Endnote 2 – “Secret Mark”: Was Morton Smith a Great Thespian and I a Complete Fool?
Here are a couple more examples: In the story of the rich young man who seeks eternal life (Mark 10:17–22=Matthew 19:16–22=Luke 18:18–23), Mark tell us that “Jesus, looking upon him, loved him.” This observation is missing from the parallel account of Matthew and Luke. They apparently did not find this sentence in their copies of Mark.
The extant text of Mark, like Secret Mark, often emphasizes that Jesus was teaching, while both Matthew and Luke in most of these cases apparently have not found such reports of Jesus’ teaching in their copies of Mark (see, e.g., Mark 1:27; 2:13; 4:1–2; 8:31; 9:31).
There is also a much-expanded version of the story, in which the scribes ask Jesus about the first commandment in the extant text of Mark (12:28–34) that Matthew and Luke did not find in their copies of Mark’s gospel. Only according to the later canonical text of Mark does Jesus first quote the Shema (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”) and then adds a discussion with the scribe who is close to the kingdom of God—typical features of the later monotheistic Hellenistic propaganda of Christianity.