Mark Goodacre, 'Parallel Traditions or Parallel Gospels? John's Gospel as a Re-Imagining of Mark'

John’s Gospel is best read as a deliberate, late reworking of Mark’s narrative rather than as an independent stream of tradition, and that some classic patristic notices can be reread in that light. On the literary side, John appears to track Mark’s story arc at key points—baptismal opening, feeding, sea miracle, passion, empty tomb—but systematically reshapes scenes, motifs, and theology, so that what looks like a “different” tradition is often a creative re-imagining of the same Markan skeleton. Patristic testimony, especially the report that “last of all, John, perceiving that the external facts had been made plain in the Gospel, being urged by his friends and inspired by the Spirit, composed a spiritual Gospel,” is then taken quite literally: “the Gospel” whose external facts are already set forth is treated not as an amorphous fourfold canon but as the Mark derived from Peter’s preaching, while John’s work is cast as a subsequent, more interpretive and theological recasting of that single narrative. Within this frame, later canonical developments at the end of the story become programmatic: Mark’s abrupt ending with frightened women who “said nothing to anyone” is read as intentionally withholding explicit eyewitness resurrection testimony, whereas Matthew, Luke, and especially John successively “undo” that reticence by adding named appearances and, in John’s case, a privileged “beloved disciple” who functions as authorized witness. A speculative extension of this trajectory imagines an intermediate stage in which the Petrine-Mark narrative is revised into a more “spiritual” or esoteric Markan form (a proto–Secret Mark in Alexandria), with John as a still later, public-facing reworking; but this remains hypothesis built on the ambiguous singular “the Gospel” in the patristic report and on perceived patterns of literary dependence.