Redaction

This is an interesting question.

Redactions are fascinating to me because I believe that there is not uniformity in how this is being done, and I don't know if it's because of sloppiness, or lack of coordination, or if it's done because we have people that actually take their oath to our Constitution seriously.

So redactions are done by, uh, FBI and DOJ lawyers and special agents.

So these are people who have been assigned this information to perform redactions on.

But it's very difficult to understand why someone would write Mark if they had a copy of either Matthew or Luke in front of them.

This is sometimes described as the argument from the implausibility of Mark's redaction profile.

Redaction is the name New Testament scholars give to the changes an author makes to their source while composing a new version of a story.

A work's redaction profile is the tendencies reflected across the various changes made by an author.

In other words, it's their editorial process and their editorial decision-making.

Why would a disciple of Jesus need a written source for Jesus' ministry? And for that matter, who needs to plagiarize their own biography? In other words, Matthew was not written by one of Jesus' disciples.

Furthermore, an approach to the gospels called redaction criticism gives us some insight into the ideology of the Synoptic gospel writers.

Redaction criticism studies how Matthew and Luke changed Mark.