My point is that Mark 1:12-13 looks like an attenuated summary of Matthew 4:1-11. And the temptation scene is also in Luke, but was not in the Evangelion.
Does Mark's simple statement really make sense? I don't think so. Why would that simple statement exist in Mark if Mark's narrative were the original?
Secondly, Mark's narrative, unlike the one in Matthew and Luke, doesn't establish that the devil is the "lord of this world".
The passage in Mark looks like a simple hand waving over the longer scene in Matthew.
Thus I suspect that the longer passage is original, and retained in Matthew & Luke. But it wasn't in the Evangelion, which means that Matthew and Luke weren't constructed from the Evangelion, as I had suspected, but rather they were constructed from some Gospel that preceded the Evangelion.
What I suspect is that the differences between Luke 3-5 and the Evangelion are due to the fact that the Evangelion is derived from the same source that Luke used, but revised to remove the genealogy, etc.
But why does canonical Mark have a shortened passage? It doesn't seem like something an editor would do -- to make Mark less like the other two, so it would seem that the truncation would have been made by someone other than the final editor of the canonical version.
But did proto-Mark contain the longer scene, as reflected in Matthew/Luke?
The difficulty is the fact that the scene says that the devil took Jesus to the Temple. Luke contains a somewhat odd rejoinder to the problem saying, "14 Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit..."
So, the devil takes Jesus to the Temple, tells him to throw himself off, and then Jesus is whisked back to Galilee. A bit of a stretch.
A similar situation arises about John:
Mark 1:
14 After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. 15 “The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”
This seems awfully short and uninformative.
Luke is much more informative, stating:
Luke 3:
15 The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Messiah. 16 John answered them all, “I baptize you with water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17 His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” 18 And with many other words John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them.
19 But when John rebuked Herod the tetrarch because of his marriage to Herodias, his brother’s wife, and all the other evil things he had done, 20 Herod added this to them all: He locked John up in prison.
This
explains why John was imprisoned.
So it seems to me that what we get in canonical Mark is an attenuated summary of the narrative that we find in Luke regarding the temptation by the devil and the arrest of John. Both points have so little explanatory detail in Mark that its difficult to believe that someone writing an original story would simply leave it at that, thus indicating that they aren't the original versions of the narrative, but rather a later editing of the narrative, thus indicating that, at least in this section, Luke preserves an older version of the narrative than Mark.