An entire faith movement, one of the world's major religions, is assumed to have been launched by those Gospel events. Yet if that were indeed the reality of history, we would face a profoundly astonishing situation. For the fact is, the story which presumably began so much is to be traced back to a single document, to the literary efforts of what may well have been a single individual.

We have already seen that until the time of Ignatius early in the second century, no one in the non-Gospel Christian record speaks of a trial and crucifixion by Pilate, of a death in Jerusalem or a rising from a tomb in that location. Moreover, contrary to popular belief, Mark himself has no corroboration. Christian tradition for the better part of two millennia has regarded the four Gospels as independent accounts of the events of Jesus' life and death, by persons in the know, providing a fourfold witness to those events. Most Christians today still believe that. But New Testament scholars know better, and they've known it for almost two centuries. They have come to realize that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, rather than being independent corroborations, are direct copies of Mark. Matthew reproduces almost 90% of Mark in his own text, Luke over 50%. As for the passion itself, those two later evangelists have shaped their accounts exactly as Mark did, with only a couple of minor alterations and additions. Even the extra source used by both, the Q document, had nothing to add to their passion story, since Q contained not a word about a trial, death and resurrection. It is as though Matthew and Luke knew nothing about the events at the end of Jesus' life, the events which brought salvation to the world and triggered the great explosion that became Christianity, until they encountered a copy of the Gospel of Mark.

Yet all of this should be regarded as an impossible situation. If something even remotely like those events had taken place and the Christian movement had begun in response to them, the Christian world could not fail to have been saturated with traditions about Jesus' death and rising, even if they contained much embellishment and inaccuracy, even if they were largely unreliable. Indeed, we would expect precisely that state of affairs. For the early record shows us that the Christian movement during its first hundred years was a sprawling, uncoordinated, diverse organism marked by division and incompatible theologies. We would expect that all those communities or regions would have preserved and developed their own angles on the passion events. They would inevitably have found different things to focus on, different characters or story elements to develop in relation to their own interests and faith.

Yet not only do we find none of this expected variety of passion traditions among the many Christian communities of the empire, we see no sign of any traditions at all for the first half century of the movement. That all these Christian groups could have lived and worshiped for that length of time, with no traditions or passion account of their own until one community, one person somewhere in Syria, decided to put down on paper the traditions which he had managed to acquire about the death of Jesus, cannot be accepted.

But Matthew and Luke show us precisely that. Even if their communities had not actually written such things down, they would surely have possessed their own oral descriptions of Jesus' passion and death. Those traditions would have been added to the mix when they came to rework Mark. Yet there is no sign of such a thing. The passion stories of Matthew and Luke follow in lockstep with that of Mark. Matthew adds a few minor details, such as the death of Judas, the guard at the tomb, the rising of some of the city's dead. Luke's notable addition is the hearing before Herod, when Pilate sends Jesus to be interviewed by the Tetrarch before finally passing judgment himself.

Of course, there are all sorts of ground-level changes which the two later evangelists have made, just as they have throughout the whole of their Gospels. They are constantly altering the words and details of Mark to reflect their own writing styles and editorial emphases. But the overall shape and content is precisely the same. We see no evidence of a passion tradition present in the Matthean or Lukan communities before the Gospel of Mark came along. And the epistles and other early writings show that no one else had one either.

Robert Funk, in his Honest to Jesus (p.237-8) has this observation to make: "It is strange that no source outside the five gospels [he is including the Gospel of Peter, not Thomas] knows this same sequence of events, even in outline. . . . If the passion story were well known, it seems likely that others would have referred to it, at least in outline." What Funk fails to further observe is that no one has any sequence of events in regard to a passion story.