A while ago I was thinking about the possibility that the woman at the cross and at the empty tomb in GMark are characters which appear earlier in the Gospel under a different name or under a different identifier. Because of some literary echos in the text I thought that
Mary Magdalene could be Simon’s mother in law
Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses could be the mother of Jesus (a view accepted by a handful scholars)
Salome could be the daughter of Herodias
Well, no one could proof this and only a few would earnestly think about that.
My reason to do that was exactly this
TedM wrote:If Mark started this story and he mentions all 3 by name, why didn't any of the other 3 gospel writers simply match the names? Since Mark mentioned Salome, why didn't Luke or Matthew too? Why did they both mention a different 3rd women? Why is Luke the only one to mention Joanna? And why is GJohn the only source that clearly states that Jesus' mother was there - but then doesn't even mention her name? Why do they each use different relationships to describe who the women were (ie GMark says "mother of James and Joses", Matthew says "mother of the sons of Zebedee", Luke says "mother of James", " John says "wife of Clopas"? IF they were trying to flesh out who from either a fictional story or a group that they just THINK existed, WHY, and why did they do it so poorly?
TedM wrote:But in the case of fiction, if you already have someone out there - Mark perhaps? - who has taken the thin outline of a story and fleshed it out and put some names to it - names of people who were fairly unimportant to his story - ie Mary, mother of James and Joses, and Salome - why would another writer remove and replace some of those characters?