34 And saith unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch.
35 And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him.
36 And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.
Luke Chapter 22
41 And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed,
42 Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.
43 And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.
44 And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
As I understand it, Luke was written after Mark but used the content of Mark as a source of information. Have I got that right?
It strikes me that the writer of Luke has taken the words of Mark (which was by no means an eye witness account) and embellished them for dramatic effect.
I am not trying to minimise Christs suffering for those who believe in that, I just would like to understand how much of Luke is poetic licence.
“We look to not only the spiritual but also the temporal, and we believe that a person who is impoverished temporally cannot blossom spiritually.” Keith McMullin - Counsellor in Presiding Bishopric
"One, two, three...let's go shopping!" Thomas S Monson - Prophet, Seer, Revelator
The Gospel according to Saint Matthew suffers from the same problem.
"Finally, for your rather strange idea that miracles are somehow linked to the amount of gay sexual gratification that is taking place would require that primitive Christianity was launched by gay sex, would it not?"
I have found that consistently the Mormon Church uses the Luke account to portray the suffering in Gethsemane. It is portrayed that Jesus bled from every pore.
On careful examination you can see that Luke is an embellishment of previously written records I.e. Mark. (It is worth noting that the Church applies this equally to the First Vision in that they use the later, embellished account rather than the original). You can also see that Luke states that Jesus sweated profusely rather than bled profusely. The reference to blood is to articulate how much He was sweating.
“We look to not only the spiritual but also the temporal, and we believe that a person who is impoverished temporally cannot blossom spiritually.” Keith McMullin - Counsellor in Presiding Bishopric
"One, two, three...let's go shopping!" Thomas S Monson - Prophet, Seer, Revelator
Here's another hypothesis about the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Maybe the apostle Matthew wrote the first gospel fairly early, based on his own observations and on information from Jesus and His brothers. That would explain why it is called "The Gospel of Matthew," which is otherwise rather a problem, since authorship by somebody who used to work for the tax-collection agency is hardly likely to boost sales of a book on religion. (And this book, more than the others, makes it clear that the apostle Matthew was indeed the tax collector who is called in the other gospels by his other name, Levi.) The Romans would have hired a literate, competent man for the work, but then the ancient Jews believed that all their sons should be taught to read so that they could read their scriptures. Maybe Matthew just happened to be the best writer among the twelve. An early authorship by Matthew would also explain the book's strong emphasis on Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah, since the early Christians were predominantly Jews.
The second gospel has always been considered in Christian tradition to be primarily the recollections of the apostle Peter, working with his younger colleague Mark. The only reason for naming it for the younger, second-string man would be because he wrote it and Peter was humble enough to let him have the credit for writing it. And Mark would have been the writer because Peter was a fisherman whose accent even in his native language (Aramaic) gave him away as a provincial in Jerusalem. (See Matt. 26:73, Mark 14:70 and Luke 22:59.) Perhaps after decades of preaching around the Roman empire he would feel qualified to write short pieces (like the epistles named for him) in Greek. But early on, Peter might have been much more confident with having the actual writing done by Mark, a city kid from Jerusalem who was probably much better educated than he was.
Many people think that Mark must have been written first because it is the shortest. They figure the writers of Matthew and Luke were elaborating on the basic material supplied by Mark. But maybe Peter chose to omit much of the teaching material because he was fully aware that Matthew had already covered it very well. What needed repeating would be the miracles and the events surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus. Even the ancients would have known to be skeptical of claims of miracles. But if two eyewitnesses both testified to the same events, that would call for serious consideration by their Jewish readers.
As the Christian message spread, however, it would have reached many in the Roman empire who would not be overly impressed if every tax collector and fisherman in Palestine believed in Jesus. They would have paid attention to a Greek doctor, though. Greek doctors were the ones who invented medicine as a scientific procedure, making careful observations and compiling them in written records. Enter Luke, a Greek doctor working under the apostolic authority of Paul and interviewing eyewitnesses with the goal of recording the Christian message for his friend Theophilus. (It's all there in the first few verses of his book.)
Luke's claim of authorship is born out by his use of language. Augustine of Hippo, when he was scholar but not yet a Christian around 500 A.D., was disappointed when he first read the New Testament, because he felt that something that claimed to be divinely inspired ought to be more elegantly written. The only books that impressed him with the quality of their Greek were the Gospel of Luke and Acts (also written by Luke). Then he realized that such was exactly what one should expect if the other books were written by fishermen and tent makers who were raised with other languages, and these two books alone were written by a well-educated man writing in his native tongue.
Luke's books repeats much of the material of Matthew and Mark for his expanded audience and in a way that reinforces the testimony of Jesus' ministry, death, and resurrection. It also includes material not found in any of the other gospels, but that material is consistent with the total message and may be explained by the input of other people, such as Mary the mother of Jesus for the information in the early part of the book.
While it is true that no very early manuscripts of these gospels have been found, it is also true that early Christians suffered persecution from people who wanted to wipe out the movement. It was, after all, in competition with Judaism and paganism as well, and those persecutors should have destroyed all the Christian manuscripts that they could.