The Great Expansion: Proto-Mark and the Gentile Enlargement of Canonical Mark

This study argues that canonical Mark is an expansion of an earlier proto-Mark, enlarged by the gospel's own author after an earlier form of the text had already branched toward Luke. The added material is identified by three formal criteria indifferent to its content: passages that Luke attests in neither Markan wording nor Markan sequence, forming blocks large and contiguous enough to bear the marks of insertion into a scroll. A fourth confirming mark is that the blocks are joined to canonical Mark at internal seams still visible in the text. The argument centers on one block — the Great Omission (6:45–8:26), minus its closing healing of the blind man at Bethsaida — which meets every criterion without qualification and carries the weight of the case. Two further blocks meet the same standard with minor caveats: the Beelzebul controversy together with the appointment of the Twelve, and the intercalated cursing of the fig tree. That all three prove to share a single pro-Gentile and anti-cultic tendency emerges as a result of the analysis rather than a premise. The structure of the added material — Gentile episodes paired with the Israelite ones Luke retains, joined to the inherited text at visible seams — tells decisively against both accidental loss and deliberate Lukan omission as rival explanations. The added matter is further shown to form a structured composition built on Isaiah. The proposed proto-Mark circulated in the orbit of Paul's mission; the statistical foundation for the wider source theory is laid in a previous study.