What proportion of the New Testament is either quotation or allusion?

Answer 1

It may not be possible to provide an estimate of how much of the New Testament is in the form of quotation or allusion, with any degree of accuracy, but it is possible to identify some of the more significant areas of quoted material and allusions.

First of all, a considerable minority of the gospels, particularly Matthew's gospel, is in the form of direct quotation or allusion from the Old Testament.

The first gospel was Mark. John Shelby Spong believes that several episodes in Mark's story of Jesus were really based on Old Testament stories. Parallels have also been detected between Mark and Paul's Epistle to the Romans and 1 Corinthians, suggesting that some of the content may have been drawn from Paul's epistles. John Carroll (The Existential Jesus) and Dennis R. MacDonald (The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark) see parallels between Mark's Gospel and the earlier Homeric epics (The Iliad and The Odyssey), although Carroll disagrees with MacDonald on the extent to which Mark may have drawn on those epics. The later gospels, Matthew, Luke and John have been found to be based, directly or indirectly, on Mark's Gospel, although there is no apparent attribution to justify the term 'quotation'.

Acts of the Apostles, and possibly also Luke's Gospel, appears to contain a good deal of material obtained from Josephus' book, Antiquities of the Jews. Whether these were quotations, in the usual sense, or simply plagiarism, depends on how the ancients would have interpreted the first verse, where Luke dedicates the book to Theophilus. Ancient writers did not acknowledge their sources using footnotes in the style of modern academic authors, but they did have another way of acknowledge their sources, known as mimesis. This was an intellectually amusing technique that required placing a clue, or flag, within the text, enabling others to identify the source. But the flag must not be obvious - it had to be a clue that needed to be searched for and identified. Josephus had dedicated Antiquities to Epaphroditus, a real name that meant 'Touched by Aphrodite'. Luke dedicated both the Gospel and Acts to Theophilus, which means 'Friend of God'. This could be a real name but is more likely a transvaluation of Epaphroditus. If so, he was identifying Antiquities as a source for some of his material.

The epistle known as 2 Peter is actually a second century work by an anonymous author. It contains most of the text of the General Epistle of Jude, itself a second century book.