Luke for Hearers of a Non-Canonical Gospel

Based on an idea by Peter Kirby.  One way into Luke’s opening chapters is to ask what kind of gospel landscape he thought he was writing into. His preface famously nods to “many” who have already composed narratives, and that alone implies a crowded field: not a tidy tetrad, but a jumble of written Jesus-stories in various hands. Read against that backdrop, the little aside in Luke 8:2—“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out”—can look like a shorthand allusion rather than a full introduction, the sort of compressed reference you give when you expect your hearers to know the backstory from somewhere else. On this view Luke is not dropping an isolated tidbit; he is stitching his own orderly account into a wider narrative ecology in which at least one other written gospel, with a fuller Magdalene exorcism scene, is already circulating. That picture harmonizes easily with the patristic reports of other gospels in the mix—Hebrews, Egyptians, various “according to X”—and makes it much less strange to imagine communities who heard Luke alongside something non-canonical.

At the same time, the counter-argument is a needed dose of restraint. There is nothing in the Greek of Luke 8:2 that must imply a prior written story; the verse can serve as a perfectly ordinary first-time characterization, introducing Mary Magdalene to Luke’s audience with a memorable tag and moving on. Later writers who echo the seven-demons line, like the longer ending of Mark, can just be borrowing Luke’s formulation, not independently tapping some lost Magdalene tradition. If so, Luke’s “many” and his demon-note widen the horizon but don’t point a spotlight at a specific missing narrative; they tell us more about the ambient noise level of early gospel production than about any one melody we can no longer hear.

For the Secret Mark debate, this matters mainly as context. If Luke is right that “many” written accounts already existed and if his gospel shows room for memories he doesn’t fully narrate, then an expanded or alternate Markan tradition is no longer an oddity that has to be explained away; it is one more possible inhabitant of a landscape already populated by extra gospels and variant tellings. That doesn’t prove that the longer Markan fragments embedded in the Letter to Theodore are genuine—Luke can’t vouch for a text he never mentions—but it does undercut arguments from sheer anomaly, the claim that “no one in antiquity would ever make a different Mark.” Luke’s prologue and his passing asides invite us to imagine a world where different Marks, different Matthews, and non-canonical cousins were not just thinkable but expected. Whether the Mar Saba text is one of those cousins remains a separate question, to be decided not by Luke’s horizon but by the specific Greek, the hand that wrote it, and the thin chain of evidence that brings it to us.