The New Testament has been one of the most revered collections of manuscripts in the hands of mankind for the last seventeen or eighteen centuries. Yet debates continue to rage over the authenticity and interpretation of many of the books and letters which form the corpus of literature which has, since at least the fourth century, been fixed as we know it today--the canon of the New Testament was established for the Eastern church by consensus by no later than 367 C.E. when "Athanasius' Easter Letter from Alexandria listed solely the twenty-seven books of the New Testament," and the Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) subsequently canonized the same list (Wright, 106).
According to Hurtado, as scholars attempt to construct what they believe to have been the original texts, "the main aim . . . is to establish a Greek text which is as close as possible to the wording of the New Testament as they first came from the hands of the authors" (91-92). Since only copies of copies of copies of the original manuscripts survive, which may themselves be the transcriptions of word-of-mouth history, some variations have likely occurred over time which include "accidental spelling differences or omissions. But some variations are clearly deliberate. Most of these appear to be attempts to 'improve' the style, to remove ambiguity or sometimes harmonize parallel accounts in different books" (Hurtado, 92).
The Gospels of Mark and John frequently stand in contrast to one another because they frequently paint portraits of Jesus which are strikingly different from one another. The Gospels of Mark and John are uniquely distinctive for several reasons.
First, while each of the Gospels post-date the Pauline corpus, the Gospel of Mark is commonly accepted as having been written first, although not earlier than about 50 C.E., and not later than 70 C.E. (Earle, 1026). While Matthew and Luke are usually dated in the mid to late 60s...