How are the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Mark both different and alike?

Answer 1

According to almost all scholars, Luke's Gospel was written much later than Mark's Gospel and is a more mature gospel, reflecting the confidence of a growing Christian community. Mark wrote only some forty years after the events he described, but seems to have been at pains to justify the apparent absence of evidence or eyewitness accounts of the miracles that Jesus performed. In this Gospel, Jesus often told those he cured not to tell anyone about him. Mark's Gospel originally ended at verse 16:8, with the women leaving the tomb astonished at the apparent resurrection of Jesus, but with no post-resurrection appearances to explain or justify. Verses 16:9-20, the "long ending", were added to Mark's Gospel later, to more or less harmonise it with Matthew's Gospel and Luke's Gospel.

Luke wrote near the end of the first century or early in the second century, by which time eyewitnesses would not be expected to come forward, and when there was growing acceptance of the reality of the miracles and the resurrection of Jesus. The author of Luke's Gospel (and of Acts of the Apostles) was more concerned with providing historical information that would assist the credibility of the gospel account. This Gospel includes a story of the birth of Jesus and his genealogy, plus a more elaborate story of the crucifixion and a number of appearances of the risen Jesus.

Luke used Mark's Gospel as his principal source for the life and mission of Jesus. but he also used the hypothetical 'Q' document as a source of many sayings and parables that are not in Mark's Gospel. The author of Matthew's Gospel also used the 'Q' document as a source for sayings and parables.

Mark's Gospel and Luke's Gospel are necessarily alike, because the author of Luke's Gospel used Mark's Gospel as his principal source for the life and mission of Jesus. Whenever they agree, the wording in the original Greek language is almost identical. However, there is a "Missing Block", probably a sequence of missing pages from a cut-up scroll, that Luke dod not copy from Mark. This result in Luke is the concatenating two unrelated verses that, in Mark, had preceded and followed the Missing Block.