For the Erasure Conference wherein scholars imagined a world without particular documents or events Mark Goodacre of Duke University wrote a fascinating paper titled ‘A World without Mark’. In it he images three scenarios: (1) “I would like to erase Mark from the surviving manuscript record, imagining that Mark was indeed written, and that it was a source for Matthew and Luke, but that no witness to it survived antiquity.” (2) “Mark is erased from history only to resurface as a handful of manuscript fragments in the 1890s and 1900s, and a more complete textual witness in 1945.” (3) “Finally, and most drastically, we will imagine that the boy who would have grown up to be the author of Mark’s Gospel did not survive childhood and that his Gospel never existed.”
To see where Goodacre takes these scenarios read his paper here.
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