.  The HSH easily handles all the phenomena: 

• Crossan’s “Cross Gospel” is really just the Signs Gospel
• original/Secret GMark derives from this Signs Gospel
• Q derives from both the Signs Gospel and original/Secret GMark (as well as from a sayings tradition)
• GJohn, like Q, derives from both the Signs Gospel and original/Secret GMark (but under the influence of a discourse tradition rather than a sayings tradition)
• and canonical GMark derives from original/Secret GMark (whether at a later date, or at the hands of the Markan author himself, a reversal of Scott Brown's proposal that Mark wrote canonical GMark first, then Secret Mark)